COMMENT
Time the best healer, except in North Asia
By David Aldridge

TOKYO - Consider this: the last time a Chinese president visited Japan was back in 1998 and the last time a Japanese prime minister made it over to China was in 2001, before Junichiro Koizumi came to office. In case you hadn't heard, relations between the two countries have been a bit strained of late.

Of course, that neither country's political leader has made an official state visit to the other's country for some time doesn't mean that Prime Minister Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao have never met. And Koizumi was supposed to get a chance to rub shoulders with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Hanoi this Thursday at the fifth summit of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM).

In principle, but not in practice. Politics apparently intervened to thwart any chance of a meeting.

A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official has said that Japan and China are unlikely to hold a summit on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting in Hanoi. Vice Foreign Minister Yukio Takeuchi said, "It seems difficult to hold Japan-China summit talks due to schedule constraints." He did not elaborate.

The two countries failed to arrange talks between Koizumi and Wen  - possibly as a result of soured political relations over Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to some war criminals. Foreign Ministry sources had stated earlier that the two countries were trying to arrange talks on the sidelines of the three-day summit.

But then if anything is a good benchmark of the wariness with which the countries of North Asia - China, Japan, the Koreas and Taiwan - view each other is that the main times these countries' leaders really get a chance to sit down and talk to each other is at other folks' meetings - ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forums (ARF), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summits, Asia-Europe Meetings, and so on.

The root of these cool relationships is a country that has not done as much as it could to show regret and neighbors who simply refuse to forget. It's that perennial problem of North Asian relations: history, and contrary to the old adage "time is the best healer", Japan's World War II legacy is becoming more controversial with the passage of time, not less. This has done much to fan the flames of nationalism in Japan, the Koreas, and China.

The rightward drift of Japanese politics over the past decade, which has accelerated under Koizumi, has resulted in a readiness to question Japan's "peace constitution" and the country's role in the world. To be fair to Japan and the more right-wing elements of its ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), constitutional revision is probably long overdue. And as much as a cliche it has become to say that "the world changed after September 11", Japan more than ever needs to question the false assumption that pacifism and security are one and the same.

However, China and the Koreas remain wary of Japan's intentions given the harsh treatment they suffered under Japanese imperial rule, and the insufficiency of Japan's elliptical apologies, especially when compared with Germany's forthright acknowledgment of its war crimes and its efforts to make restitution. Indeed, history remains probably the major irritant in China's and Korea's relationship with Japan. Japanese textbooks that gloss over World War II atrocities and Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the remains of convicted World War II war criminals, including Class A criminals, continue unsurprisingly to attract howls of protest from Seoul and Beijing.

Yet while Japan is not blameless for its haphazard approach to fully confronting its World War II crimes and aggression and while mainstream Japanese politicians flirting with right-wing ideology do not endear Tokyo to its neighbors, both Korea and China have used Japan as a convenient scapegoat.

China has been particularly prone to playing the history card. With precious few outlets for dissent in China, Japan-bashing is an easy outlet for venting anger, as the recent debacle in August at the soccer Asia Cup final showed, when Chinese fans rioted (albeit mildly compared with European soccer riots) after Japan's victory. The lack of Japanese contrition, the Nanjing massacre, and its sea of slave laborers are frequently bandied about on the mainland. But as in Japan, awkward facts, such as Chinese collaboration with the Japanese Imperial Army, are glossed over.

Beijing has long taken a hard line on Japan and Taiwan, so it is not surprising that the most frequent displays of nationalist fervor are directed toward the two. It should not be much of a shock, then, that diplomatically isolated Taiwan, a colony of Japan's for half a century, is the most sympathetic to Japan's viewpoint.

Contrast the displeasure in Beijing and Seoul at the Tokyo Board of Education's adoption in August of a revisionist textbook - which will be used in a handful of schools - to Taipei's silence. In part, this is due to Taiwan's need for regional allies but also because the island in many ways benefited from its period under Japanese rule, which modernized much of its infrastructure.

But nationalism is not just limited to the two big North Asian giants of Japan and China. South Korea has had more than its own fair share of nationalist spats of late. While Koreans have long been suspicious of Japan, anti-Americanism has been on the rise in South Korea's younger generations and the recent spat with China over the ethnic origins of the ancient Koguryo Kingdom, which comprised much of what is now South Korea, all of what is now North Korea, and a slice of northeastern China from 37 BC to AD 668.

China's decision to re-label Koguryo as part of China (though it has not made any territorial claims) caused the kind of howls of indignation in Seoul normally reserved for Japan. Despite a hasty patch-up over the issue, which threatened to sour the normally cordial relationship between Beijing and Seoul, more historical headaches lie further down the line for the Koreas and China. The Gando region in China, which previously belonged to Korea, could become another explosive national issue in time.

The lesson to be drawn from all the nationalist posturing and historical revisionism in which all the countries of North Asia engage is that history is a double-edged sword. Soccer riots in China tar its international image, as does Japan's reluctance to consider the sensitivities of its neighbors, especially Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which have been a major bone of contention with China.

But where history divides, at least economics, trade and money unite. As President Hu Jintao pointed out to Japanese Lower House Speaker Yohei Kono during the latter's visit to China at the end of September, relations between the two are "cold in politics, but hot in economics".

Nationalism may color and shape relations in North Asia, but as long as the money keeps flowing it is unlikely to destroy them. When it comes to the cool relationships of North Asia, Brad Glosserman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, caustically observes that "as in a boxing match, it's harder to punch while in a clinch".

Still, there are signs that Korea, China and Japan understand that more cooperative and warmer relations are essential to regional stability. Beijing has made it clear that it wants to put its rocky relationship with Japan on a more even keel. Zhao Qizhen, head of China's State Council Information Office, told Japanese reporters recently that Beijing would no longer tolerate "anti-Japan reporting by major [Chinese] news organizations". And Beijing has dispatched Wang Yi, a talented young Chinese diplomat, to Tokyo as it new ambassador to oversee the complex relationship between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Japanese lawmakers have been visiting China in droves. And although Koizumi will continue his trips to Yasukuni, the new Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, a noted foreign-policy hawk, has said he won't visit the shrine while in office.

So will North Asia continue to be characterized by nations economically and geographically close but culturally distant? Well, it's not mission impossible, but as a Chinese academic recently put it, "History is like a servant. It puts on whatever appearance its master fancies."

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