Ezra Vogel talks about the challenges facing Sino-Japanese relations in light of the ongoing salience of history. He emphasizes that regardless of other factors, the United States will continue to play a key role in shaping relations between the two countries.

Ezra F. Vogel is Henry Ford II Research Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he taught from 1967-2000. From 1993-1995 he served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in Washington DC. Vogel is the author of Japan's New Middle Class (1963), Canton Under Communism (1969), Japan as Number One (1979), The Four Little Dragons (1991) and a number of other books on China and Japan. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1958.

HAQ: You are unusual among American East Asia specialists in that you have worked on both Japan and China. How did you come to study both countries?

Vogel:  My Ph.D. actually had nothing to do with Asia – it was on American society and family and mental health. One of my teachers suggested that after my Ph.D. I do something comparative so that I’d have some perspective on the United States. Another one of my teachers had worked in Japan and he suggested I go there. So that’s how I got to Japan. When I came back, my first teaching job was at Yale, and we were working on the sociology of mental health. While I was at Yale I came back up to visit Harvard, and one of my former teachers said, “How would you like to work on China?” I’d never thought about working on China before, but I had realized by the time I left Japan that I was more interested in studying East Asia than the United States. I decided to accept the opportunity for training as a postdoc on China. Harvard at the time was trying to develop studies of Asia and particularly of communist China, so they re-trained me on China. My earlier work on both countries was on domestic issues, since I was trained as a sociologist. For many years I was interested in Chinese society and Japanese society rather than in Sino-Japanese relations.

Since there weren’t many people who had worked on both societies and since I had many acquaintances in both places, naturally when I went to one country they asked me about the other. And since there weren’t many Americans working on Sino-Japanese relations, I was drawn into discussions of the topic. I also was very interested in the comparisons and relations between the two countries. Because they’d had so many problems stemming from World War II, I think that Americans like me, who know both countries and have good friends in both places, can play a role in helping them to work together on the difficult historical issues. If they sit down together it’s easy to argue, but if there’s a third party it’s easier to have a serious discussion. It helps remove the tension between the two parties. Once I got into it, I found plenty of demand – it was a niche that nobody else was filling.

HAQ: In the postwar period here has been a fair amount of cooperation between Japan and China, especially in terms of trade. However, the relationship has many deep problems, largely related to Japan’s history of aggression towards China. In the context of contemporary China and Japan, how would you define “good” and “bad” relations?

Vogel: “Good” doesn’t necessarily mean they have to love each other. But they have to work together effectively enough to resolve the problems that naturally confront them, without the emotional baggage that can make it very difficult. “Bad” is when the negative feelings are so strong that they interfere with constructive resolution of concrete problems. Now, with closer relations, and with the economies and information being so closely linked, China and Japan really need to work together on many issues.

HAQ: What are the main issues at stake in the Sino-Japanese relationship?

Vogel: One of the greatest priorities is creating an environment in which both sides can feel secure without an arms race. China’s growing military strength is alarming to some in Japan, and on the other hand some in China continue to see Japan as a potential military threat. There are also difficult regional security issues, like North Korea and the status of Taiwan, whose peaceful resolution will require the cooperation of China and Japan. Managing trade relations is another important issue, especially as economic ties continue to grow. They will have to work together on a wide range of regional and global issues.

HAQ: In February 2001, Japan’s imposition of a tariff on certain Chinese agricultural products set off a trade dispute between the two countries. China retaliated with punitive tariffs on Japanese electronics and automobiles, and threatened further action if Japan did not repeal its tariffs. Do you think this was a sign of things to come in Sino-Japanese relations?

Vogel: That kind of thing happens with all countries that trade. I don’t think it’s unique and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it. As trade with China grows and more Japanese industries move production facilities offshore, it affects a lot of people’s lives in Japan. That will be a continuing problem, and I expect it will probably get worse because industries and their political protectors in Japan will be affected. The trade balance between Japan and China will also get worse from Japan’s point of view, and there will be ongoing friction on that issue.

HAQ: The Japanese tariff was due to pressure from the politically powerful agricultural sector, and the Chinese response was also due in part to the government’s need to appear tough toward Japan. Will it be difficult to isolate trade relations from domestic pressures, and will domestic pressure be a source of tension in bilateral relations?

Vogel: All democratic countries have public pressures. Japan is going through difficult readjustments and I don’t expect that process to end soon. I expect this adjustment to aggravate the political pressures, and those pressures will continue to be very important in relations with China. On the Chinese side, while political pressure doesn’t work quite the same as in democracies, public emotions toward Japan are quite strong and will affect relations.

HAQ: There is a great deal of popular animosity towards Japan in China. Do the Japanese have a realistic idea of how they are perceived?

