Unlike legal responsibility, historical responsibility does not rest on an individual, but on Japan as a nation-state. However, the nation, as a principle of cohesive unity among its inhabitants, imbues individuals, as a collective, with a sense of vulnerability to this historical guilt.
Prime Minister Takaichi said Japan would intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan. In response to a direct question from an opposition member in the lower house, she stated that a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan would pose a threat to Japan’s survival, and therefore a military response from the Japan Self-Defense Forces was inevitable.
That same day I went to an exhibition of prints by Utagawa. The prime minister’s words resonated in one of the pieces depicting Japan’s defense against the invading forces of the Mongol Empire. Kublai Khan, who already dominated Eurasia thanks to the conquests of his grandfather Genghis Khan, sent 900 ships in an initial attack on the archipelago after the Japanese repeatedly refused to acknowledge their vassalage to the supreme empire.
When the powerful Mongol force landed on Kyushu, the second largest island in the Japanese archipelago, the island warriors withstood the Mongol onslaught for twenty days. The mainland warriors decided to return to their ships to regroup, but suddenly a typhoon swept them out to sea.
The same thing happened seven years later, when the Mongols, who returned with more ships and almost three times as many warriors, were annihilated by the kamikaze, the divine wind that protects Japan. In Utagawa’s work, the Mongol vessels were swallowed by the claws of the Japanese sea, spurred on by the divine pantheon that victoriously attacked the continental invaders.
Takaichi, confident that the archipelago is protected by deities capable of urging ships and planes against the mainland enemy, reminded us that day that Japan’s historical responsibility towards Taiwan was blown away by the Yankee wind.
Taiwan: Adopted child of the Great Empire
The existence of Taiwan within Japan, and of Japan within Taiwan, was established in 1895, when the vast Japanese empire invaded China and forced the Qing dynasty to cede Taiwan to the Japanese with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. This occurred two hundred years after the Qing dynasty made the island part of Fujian province and ten years after it elevated Taiwan to the status of the empire’s twentieth province.
The Sino-Japanese War was the materialization of the expansionist policy of the neighboring empire, that of Emperor Meiji, whose rise to power meant the assimilation of a civilizational project in terms of building a great empire that was strong enough economically and militarily to confront the West.
In 1910 Japan annexed Korea, and although the imperial army also seized Manchuria in 1931 and advanced powerfully over other territories in Southeast Asia, the colonization of Taiwan and Korea was distinguished by the fact that it assimilated these territories and their inhabitants topographically, spiritually, and conceptually as Japanese.
That is, they were instilled by Japan as imperial subjects who, although they did not have the lineage because their families were not pure Japanese, from their integration into the archipelago they would be born within the national territory and would be educated as Japanese.
Despite the presence of Western powers in Asia during this period, Japan avoided being colonized and instead became the first third-world country to establish itself as an empire.
Unlike the West, Japan did not claim to have brought the fruits of “civilization” with it. Instead, the country’s ideologues justified expansion, colonization, and exploitation under the idea that Asia and Japan shared a common origin, and therefore it was the destiny of the Japanese to restore and order the region under the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere: a single nation in which everyone could be Japanese, so that their past and identity would be aligned with the Emperor.
Adding Taiwan and Korea to the territories of Okinawa and Hokkaido, which Japan absorbed at the end of the 19th century, more than 30 percent of the nation became comprised of non-Japanese people. For this reason, the Japanese empire ceased to see itself as homogeneous and instead as mixed and diverse, yet still capable of naturalizing its new subjects as Japanese citizens.
In the case of Taiwan, although Japan gave a little over a year for those who did not want to be absorbed by the Japanese empire to leave the island, it encountered resistance.
Upon the arrival of the occupying forces, the people of the Yunlin region organized to ambush and fight against the Japanese army, who responded by burning more than 50 communities and indiscriminately murdering women and infants.
The resistance on the island was so fierce that it took the Imperial Army more than 20 years to completely suppress the armed and civil insubordination of the islanders. As late as 1930, the Seediq people, originally from the Wushe region, rebelled, attacking and looting police stations, barracks, ammunition depots, and a school, resulting in the deaths of 134 Japanese soldiers.
In retaliation, the Japanese army deployed more than two thousand soldiers and bombed the mountains from the air with mustard gas, killing more than four hundred anti-colonial rebels along with women and children from Wushe.
Without any complete respite, the Japanese state established a colonial jurisdiction and administration over more than 2.5 million Taiwanese people for fifty years.
The Japanese regime implemented a system of interracial marriage and imposed Japanese names, customs, and language as mandatory. Family registration changed from patriarchal to familial.
Previously, the couple retained their respective paternal surnames and the children took the father’s surname; however, as the Japanese nation viewed itself as one big family, one of the two spouses lost their surname and was absorbed into the other’s family.
In this sense, blood took a back seat, because anyone could be adopted into a family as long as they detached themselves from the individual, from the past and their origins to let themselves be swallowed up as a brother or sister of a superior institution that was the very image of the Great Empire.
