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Efforts have been made among scholars from Japan, South Korea, and China since the 1980s--on both private and state initiatives--to narrow the gaps in their historiographies and to cultivate mutual understanding. This article offers an extensive discussion of the author's history project, "A Student Project of Writing a Common History Textbook," which which was incorporated in a multinational class environment in the Spring 2019 semester. First the author explains the development of the conceptual framework and the organization and management of the class. Then, some of the history teaching materials that the students created is introduced. Finally, the author examines what the students actually learned from this exercise and working with their group members, based on their journals and answers to the project survey. The author would argue that this was a success in promoting mutual understanding among students by having them learn history together from various points of view, as the goal was not a complete reconciliation of their historical viewpoints. Young people from different countries, even those from the countries embroiled in politico-historical controversies, are able to learn from one another to create more complex historical narratives that look beyond competing nationalisms. The results of the course confirm the value of teaching history from a global standpoint and hold promise that if adopted widely, it might have a long-term and larger, positive effect on society and even on international relations by producing globally competent future generations.

Drawing on a recent collaborative and interdisciplinary study of East Asian Images of Japan, this article discusses contemporary Chinese portrayals of Japan, their political context, and their significance for Sino-Japanese relations. It questions some widely-held assumptions concerning the extent of "thought control" in an authoritarian state, the nature of popular protest, and the relationship between official propaganda and popular lived experience. While the main focus is on portrayals of Japan in mainland China, for comparative purposes some reference is made to Hong Kong and Taiwan. The latter part of the article also features a brief discussion of images of China in Japan, especially relating to the Second World War. This reflects particularly on the role of museums as vehicles for "peace education," focusing on two key institutions in Kyushu. China's "bases for patriotic education" and Japan's "peace museums" ostensibly embody radically different institutional missions. However while Japan's memorials to the war evince greater diversity, in harping on national victimhood and obscuring the reasons for war key sites of "peace education" arguably deliver a message that is just as nationalistic as that conveyed by their Chinese counterparts. The article concludes by arguing that, notwithstanding its "totalitarian" facade, China's social and political fragility in fact limits the scope for the authorities there to moderate anti-Japanese public discourse. In democratic Japan, by contrast, a more honest and open engagement with the national past is--or should be--far more achievable. For both moral and political reasons, scholars and educationalists in Japan therefore urgently need to consider their role in improving Sino-Japanese relations, not least through more forceful engagement in public debate over the socialization of the young.

In light of popular nationalism on the rise in China and Japan, this inquiry develops and validates a survey instrument to document university students' motivation to learn Japanese in mainland China and explore how the learning of a foreign language may lead to better cross-cultural understanding. A total number of 398 Chinese learners of Japanese in Chinese universities participated in the survey and 12 of them participated further in post-survey interviews. The results confirm that participants' interest in Japan-related products, employment opportunities, and activities contribute to the motivation to learn the language for cross-cultural understanding and undertake cross-cultural exchanges with Japanese people. The results suggest that increased exposure to Japan-related affairs in the media coverage undermines their desire for intercultural communication and increases the approach for interacting with Japanese people. This means it is necessary for Japanese language educators to engage with Japanese language learners and to address macro contextual processes such as rising tensions between the two countries, negative coverage on China in Japan's media, and negative coverage on Japan in the Chinese media.

Informed by recurring international controversies, this study explores representations of the Second World War as official history in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean secondary-level textbooks and theorizes about how they influence and function as collective memories about this time period. Using grounded theory, it finds that the examined Japanese textbooks tend to present the Second World War in chronological order with a passive voice and avoid discussing why the war occurred and how it ended. The examined Chinese textbooks develop narratives in chronological order as well, but thematic units are structured to highlight the coalition of Mao's Communist Party and Chang Kai-Shek's Nationalists as the decisive factor in the victory against Japanese imperialists contributing to the worldwide fight against fascism. The examined Korean textbooks tend toward a single, patriotic perspective of a people that overcame Japanese colonialism and developed as an independent nation, often ignoring issues that complicated the relationship between the two nations.

This article reviews the history of international mobility of students from China to other countries over the century and a half from 1870 to the present day. Different motivations, goals, courses, and knowledge are considered, together with how the purposes of individuals have matched national policy. Implications for the future development in a globalized context are briefly considered.

