[skeptic-1]

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/hi ... eaderB.pdf


At least skim the contained material ! More to follow

The argument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senkaku_Islands

NOw talk about it !

[foxdemon]

I think most pofo'ers are a bit Sino-Japanese wared out having argued over this topic ad nauseum.

I have skimmed the references you provided and I will read the history article in detail when I get the time. One word used in the article is 'obduracy'. This is a new word to me but it is a nice word to describe the attitudes of people with power in the far east. Here is the definition:

ob·du·rate

adjective
1.
unmoved by persuasion, pity, or tender feelings; stubborn; unyielding.
2.
stubbornly resistant to moral influence; persistently impenitent: an obdurate sinner.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obdurate

ob·du·ra·cy

noun
the state or quality of being obdurate.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obduracy

[feihua]

I gave it a shot. It still remains for me that China did not put a lot of thought into the Senkakus because there was no need at the time, and basically gave up the mineral rights to what was above ground, and admittedly, for the taking.

But China did not make a claim....certainly not in their wording. And the Okinawan occupation placed the decision into US hands based upon the wording.

Had China not been involved with civil war, more attention may have been paid to what was actually at stake. Yet, this particular area was still extremely close to US interests, which had a great deal of power at the time, and I remain in doubt that China would have made an overture to the US for the interests of China.

Even if China had been interested in the land during the time of Mao, there were opportunities to bring up the matter. However, under Mao, China made it quite clear repatriations regarding sides involved in World War II were off the table. What China is now wanting to do is go back before World War II and make a claim and it just doesn't follow a logical basis.

Again, in 1971, this is the decision reached between China and Japan:

1. The abnormal state of affairs that has hitherto existed between Japan and the People's Republic of China is terminated on the date on which this Joint Communique is issued.

2. The Government of Japan recognizes that Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China.

3. The Government of the People's Republic of China reiterates that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China. The Government of Japan fully understands and respects this stand of the Government of the People's Republic of China, and it firmly maintains its stand under Article 8 of the Potsdam Proclamation.

4. The Government of Japan and the Government of People's Republic of China have decided to establish diplomatic relations as from September 29, 1972. The two Governments have decided to take all necessary measures for the establishment and the performance of the functions of each other's embassy in their respective capitals in accordance with international law and practice, and to exchange ambassadors as speedily as possible.

5. The Government of the People's Republic of China declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan.

6. The Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China agree to establish relations of perpetual peace and friendship between the two countries on the basis of the principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence. The two Governments confirm that, in conformity with the foregoing principles and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, Japan and China shall in their mutual relations settle all disputes by peaceful means and shall refrain from the use or threat of force.

7. The normalization of relations between Japan and China is not directed against any third country. Neither of the two countries should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.

8. The Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China have agreed that, with a view to solidifying and developing the relations of peace and friendship between the two countries, the two Governments will enter into negotiations for the purpose of concluding a treaty of peace and friendship.

9. The Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China have agreed that, with a view to further promoting relations between the two countries and to expanding interchanges of people, the two Governments will, as necessary and taking account of the existing non-governmental arrangements, enter into negotiations for the purpose of concluding agreements concerning such matters as trade, shipping, aviation, and fisheries.

THAT is it. Fisheries under item 9 is the only matter that could include the matter of the Senkakus, however, items 1 and 5 make it clear just what China, to it's own admission, can use as reasons for arguing. The issues that frequently come up, Not directly from the PRC but those who feel they can speak for the PRC just as the nationalists feel they can speak for the nation of Japan Do Not Apply, cannot be applied and will not gain recognition from other nations that can be placed into position as mediators.

It is very doubtful China would have even the base to argue from today had the Japanese nationalists Not made a move upon the islands. It is extremely obvious the nationalists caused Japan a great deal of grief with their move and the appropriate move was to purchase the islands to keep the nationalists away from them as the presence of the nationalists was straining relationships between the PRC and Japan.

