Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea and Japan

by Michael Booth

According to the poll, 81 per cent of Chinese people had an unfavourable impression of Japan and 86 per cent of Japanese felt the same way about the Chinese, while 77 per cent of South Koreans had an unfavourable view of the Japanese.

by April 1895 the Japanese had defeated the Chinese Qing army in the First Sino-Japanese War, fought to decide who would ‘protect’ Korea. By the ensuing Treaty of Shimonoseki, China was forced to hand over control of Taiwan to Japan. And in 1905 Japan became the first outside nation to defeat a Western power, Russia, following a conflict over present-day North Korea.

At the Tokyo war crimes trials in 1946, General Kanji Ishiwara, who had been in charge of the invasion of China in 1931, referred specifically to Commodore Perry when questioned on Japan’s military expansionism. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perry!’ he told his American interrogators. ‘[Japan] took your country as its teacher and set about learning how to be aggressive.’

Remember your ramen golden rule: ‘The true test is how you feel beyond the halfway mark.’

Most remarkable from a foreign perspective is the second group – die-hard North Korean sympathisers who hope and believe that one day they will return to live in a reunified Korea run by the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang. They are called Chongryon or Chongreon.

There used to be many more North Korean-affiliated schools in Japan, but a large number have amalgamated or closed over the past twenty years. Some of these Chongryon schools are funded directly from Pyongyang, and some even receive Japanese state funding via their local prefectures.

Following further pressure from the United Nations Human Rights Committee, Japan did eventually pass a law against physical threats to people, but the law doesn’t actually ban hate speech in person or online and carries no penalties for the guilty.

‘I asked a member of Zaikokukai this, and he said that it was because they had more information about South Korea. China and North Korea are further away physically but also in terms of information. Whatever is reported in the South Korean media is also reported here. The racists in Japan hear about the Korean education system [which can be virulently anti-Japanese]; they know a lot about how the average South Korean thinks about Japan. They are an easy target.’

The nature of the Japan fetishist is such that he or she can experience shivering frissons of excitement at the most quotidian of Japanese sights – a billboard campaign for coffee featuring Tommy Lee Jones floating in a bathing ring, for instance, or a timewarp 1960s shopfront

The stark figures are these: within two years the square-metre price for property in the Japanese capital had dropped by 80 per cent, in some cases more.

Kyoto has an almost mystical significance for the Japanese, partly because it was the capital from AD 794 to the Meiji Restoration, including, crucially, the sakoku period. This was the era of unification and relative peace, the lotus-eating time when the samurai class indulged in ritualised tea ceremonies, calligraphy, poetry, elaborate multi-course meals and precision gardening. At least, this is the commonly held perception of Japan in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Theirs was a shame culture, as opposed to our Western guilt culture, with its clearer (to us) moral landscape of right and wrong, guilty and innocent. In shame cultures one’s choices are driven by preservation of reputation rather than a moral code: getting caught is the crime.

General Curtis LeMay is buried at the US Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado. LeMay was the man responsible for the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 people and was arguably the worst individual instance of mass killing of non-combatants in military history. LeMay himself admitted, ‘If I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.’

The Allies were arguably more concerned about the post-war order, and there were probably many men guilty of crimes, possibly Class A crimes, who were never prosecuted or were pardoned. Some even ended up running major Japanese corporations or, like Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, running the country. Kishi was categorised as a Class A war criminal for his role in overseeing slave labour in Manchuria in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was imprisoned for three years after the war. He was pardoned by the Americans and went on to become a notably hard-line right-wing prime minister of Japan in the late 1950s.

Japanese are also the least patriotic people, not only of all Asian nations, but possibly in the world. The World Values Survey of 2010 revealed that Japan has the lowest percentage of people proud of their country (24 per cent) of all the nationalities polled, with only 16 per cent willing to fight for it. Similarly, an Asia Barometer survey revealed that only 27 per cent of Japanese were ‘proud of their own nationality’ compared to 46 per cent of Chinese.

2017 poll revealed that 65 per cent of Japanese people support no political party.

They have a nifty method for avoiding the tedium of queuing: they simply let their luggage do it for them, placing their suitcases in front of, or behind, the Japanese while they pop off for some last-minute duty-free shopping. This seems to suggest a unique combination of high social trust and blithe entitlement.

Following the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s military and technological rise, Korea added its next-door neighbour to the list of dangers, and when in 1875 the Japanese imposed an unequal treaty upon the Koreans just as the Americans had done to them, it marked the beginning of a stealthy annexation of the entire peninsula via trade-related infrastructure investments – a port reclamation here, a railroad there, and so on.