This paper explores the ways in which policies for national identity formation and internationalization interact to complement and contradict each other in the context of global higher education. These themes are explored by comparing recent policies in two countries in East Asia, a part of the world currently on the rise in the global hierarchy of higher education (Altbach in "Tert Educ Manag" 10:3-25, 2004; Marginson in "High Educ" 4(1), 2011b). China and Japan are presented as case studies, with a focus on the ways the two countries have pursued both higher education internationalization and nationalist agendas through education more broadly. The paper then turns to a discussion of the factors that might explain these approaches as well as the dilemmas that arise from the interaction of these policy agendas in the context of global higher education. The paper argues that while increasing global competitiveness through HE internationalization may prove beneficial to individual nation-states in the short term, countries in East Asia should consider the potential pitfalls of becoming too singly focused on competitiveness at the expense of mutual understanding and peaceful international relations in the region. Furthermore, the continued push to create uncritical nationalistic citizens threatens to undermine the goals of internationalization and may be detrimental to efforts at HE regional cooperation and integration. The paper concludes with recommendations that the two countries consider the potential benefits of global citizenship education and the expansion of regionally focused study abroad programs to help develop graduates with the global competencies conducive to both national competitiveness and regional cooperation.

This article provides a comparative evaluation of Chinese character reform in the People's Republic of China and Japan, with a particular focus on the latest changes announced in 2009 to the existing script policies in the two countries. The first Chinese script reform took place in 1956 and the first Japanese script reform in 1946, both for the purpose of simplifying the scripts to facilitate mass education. In the 1980s, prompted by nationalistic sentiments and economic security, both countries backtracked on their script reform policies and adopted a more conservative approach that put an end to any further simplification of the script. The conservative trend which continued into the new millennium is reflected in the two latest reforms. Both China and Japan have moved further away from phonetizing the script in their effort to address issues related to information and communication technology. (Contains 2 notes.)

The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the "Confucian" education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism--still playing out everywhere except Japan--and have created a distinctive model of higher education more effective in some respects than systems in North America, the English-speaking world and Europe where the modern university was incubated. The Confucian Model rests on four interdependent elements: (1) strong nation-state shaping of structures, funding and priorities; (2) a tendency to universal tertiary participation, partly financed by growing levels of household funding of tuition, sustained by a private duty, grounded in Confucian values, to invest in education; (3) "one chance" national examinations that mediate social competition and university hierarchy and focus family commitments to education; (4) accelerated public investment in research and "world-class" universities. The Model has downsides for social equity in participation, and in the potential for state interference in executive autonomy and academic creativity. But together with economic growth amid low tax regimes, the Confucian Model enables these systems to move forward rapidly and simultaneously in relation to each and all of mass tertiary participation, university quality, and research quantity and quality.

This article reports on an ethnographic case study that explored how Chinese learners' national identities were displayed and reconstructed through their English language-learning journeys in Britain. Drawing on a variety of sources (ethnographic observations, informal conversations, diaries, and narrative interviews), the analysis focuses on the Chinese learners' raising self-awareness of being Chinese and their attitudes towards Japanese students, South Korean students, and students from Taiwan. This study found that during their English language learning journeys in Britain, the Chinese learners tended to affirm and often displayed their membership with respect to China and Chinese national imagination, which contributed to heightened senses of Chinese national identity and increased patriotism. At the same time, the experience of interacting with Japanese students, South Korean students, and students from Taiwan encouraged the Chinese learners to question and critically reexamine their own attitudes and values related to their national identities. Then, the elements that made up an individual's Chinese national identity were brought under scrutiny and negotiation. Implications for classroom practices are also discussed.

The Christian missionary movement is a kind of global movement that aims to evangelize the whole world; hence the concept of globalization can be useful for the study of Christianity as a worldwide movement. However, recent studies have suggested another equally important concept: the process of localization, which runs parallel to the process of globalization. Hence, the present paper attempts to take Christian higher education as a case study and tries to reveal a better picture of the interplay between the processes of globalization and localization. An attempt was made to compare the sociopolitical contexts in three Northeast Asian countries, namely China, Japan, and Korea, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to see how Christian higher education had responded to the issue of nationalism in these countries. It was found that Christian higher education in the three countries played very different roles when they were encountering different situations, and they had come to different fates in the three countries under study.