China made some last gasp efforts by making claims directed at the UN that geological factors as a continental shelf should be taken into account but it has done itself little good with the illogical way China has made territorial claims regarding the Spratleys. And with the Spratleys a much more international situation than a bilateral matter, China has not had any other nation able to come to their side in political terms. Now, with the incursion regarding India, it has lost any ground it hoped to have gain even if on purely sympathetic terms. There just isn't anything really there for China to fall back upon regarding claims towards the Senkakus.

Japan has extended fishing rights, as mentioned in item 9 of the above communique, to Taiwan, which is a bit bizarre to me considering item 2 of the same communique and with that has given the PRC a backdoor to some type of left field claim to the Senkakus but I suspect this is some type of backroom arrangement involving the US State department with a further trade off being promised to China by Japan at a later date.

I do not think Japan as a nation has much interest in the islands. I truly believe Japan wants to contain nationalist parties as much as they gain legally in the eyes of the Japanese public. The strategic concern is only a concern to the US as long as the promise of protection for Japan by the US remains something to be respected by the world via the UN.

Japan may possibly have a reason to keep the Senkakus in their hold when looking at their recent developments in being able to mine natural gas out of the sea, but those efforts do not at all look limited or even centered on the Senkakus.

The Japanese nationalists are losing power on the main four islands. They have been humiliated by the likes of the expose regarding the trapping of dolphins off their coastline. There is not much left in area for them to exert influence that can be viewed in any way as constructive power by the Japanese public. The purchase of the islands was a defeat Japan put upon the nationalists. It was necessary for China to address it, and let their public run wild with it, as they have been successful with before as a type of political tactic but that purpose has been served and the issue is pretty much closed.

[Franker65]

It is of course complete and utter fiction. What China is doing effectively amounts to sabre-rattling. They are just showing off their new found military power to other countries in the region. Realistically, China and the US are interdependent entities - one cannot prosper without the other. Look at statistics on China's key trading parters. If they attack Japan, lucrative trade agreements with South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and the United States come under threat. That would in turn suck the growth out of China and ruin it. War with Japan is simply not an option for the Chinese. They will continue to demonstrate their power in the South China Sea/Pacific region but do not expect them to initiate hostilities.

[Baff]

Previously China was not in any position to argue.

Now it is.

The economic arguments cut both ways too.

Will Australia really be willing to end it's Chinese trade for Japan?
Not likely.

China is making the Aussies the richest people on earth. If traders have to choose between Japan and China, I would expect most of them to now choose China.

Less so America since they've been angling their rhetoric and propaganada towards a war with the chinese for many decades now. A lot of those folks actively want a war with China. All they need is an excuse big enough to assure it.

[feihua]

Actors in Japanese military uniforms take pictures of each other while holding a flag demanding the return of uninhabited islets known as Senkaku isles in Japan, Diaoyu islands in China and Tiaoyutai in Taiwan, to China, during the filming of an anti-Japanese World War Two film at the Hengdian Film City in Zhejiang Province March 2, 2013. REUTERS/Aly Song

Special Report: Why China's film makers love to hate Japan
By David Lague and Jane Lanhee Lee | Reuters – 10 hrs ago

http://news.yahoo.com/special-report-wh ... 33446.html

HENGDIAN, China (Reuters) - Shi Zhongpeng dies for a living. For 3,000 yuan ($488) a month, the sturdily built stuntman is killed over and over playing Japanese soldiers in war movies and TV series churned out by Chinese film studios.

Despite his lack of dramatic range, the 23-year-old's roles have made him a minor celebrity in China. Once, Shi says, he perished 31 times in a single day of battle. On the set of the television drama "Warning Smoke Everywhere," which has just finished shooting here at the sprawling Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang Province, he suffers a typically grisly fate.

"I play a shameful Japanese soldier in a way that when people watch, they feel he deserves to die," Shi says. "I get bombed in the end."
For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan's brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.

Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year.

This well-nursed grudge is now a combustible ingredient in the dangerous territorial dispute over a group of rocky islands in the East China Sea, the most serious row between the two Asian powers since Japan's 1945 defeat. It is debatable which side has the better case for ownership of the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. The United States, Japan's security-treaty partner, refuses to endorse either claim, only insisting the dispute be settled peacefully.