Vogel: Yes, they do. I believe many Chinese have been influenced by propaganda and education. The ability of the Communist party to rally people to their cause in the 1930s and 1940s was heavily dependent on anti-Japanese propaganda. In the 1990s, anti-Japanese propaganda has been revived in China. The Japanese are quite aware of this and they respond in a sensitive way when they meet Chinese. In the 1950s and 1960s the natural way for Japanese going to China was to apologize – they felt bad about what they had done in China. But when China got stronger and began putting these issues in a more forceful way – and also when the Japanese found that at times China used these issues to achieve concrete goals like getting more financial help from Japan or getting support for countries in Asia to unite with China against Japan – this added to the tension over the issue. Of course the Chinese do have genuine anger, but just as most Japanese who are alive today can’t be held responsible for World War II, so there’s only a small proportion of Chinese now who can actually remember what went on. Of course, some memories of Chinese about Japan are passed down in families.

HAQ: A Tokyo University law professor recently spoke at Harvard about the need for Japan to apologize to and compensate its wartime victims beyond the requirements of the treaties that ended the war, which were actually very lenient towards Japan. What are your thoughts on this issue?

Vogel: I have a different view on the compensation question. It’s now 57 years after the war and there’s no end to the question of compensation and apology. Should America compensate American Indians and black people for the way we treated them? Many countries did a lot of horrible things to other countries around the world. There would be no end if we push compensation. Societies would be polarized. We can do things to help those who suffered have better lives.

The Chinese government officially agreed not to ask for compensation. Of course, lawyers stand to greatly benefit from these cases, and lawyers have been very much at the center of the efforts to get more compensation. There are certain people – certain women in Korea, or certain people in China – who think that they can win big court cases. But I think it’s questionable whether they are the ones who suffered most. I think the way to deal with the issue is not by more compensation or apology, but by being very open and direct about looking into and acknowledging what happened, and being very firm and convincing that the Japanese are determined not to let history repeat itself. And by assisting the people directly or indirectly affected build better lives. Also, most people in Japan feel that the war was imposed on them by the military. You don’t find many Japanese today who feel that they are responsible, so it doesn’t make any sense to push them to pay for what militarists imposed on their parents. But I think that the Japanese should be open and honest about what happened, and teach their children about what happened. Getting hung up on apologies isn’t the right way to deal with this problem.

HAQ: Do you think that Japan is headed in a direction where it will be able to speak openly and convincingly about its wartime history, or are there institutional and psychological barriers to dealing with the issue?

Vogel: Unfortunately, I don’t see signs that this problem is going to go away. One of the barriers in Japan is the right wing, which is very intimidating to a lot of Japanese who would like to deal with these issues openly and frankly. But there is considerable support among certain limited groups for trying to whitewash all the sins of World War II. I haven’t done a careful analysis of the social base of those people – probably a lot of them are not the most successful people in the society, and many are probably people who have a lot of relatives who died or suffered in the war. Most Japanese do know that Japan caused horrible suffering in World War II. Historical issues are very complicated to deal with. China has not fully dealt with the injuries and deaths in the Cultural Revolution that ended 25 years ago.

HAQ: Given the political value of the issue in China, is the Chinese government in a position to accept a Japanese apology? What are the obstacles on the Chinese side to a resolution of the history problem?

Vogel: Dealing with historical issues requires efforts on both sides, and the Chinese and Koreans have not done a good job in talking about the developments in Japan after World War II. Some Chinese leaders still use anti-Japanese issues as a rallying point for national unity. Mao Zedong said that the Communists have to thank the Japanese for making it possible to have the revolutionary movement, and certainly for the Communist victory.

Still, it’s paradoxical to me that in a lot of the places where you’d think anti-Japanese feeling would be strongest there are many people willing to work with the Japanese – particularly in the northeast and in Shanghai. You do find a lot of anti-Japanese feeling, but you also find people who learned Japanese, both during the Japanese occupation and afterwards. A high proportion of China’s Japan specialists come from the northeast or Shanghai. Dalian is the city that perhaps Japanese feel the most comfortable in even though it was part of Japan’s Manchurian Empire. And there are a lot of Japanese in Shanghai. There’s a new book by Rana Mitter called The Manchurian Myth, which argues that in addition to those who resisted the Japanese, there were a lot of collaborators. The dominant narrative in China is that of the patriotic Chinese fighting the Japanese, but in fact at the grass roots level there were many who actually worked with them, and lived with them. That is an issue that has not been fully dealt with in China.

