第一篇原文「Strained relations between Japan and South Korea」是相關於日本和韓國的竹島或獨島的主權之爭。筆者順便於這兩、三週經濟學者雜誌履次發稿也對中國和日本的釣魚島或尖閣群島作批評。因此分兩篇依時間貼在這部落格上。筆者所回的文和對這些文章的回顧貼在第二部份。

Strained relations between Japan and South Korea

Lame ducks and flying feathers

Domestic political upheaval in both countries makes a damaging row worse

Sep 8th 2012 | SEOUL AND TOKYO | from the print edition

IN RECENT administrations in South Korea a pattern has emerged for how presidents treat Japan. For the first three of their five years in office, they are in a friendly swoon, focusing firmly on the future. Then, as if rudely awoken, they remember that Japan was once a brutal coloniser, and things go swiftly downhill.

Lee Myung-bak, in his last few months as South Korea’s president, is following the same script, but with a twist. On August 10th he made an unexpected visit to an islet that South Korea, which occupies it, calls Dokdo, and that Japan, which covets it, calls Takeshima. That suddenly upset the diplomatic limbo in which the territorial dispute had lain for years. A South Korean president had never set foot on the island before. A few days later Mr Lee added what the Japanese saw as insult to injury, by saying that if the emperor, Akihito, were to visit South Korea, he should first apologise for Japan’s wartime sins. Then followed aDokdo nonsense, in which the South refused to receive a diplomatic letter and Japan refused to take it back. Even Japan’s relations with North Korea appear to have more scope for improvement.

The question is why Mr Lee, who must leave office shortly after elections in December, is going out of his way to be so provocative. Now that Park Geun-hye, no friend of the president, has become the ruling party’s candidate to contest the elections, Mr Lee looks like a lame duck. His brother, who wielded influence over his administration, was indicted in July on kickback charges, joining other former presidential aides accused of corruption. In a country where ex-presidents’ families and friends are often hounded by their enemies, Mr Lee’s visit to the island can best be explained as a way of shoring up his defences before he goes.

The trouble is, he is not the only diminished leader in the neighbourhood. In late August Yoshihiko Noda, the Japanese prime minister, was defeated in an opposition censure in the upper house, in effect killing his chances of pushing legislation through both houses of parliament during this session.

The immediate consequence is that his government is running out of cash. On September 4th it postponed ¥4.1 trillion ($52.4 billion) in tax grants to towns and cities, following its failure to pass a bill to issue bonds to help fund this year’s budget. Soon, though, the censure motion may leave Mr Noda no choice but to dissolve parliament, pushing him into an autumn election that polls suggest his ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) will lose. The fight is likely to be liveliest on the nationalist right, where some of the DPJ’s most potent challengers include people spoiling for a verbal confrontation with South Korea. That will make the bilateral tensions even harder to diffuse.

Pundits are struggling to understand how matters deteriorated so swiftly. They are mystified as to why Mr Lee brought the emperor into the fray. The 78-year-old has worked hard to improve relations with South Korea, as with all neighbours who suffered under Japanese imperialism. He is not shy of apologising.

As for the surprise visit to the island, Mr Lee has broken what the Japanese see as a diplomatic taboo. And he has sought to aggravate the thorny territorial issue with the emotive issue of “comfort women”, South Koreans press-ganged during the second world war, along with other nationalities, to provide Japanese soldiers with sex.

A year ago South Korea’s Constitutional Court compelled Mr Lee’s government to take steps to address the grievances of some of the victims who every week hold protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Park Cheol-hee of Seoul National University reckons that Mr Lee decided to go to the island partly out of frustration, because his government was unable to persuade Mr Noda’s administration to offer compensation to the comfort women, along with profounder apologies than Japan had issued to date.

In South Korea the blame for this fell largely on Mr Noda. However, Hitoshi Tanaka, a Japanese foreign-policy expert who has taken part in comfort-women negotiations in the past, says it was long ago agreed between the two countries that Japan could not offer state handouts to individuals, however much they suffered, on the (admittedly curious) ground that the demands would be endless. He says the Lee administration ignores numerous past apologies, as well as indirect compensation payments.

