Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia,

Abstract

This slim volume on a topic of perennial interest begins with an easily-imagined scenario in the social media age: young Chinese men who had posted images online of themselves in Japanese military garb at sensitive war-related sites trigger a deluge of (mainly critical) comments on social media. At the heart of this episode lies two prominent aspects of Japan’s relations with its East Asian neighbours: the admiration for Japan that many young people have for its popular culture (the offending Japanese army uniforms had first been tried out at as cosplay at an anime convention, p. x) and the lingering animosity towards Japan’s aggression and colonial expansion of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leo T.S. Ching, an Associate Professor of Japanese and East Asian Cultural Studies at Duke University, has produced a thought-provoking and wideranging analysis that ultimately argues: ‘Antiand pro-Japanese sentiments [... ] are symptoms of the failure of the decolonization of the Japanese empire and the reemergence of China under global capitalism’ (p. 131). This line of argument identifies the ongoing history issue and failed attempts at reconciliation in East Asia as being due to many factors over and above Japan’s unconvincing official attempts to address war and colonial responsibility. As such, it is part of a broader consensus in East Asian Studies, seen most notably in the massive recent projects led by Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel C. Sneider on reconciliation, and by Barak Kushner on deimperialization. Where Ching’s contribution is notable is in its blend of a sociological model deconstructing different forms of antiand pro-Japanese sentiment, and the close cultural readings of works from Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea that illustrate key issues underpinning those sentiments. The Acknowledgements and Introduction set out a useful theoretical framework. Key terms in Chinese are defined and explained, such as the distinctions between ‘resist-Japan’ and ‘antiJapan’ (p. 4), and parallels are drawn with antiand pro-American sentiment within Japan (p. 9–11). Ching says that ‘anti-Japanism consists of at least four distinctive but interrelated sets of attributes: (1) [... ] the ‘idea’ of Japan; (2) a set of performative acts and representations; (3) a set of emotions and sentiments; and (4) a set of temporary fixes to political, economic, and social crises’ (p. 12). In short, the internal dynamics of the countries exhibiting anti-Japanism are as much a part of the issue as any actions by Japan. Or, as Ching puts it: ‘While anti-Japanism in postwar Asia mostly takes on the form of demands for