But decades of officially sanctioned hatred for Japan in China means Beijing is now caught in a propaganda trap of its own making. It has little room to negotiate or step back now that forces from both sides are circling in a potentially deadly standoff. Nationalism in Japan also makes concessions difficult for Tokyo. But the stakes are potentially higher for China's ruling Communist Party under its new, strongly nationalistic leader Xi Jinping.

"It is going to be very hard for the current Chinese leadership if they want to compromise," said He Yinan, a professor at New Jersey's Seton Hall University who studies the impact of wartime memory on Sino-Japanese relations. "It will be rejected by the public, and the leaders know it."

The tensions and the propaganda go far beyond the current spat. Underneath it all lies a struggle for power and influence in Asia between China and Japan - and political struggles within China itself. Many China watchers believe Beijing's leaders nurture anti-Japanese hatred to bolster their own legitimacy, which is coming under question among citizens livid over problems ranging from official corruption to rampant environmental pollution.

POLITICS DRIVES OUTPUT

As sparring continues in the East China Sea, open hostilities rage on Chinese screens.

On the hilly, forested set of "Warning Smoke Everywhere" at Hengdian, the world's biggest film lot, lead actor Jing Dong plays a young Chinese sniper taking on the invading Japanese in a second television version of a 2011 action film of the same name. In one scene, Jing and his comrades scramble through a village to reach a new firing position. In an interview between takes, the actor rejected suggestions that politics drives the output of these TV dramas and films.

"It's a theme people have liked for a long time," he said, wearing his Chinese Nationalist uniform with its distinctive German-style, coal-scuttle helmet. "That's a fact."

The film original, starring veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, was also released for foreign audiences with the English title, "Cold Steel." Adapted from a popular Internet novel, it tells the story of Mu Liangfeng, a young hunter who is drafted into the Nationalist army for his marksmanship. He duels with a ruthless Japanese sniper, Captain Masaya, in a series of bloody encounters. Both marksmen are in love, Mu with a war widow and Masaya with a Japanese military nurse. But the film draws a clear distinction between the moral qualities of the two combatants.

"I want to marry a samurai, not a murderer," Nurse Ryoko tells Masaya after accusing him of massacring civilians.

In the remake, director Li Yunliang says he isn't trying to demonize the wartime enemy. "The Japanese soldiers in our drama also have emotions," he says. "It's the war bringing suffering to both China and Japan."

The Communist rulers in Beijing will still find much to like. Pre-publicity material suggests the new storyline will have a harder political edge, concentrating more on the martial qualities of Communist forces who formed a united front with the Nationalists.

WAR STORIES

Some film reviewers in China say that with the censors declaring so many other subjects off limits, it is only natural that the war dominates story-telling in a competitive market for viewers and advertising.

"Only anti-Japanese themes aren't limited," says Zhu Dake, an outspoken culture critic and professor at Shanghai's Tongji University. "The people who make TV think that only through anti-Japanese themes will they be applauded by the narrow-minded patriots who like it."
Zhu estimates war stories make up about 70 percent of drama on Chinese television. The state administrator approved 69 anti-Japanese television series for production last year and about 100 films. Reports in the state-controlled media said up to 40 of these were shot at Hengdian alone. State television reported in April that more than 30 series about the war were filming or in planning by the end of March.
On any given night, state-owned television channels bombard Chinese viewers with the heroics of the two major Communist armies in combat with the Japanese, the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army. Elaborate plots tap the period's rich history of deception, betrayal and collaboration.

In January, a tense seminar in Hong Kong brought together opinion makers from both sides, including senior retired military officers. There, the role of wartime drama was singled out as a major factor in plunging ties between the two nations.

"Yes, the Nanjing massacre did happen," Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor at Tokyo University and a former Japanese defense ministry researcher, told the seminar. "Yes, Japan did invade China. These are facts. But, when there are more than 200 movies coming out, you can imagine the negative effect."