A big risk now is that the row could inflame anti-Korean sentiment in Japan. Charismatic right-wing politicians such as Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka, who is preparing to launch a nationwide political party to take part in the elections, is one of several influential figures who have called for a review of the 1993 “Kono Statement”, named after the then chief cabinet secretary, which is Japan’s fullest apology for the incidents of sexual slavery. So has Shinzo Abe, a nationalist whose disastrous spell as prime minister has not snuffed out his ambitions. Such a review would infuriate South Koreans.

Deteriorating relations have already had material consequences. In June, and at the last moment, South Korea shelved a deal to share intelligence with Japan, mainly about North Korea. Military exchanges, which are encouraged by the United States, an ally of both countries, were suspended this week. Japan is mulling whether to renew a currency-swap agreement that expires in October. Politicians are even threatening to stop a Korean soap-opera star from visiting Japan, after he took part in a swimming relay to Dokdo. For Japanese women obsessed with the “Korean wave” of popular culture, that is extremely serious.

Five million tourists travel between the two countries each year, and the business ties are so thick that a huge incentive exists for South Korea and Japan to overcome their differences. It will not happen, however, before Mr Lee leaves office. By then,Mr Noda may be gone too.

from the print edition | Asia

Sino-Japanese maritime disputes

Islands apart

There is more than meets the eye to the countries’ tense stand-off

Sep 15th 2012 | TOKYO| from the print edition

THE row between Japan and China over five islets that lie between them resurfaced again on September 11th when the Japanese government agreed to pay ¥2 billion ($26m) to buy, from their private owner, the three it does not already own. China reacted with outrage, and sent two patrol vessels to waters near what the Japanese call the Senkaku islands, and the Chinese call the Diaoyu.

Japan hopes this is more sound than fury. Yoshihiko Noda, the prime minister, may have bought the islands not to stir up troubled waters, but because he felt it was better than putting them into the hands of Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo and a crusty, China-baiting nationalist. In April Mr Ishihara launched a campaign for the Tokyo metropolitan government to buy them.

China may not see it Mr Noda’s way. Part of the problem is that, while much of the region resents what it sees as Chinese maritime expansion, China is troubled by Japan’s own maritime scope. Although the two nations have, by some estimates, roughly the same amount of coastline, Japan, an archipelago, claims an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 4.5m square km (2.8m square miles), five times more than China.

A recent paper by Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University argues that since the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was ratified in 1982, Japan, thanks partly to a colonial legacy, has done better out of it than China. In EEZ terms, the latter ranks somewhere between the Maldives and Somalia as a maritime power.

Japan takes its EEZs seriously. The Tokyo metropolitan government, amazingly, has jurisdiction over islands and atolls stretching deep into the Pacific. It reaches as far as Okinotorishima (literally “remote bird island”), almost 2,000km (1,250 miles) from the capital—roughly the distance from London to Reykjavik. Essentially two islets on an atoll, the territory shrinks at high tide so that “one is about the size of a double bed and the other a small room,” as Mr McCormack puts it. Since 1987, he says, Tokyo has spent $600m trying to stop the reef from disappearing. Under international law Japan’s claim that Okinotorishima counts as an island (thus permitting an EEZ stretching out in a 200-miles radius) is shaky, to put it mildly.

Given the potential territorial and resource benefits, neither country’s hysteria over the Senkaku seems quite so outlandish. Mr Noda’s government may try to soothe the issue by pledging to keep Japanese from setting foot on them. Yet the islands may soon loom large again. A general election in Japan is due. And the chief opposition hopeful as next prime minister is none other than Nobuteru Ishihara, the crusty governor’s son.

from the print edition | Asia

Anti-Japan protests

Outrage, to a point

Sep 17th 2012, 7:18 by N.D. | SHANGHAI

ABOUT three thousand protesters gathered outside Shanghai’s Japanese consulate on September 16th. The young crowd, mostly aged 20-35, had draped themselves with the Chinese flag, chanting anti-Japan slogans and brandishing portraits of Chairman Mao. But the presence of riot police and soldiers had a sobering effect. Even as the protesters shouted for Japanese nationals to “get the hell out of China”, they waited obediently before filing towards the gates of the consulate in batches. Each group had an allotted ten-minute remonstrance at Japan’s official doorstep. They took their banners with them when they made their orderly series of exits.

