Invasion. Genocide. An utter lack of remorse. and why there could be a terrifying new war between Japan and China

Invasion. Genocide. An utter lack of remorse. and why there could be a terrifying new war between Japan and China

A few years ago, nobody in Asia gave much thought to the Senkaku islands. They form a cluster of eight pimples in the East China Sea, mid-way between Taiwan and Japanese Okinawa, devoid of people, culture and — by all accounts — beauty.

Yet suddenly, they have become the focus of a dispute between China and Japan which is growing so bitter that doomsters fear Beijing might even go to war over them.

The dispute is one of a dozen involving islands off the Asian mainland — some claimed by Vietnam, others by South Korea, others again by the Philippines — in which China is wielding a big stick.

In some cases, it covets fish stocks around the rocks, in others there is oil under the sea; elsewhere, Beijing merely wants to extend its territorial waters.

What alarms the United States, as well as the regional powers, is the ferocity with which China is pursuing its claims.

The row about the Senkakus escalated when the Tokyo government recently purchased them from their owner, a Japanese businessman. In the past week, the ownership of the islands has provoked demonstrations in a dozen Chinese cities, outbreaks of violence and vandalism against Japanese targets which have prompted some of its industrial giants — Nissan, Honda, Canon, Panasonic — to shut down their plants in that country.

Some Japanese residents of China have shut themselves in their homes for safety. They feel unable to rely on the Chinese police for protection, because it is impossible for sustained vandalism to happen without official acquiescence. Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to issue tough statements about the islands, which it calls the Diaoyus.

Washington, as well as Tokyo, is alarmed by the spectacle of China playing rough.

Nobody forgets that in the past, the Chinese have sometimes used force to get their way in border disputes: they occupied Tibet and fought a bitter war with Vietnam. Fears persist about China’s obsessive determination to reunite the mainland with offshore Taiwan, left in the old Chinese government’s hands after the 1949 communist revolution.

The quarrel over the Senkakus has reawakened atavistic Chinese hostility and resentment towards Japan, which goes back more than a century.

In 1894, the Japanese seized and colonised the Korean peninsula — a staging post towards an occupation of China — and sank a Chinese fleet. China’s Qing regime had to sign a humiliating peace surrendering part of Manchuria — effectively north-east China — and the Pescadore islands, off modern Taiwan.

Then, on September 18, 1931, the Japanese staged a faked attack on their own railway in their sector of Manchuria, blamed the Chinese, and used the incident as a pretext to overrun all of that region. (That date lives in infamy in China — which is why violent demonstrations took place in the country this week.)

The Japanese renamed the area Manchukuo, and installed the emperor Pu Yi as their puppet ruler.

In the decade that followed, they extended their empire with a ruthlessness that shocked the world. In 1932, after a Chinese mob in Shanghai attacked five Japanese monks in the city, the Japanese air force took reprisals by bombing the entire city, killing thousands of civilians.

In 1937, Japanese army officers manufactured a new incident at the ancient Marco Polo bridge outside the northern Chinese city of Tientsin — in which the Japanese had a garrison under the terms of a treaty. Claiming that their troops had been fired on by Chinese soldiers, they launched a full-scale invasion of China. What happened thereafter has never been forgotten or forgiven — not least because today’s Japanese are reluctant to admit past war crimes.

Having fought their way through Shanghai, sacking and killing, they embarked on a campaign which showed the world the nature of Japanese militarism.

Tokyo’s soldiers marched on the Chinese Nationalist capital, Nanking, killing and burning everything in their path in the spirit of ‘Bushido’ — the ‘Code of the Warrior’. Their route led them through Suchow, one of the oldest cities in China, famous for its silk embroideries, palaces and temples set beside the Tai Hu lake.

On November 19 in heavy rain, Japanese troops overran Suchow, ‘the Venice of China’, then spent days sacking the city. Thousands of women were seized to be raped by the conquerors, and most of the rest of the population fled.

Prince Asaka Yashuhiko, uncle of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, took personal command of the 50,000-strong army. His men went on to storm Nanking, overcoming a much larger Chinese garrison. Then an order was issued systematically to kill thousands of Chinese prisoners, whom the conquerors despised for accepting defeat, and whom they had no means to feed.

A Japanese soldier named Azuma wrote: ‘They all walked in droves, like ants crawling on the ground . . . a herd of ignorant sheep . . . whispering to each other. It felt quite foolish to think that we had been fighting to the death against these ignorant slaves, some were even 12-year-old boys’.

On the evening of December 17, 1939, the Japanese herded thousands of prisoners, their hands bound, to the bank of the Yangtze river. There, abruptly, Japanese machine-gunners opened fire. Within minutes, amidst frenzied screams of excitement from the killers, and of terror and agony from their victims, hundreds of Chinese were thrashing wounded or dying beside the river.

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