When Tokyo nationalized the disputed islands last September, buying them from a private Japanese owner, it provoked sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests in cities across China. In a telling indicator of the hostile mood in China, demand for Japanese products is falling across the board. Japanese exports to China for the year through March dropped 9.1 per cent to 11.3 trillion yen, according to Japanese customs figures.

Out in the East China Sea, both sides are so far exercising restraint. The risk of conflict through accident or miscalculation, however, remains high. Under Xi, China has intensified an air and sea campaign that military experts believe is aimed at wearing down Japanese forces around the potentially resource rich islands.

FASHIONING PARTY LORE

Anti-Japanese films were instrumental in fashioning some of the Communist Party's foundation myths.

In the early years of the People's Republic, these films showed Mao Zedong's patriotic Communist guerrillas leading a heroic resistance. In contrast, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were portrayed as corrupt, ineffective and aligned with treacherous foreign powers, principally the United States. A vast majority of Chinese born before the 1970s remember the black-and-white classics from this period.

One of them, "Tunnel Warfare," is the world's most-watched film, with an estimated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, according the August First Film Studio in Beijing, the Chinese military production house that turned out the 1964 landmark and many others like it. In "Tunnel Warfare", Maoist guerrilla strategies inspire resourceful peasants to dig extensive tunnel networks beneath their village homes, from which they emerge to harass the occupying Japanese.

Regular screenings during an era of tight political control and virtually no alternative entertainment meant generations of viewers saw these movies many times. They are often crude, with voiceovers making sure viewers get the point. The brutality of Japanese troops toward Chinese combatants and civilians is a staple, but the films paradoxically avoided over-vilifying the invaders. Japanese characters are rarely developed. Plot lines concentrate on Mao's triumph in leading the resistance, rather than the clear battlefield superiority of the invaders, which had Chinese forces in retreat right up to the end of the war.

In this period, Chinese film makers conformed to a wider geopolitical strategy, where Beijing was anxious to avoid alienating Tokyo, historians say.

The Communist Party wanted diplomatic recognition from Japan and also sought to drive a wedge between Washington and its most important regional ally. Strict censorship ruled out researching or publishing material about Japanese atrocities. In a move that would be unthinkable today, Beijing treated convicted Japanese war criminals leniently at the 1956 war crimes trials it held in Shenyang and Taiyuan. None of the 51 prisoners who stood trial were executed or sentenced to long terms.

Textbooks from this time mentioned key events and battles but played down the scope and impact of Japan's occupation. Film makers avoided the dramatic potential of atrocities such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Some historians suggest the Communists were also determined to suppress movies or detailed historical accounts of major campaigns: Otherwise, attention would have been drawn to the role of the Nationalist armies, which bore the overwhelming brunt of fighting the Japanese. In the sacking of Nanjing, the Nationalists' capital, Communist forces played little or no role in defending the doomed city.

JAPANESE ATROCITIES REVISITED

This changed in the early 1980s when Chinese film makers began to turn their cameras unsparingly on Japan's wartime behavior. Beijing had already won diplomatic recognition from Japan in 1972, and when the disastrous Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping abandoned its ruinous economic policies and began experimenting with market reforms.

For a ruling party desperate to recover its prestige and stamp out demands for political change, revisiting Japanese atrocities provided a useful distraction, historians say. In contrast, the party still vigorously suppresses any effort to document or publicize the calamities of its own making, including the starvation of tens of millions following Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward.

The official desire to foster nationalism intensified after the 1989 Tiananmen protests shook the party to its foundations. "Maybe the leadership realized that a memory of collective suffering at the hands of an external enemy is more effective in bringing people together," said Kristof Van Den Troost, a film and history researcher at Hong Kong's Chinese University.