The Emperor was the father of the family, Japan was the older brother, and Taiwan, along with Korea, were younger brothers who aligned themselves to a hierarchical system of “natural” order.
Takayama, an influential intellectual of the “Greater Japan Society,” wrote in Nippon Shugi, the quintessential nationalist magazine of the time, that Taiwanese people should be molded in this way to grasp the Japanese spirit within them, which would allow them to feel emotions in the same way as “authentic” Japanese people.
Despite cultural assimilation and loyalty to family, father, and older brother, neither Taiwan nor Korea had equal rights. Neither had representatives in Parliament, and their citizens could not transfer their family records to Japan, resulting in a permanent ethnic distinction as not being considered authentic Japanese.
However, they were pressured and forcibly recruited into the Imperial Japanese Army and paramilitary forces to serve the Empire against the interests of the native population. Taiwanese serving in the military were segregated as minorities in large battle units formed and led by Japanese from the archipelago.
If they died, they were enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine and considered subjects of the Emperor. In 2009, Kao Chin Su-mei, a representative of Taiwan’s indigenous communities, protested at the Yasukuni Shrine along with many island residents, demanding that the spirits of their ancestors be allowed to return home and not be misrepresented or stigmatized.
It is estimated that 30,000 of the 200,000 Taiwanese mobilized in the Japanese army died in the Philippines, Burma, Iwa Jima and Okinawa, but many remain missing and also those who were registered after their death with Japanese names.
In addition to the instrumentalization of the inhabitants, the exploitation of Taiwan involved the destruction of the territory to build electrical networks, railway lines, roads, bridges, ports and dams.
Sugarcane also became the dominant crop, eroding and eliminating all traces of the agricultural and peasant diversity that existed before the arrival of the Japanese. The Taiwan Strait became the cornerstone of expansionism in Southeast Asia, with a strong mining, chemical, and metallurgical industry for shipbuilding.
During the exploitation of resources, forced labor, and massacres perpetrated to allow the State its imperial rest, more than 650,000 Taiwanese died or were killed on their territory.
Pax Americana and the Reconstruction of the Empire
In 1941, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist government declared war on Japan at the same time as the United States did after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The declaration of the Republic of China stipulated that all treaties, agreements, and contracts between the two countries, including the Treaty of Shimonoseki, were null and void, and that they would reclaim their territories by force of arms.
In December 1943, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom jointly demanded Japan’s surrender and the dissolution of the territories under its control in the Cairo Declaration. These points were reiterated in the Potsdam Proclamation of 1945, which was recognized by the Soviet Union and accepted by Japan in September of that year, when it signed its surrender.
The Republic of China victoriously reabsorbed Taiwan, Manchuria, the Penghu Islands and other seized territories, but it did so with two sides confronting each other in a civil war: Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists.
Two years after regaining control over Taiwan, the nationalists, still the representatives of the republic, massacred the inhabitants who sought autonomy under the name of “Formosa”.
They then stipulated that the Republic of China, regardless of whether they were nationalists or communists, had no more historical legitimacy over Formosa than Japan, Portugal, or Holland, all colonizers of the territory.
The Chinese civil war dragged on until 1949, and despite the disparity of forces and American support for the Nationalists as part of its anti-communist policy in Asia, victory in the “war of liberation” went to Mao’s side.
Chiang Kai-shek and the defeated established the capital of the Republic of China in Taipei, from where they denounced the illegal occupation of Chinese territory by the communists, who triumphantly entered Beijing in October and made it the new capital of the renowned People’s Republic of China.
Following Japan’s surrender, a new constitution was promulgated in 1947, drafted primarily by MacArthur’s US headquarters. Article 9 of the new constitution stipulated that Japan renounced war as a sovereign right.
For the same reason, the document stated that it will not have armed forces by land, sea or air, and that the right of belligerency is not recognized by the State.
In return, and under the pretext of needing military protection, Japan allowed the perpetuation of the American military occupation of the archipelago with the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan in 1951.
It stipulated that the defense of the archipelago and the preservation of peace and security in the Far East are the responsibility of the Americans in strategic collaboration with Japan, which grants the US military forces of air, land and sea the use of Japanese facilities and territories.
The treaty stipulates that any military aggression against either party will constitute a threat to the peace and security of the other. To enforce this agreement, the Americans maintain approximately 120 military installations in the archipelago and around fifty thousand troops.
Of these facilities, more than 80 are in the Okinawa islands, of which Yonaguni is only 100 kilometers from Taiwan.
The constant military tension caused by the Americans in the Taiwan Strait, along with their involvement in the Korean War, allowed Japan’s political class, economically supported by the injection of American capital into the archipelago, to justify a mutual defense agreement in 1954.
This agreement solidified the mutual willingness of both sides to abandon Japanese demilitarization in order to support American military expansion in Asia and its anti-communist program. Thus, trained, organized, and equipped by US arms corporations and the military apparatus, the Japan Self-Defense Forces, the Jieitai, emerged as an organization of the people and for the people.
A force that, according to the head of the National Police Reserve of Japan, was created to revive the military corps and restore to the Japanese spirit the will to fight and the decision to die.
