Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. x, 230 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7656-2.
That Distant Country Next Door offers valuable insights into Japan-China relations from 1952 to 1972, a period when the Cold War and “containment” dominated bilateral relations. The international environment and its changes, from the Sino-Soviet split to détente and US-China rapprochement, have helped inform studies on how Japan and China normalized diplomatic relations. Their bilateral relationship prior to 1972 has drawn less research interest beyond studies of official narratives. To fill this gap, Esselstrom offers a fascinating look into this forgotten period through his analysis of largely unexamined Japanese popular perceptions of China under Chairman Mao, from politicians, diplomats, industrialists, and intellectuals to students and salarymen and salarywomen, and he constructs the social and cultural context that was critical in facilitating the normalization.
The book examines a rich variety of Japanese polls, print media, and visual arts centering on four widely debated events related to Mao’s China: the 1954 visit to Japan by Minister of Health Li Dequan (the first Chinese official visit to Japan), China’s atomic weapons testing from 1964 to 1967, the Red Guard movement of the Cultural Revolution, and the trend of Chinese mainland “rediscovery” from 1971 to 1972. Esselstrom finds that in these four events, Mao’s China was frequently characterized as “that distant country next door” in the popular Japanese consciousness. Nevertheless, he also shows that Japanese popular perceptions of China present not only a significant gap from the official narratives, but also a dynamic and multidimensional Japanese society that held varying or even conflicting views of its neighbouring country. This perceptional gap or conflict weaves through the four public debates, from the divided public reaction of Li’s visit to Japan, to the anxiety and satisfaction among the public in response to China’s nuclear tests, to the critics and the admirers of the fanaticism and passion represented by the Cultural Revolution, and to the rising though varying interests in learning and relearning China in the early 1970s. Through a close examination of these debates, Esselstrom vividly demonstrates Japanese society’s ambivalence over its own rapid political and economic transformation in the postwar era. Mao’s China, he writes, “was a lens through which Japanese society crafted its own identity and worked out internal struggles over that image … everyday people in postwar Japan routinely filtered these mixed perceptions of contemporary Chinese through the lens of Japanese historical experience, producing portraits of Mao’s China that alternated between the nostalgic embodiment of a traditional post long since left behind and a bold new future the Japanese world had yet to achieve” (12).
The book also provides a sober view of the Japan-US security alliance as part of Washington’s geopolitical strategy during the Cold War. A wide variety of social forces in the debates praised Mao’s China and pressed for the restoration of Japan-China relations; these forces ranged from China-friendly social movements and left-wing political parties to corporate business interests and pro-China elements within the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Their positive view on Mao’s China was the flipside of the frustration embedded in Japanese society over Japan-US relations. This frustration, as Esselstrom convincingly shows, began with the American Occupation and continued US military presence beyond occupation, which, for many Japanese, signified their country’s incomplete sovereignty. Because of the US security alliance, Japan also had restricted contact and business exchanges with China, which contradicted the longstanding Yoshida doctrine and its economy-first principle. Further, Japan’s two-decade-long rapid growth, and subsequent trade tensions with the United States that surfaced during the Nixon administration, signified a Japan-US relationship that differed markedly from that in the immediate postwar era. In a sense, the series of debates over Mao’s China illustrate the dilemma Japan faced in its relationship with the United States as well as its desire to be a prosperous and autonomous state connected with other Asian states, particularly China. While embodying such complexity, Japanese popular perceptions of China, as Esselstrom observes, carry conceptual continuities throughout the prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan, including “the notion of an advanced Japan versus a backward China, the ambivalent clash in Japanese consciousness between the China of admiration and the China of ridicule, an understanding of China as both Japan’s past and future, the bond of Japan-China unity in the face of Western aggression, and the anxiety induced by a perception of China’s troubles posing a threat to Japanese lift” (17).
Studies on contemporary Japan-China relations often emphasize territorial disputes and speak to increased conflicts between the two countries. That Distant Country Next Door is a useful reminder of the fluidity of this relationship and various components within Japanese society supportive of better China ties. Those components continue to play a role in today’s Japan, which has been cautiously balancing its relations with the United States and China amid their rising geopolitical competition. At the end of the book, Esselstrom uses the lessons from the 1952–1972 period and strikes an optimistic tone in addressing future Japan-China relations. Nevertheless, perceptions are a social construct. Limited contact, coupled with a Beijing eager for friendly Japanese ties, is an important background that gave rise to the positive perceptions of China in Japanese society in the postwar era. A half-century later, China has transformed into a world power and Japan too has undergone significant socio-economic transformation while still searching for its own identity and role on the world stage. While Esselstrom makes clear that interactions shape perceptions, how the Japanese public perceives a China that is no longer so distant but assertive and increasingly nationalistic remains uncertain and requires another book project to explore.
Jessica C. Liao
North Carolina State University, Raleigh