Elsewhere things have been less peaceable. Over the weekend anti-Japan-themed protests erupted in dozens of Chinese cities, in what one observer has called the largest such widespread display since Japan established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic in 1972. In Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, police used tear gas to control crowds. In Guangzhou 10,000 protesters took to the streets, according to the Japanese press. A Panasonic factory and a Toyota car dealership were both set on fire in the port city of Qingdao, as were Japanese-made cars in Xi’an. The embassy in Beijing got off lightly by that measure, being pelted with eggs and rocks.

Anti-Japanese tension, never far below the surface of public life in China, has bubbled to a boil over the past few weeks. On September 11th the Japanese government outraged China by buying the three Senkaku islands from a private owner, the only three it did not already possess. The islands as a group are known as the Diaoyus in China, which claims them as its own. On September 14th, Japan’s coast guard reported that six Chinese patrol ships entered Japanese territorial waters, in an apparent provocation. They left a few hours later.

The Senkakus—a straggle of rocky islets 200 nautical miles (370km) from China—have been a site of contention for decades. But the Sino-Japanese fissure runs much deeper still. Bitterness over Japan’s imperial aggressions in the 1930s and ’40s is tangible today. September 18th will mark the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident, when Japanese forces took Manchuria and embarked on their 14 years of pillage and suppression. The weekend’s protests may yet intensify, though they will remain under watch. Mass protests do not occur in China without some degree of official forbearance.

Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has urged the Chinese government to protect Japan’s citizens resident in China. (Diplomatic relations were further complicated by the inauspicious news of September 16th: the new ambassador to China, Shinichi Nishimiya, died suddenly in Tokyo.)

Mr Noda’s plea followed a spate of minor physical attacks on Japanese nationals in Shanghai, which is home to 60,000 Japanese expats. In one incident, noodles were thrown in the face of a Japanese man. Another had his glasses smashed. Mr Noda is keen to avoid the sort of demonstration seen in the city in 2005, when tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, physically assaulting Japanese nationals and smashing the windows of Japanese-owned businesses.

At the Shanghai protest, a Mr Tong, 35 years old and wearing a T-shirt that says “overthrow the Japs, defend Diaoyu”, had just finished a bout of demonstrating. Mr Tong says losing the islands would be a national humiliation. “China has the power to say ‘no’ to Japan and the government should play the hard line.” Citizens, he says, should boycott products made in Japan and stop travelling there. A handout listing the Japanese brands that are to be shunned was circulating among the protesting crowd.

Mr Tong does not support the violence that is cropping up in other cities. It would be misdirected, anyway. According to Mr Tong there is more to such outpourings than the old anti-Japan feeling. People’s frustrations at other social injustices, he says, have been suppressed for too long, becoming mixed up in this issue. The test for authorities will be dissolving public anger while maintaining the peace. In Shanghai, for now, things seem under control.

(Picture credit: The Economist)

Protests, real and fake

Of useful idiots and true believers

Sep 18th 2012, 5:04 by T.P. | BEIJING

YEAR in, year out, the anniversary of the Mukden incident always arrives on September 18th. Anniversaries are like that, and yet the memory of September 18th, 1931 is subject to change within China, flaring up and settling down in an unpredictable pattern. It is the true story of a false bombing, plotted by the Japanese against a Japanese-owned railway near the north-eastern city of Shenyang as a pretext for the invasion of much of China. In Western press accounts it is barely remembered at all, and so tends to be potted and repotted with a numbing regularity. This year, with anti-Japan sentiment already at a high for what seem like unrelated reasons, the timing looks almost malevolent. Can such things be planned?

