Pioneers of Sino-Japanese Relations: Liao and Takasaki by Mayumi Itoh (review)

In her meticulously researched book, Pioneers of Sino-Japanese Relations, Mayumi Itoh brings to life the stories of two men who lived through both the good and the most turbulent times in China and Japan’s modern history and emerged from the tragedy of World War II committed to putting Japan and China back on track to normalized diplomatic relations. Taka-saki Tatsunosuke (1885–1964) was a product of the Meiji entrepreneurial environment, a risk taker whose talent for business took him from small fish-canning ventures in California to managing industries in Manchukuo to directing key economic recovery efforts in postwar Japan. Liao Chengzhi (1908–1983), son of Sun Yatsen associate Liao Zhongkai, spent his formative years in Japan where his parents were students. With his native-level fluency in Japanese, experience in European labor movement politics, and Long March connections, Liao rose quickly in the foreign affairs apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) where in 1952 he became part of a Japan policy group charged with reestablishing bilateral ties.

Takasaki and Liao first met at the Bandung Conference in 1955 when Takasaki was 70 and Liao 47. How to present the stories of these two individuals, separated by generation and political-historical context, whose lives did not intersect until mid-career is an organizational and narrative challenge. Itoh chooses to chronicle their lives in parallel fashion in chapters 2 through 5, alternating between Takasaki’s early life and Liao’s early life, then Takasaki’s mid-career and Liao’s mid-career. Each chapter is divided into 15 to 20 subheadings one to three paragraphs long, which move the story factually ahead in resumé fashion. In chapter 6, Itoh reproduces in extraordinary detail the complex politics that produced the LT (Liao-Takasaki) Trade Agreement she variously refers to as “unofficial” and “semiofficial,” which required overcoming opposition from pro-U.S. politicians on the Japan side and anti-Japanese sentiment from within China’s political establishment.

The LT Trade Agreement was signed in 1962. Important as the exchange of Japanese agricultural machinery for Chinese raw materials was for both sides on economic recovery grounds, trade faltered in the next few years, victim of Cultural Revolution politics. Takasaki, who died in 1964, was spared witnessing this new low point in bilateral relations. But he also missed seeing the revival of normalization talks in 1972 in which Liao Chengzhi played a leading role as interpreter and mediator. Liao was a man with Japan connections par excellence. Itoh outlines Liao’s late career path in chapter 8, describing in detail the various party and government positions he assumed as the sudden thaw in U.S.-China relations prompted top leaders in China and Japan to seek closer ties as well.

Chapter 7, “The Late Career of Takasaki,” presents author and reader with something of a problem. Since Takasaki died in 1964, discussing his late career requires backtracking to events prior to those described in chapter 6 on the LT Trade Agreement. Thus, the chapter starts by detailing Takasaki’s activities beginning in the late 1950s, and these having to do, not with China, but with Soviet fisheries negotiations, meetings with Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan, building zoos in Manchukuo and Tokyo—collecting exotic animals was one of Takasaki’s hobbies—and constructing a dam in Gifu Prefecture. This is confusing. A readable alternative might have been to attach this material to chapter 4 (Takasaki’s mid-career), then to have entitled the late career chapter on Liao something else entirely—“Liao and Fulfillment of the LT Dream,” for example.

Itoh states in her introductory chapter that the book “gives visibility to political figures in Asia” (p. 5), in this case by putting a human face on the process of postwar normalization of relations between China and Japan. For the reader who follows the author’s carefully assembled details to the final chapter, LT becomes more than a simple acronym attached...