rayloke2009blogspot: Japan in Chinese history: Cross-currents

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Japan in Chinese history: Cross-currents | The Economist

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RAYLOKENovember 18, 2012 at 3:11 PM
The anti-Japanese protests which roiled several Chinese cities last week have subsided, but the situation remains tense. The emotion and vitriol unleashed against Japan during last week’s demonstrations was a reminder that anti-Japanese nationalism remains a potent—and potentially destabilising—force in China.

Zhou Enlai once characterised the relationship between the two countries as “2,000 years of friendship and five decades of misfortune”. The latter referring to the period that began with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and lasted to the end of Japan’s occupation of China at the end of the second world war. The history of Japan’s invasion of China, in particular, remains a painful and traumatic memory for many Chinese, including very many who were not yet born at the time. Old wounds from that era are kept fresh through the media, in television dramas and movie plots, as well as in the “patriotic history” curriculum taught in the mainland’s schools.

Zhou’s 2,000 years of friendship refers to a long history of cultural cross-pollination. Chinese historians never tire of listing the many contributions China made to the development of Japanese politics, literature, religion and culture. Buddhism represented a key conduit for the exchange of intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic ideas between China and Japan.

Even in the bleak years that followed Japan’s humiliating defeat of the Qing empire in 1895—a defeat which resulted in China’s cession of both Taiwan and the chain of islets currently in dispute—thousands of Chinese students went abroad to study in Japan. Their numbers included Chiang Kai-shek, the author Lu Xun, and the female revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin. Sun Yat-sen travelled there many times, organising the Chinese overseas students and recruiting among them for his Revolutionary Alliance.

In Japan students learned about medicine, science and the social sciences, and along the way they adopted a new vocabulary to describe the modern world. Literally. Japanese translators used their version of a Chinese Buddhist term sekai (Chinese: shijie), a combination of characters which indicated a distinction in time and space and was used to mean “generation”, and adapted it to mean “the world,” replacing the older Chinese term tianxia, or “all under Heaven”. Last month a programme director for CCTV 1, Xu Wenguang, reminded his microblog followers of the staggering number of Chinese words, especially in the social sciences, which were likewise reimported from Japan. Japanese translators in the 19th and 20th centuries, faced with the daunting challenge posed by concepts like “society”, “philosophy” and “economics”, often simply borrowed classical Chinese phrases, imbuing them with new meaning along the way—creating what Victor Mair, a Sinologist, refers to as “round-trip words”. Centuries after Japanese culture had incorporated Chinese characters as a major component of its own writing system, Chinese students would return from Japan with a new lexicon for scholarship of their own.

Nor were the preceding 2,000 years always ones of friendship.
...cont/
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