In Hideyoshi’s day it was normal practice for the Japanese to sever the heads of their enemies after a battle to obtain the bounty for each one killed, but so many Koreans were slaughtered during his army’s invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597 that shipping their heads back to Japan proved a logistical challenge.

‘They see on the television or movie screen a modernised society filled with capitalistic commodities like modern buildings, cars, restaurants and fancy clothes. At the same time, however, they observe behavioural patterns that accord with Confucian traditions, including emphasis on the family, male dominance, patriarchy, strong hierarchy, spirit of self-sacrifice among males and female obedience,’

‘It is very ambiguous. There is no strict clear policy, no sanctions; it is indirect patriotism. About 88 million Chinese are members of the Communist Party, which is huge, and you know SMS is very prevalent in China.’ In other words, the message goes out almost subliminally: We are not happy that Korea is allowing this, and suddenly the Chinese stop going on holiday to Korea and go to Thailand or Indonesia instead. Within a year, tourism from China to Korea declined from five million to two million; K-pop stars found their visa applications to China refused; thousands of Hyundais and Kias were left standing in the ports.

Something similar had happened a few years earlier in Japan – the Japanese market turned against Hallyu when South Korea and Japan clashed over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands. Cultural exports are, it seems, the first thing to suffer when relations deteriorate between the east Asian siblings.

Tei Tai-Kin described the Koreans as having ‘a kind of herd mentality’. He used a word, skinship, which I had never heard before. ‘It’s a Japanese-English word. It refers to very close bodily contact, physical contact to show that there is an emotional friendship. When people like to be close to each other in a crowd. When that happens, they are easily manipulated by propaganda.’ There is actually a Korean word which is close to this – chung, meaning ‘group consciousness’ or ‘loyalty’ – but it has a moral aspect: collectivity is good. Standing together benefits the country as a whole.

Ironically, many chaebol were founded in Korea using assets taken from these Japanese companies after 1945, and from the 1960s to the 80s their activities were closely ‘guided’ by the president.

Today forty-five chaebol remain. The five largest – Samsung, Hyundai, LG, SK and Lotte – account for over half of South Korea’s annual GDP.

So why are the chaebol tolerated? Because the South Korean economy is unusually dependent on exports (78 per cent compared to the OECD average of 56 per cent) and relies on their continuing success. ‘They have brilliant synergies,’ Andrew Salmon told me. ‘And they’ve globalised extremely successfully, with great marketing these days, great branding, pretty good pricing, good products. They’re really good. They’ve got it all apart from the governance issue – that is their Achilles heel.’

One cultural variable that is very much related to happiness across nations is individualism, and the essence of individualism is you’re kind of trained mentally to live your life and not care too much about how other people evaluate your life. That mentality is very beneficial for maintaining a high sense of happiness because you don’t need validation from other people. It’s none of their business.’

The rampant individualism of Western cultures leads to all sorts of other psychological pressures, but at least there is the option for individuals to interpret their ‘success’ on their own terms. We can say, ‘Fuck it!’ and opt out of having to be rich, beautiful and successful yet still put on a fairly convincing show of being happy, but in Asian cultures, as Eunkook puts it, ‘There are going to be very few winners, by definition. A lot of people will feel relatively inferior.’

‘Actually, I just wrote a book criticising all this happiness business, the positive-psychology bandwagon. I think it’s crap because, sadly, we’re not designed to be happy. Homo sapiens, we’re like birds or animals, and they’re not designed to be happy, right? From an evolutionary perspective, happiness is just a tool, a sort of signal to direct you to seek resources which were essential for your survival. When do we feel happy? When we eat or have sex. That’s just a signal that you are a functioning human being.’

The Japanese were only doing what every other imperial power was attempting to do at the time, and the abuse of sex workers is one of the universal tragedies of war. German soldiers raped Russian women as they advanced on Moscow, for instance. The difference was, in the German army rape was illegal; the Japanese institutionalised it.

Adultery was illegal in South Korea until 2015; forty-two people were jailed for being unfaithful in 2008; and premarital sex is still the exception.

Two demographics are particularly prone to BQJS, and each has its specific method. Middle-aged men exude an air of relaxed entitlement, as if sidling to the front of queues is their birthright. Younger women pretend to be engrossed in a Very Important Conversation on their smartphones, looking up at the departures board in a don’t-talk-to-me-I’m-multi-tasking kind of a way and using the arm holding the device to shield them from their victims. Both of these techniques were impressive in their brazenness.