In this same back-and-forth, Japan signed a Peace Treaty with Taiwan, which meant the recognition of the Republic of China as a different state from the People’s Republic of China.
In addition, President Nixon and Prime Minister Sato met in 1969 to stipulate a joint declaration between the two countries where the peace and security of Taiwan, they said, is of vital importance to the security of Japan.
However, Taiwan’s aspiration to be an independent state from the People’s Republic of China only drew international support until 1971, when United Nations resolution 2758 expelled Chiang Kai-shek from his seat as representative of the Republic of China and recognized Taiwan’s existence as a province of the People’s Republic of China.
A year later, with Taiwan’s dreams of secession dashed, the People’s Republic of China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations, the symbolic aura of which was the arrival of the pandas Kang Kang and Lan Lan to the archipelago.
With this, the peace treaty that Japan and the Republic of China made years ago was abolished, stipulating between the parties that Taiwan is an inalienable territory of the People’s Republic of China and that Japan understands and respects it as such.
Postcolonialism: The existence of Taiwan in Japan
Taiwan floats just 160 kilometers from the People’s Republic of China and 111 kilometers from the most remote island in the Japanese archipelago.
Separated from the mainland and the archipelago, Taiwan does not necessarily share an ethos with China or Japan, because although history and politics are parallel, the resulting amalgam of customs and ways of being is not shaped by the same relational process.
In other words, the familiarity, the landscape with all that it implies, as well as the everyday life of the world in which the inhabitants of these territories have moved daily, has not been the same.
The established framework of shared experiences that shaped Taiwan before, during, and after its colonial period is not comparable to that of Japan. Therefore, Taiwan’s presence in Japan and Japan’s presence in Taiwan are not the same thing.
Taiwan’s existence within Japan is intertwined with the colonial past and the post-colonial process that forcibly redefined the nation’s identity and social imaginary. Suddenly, the empire collapsed, along with its multiethnic policies.
With the loss of the colonized territories, the national identity underwent a sudden change at a symbolic and bureaucratic level simply because 30% of the population ceased to be Japanese.
In this postcolonial narrative and Japan’s relationship with the seceded territories, we must consider that both Taiwan and the other countries in the region were swallowed up by the imperial presence of the United States upon inheriting the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Americans, as I explained in another text published in Diario Red, made the Japanese a surrogate empire, governed by war criminals and anti-communist ideologues.
This idea that Japan was only defeated by the United States and not by its former colonies prevented the Japanese from confronting the traumatic loss of the empire, which would entail a kind of collective humiliation necessary to decolonize themselves as well.
In this sense, Naoki Sakai says, postcolonialism is nothing more than an anachronistic state of affairs with a perverse rejection of change. The ” post” is not an aftermath, but rather the ghostly persistence of the past that refuses to disappear in the present.
Prime Minister Takaichi’s statements capitalize on this specter. It’s a recurring theme in her political faction’s rhetoric, which this time was met in China with restrictions on rare earth trade, a ban on Chinese tourists visiting Japan, military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, and the return of all Chinese pandas from Japan.
In Japan, Takaichi’s cabinet, along with the national media apparatus and major Western outlets, sought all sorts of justifications for the bellicose rhetoric emanating from parliament. The following day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara cited the “Japan Peace and Independence Act,” which Japan had enacted in 2003 in agreement with the United States.
Minoru said that Takaichi meant that Japan’s security would be at risk if there were an armed attack on any foreign country with which Japan has a close relationship, because it would endanger the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the Japanese people.
This narrative never addresses Japan’s historical responsibility toward Taiwan and the other countries it invaded. The responsibility of any empire that loses its colonies is to answer for past crimes, transgressions, and the accusations of victims, but in Japan, this obligation was diluted by the agreements and treaties imposed by the United States and accepted by the Japanese elite, who were unwilling to be legally held accountable for their war crimes.
According to Naoki Sakai, historical responsibility comprises four parts: the sender who demands answers from the receiver, the receiver who must respond to the sender, a witness who is neither of the two parties, and an event about which responsibility is demanded.
The revisionist apparatus, orchestrated by the Liberal Democratic Party and chaired by Prime Minister Takaichi, has publicly argued that the Japanese should not feel ashamed or apologize for acts that did not happen in the way the victims claim.
The great predecessor of this political faction, Shinzo Abe, declared in 2015: “We cannot allow our children, grandchildren and even future generations, who had nothing to do with this war, to be forced to continually apologize.”
Unlike legal responsibility, historical responsibility does not rest on an individual, but on Japan as a nation-state. However, the nation, as a principle of cohesive identity among its inhabitants, imbues individuals, as a collective, with a sense of vulnerability to this historical guilt.
Therefore, Taiwan’s existence in Japan entails accepting its obligation to respond when the victim addresses it in relation to past events and the current state of affairs.
Those who still yearn for the colonial order in Japan think that the divine wind that protects the archipelago is now a Yankee gale, but the true divine wind is the one that dismantles imperial structures.