Anyone with much of a memory who has been watching the past few days of raucous anti-Japan demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities might be feeling more than a touch of déjà vu. During China’s last big outbreak of anti-Japan protests, in 2005, and during the violent anti-American and anti-NATO protests that broke out after the deadly bombing in 1999 of China’s embassy in Belgrade, the scene was not dissimilar. Angry crowds of Chinese demonstrators marching and shouting as row after row of riot police watched passively—protecting embassies and consulates from hostile breach, and sometimes bearing the brunt when bottles, fruit or slashes of paint were sent flying.

Then as now, the protesters’ slogans, whether chanted or waved on signs and banners, ranged from assertions of simple patriotism and the “bullying” and “shame” China has endured over the course of its modern history, to harsh and racist messages urging violence.

The protesters are not the only ones repeating themselves. There is a whiff of déjà vu too when one turns to the reaction of onlookers. Especially with regard to the question of whether the demonstrations are genuine, passionate outpourings by ordinary Chinese citizens, or stage-managed pieces of political theatre put on by puppet-masters from Party central.

One long-time foreign resident on the scene of this weekend’s demonstrations in Beijing was convinced “the whole thing was a fake” and that “every single person with their fist in the air” was a member of the Chinese army or police forces “assigned to compulsory duty to fake the protest.”

Some Chinese are similarly sceptical “about the real situation of the ‘patriotic’ anti-Japan demonstrations.” They offered up as proof the identification one man, who was photographed leading protesters in Xi’an with megaphone in his hand and anti-Japanese slogans on his shirt, as a senior local police official. (Which the local public-security bureau has since tried to debunk.)

Your correspondent has learned that to ask demonstrators in these situations whether they have been put up to being there, or even helped along, is a risky thing to do. (The lesson comes from personal experience, though common sense might have sufficed.) It invites anger and indignation for suggesting that they have been manipulated—or insincere.

Given that the answer to this question of whether such demonstrations are stage-managed or spontaneous actually does matter a great deal, is it not worth noting that the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive? And that in some measure both are likely true?

Despite the presence of some officials in the mix, and what may be their significant role in guiding the proceedings, there should be no doubting that there are also plenty of ordinary people joining in, expressing real passion and anger.

Fierce anti-Japanese attitudes are widespread in China, across lines of region, class and age group. For anyone with even the slightest passing knowledge of 20th-century history, it is not hard to understand the roots of these feelings. Still it is disconcerting to see them cultivated and encouraged across all the platforms of China’s state-controlled media.

That they have been cultivated is beyond dispute. There may be surprising diversity of opinion in the new and quite wild world of the Chinese blogosphere, but the mainstream channels of discourse are still managed directly by the Party. And there—in the news, academic publishing, educational materials, television dramas and more—the anti-Japan drumbeat can ever be heard. Sometimes faster or louder, sometimes slower or softer, but never absent when the subject ranges towards Japan. The Chinese government takes very seriously the business of using media to “guide public opinion”.

To cite the role of those efforts in shaping views that are commonly held in China is not to deny that the views are themselves sincere. People are genuinely passionate about the disputed islands, as they are about the rest of the sorry modern history of Sino-Japanese relations. And Japan has done its share to keep the story in the news in recent weeks. China’s state-run media have chosen to emphasise it.

So now there are people who really do want to march, chant and throw plastic bottles at Japan’s embassy. And the authorities—either because they are afraid of angering people by denying them the opportunity or because they like the idea—are allowing it, up to a point. Since it would be riskier to let protesters march long distances across Beijing and pick up steam as they went, it makes a good deal of sense to provide the masses with buses. And since they are loth to pass up any opportunity to guide public opinion, they are probably also handing out flags and signs with approved messages.

In short, officials are allowing the demonstrators to do their thing, and at the same time doing their best to channel them. To credit the object of their manipulations as the real passion of real people is not to deny that there is some manipulating going on. Likewise to acknowledge that protesters may have been bused in, handed a sign to wave and a bottle of water (either to drink or to hurl over an embassy wall) is not to say that their passions are fake.

(Picture credit: AFP)

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