I think the propaganda department in China finds the anti-Japanese sentiment convenient to use. And as some Japanese have noted, when China is negotiating a loan or aid, the issue often seems to be used as a pressure point. In China, the narrative of humiliation has been very powerful, but I think that is beginning to change. A more confident China is starting to emerge, and the emphasis on defeat and humiliation and the horrors of colonialism is giving way to a self-confidence among some Chinese that they will be a strong country again. It’s my hope that the base of pride can be in their successes, not their humiliation. Just to mention three things that happened last year – one of course is the entry into the WTO, which was a great success; another is getting to host 2008 Summer Olympics; and their holding the APEC meeting in Shanghai last October and allowing foreign leaders to see how rapid the growth has been there. So I think that all these things give some hope that China can have a positive base for unity and will not need to use the anti-Japanese card so much in the future.

HAQ: Do you think that the autocratic nature of the PRC regime is an obstacle to relations with Japan? Would the peaceful demise of the Chinese Communist Party be a good thing for Sino-Japanese relations?

Vogel: I don’t think so. When Korea concluded its pact with Japan in 1965, it was against popular anti-Japanese sentiment. If anything, the leaders of the PRC in the 1980s – especially Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, who had a responsibility for economic growth and wanted technology investment, peace and stability in the region –  had the ability to act in the national interest to attract Japanese investment despite popular anti-Japanese feelings. Nationalism doesn’t go away with democracy, and democracy can even heighten patriotic feelings. The Communist Party, in my view, has now become an elite with superior education that feels a responsibility for the nation as a whole. If they continue to believe – as Deng did in 1978 – that they need a peaceful environment for economic growth, and that economic growth is the main priority, then if anything the nature of the regime is more helpful than harmful to improvement of relations with Japan.

HAQ: Since the late 1970s, China has been a top recipient of Japanese economic aid – partly due to the belief that Japan stands to gain from a stronger, more stable China. On the other hand, some in Japan have criticized the aid, pointing out that China has repaid generosity with criticism. Skeptics also argue that while Japan pours aid into China, the Chinese government is spending money on a military buildup which could threaten Japan. What is your opinion on this issue?

Vogel: I think 1998 was kind of a turning point when Prime Minister Obuchi, in response to Jiang Zemin’s comments when visiting Japan, said that Japan wasn’t going to give China a written apology. I believe his decision reflected an accumulation of Japanese frustrations, and the mood in Japan that “we’ve been apologizing too much, we’ve been bending down too low and it’s time to stand up.” This mood has been fairly strong in Japan since 1998. It’s also aggravated by the Japanese economic difficulties and by the Chinese economic boom. The Japanese feel they should be giving to poor countries to help them get over their poverty in early stages of development, but when China is booming then a lot of people begin to question the need for aid. Japan will cut down on aid to China. But the bureaucrats will probably try to control the process, so that it’s not so sudden that it destroys projects or gets people too upset.

HAQ: Some have argued that generational change, especially among leaders, will alter relations between Japan and China. Do you think this will be an important factor?

Vogel: I feel that the impact of generational change has sometimes been exaggerated. It’s true that younger people are richer and use more mobile phones, but Japan is a country where mass culture is so widespread and the mass media has such influence on public opinion that it’s not just the young people who change. I’ve been impressed by how much older people change. So I think that time change is more important than generational change.

But in terms of generations of politicians, there is some truth to the concept of generational change. In the early decades after World War II, Japan was led by the “Yoshida school” –  people who were formerly bureaucrats and very sophisticated, such as Kishi, Ikeda, Sato and then Fukuda, Ohira and Nakasone. All those people were very poised and had a grand vision. The politicians who came later had to spend so much time preparing for local elections, attending weddings and funerals, and dealing with factional infighting that they didn’t have the kind of distance from petty issues that it takes to become real leaders. Some of the talented young politicians get so weighed down in politics that they may not have the opportunity to develop their best talents, to keep thinking about the big picture and to stand apart from the daily battles. There are quite a few in that generation who have had more training abroad and speak English, and that’s quite different from the current generation of leaders. But they need more time to focus on big issues and more support so that they can be effective.

HAQ: What is the effect of the US-Japan Security Treaty with respect to the Sino-Japanese relationship? Does it strengthen the relationship, or create tensions?

Vogel: When Nixon and Kissinger came to China, they persuaded the Chinese that the US-Japan treaty contributes to stability in the region and is good for the Chinese as well. The more cynical way of saying this is that it’s “the cork in the bottle” – the treaty keeps the Japanese from becoming militaristic again. I don’t think that’s an accurate statement of the treaty’s function. Japanese are not itching to become militaristic. I believe the treaty provides many benefits to Japan. It can achieve security without the need to greatly expand its military.