One of the best known films of the era, "Red Sorghum" from 1987, based on a novel by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, launched the careers of actress Gong Li and director Zhang Yimou. It pulled no punches, switching from a rich love story set in rural China to a blood-drenched climax in which the Japanese order a local butcher to skin alive a prisoner. "Skin him," the Japanese interpreter screams at the butcher, who in an act of mercy stabs the prisoner to death and is immediately machine-gunned. The butcher's assistant is then forced to skin another live prisoner, later revealed to be a communist guerrilla.

As war museums and memorials opened all over China, film makers were free to explore the orgy of killing and rape at Nanjing. Chinese estimates put the Nanjing death toll at 300,000. Japanese and some other foreign estimates are lower.

Today, while hewing to the official anti-Japanese line, some of these films are more subtle than their forerunners. In the 2009 box office hit, "The City of Life and Death," director Lu Chuan controversially included a relatively sympathetic Japanese character. Sergeant Kadokawa, played by Hideo Nakaizumi, stands apart from his comrades amid the orgy of violence in Nanjing.

But film makers can go too far. Jiang Wen, the male lead in "Red Sorghum," ran afoul of the state film administrator with "Devils on the Doorstep," his second film in the director's chair. The film won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 2000 but was subsequently banned in China. It mocks the confusion of peasants in a village in northern China entrusted with holding a captured Japanese soldier and his translator. Though the movie ends in a bloodbath for the villagers, censors attacked it for its sympathetic treatment of the Japanese prisoner and failure to depict the Chinese as selfless patriots.

LUDICROUS PLOTS

While studios continue to pump out drama, there are now signs scriptwriters are scratching for material. Critics inside and outside the government have been scathing about the ludicrous and violent plots of some of the more recent productions.

Some directors have merged war dramas with semi-mystical, martial arts action where virtually unarmed Chinese slaughter platoons of hapless Japanese.

In the television series "Anti-Japanese Knight," an unarmed Chinese martial art expert tears a Japanese soldier in half from head to crotch, the divided corpse suspended in the air with a skein of blood connecting the pieces. In another scene from the same series, a Japanese soldier's intestines are wrenched out of his abdomen in a fight sequence.

Under the weight of ridicule and disgust, officials from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television this month ordered a crackdown, insisting studios make "more serious" dramas.

Even Shi, the busy stuntman, is tiring of his role as a Japanese victim.

"I'm not good-looking so I play a Japanese soldier," he said. "I would really prefer playing a soldier in the Eighth Route Army."
(Reporting By David Lague in Hong Kong and Jane Lanhee Lee in Hengdian, China.; Edited by Bill Tarrant)

Visitors use toy weapons to shoot pictures of Japanese soldiers at a theme park in Wuxiang, Shanxi province, China, on Oct. 20.

[Igor Antunov]

Is it hard to understand that the average Chinese views the Japanese as the Americans and Europeans view the Nazis? In fact their antics were even more brutal. And what's more a part of that old regime still lingers in present-day Japan. It is the perfect and logical pop culture enemy, as the nazis are in the west.

[Baff]

Except that here in the west, we don't riot in the street about the evils of the Nazi's still.

So while we can see where the roots of this antipathy lie, we can't still see any particular reason to be continuing with it. The war is over. Long over.
Unless you want to start it all up again that is...

[Igor Antunov]

Except that here in the west, we don't riot in the street about the evils of the Nazi's still.

People would be rioting if shrines to hitler were being visited by german chancellors and random german politicians were declaring that mass rape and murder are a necessary and logical act.

[Baff]

Unlikely.

All those people old enough to still hate Mr Hitler are too old to riot.

These people who are rioting? It has nothing much to do with the war of 70+ years ago.

[feihua]

The Nazis get made fun of with Broadway musicals. The Germans don't.....but the Mormons do.

I find it interesting that the Chinese are not having mass riots over the Hashimoto remarks. It could be a case that the Chinese government has not allowed attention (to be paid towards Hashimoto) in the local press.

There were plans for an Auschwitz theme park in Japan about 15 years ago....and I want to say it was supposed to be along sympathetic lines...but it did not come off.

