Boston Globe Editorial: Japan's history lesson

The Boston Globe
GLOBE EDITORIAL
Japan's history lesson
February 8, 2006

JAPAN'S RIGHT-WING politicians are making a dangerous habit of offending Asian neighbors, who suffered grievously under Japanese imperialism and become understandably angry when they hear Japan's leaders extol the benefits imperial Japan bestowed upon the conquered peoples.

The new Japanese nationalists peddle myths about the benevolence of Japan's imperial past with the intent of reviving a spirit of militarism. They defend Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine where class-A war criminals are buried. They revise school textbooks to whitewash the atrocities perpetrated in occupied China and Korea by imperial Japan's forces. And they stoke conflicts with China and Korea over rights to undersea energy deposits.

Japan's hawkish foreign minister, Taro Aso, exemplified this penchant for provocation when he foolishly declared over the weekend that Taiwan owes its advanced educational level to compulsory education policies imposed on the island during the 1895-1945 period of Japanese colonization.

Rightists like Aso indulge in this kind of undiplomatic behavior to advance their own political ambitions. Just as Koizumi pretends foreigners have no cause to be upset at his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, Aso appears to assume that Japan's neighbors will not care if he insinuates that the people on Taiwan were lucky to have been ruled for a half century by a more advanced race of Japanese. But the neighbors do care.

Indeed, Aso's insensitive boast accomplished a rare feat -- uniting Taiwan and mainland China in parallel expressions of indignation. A foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing excoriated Aso for ''overtly glorifying invasion history" and for distorting a period of Japanese domination that ''made Taiwan people suffer enslavement and brought grave disaster to the Chinese nation." A vice education minister on Taiwan contended that the islanders' advanced level of education should be attributed to generous government spending on schools and the value Chinese culture places on education. Parents on Taiwan ''would sell their land so their children could go to school," the vice minister said, and so Taiwan's educational success has ''nothing to do with Japan's colonization."

There is no inevitability to revived hostility between Japan and China. But to avoid a development that could put stability at risk across Asia, Japan's right-wingers will have to change their bellicose ways and China's communist leaders will have to refrain from seizing on Japanese provocations to stir up their own people's nationalistic passions.