Of the Japanese I’ve met in China, it’s been the three Japanese Christians (two more plus the one pictured, all serving in the same NGO) who’ve gone out of their ways to personally and symbolically apologize for the actions of their country during WWII. On another occasion, an older Japanese couple hosted a special dinner for their Chinese colleagues and language teachers at which they personally and formally apologized on behalf of their nation.

Has anyone else seen or heard of individual Japanese making apologetic gestures in China? I assume it’s not just Japanese Christians who do this (though with the three I’ve mentioned, their Christianity has a lot to do with it). But I’m also assuming that these kinds of apologies are exceptional, since, as at least one scholar points out, “in Japan there’s almost a dramatic lack of any sense of responsibility.”

I’d love to know more about the dynamics of apology and forgiveness in honour-oriented, Confucian-heritage cultures like China and Japan. I’m also curious about the ways Mainlanders are likely to perceive these types of gestures.

And I wonder: Should Europeans and Americans do the same for the Opium Wars?

More on Eric Liddell and the Japanese invasion:

• Why they hate the Japanese
• Eric Liddell: McSaint (biography review)
• Marriage market, Eric Liddell, weekend slogan (finding Liddell’s former residence in Tianjin)
• Spitting is good for something! (interesting anecdote from Liddell’s Japanese internment camp)

P.S. – For some info about official Japanese acknowledgment of WWII atrocities in China, see this comment.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

My only beef with Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, the latest Eric Liddell biography, is that I couldn’t get a feel for what kind of guy he was – what it might have been like to interact with him – until near the end of the book after he’d already died. The author desires to present Liddell as an inspirational Christian role model, and this becomes the book’s tragic flaw. Instead of letting Liddell’s inspiring life and character speak for themselves, the author coats the narrative in an artificial layer of Evangelical-ese, going out his way to over-emphasize and massage the aspects of Liddell’s spirituality that resonate in the popular Evangelical market. In the end, the Evangelical gene pool misses out on some potentially beneficial diversity, and the author produces a biography that reads a little too much like hagiography.*

Liddell comes across as so virtually perfect that he doesn’t seem real. The few token flaws mentioned are so minor and forgivable that they just reinforce the impression of an impossibly high degree of saintliness. It chaps my hide all the more because Eric Liddell’s life doesn’t need an author to compensate for it; his story is plenty inspiring and admirable in and of itself. Being able to see that this was a real man with whom we can relate and connect would make the story all the more compelling.

I finally found a pulse on this book’s Eric Liddell near the end, when the author quotes from an unnamed internee’s personal diary, written soon after Liddell’s unexpected passing in 1945:

He was not particularly clever, and not conspicuously able, but he was good. He was naturally reserved and tended to live in a world of his own, but he gave of himself unstintedly. His reserve did not prevent him from mixing with everybody and being known by everybody, but he always shrank from revealing his deepest needs and distresses, so that whilst he bore the burdens of many, very few could help to bear his.

His fame as an athlete helped him a good deal. He certainly didn’t look like a great runner, but the fact that he had been one gave him a self-confidence that men of his type don’t often have. He wasn’t a great leader, or an inspired thinker, but he knew what he ought to do, and he did it. He was a true disciple of the Master and worthy of the highest of places amongst the saints gathered in the Church triumphant. We have lost of our best, but we have gained a fragrant memory. (285)

This entry, for me, put some flesh and bones on the Eric Liddell of history, and in a way salvaged the whole book for me. I can look back at the stories and imagine a real, living and breathing brother, teammate, teacher, co-worker, husband, and father, rather than merely seeing a stock Evangelical archetype labeled “Eric Liddell.”

Historically, this book opens a window into the lives of missionary families of the day, how family members were often separated by oceans for long periods of time, dependent on written letters for news in an unstable time of civil and world war. The book offers only minimum detail regarding the larger, momentously consequential historical setting of aggressive Western economic imperialism (Liddell lived in Tianjin’s British ‘concession area’) and the brutal Japanese occupation of China. The Chinese people and culture of the time period, and Liddell’s interaction with them, also receive minimal attention. The bibliography is quite impressive; the author obviously did his homework. I just wish he’d backed off a bit and let us hear the story speak for itself.

Rumour has it that there’s an old man who sometimes attends one of the local churches here who actually remembers Eric Liddell, and who likes to give tours to all the related places of interest. Friends of ours did this a couple years ago. We just might hunt that guy down.

