Maybe the Japanese Aren’t So Bad After All

Living in Korea you are surrounded by the anti-Japanese media. However, the Japundit provides an insightful view of the whole “Great Dokto Crisis” from the Japanese point of view we rarely see here. Definitely a must read:

Give the Korea Times credit, however. They did inject some reality into their account, but you have to read to the end of the article to find it: “Only a fraction of schools – less than 0.1 percent – adopted the first edition of the Fusosha textbook in 2001, far less than the publisher’s target of 10 percent.”

After all the talk about the brainwashed Japanese youth and their failure to teach history, we finally find out that only 0.1% of the schools actually used the textbook they’re risking a diplomatic war about. Lest their readers be overly dismayed by the facts, the Times tried to buck them up: “But the publisher may be able to exploit the ongoing controversy to increase sales, analysts said.”

They should have kept going and talked about militarism while they were about it. For example: Reporting the worldwide ranking for military personnel by country.

China: 2,930,000
United States: 1,547,300
India: 1,457,800
North Korea: 1,120,000
South Korea: 600,000
Japan, where “militarism is poised to resurface” is not even in the top 15, with military forces that total 239,500. In every category surveyed, either China or one of the Koreas is in the top five. The only category in which Japan is in the top five is total military expenditures, coming in 5th. South Korea is 10th.

China has nuclear weapons. They provoked a military incident with the United States in 2001. They constantly threaten to use military force to incorporate Taiwan. South Korea has universal male conscription. They scrambled fighter aircraft to drive away reporters in a business jet taking pictures of the Takeshima/Dokto islets. North Korea is a de facto military dictatorship with nuclear weapons and a belligerent attitude. The average news broadcast in North Korea is delivered in a martial tone that sounds like George Orwell translated into Hangul.

But one of Japan’s smaller prefectures passes a bill calling for a memorial “Takeshima Day”, and 0.1% of Japan’s schools use a rightwing textbook, and militarism is “poised to resurface in Japan”?

No wonder the “Japanese Remain Silent on Roh Statement”. Laughing would be an inappropriate diplomatic response.

The Japundit definitely brings out some good points that Korea is probably over reacting to the whole “Great Dokto Crisis.” President Roh is just trying to build up his popularity through Korean nationalism by confronting Japan. Koreans have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Japanese so it seems to make people feel good now that Korea is strong enough to stand up to Japan even if it has gone overboard now.

However, Japan does have some responsibility for creating these tensions by starting the whole Dokto, biased text books, no-apology for WWII, etc. etc. issues to begin with. Politicians in Japan are using some of these issues for their own political reasons (ie-fishing rights at Dokto) just like President Roh is taking advantage of it for his own political reasons. I don’t see how any of this will do any of them any good in the long run but I guess we will see.

The fears of Japanese militarism are definitely blown out of proportion. Japan may have a much smaller army than Korea but they do have a technologically advanced military that makes up for their lack of numbers especially their naval forces. However, no advanced military is much good without large numbers of boots on the ground to hold territory. 239,500 soldiers in the Japanese military isn’t nearly enough to start a war in Asia and begin occupying countries like Korea and China. Even if the Japanese attacked Korea, Korea is more than capable of defending themselves and defeating any Japanese attack.

The fact that the Japanese are becoming more and more able to rapidly deploy their forces is of concern to a country like China who could face a joint US-Japan counter attack if China uses military force on Taiwan. This creates the need for China to curtail the deployability of the SDF in Japan. That is why China likes to bring up past Japanese atrocities and that is also why China protests any UN peacekeeping mission or the deployment to Iraq of Japanese soldiers.

So here in Korea I doubt we need to fear a Pearl Harbor style of attack on Pusan amy time soon. Great reality check from the Japundit.