Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2012

This past summer those poorly stitched up old wounds in East Asia just about turned septic. As Japanese flags went up in flames in China, the prime minister of Japan, Yoshihiko Noda, pleaded with its neighbors to look at the “broader picture,” hoping they would side with their usual pragmatism rather than give in to the nationalist fervor that evidently fills their countries. But if Noda wants to subdue nationalists from across the sea, he has to be willing to stand up to the overbearing nationalist lobby in his own country.

It’s usually around the end of the summer, with the anniversaries of the A-bomb and Japan’s surrender, that East Asia opens the books on “war memory” and goes through its annual disputes over historical records, compensation and island sovereignty. For over 60 years, China and South Korea have refused to accept international adjudication on the island disputes from the International Court of Justice. Without any hope of consensus, the disputes have instead become the symbols of a nationalist cause and an excuse to caricature Asian neighbors in a most bloated and sinister way.

In Japan, the proponents of this are known as the “revisionist conservatives”—the most parochial yet outspoken group in post-war Japan. One revisionist conservative for example, the recently resigned governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, broke the parameters of a city governor by stepping into national foreign policy and pledging to buy the Senkaku Islands unilaterally. The government nonetheless failed to denounce his actions and instead allowed itself to be led sheepishly into the latest confrontation with China.

The revisionists also foiled attempts by the Asia Women’s Fund (AWF) to compensate “comfort women” from eight Asian countries occupied by Japanese forces during the war. Their opposition allowed for only a tepid, carefully worded, lawyer’s apology from the Japanese government to those victims, and it has also forced the omission of the comfort women issue in the most recent middle-school history textbooks.

War memory is readily used as political capital in Japan. Revisionists such as Nagoya mayor, Takashi Kawamura, still think that downplaying or outright denying the Nanjing Massacre is the best way to get under the skin of the Chinese, which evidently it is, and that it’s the best way to restore Japan’s post-imperial national integrity, which most certainly it is not. The mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, played the same card with his dismissal of the comfort women issue, while Ishihara has made countless ventures into Sinophobia and Nanjing denial.

The fact that these reactionaries have been popularly elected into three major Japanese cities shows that the Japanese electorate prefers either to ignore foreign policy issues or that it favors a more digestible and self-assured foreign policy narrative. But if the Japanese citizenry wishes to carry on their current trajectory, they must be willing to face lasting alienation from the region. 

They might bear in mind the lengths their elected revisionist leaders will go to in order to salvage the “glorious” past. They will obsess over fractions in the historical records, and they will feel vindicated when Japan is alienated because of it. To let their attempts discredit the sincerity of the war apology effort embodied in the Peace Constitution—and people like Saburo Ienaga and Yohei Kono—is to make sure the scars of the past stay bloody and exposed. And if anyone in Japan finds this deplorable then they should say so, so that the Chinese and South Koreans, as perceptible as they are, hear only sincere contrition, and not the insufferable ambivalence that they’re hearing now.

Whether it’s rock droppings in the sea or historical records, it’s clear that the small differences in East Asia matter. Freud encapsulated these sentiments well with what he called “the narcissism of the small difference”—the exercise of exaggerating minor differences for the purpose of developing one’s own sense of uniqueness.

Instead of East Asian history, proponents of this nationalism should look back to early 20th century Europe where nationalism collided to inglorious ends. In doing so, they might see the poverty of an ideology that is largely predicated on a hatred for other countries; or an ideology that abhors self-criticism, breeds indifference to the suffering of foreign peoples, but compels its followers to rally for the absorption of a handful of rock droppings in the sea.