Even the most obtuse of the Western pro-China crowd seem to have now recognised that the efforts of the last twenty years to “liberalise” the place via FTA’s and cultural exchanges, has failed.

It’s hardly the only place in the world that so-called “Liberalism” has failed, but in this case the failure is creating problems that are immediate, combined with increasing worries about the long-term.

China’s growing assertiveness – I’d call it outright bullying – of various smaller nations in its vicinity has, in turn, resulted in pushback from those nations. The pushback has ranged from Vietnamese protesting and burning Chinese businesses – leaving American businesses alone even though they were the enemy fifty years ago and China a “friend” – to the Philippines and India moving closer to the West, especially towards the USA and especially in matters military.

But two nations in particular stand out among the others; Japan and South Korea. Both have been objects of ire for the Chinese for decades now, both are heavily industrialised, developed countries, both have substantial, well-trained militaries on sea, land and air.

But both also have a deeply rooted history of antagonism and sometimes outright hatred that goes back hundreds of years so the question is, Can They Overcome Their Divisions?, starting with an obscure, yet famous, work of art in an obscure Japanese museum:

And just in front of the Tokoyuni shrine, almost completely wrapped in a mantle of clouds, we can just make out another, much smaller shrine, called the Mimizuka, an unassuming edifice, little more than a heap of earth surmounted by a stone monument — or so it would seem to the casual observer.
…
The English historian Stephen Turnbull has called this unassuming shrine “Kyoto’s least mentioned and most often avoided tourist attraction,” and indeed the Mimizuka seems still to be under something of a pall, just as it was 400 years ago when the Rakuchū rakugai-zu painter discretely concealed it beneath a clouded veil.

There is a very good reason, mind you, that the Mimizuka shrine is not just ignored but actively avoided, and it can be found deep underground, where below the grassy hillock are entombed the remains of some 38,000 Korean and 30,000 Chinese noses, cleanly sliced away from their original owners during the catastrophic Japanese invasion of the Korean Peninsula that took place between 1592 and 1598. 

The noses are there because they weigh less than the heads, which were supposed to have been sent back as proof of conquest. The article goes through all the other horrors that Japan inflicted on Korea from the the late 19th century to 1945 and discusses how even seeming resolutions of past injustices agreed upon by the respective governments, such as the so-called “Comfort Woman”, have fallen apart:

It did nothing of the sort, alas, and only two years later, the subsequent South Korean President Moon Jae-in was arguing that “the reality is the majority of our people cannot emotionally accept the comfort women agreement” before moving to shut down the Japanese-funded comfort women foundation.

But the article finishes on a hopeful note, even if that hope is driven by acts of deliberate memory loss driven by modern fears, rather than true understanding and forgiveness:

Japanese and South Koreans will likewise quickly forget disputes over comfort women or the contested sovereignty of the Liancourt islets when faced with China’s increasingly overweening geopolitical and ideological ambitions. Nothing focuses the mind or puts things in perspective quite like an existential threat

Perhaps, but as the author himself quotes from a Japanese novelist:

“History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.”