New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xi, 454 pp. (Figures.) US$79.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-537566-4.
Can Japan and China learn to get along? More than a few observers will hesitate to say yes. After all, recent years have treated us to an apparently unending stream of bad news: clashes in the East China Sea over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, diplomatic competition in Southeast Asia, Chinese fury at the visits of Japanese politicians to Yasukuni Shrine, heated rows over the legacy and interpretation of Japan’s role in World War II—the list goes on. At times, it appears as if there is nothing uniting the two giants of East Asia.
Such views are unfortunate, disquieting, not entirely false—at least in a contemporary sense—and unlikely to change in the near term. What it also highlights is the pressing need for a new perspective as well as original ideas to ensure the China-Japan relationship does not completely fall off the rails. To inform this debate, however, it is crucial that we have access to an insightful and informative literature, one that provides a deep and balanced account of China-Japan interactions. While scholarly articles on particular aspects of this 2000-year-old relationship abound, full-volume treatments of the subject are frustratingly rare. It was thus with much anticipation that this reviewer opened June Teufel Dreyer’s latest book.
The result is disappointing. A professor of political science at the University of Miami, Dreyer focuses on the post-war era. She does not attempt to provide a new historical interpretation nor does she try to offer policy advice on the way forward—the latter is particularly surprising given that she has done consulting work for a number of institutions, including the American government, at different times throughout her career. As for her sources, Dreyer relies mostly on secondary material and her primary documents are almost entirely in English. For students and researchers alike, Dreyer’s dry book will mostly be useful as a reference tool to review the sequence of the key events that have connected Japan and China in the twentieth century.
Dreyer organizes her survey in three broad sections. The first, divided into seven chapters, reviews bilateral relations from the time of the first recorded Japanese embassy to China, in 57CE, all the way to the present. The second section, composed of the three following chapters, respectively focuses on post-WWII economic rivalry, military competition, and Taiwan’s past and present relations with its two neighbors. Section three is billed as a conclusion, but it merely summarizes the material reviewed in the previous chapters and thus, is neither particularly useful nor enlightening.
One of the many reasons Dreyer’s book feels unsatisfying is that it fails to deliver on its bold promise. Though subtitled “Sino-Japanese Relations, Past and Present,” it has little to say about the past: Dreyer skims over the first nineteen centuries of contacts in less than thirty pages. Cultural relations during the first millennium of our era, though largely unidirectional, were extensive, at times constructive, and constitute a useful historical background to help contextualize the negative trend of the present. Whether it is the tale of Eichu, an eighth-century monk who spent thirty years in China and introduced tea to Japan, or his contemporary, the better known Kukai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, there is plenty of rich material to mine, but Dreyer chose not to do so.
The century preceding the Pacific War is given a more thorough account. By then, Dreyer points out, pre-existing cultural and diplomatic patterns, which had changed little over time, were beginning to shift. As Japan awoke from centuries of near seclusion and embarked on an ambitious program of modernization, it began to see China in a different light. In the past, Japanese cultural elites had expressed great admiration for the Middle Kingdom, its culture, philosophy, and institutions. By the 1880s however, China had lost much of its luster. The Qing government was inching towards collapse, weakened by conflict with Western powers, the Taiping Rebellion, and domestic unrest. In fact, many in Japan felt that it “had declined into an entity that was no longer worthy of emulation.” By comparison, Japan had never been conquered and “retained and nurtured ancient virtues” (42). Tokyo began looking for models elsewhere, in Europe and the United States.
Dreyer’s prose is competent, albeit fairly dull, and she misses many opportunities to enliven her story with personality sketches that could provide human context to her broader narrative. For instance, she says nothing at all about the crucial friendship between Sun Yatsen and Umeya Shokichi, an early film buff who established a company that would later become Nikkatsu Corporation, and also a generous financial backer of Sun’s many unsuccessful revolutionary schemes—by one account, Umeya provided Sun with billions in today’s US dollars. It was also in Umeya’s residence that Sun married his second wife, Song Qingling, who he had met in Japan in 1915.
In other cases, Dreyer teases her reader with fascinating connections, but frustratingly fails to dig deeper. She says little about Nosaka Sanzō, a charismatic adventurer who helped establish the Japanese Communist Party in the 1920s and then became its most important post-war leader. Nosaka, who travelled to Russia and worked for the Comintern for a while, spent much of the war years ensconced in Yanan with Mao Zedong where, inter alia, he was involved in the reeducation of captured Japanese soldiers. Dreyer says equally little about Saionji Kinkazu, the head of the Beijing-based Japan-China Cultural Interchange Association between 1958 and 1970, and one who is said to have befriended Mao and Zhou Enlai.
One thing Dreyer does well is showing how countless small incidents are slowly but constantly tearing at the fabric of the bilateral relationship, in a way that seems to preclude any significant and durable long-term improvement. The decade spanning 2006 to 2015, to which Dreyer devotes a full chapter, was rich in tit-for-tat irritants: Japanese Diet members attending the Taipei inauguration of Ma Ying-Jeou in 2008; the Dalai Lama and Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer receiving visas to visit Tokyo in 2009; a Chinese fishing trawler ramming a Japanese coast guard vessel in 2010; Japan nationalizing several islands in the East China Sea in 2012; cyber attacks from the mainland. Dreyer lists many more. But unfortunately, she does not offer solutions on how to break this cycle.
This, in the end, is what sinks the book. As an author concentrating on the contemporary era, Dreyer seems to have spent little time doing fieldwork. For the 2006–2015 period, for example, she relies almost entirely on newspaper clippings—of the 169 citations for that chapter, a mere two refer to Dreyer’s personal interviews. Many of the individuals who have helped shape the China-Japan bilateral relationship in the last three decades are still alive. Seeking their perspective could have been enlightening. It would certainly have provided some zest to her story. Her book is all the poorer for it.
Martin Laflamme
Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa, Canada
(The views presented here are the author’s own.)
pp. 546-548