FWIW for sure, I get loads of opportunities to bring up the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army with my wife. She is so apolitical I can't get a response out of her....as is the case, she is extremely removed from any connection and doesn't get defensive about anything. She thinks we are all a bunch of kooks in this forum in comparison and cannot understand the thrill of debate.

My Chinese wife, on the other hand, was a different case. Despite even living in Japan, and preferring to live in almost any country compared to China, she would get very angry but it was all a case of ego more than anything political. If she was in China, it was a case about how unfair it was to women. When she was living in Switzerland, she hated how they were so snooty. When she was living in Canada, she felt it was unfair how that was one of the few countries she could freely move to.

Shrugs.

If the Chinese were allowed access to more information, their anger towards Japan would probably get redirected towards more traditional avenues of current displeasure. And that would indeed make the govt of the PRC feel very uneasy. As is the case, they do not have many directions for their frustration to have aim, so the Japanese works for them.

To be fair, people who live in Texas (natives, transplanted Yankees and so on) unleash a parallel frustration out at the Mexicans. Although not as violent, it is probably even more vocal than the Chinese on a domestic level. It is even more baseless and uncalled for than the attitude of the Chinese. Yet, as mentioned, it is certainly not as violent (in terms of attacking embassies with protests) and it rarely is done for international promotional purposes. It is basically the same venting, however. The odd part is it usually is carried out by those who have the least connections to Texas. Example, I know this English gal who lived during the bombings in the UK. She cannot get her mind off the war. She hates the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians and anyone she can think of. Then she sits in her backyard in the country and starts saying crap about how she wishes the Mexicans would go back where they come from.

None of it makes any sense in the 21st century.

But yep, Nazis are great to make fun of. And keep in mind, for some reason American kids in the States, especially in the 1960s (do some research and look up surfer's crosses and motorcycle helmets of the sixties), thought the Germans were a much cooler army than that Allied forces. I cannot even recall parents giving kids hell for that idolization. The idolization certainly wasn't because of political beliefs - undoubtedly it had to be that a efficient fighting machine was something to be noticed. But no one that I can recall thought the Nazis were anything to idolize once one had reached the age of 12.

I have absolutely no problem with the following lyrics by the Ramones:

Well I'm a Nazi Schatzi, I'm a Nazi, yes I am
A Nazi Schatzi, you know I fight for fatherland

A Nazi Schatzi, I'm a Nazi, yes I am
A Nazi Schatzi, you know I fight for fatherland

Little German boy, bein' pushed around
A little German boy, in a German town

A Nazi Schatzi, I'm a Nazi, yes I am
A Nazi Schatzi, you know I fight for fatherland

Well I'm a Nazi Schatzi, I'm a Nazi, yes I am
A Nazi Schatzi, you know I fight for fatherland

Little German boy, bein' pushed around
A little German boy, in a German town

Today your love, tomorrow the world
Today your love, tomorrow the world
Today your love, tomorrow the world

It's funny, it's the Ramones, and there Is a certain amount of empathy in it. In the end, it is just dumb and oddly sung by someone (Joey Ramone) who happens to be Jewish. I cannot recall a single time the Jewish Anti-Defamation League came out to make a protest against the Ramones.

The Japanese, when offered the opportunity of choosing to either berate the Chinese or play up the 'shenanigans' of Mother Theresa as self-serving, will go towards Mother Theresa with at least a 90% ratio. Certainly, this has to do with freedom of information.

Even the humongous concern of the plight of Chinese babies is largely a western concern. One will not find the Japanese complaining much about the tragedy. They did not even seem to be aware of such a situation until Hillary Clinton planted The Year of the Woman in Beijing helping to spread the word.

The issue with the Chinese public (more so than even the govt of China) is that there is this unrealistic attitude that the Japanese of today are the same people as Japan pre-WW2. It just isn't the same country.

And this is probably why United States citizens don't really give a fuck about Iraqis or Vietnamese being some kind of anti-US force, today.

Seriously, imagine UK citizens clamoring in the streets about Zulus in the 21st century. Haha, now THAT'S a riot I want to witness.