Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia

Author

Dr. Ryu was born in South Korea and grew up both in South Korea and New Zealand. He first completed his BA in Economics and Politics and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating top of his class with the K J Scott Memorial Prize. He then moved to The University of Auckland for his BA (Hons) in Political Studies, where he graduated with First Class Honours. Later he went on to do his AM and PhD in Government (or political science) at Harvard University as a Frank Knox Fellow, where he specialised in International Relations.

His main research expertise covers international relations of East Asia, the foreign policies of China, Japan, and Korea, ASEAN, and identity politics. His PhD dissertation examined the different patterns of interstate relations between Northeast and Southeast Asia since the 1980s, and showed how identity-related issues have affected the contrasting evolution of interstate interactions in the two sub-regions of East Asia He has completed a book monograph based on his PhD thesis.

His current research projects focus on several topics. First, he is working on two book-length projects that investigate China’s economic statecraft and historical issues in contemporary Korean politics and foreign policy. In addition, he has three journal article projects: (1) China's threat percept of Japan; (2) socialisation within ASEAN; (3) the effect of the '’history problem.’

Introduction

The so-called “history problem” (lishi wenti or lishi renshi wenti) relates to the understanding and interpretation of Japan’s past colonialism in Asia, and has been one of the most controversial issues in East Asian interstate relations. Not only has it tarnished Japan’s international image and adversely affected Japan’s relations with the neighboring countries of China and Korea, but it has also derailed the US rebalancing strategy in East Asia by restricting trilateral cooperation between USA, Japan and Korea. Despite significant international audience costs and negative impact on Japan’s foreign relations and security cooperation, why do Japanese politicians and public opinion leaders still make controversial statements about Japan’s past history from time to time? Why does the issue still linger on even when it involves no or little conflict of any material interests?

Existing analyses of the ‘history problem’ provide no answer to these questions, as they focus on the effect of the issue on interstate relations (Suzuki 2007; He 2007; Lawson and Tanaka 2010; Soh 2008) and neglect if and how the issue matters in domestic politics. Furthermore, despite extensive media coverage and heated exchanges of political rhetoric, empirical studies examining the causal effect of the ‘history problem’ are still rare. The predominant case study method based on anecdotal evidence is useful in providing the sociopolitical context, but is of little help in proving a causal effect.

Understanding why the issue persists and how it matters in domestic politics is the first step in explaining why the issue is seemingly intractable. It would also help to find ways to resolve issue. This article, therefore, seeks to fill this academic gap and examines how the ‘history problem’ issue matters in domestic politics by analyzing the effect of the ‘history problem’ issue on the public opinion of Japan. Japan is a key actor in the issue, because of its past actions as well as occasional controversial statements by Japanese politicians. Essentially it is the ‘supplier country’ of the ‘history problem’ issue.

The article takes experimental approach in order to test the causal effect of the ‘history problem’ issue on the Japanese public opinion. I design a randomized block experiment in which, first, four blocks are created based on a prior question regarding the degree of national identity, and then the ‘history problem’ treatment is randomly assigned within those blocks. This experimental design improves on efficiency of simple experimental design by creating blocks, which takes care of variation between those blocks. The research makes an important empirical contribution to the study of East Asian interstate relations by shedding new light on how the ‘history problem’ issue interacts with national identity and domestic politics to affect regional interstate relations.

The article is organized as follows. First, it will discuss the ‘history problem’ with a focus on the causes of its salience. The article will then outline the argument and methodology. The next section will present the data and empirical analysis. The final section will present a critical discussion of the findings and their implications.

The ‘History Problem’: The Definition, Causes and the Puzzle

The so-called ‘history problem’ issue is one of the most widely reported and analyzed issues in East Asian international relations both by the media and academia, but it is seldom clearly defined. The ‘history problem’ is a non-material issue concerning the understanding or interpretation of Japan’s past colonialism in Asia. While the debate is often about the specifics such as the number of casualties and the parties intensely dispute them, the essence of the issue is whether the parties (mainly, Japan, China and Korea) share the understanding or interpretation of the same past event, namely, Japan’s aggression in Asia. As China and Korea bore the brunt of Japanese aggression, the issue is most intense between Japan on the one hand and China and Korea on the other. It encompasses a number of sub-issues such as Yasukuni Shrine (Ryu 2007; Koga 2015), the revision of Japan’s history textbook (Burke 2007), the so-called “comfort women” issue (Soh 1996 & 2008) and Nanjing massacre (Chang 2012) among others, each touching on different aspects of Japan’s self-understanding of its past atrocities.

The issue has been particularly intense during the Koizumi administration in the early 2000s and the current Abe administration in the early 2010s. At the center of the controversy were the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by both prime ministers as well as Abe’s attempt to reformulate Japan’s position on the so-called ‘comfort women’ (ianfu) issue. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, and prime minister Abe will make a statement about Japan’s past aggression in Asia. It is expected that he will inherit the Murayama statement, but he may also seek to tone down his apology for the past tragedy. Depending upon the contents of his speech, the ‘history problem’ issue might intensify in East Asian interstate relations.

The recent saliency and intensity of issue suggests that history is neither linear nor is necessarily about the past. Rather, history is about how the present generations understand and use the past for present political purposes. Despite the fact that these atrocities were committed more than seven decades ago, they became international controversies only in the 1980s when we expect war memories to be less vivid than in the immediate aftermath of the end of World War II (WWII). Figures 1 and 2 below show the frequency of newspaper articles covering key historical issues between Japan on one hand and China and Korea on the other.

For China, three historical issues ― Yasukuni Shrine, history textbook, and Nanjing massacre ― began to appear in the People’s Daily (renmin ribao) in the 1980s. Before the 1980s, there were three articles on Yasukuni Shrine in 1974, but overall the history problem was non-existent. However, beginning the 1980s, the three issues arose in saliency, which intensified throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 2001, for example, there were more than 50 articles on Yasukuni Shrine. For Korea, three issues – Yasukuni Shrine, history textbook and ‘comfort women’ – appearing in Donga Daily were used to measure the saliency of the ‘history problem’. Once again, the broad trend is the same. The these issues were essentially non-existent before the 1980s, with only one or two sporadic articles. However, the same issues began to appear in the 1980s, and became more frequent throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Both figures show that the ‘history problem’ became issues only since the 1980s, several decades after the end of WWII.

There are both domestic and international contexts that enable the persistence of the ‘history problem’. Domestically, how to interpret and teach Japan’s own imperial and colonial history was never clearly resolved at the end of the WWII. The US Occupation Authority sought to purge the wartime militaristic leaders, but the outbreak of the Korean War (1950 – 1953) increased the geostrategic value of Japan for the Cold War and reversed the US-initiated sociopolitical reform in Japan. The US brought some of the wartime leaders back in power. And after the end of the Korean War, Japan entered into the phase of rapid economic development under the Yoshida Doctrine of relying on USA for national security, and Japanese society never really had sufficient time and opportunity to critically reflect on its own past.

As a result, since the end of WWII, there have existed two different groups in Japan that propagate contrasting interpretations of Japan’s imperial past. The mainstream group, which consists the majority of Japanese society, believes that Japan’s colonialism was an act of aggression waged on the pretext of creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and caused much pain and atrocities to other Asian countries. On the other hand, a small but vociferous group of right-wing conservatives believe that WWII was a righteous war of self-survival and self-defense (jison jiei no sensou) that was forced upon Japan by the circumstances. This group regards the mainstream view and treatment of Japan’s history to be ‘masochistic’ (jigyakudeki), which suppresses the national pride of current generations of Japanese, especially youth (Fujioka 1997: 57-60)...(Continued)