———

*(hagiography - an idealized, overly romanticized, and usually partially-fictionalized pseudo-biography intending to present the subject as worthy of admiration and imitation.)

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

In philosophy and ethics classes I heard the joke more than once that everything eventually has to do with the Nazis. In my education, the Nazis were the proof and symbol of evil in the world, and were always finding their way into thought experiments, ethical dilemmas, debates regarding human nature, and arguments over the existence and nature of God. There was also this unspoken rule I grew up with – that perhaps the most un-politically correct thing you can do is treat the Nazi Holocaust as anything but the greatest evil ever committed by humanity, and you sure shouldn’t cheapen it by comparing it to other events.

The Rape of Nanking is the representative historical event for all of Japan’s atrocities in China during WWII. The book by the same the name calls it “the Forgotten Holocaust of WWII,” and then proceeds to make the case for not just holding the brutality of “the Rape” as generally comparable to the Holocaust, but even surpassing it in certain aspects:

“Nothing the Nazis under Hitler would do to disgrace their own victories could rival the atrocities of Japanese soldiers under Gen. Iwane Matsui” (historian Robert Leckie) (p. 7).

…the Japanese treatment of their POW’s surpassed in brutality even that of the Nazi’s. … the Rape of Nanking was not the kind of isolated incident common to all wars. It was deliberate. It was policy. It was known in Tokyo. For that matter, it was front page news in the world press (p. 173).

The events related in the book are beyond brutal; part of you dies inside just from reading it. I don’t know how anyone could make a movie that would be possible to watch. But there is quite a “Schindler’s List”-type story here. In the midst of brutality for which language cannot possibly convey any adequate expression, the oddest assortment of Westerners – Nazis and missionaries – combined forces to form a safety zone within the city and save hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives. These heroes risked their own lives multiple times during the Rape, and suffered physically and psychologically for the rest of their lives; one eventually committed suicide. Ironically, these Westerners originally chose to stay rather than evacuate, thinking that the greatest danger to the civilian population would be the retreating Chinese soldiers, and that the Japanese were more or less trustworthy (as occupying armies go) and would restore order and basic infrastructure once they’d captured the city. Instead, the Japanese military intentionally sunk the warship that was carrying the foreigners who had chosen to evacuate, and then went on to rival and perhaps even surpass the Nazis.

Japan as a nation still refuses to acknowledge what happened* [see comment #4].

Sixty years later the Japanese as a nation are still trying to bury the victims of Nanking — not under the soil, as in 1937, but into historical oblivion. In a disgraceful compounding of the offense, the story of the Nanking massacre is barely known in the West because so few people have tried to document and narrate it systematically to the public (pp. 219-220).

It’s not in their textbooks* [see comment #4]. Germany had to face the music, but some of Japan’s commanding officers went on to lead decorated lives of honour and privilege. Academics in Japan still vigorously deny the charges.

…Germans have incorporated into their postwar political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, was guilty of war crimes. The Japanese government, however, has never forced itself or Japanese society to do the same. As a result … many in Japan continue to treat the war crimes as the isolated acts of individual soldiers or even as events that simply did not occur (p. 200).

Compounding the situation is China’s current administration, which has always spun the war with Japan, and Chinese public sentiment, in beneficial ways, stoking hatred of a common, nationalism-galvanizing enemy when it’s convenient to do so. Museums, like the one we visited with ‘Shine Far,’ play an important role in this:

The first rooms of the spacious museum depict China as a victim of Japanese aggression, but as the visitor moves towards the exit, he is treated to an interpretation of China as almost the lone victor on World War II in Asia.

The two factors widely credited with ending the war get only cursory treatment.

The Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Northeast Asia in the summer of 1945 is mentioned in passing, and America’s nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not at all.

… It’s more promoting the internal unity under the guidance of the party. [Full text]

The older Japanese couple who were in our language school last semester made it a point to host special meals with their Chinese colleagues and closer acquaintances, during which they would personally apologize on behalf of their country for what happened. They still live in China and still do this, though they’ve now moved to a city in the south. Some of our school’s teachers originally requested to not be assigned to them when they first enrolled, solely because they were Japanese. Their request was not granted – in fact, our school’s American administrator confessed to me that his teachers’ requests may have influenced his decision to assign those teachers to the Japanese couple – but after a few weeks the teachers actually thanked him for doing it. One of these teachers recently returned from a trip she’d made just to visit them, and came back talking about how great she thinks they are.

China marked the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking last Thursday.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.