The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and Sino-Japanese Relations by Robert Hoppens (review)

The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and Sino-Japanese Relations. By Robert Hoppens. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2015. xii, 298 pages. $112.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $83.99, E-book.

Contemporary Sino-Japanese relations are indeed complex and multifaceted. Scholars and analysts have sought to understand these very important bilateral ties from various perspectives including geopolitics, economic interdependency, and shared or competing values. While not ignoring the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance during the cold war era and occasional Sino-Japanese tensions caused by contested historical narratives and territorial disputes, Robert Hoppens focuses on the polarized Japanese domestic debate concerning the country’s national identity and its impact on Sino-Japanese relations between 1945 and 1979. Hoppens has written a significant, original, nuanced, and persuasive book that gives us a better understanding of the domestic context and its clash of ideas and interests which framed Japan’s diplomatic normalization and subsequent peace treaty with China.

Hoppens argues:

Japanese policy towards the PRC in the 1970s was not a policy of appeasement or easy submission to Chinese positions. Nor were Japan’s relations with China handicapped by the lack of a normal national identity that constrained the pursuit of national interests. … If anything, Japanese policymakers in the 1970s were constrained by the strength of Japanese nationalist sentiment, not its weakness.

(p. 9)

He continues: “Thus, contrary to popular assumptions, Japanese of all political persuasions championed China policies and narratives of Japan-China relations that gratified rather than challenged their own sense of national identity” (p. 9).

Robert Hoppens organizes his book in four parts. The first part examines the China problem in postwar Japan from 1945 and 1970. In this section, he masterfully explains the contested and polarized Japanese discourse on national identity. The second part deals with the Nixon Shock and the normalization of relations between 1971 and 1972. Part 3 analyzes the controversial antihegemony clause as a Chinese precondition for a peace treaty with Japan amidst the Sino-Soviet cold war. The fourth and last part focuses on the peace treaty and bilateral economic cooperation between 1977 and 1979. Ironically, the left and progressive forces, which once advocated closer ties with socialist China to affirm a national identity which is not subordinated and supine to the U.S. superpower, became alienated from a China that no longer supported their nationalist narratives. The Japanese left was dismayed that Beijing, in the cynical pursuit of its own national interests, cosied up to the political conservatives in Japan to forge a united front with the United States against the Soviet Union, and even launched a limited invasion of Vietnam, another socialist state. Despite initial misgivings among some conservatives toward China (especially over the “betrayal” of Taiwan to establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese mainland), the new relationship with China supported a “conservative triumphalist narrative of national identity in which an advanced, modern Japan aided and tutored a relatively less advanced China” (p. 199).

There are at least four things I like about this book. First, Hoppens maps out very well the political spectrum of Japan and its contending perspectives on how the China factor had intertwined with the Japanese identity issue. In the various chapters, he identifies the key politicians in government who grappled with China relations and their fierce critics from both ends of the spectrum in party politics and academia. These included the Japan Communist Party and the Japan Socialist Party on the left and right-wingers within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party such as Ishihara Shintarō, the nemesis of better Sino-Japanese relations. Second, the chapter on the normalization of bilateral relations is excellent. Hoppens notes that the “joint communique was largely the result of Chinese compromise on these issues. The Japanese certainly did not simply accommodate all the wishes of the PRC leadership” (p. 98). Third, the detailed analysis of Ōhira Masayoshi (as foreign minister and subsequently prime minister) and the conservative approach to the China problem is very interesting and well explained. Fourth, the...