However, beginning in the early 1990s there was more concern on the Chinese side that the Japanese might be using their relationship with the United States to get new weaponry, as part of a plan to become an independent military power. This became particularly true when the Japanese began talking not only about the security of Japan but also in the “vicinity”, and when they began sending PKO (United Nations Peace Keeping Operations) troops abroad. It was not unnatural for the Chinese – whose closest contact with Japan had come in World War II – to worry that Japan was again becoming militaristic, and to say that Americans had short memories and didn’t really understand the Japanese. So there’s been a growing concern in recent years in China that the US-Japan Security Treaty contributes to Japan gaining military technology that is not in Chinese interests. Particularly after the 1996 near-confrontation between China and the United States over Taiwan, there was concern that the US-Japan Security Treaty might be used to prevent Taiwan from returning to the mainland. China is really quite concerned about this now, and there’s a lot of debate on the role of the treaty, and whether the US-Japan treaty will be used to balance China.

HAQ: On the Japanese domestic political side, do you think that Japan’s continuing subservience under the Security Treaty might have the effect of giving legitimacy to those calling for Japan to break away from America’s military influence entirely?

Vogel: There are three fundamental choices for Japan. One is unilateral disarmament, where Japan becomes a neutral unarmed country. Another is the US-Japan Security Treaty. The third is for Japan to develop an independent military. The first and third alternatives, when you examine them very deeply, are extremely unwise. To leave yourself as a weak country, subject to the intimidation of any country around you, would not be sustainable for long. The idea of developing an independent military – when the United States has so much technology to offer, when the Japanese economy is in trouble, and the dangers of a Japan-China arms race are so great – does not make sense. Even if the right-wing Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro came to power, where would he get the money to have a really independent military? It just isn’t going to happen.

HAQ: Aside from the Security Treaty, what do you see as the role of the US with regard to Sino-Japanese relations? Do you see any conflicts between US interests in the region and mutual Chinese and Japanese interests?

Vogel: It is conceivable that in a few years, if there’s a strong China, Japan will feel caught between the United States and China. If there is a standoff between the United States and China, or a lot of tension in the US-China relationship, then Japan will have to make difficult choices. China would certainly exert a lot of pressure. The Japanese want to avoid such a close embrace with the United States that they don’t have some flexibility in working with China. If I had to speculate on 2045 (a century after the end of World War II) I’d say that Japan may be equidistant from China and the United States, or even a little closer to China. Japan has to live with China. It’s very close geographically, and trade between Japan and China is likely to be greater than with the United States. But the idea of being allied with the United States, in case China should turn out to be a problem, is also very appealing to Japan. Japan does not want to be completely dependent on China, but there’s more caution about alienating China than a lot of people in Washington would like to think.

HAQ: Japan has tried to approach the issue of East Asian regional security through multilateral institutions. In developing and strengthening the Sino-Japanese relationship, how important are multilateral as opposed to bilateral mechanisms?

Vogel: Multilateral institutions in Asia cannot have the level of interoperability and close communication in the near future that’s required to respond effectively to security threats. Even Europe had to work very hard to develop NATO. The Japanese know that ASEAN+3 cannot be a real security alliance. Japan would like to expand multilateral discussions to reduce the risk of conflict and create a better environment all around, but in the near future multilateral relations cannot offer much more. Some people have suggested that Korea-US-Japan relations might become a regional force, but personally I think that’s very dangerous because it would antagonize China. Korea would probably not want to lean that heavily toward the United States against China either. So I don’t think that meaningful security cooperation on a multilateral basis is really possible in the next decade or two. But we should move beyond bilateral alliances to increase cooperation with China to preserve regional stability.

HAQ: What do you see as the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario for Sino-Japanese relations?

Vogel: The best-case scenario would be that some Chinese leaders who are quite confident will behave somewhat like Kim Dae-Jung in saying to the Japanese, let’s think about the future and work together. And that some Japanese leaders will be strong enough to push ahead on getting textbooks to deal fully and frankly with World War II issues. And that scholars and other specialists from China and Japan would begin to work together on those issues, and there would be an openness that would start the same kind of process as in Germany and France in the 1950s.

Pessimistic scenarios would be tension over issues like Taiwan or the Korean peninsula. Also, particularly if the US-Japan Alliance is not very firm, arms competition between China and Japan could grow. To me, an arms race, with some skirmishes along the edges, would be the worst kind of scenario.

HAQ: Finally, what kind of prospects do you see for the near future?

Vogel: At the moment I’m working on trying to get historians from China and Japan to look at World War II together. This could help provide the basis for political leaders in the two countries to work on healing. Security talks between China and Japan are beginning. Thoughtful, responsible, cosmopolitan leaders on both sides realize they need to work together, and there may be more accommodations than you would guess from the rhetoric. There are quiet diplomats and business people in both systems who realize they need to work together. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there could be some real improvement in relations despite all the troubles.