The Han sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20th century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanised "Chu Quoc Ngu" and phonemic Hangul, respectively. In Japan, the number of Han characters in use decreased, and the syllabic "Kana" system was promoted to a national status. In Taiwan, although Taiwanese romanisation was developed centuries ago, Han characters remain the dominant orthography in current Taiwanese society. This paper examines Taiwan's orthographic transition from the perspective of the Han sphere. Both internal and external factors have contributed to the different outcomes of orthographic reform in these countries. Internal factors include the general public's demand for literacy and anti-feudal hierarchy. External factors include the political relationships between these countries and the origin of Han characters (i.e. China). (Contains 5 notes.)

In the last two decades, against the backdrop of multiple anti-Japanese protests in China, the rise of Chinese nationalism has been much debated. By taking the 2010 and 2012 Sino–Japanese crises over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands as a case study, the article applies discourse analysis to media articles and interviews to ascertain the Chinese government's propaganda toolbox in shaping the nationalist discourse, as well as to substantiate the defining features of anti-Japanese nationalism. The findings reveal a combination of strategies and techniques that the propaganda apparatus uses, such as the creation of an 'us-versus-them' dichotomy, galvanised inclusiveness, censorship, and 'card-stacking' to mould nationalism. The article substantiates empirically both top-down and bottom-up strains of nationalism, and their interaction through the four key themes of sovereignty, history, mistrust and reactivity. It finds that Japan bridges these strands of Chinese nationalism, but in its absence alternative views of nationalism are articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is well known that regime types affect international conflicts. This article explores political parties as a mechanism through which they do so. Political parties operate in fundamentally different ways in democracies vs. non-democracies, which has consequences for foreign policy. Core supporters of a party in a democracy, if they are hawkish, may be more successful at demanding hawkish behavior from their party representatives than would be their counterparts in an autocracy. The study draws on evidence from paired experiments in democratic Japan and non-democratic China to show that supporters of the ruling party in Japan punish their leaders for discouraging nationalist protests, while ruling party insiders in China are less likely to do so. Under some circumstances, then, non-democratic regimes may be better able to rein in peace-threatening displays of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze the influence of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō's nationalist stance on Japan's policy towards China from a neoclassical realist perspective. It is argued that the extent to which Abe's ideological leaning exerted impact on foreign policy making depended on external stimuli, as well as Abe's domestic political interests. Prime Minister Abe generally perceived China as a threat to Japan, and remained assertive towards it, but he also pragmatically displayed flexibility in such areas as history issues, security policy, and territorial dispute. This article analyzes these complex developments in light of the changes in international environment and domestic politics, examining three periods: Abe's first administration (2006–2007); the escalation of diplomatic disputes with China (2012–2014); and gradual rapprochement with China (since 2014). It is concluded that the nationalist beliefs of decision makers affect foreign policy to the greatest extent whenever they are in line with other kinds of variables, such as external pressures and domestic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of rising tension between China and Japan, two powerful countries in Asia, the favorable attitudes of each country's citizens toward the other country have dropped to a historical low. The Taiwan issue, historical legacy, island disputes, and maritime resource competition are major obstacles in Sino-Japanese relations, but the most fundamental issue is a deep-seated mutual distrust and suspicion between the two countries, which result in rising threat perceptions. Beyond the structural and political elite-centered approaches, this study examines the evidence related to the three approaches (face-to-face contact, cross-cultural exposure, and social identity) to reduce mutual distrust and antipathy in the two countries. With a careful analysis of the survey data, this study sheds light on the conditions under which contact (a) results in improved attitudes toward outgroup, (b) has little or no effect on intergroup relations, and (c) yields more prejudice and hostility toward the outgroup. The findings of this study not only identify factors that could facilitate mutual understanding between Chinese and Japanese people and more favorable impressions of one another, but are also relevant to planning interventions to reduce prejudice and distrust among people from different races, religions, and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During August and September 2012, Sino-Japanese conflict over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands escalated. Alongside street demonstrations in China, there was an outpouring of public sentiment on China's leading micro-blog, Sina Weibo (微波). Using human and computer-assisted content analysis, we exploit original Weibo data to measure how public sentiment in China fluctuated over the dispute, and ask two questions. First, how cohesive and volatile were online nationalist sentiments? Second, we measure government censorship of Weibo in order to ask which sentiments did authorities allow to be expressed, and when? We first find that many of the micro-bloggers' harshest invective was directed not at Japan but at their own government. Second, while censorship remained high across topics for most of the dispute, it plummeted on 18 August – the same day as bloggers' anger at Beijing peaked. These observations suggest three theoretical explanations: two are instrumental-strategic (“audience costs” and “safety valve”) and one is ideational (elite identification with protesters). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2009, two significant script policy measures were adopted by Japan and the People's Republic of China (China hereafter), both as a response to national language needs triggered by globalisation. However, the measures chosen by the two countries were very different, Japan choosing to increase and China choosing to standardise the Chinese characters in the respective official character lists. The Japanese script reform measure was an integral part of Japan's recent national efforts to beautify the Japanese language and preserve the Japanese culture. The new script policy was implemented specifically to counteract the impact of digital media on the Japanese script which came about due to the globalisation process. The latest Japanese script reform thus drastically increased the number of officialkanji(Chinese characters in the official character list), which had been substantially reduced in 1946 to facilitate mass literacy. In contrast, the Chinese script reform measure was an attempt to standardise and streamline its script to make it function effectively in digitalised environments. It was the centrepiece of China's current efforts to fast-track into the post-industrial knowledge economy and information society of the globalised, industrialised nations. The latest Chinese script reform thus rigorously weeded out large numbers of characters that had hitherto made its script untenable for computer use. Although the two language policy measures chosen to respond to the forces of globalisation are fundamentally different, both Japan and China are similar in the indifference shown towards language rights and social justice issues caused by their respective policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Amidst political tensions between China and Japan, and against the backdrop of the patriotic education campaign in China that promotes a negative image of Japan as the victimiser, Chinese students in Japanese educational institutions study and work in Japan in a highly politicised context. In general, how they chose to interpret their experiences in Japan, and their views on history and controversial political issues involving China and Japan, demonstrates two levels of cosmopolitanism - namely, the ability and the willingness to engage with Japanese people on such issues, and reflexivity towards their own national identities. Meanwhile, some informants would deliberately avoid talking about history and controversial political issues involving China and Japan. While they lacked the willingness to engage with Japanese people on controversial issues, their keenness to separate their daily lives in Japan from the political context means they were also engaged in a reflexive reconfiguration of their national identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asia is narrated in Japanese foreign policy pronouncements as an opportunity as well as a threat. Despite the purported transformation from militarism to pacifism since August 1945, the reified images of Asia as an ‘entity out there’ remain resilient. The image of a dangerous Asia prompted Japan to engage in its programme of colonialism before the War and compels policy makers to address territorial disputes with Asian neighbours today. Simultaneously, Asia persistently symbolises an opportunity for Tokyo to exploit. Hence, despite the psychological rupture of August 1945, reified Asia remains a reality in Japanese foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 1945, the United States (US) has served as a focal point of both Left-wing and Right-wing Japanese nationalism. Both sides argued that the US was an arrogant hegemon that unjustly robbed Japan of its autonomy, and prevented Japan from achieving its own ideal national identity. Both sides frequently demanded that Japan should be more ‘resolute’ and resist unfair demands emanating from the US. In recent years, however, both camps are increasingly using the same rhetoric to criticise the Japanese government's China policy. China is also being depicted as an overbearing state that unfairly browbeats Japan into making diplomatic concessions. Given the similarities between the portrayal of China and the US, has China now become a nationalist focal point forboththe Japanese Left and Right? Utilising constructivist insights, this article seeks to shed light on this question, by examining how the Japanese Right and Left portray China, and explores the implications for Japan's China policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The "images" which have commonly distinguished Brussels' relations with Beijing (starting from the 1990s) and Tokyo (since the Cold War years) appear to actually be the result of the concurrence of events and of structuring factors that denoted trade problems on the surface, or dysfunctions generated by the systemic variable. Nonetheless, in this paper I try to explain that these problems are fundamentally based on a much more complex and inherent divergence of two universes of values and different political cultures. Zhao Tingyang's theory on "relation rationality" and the Japanese ethical notion of "relational coexistence" (linked to Watsuji Tetsuro) may help to inscribe and construct modern historical relations between China and Japan towards Europe into a narrative by bringing - in Carol Gluck's words - "the outside in". Finally, I analyze the relationship between the three actors in the light of the systemic changes occurred after the end of the bipolar system and especially following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, trying to highlight the potential of their political dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of an increasingly vociferous public debate in China over the true contribution made by the KMT in the war against Japan. Following years of rigid adherence to the traditional Maoist line that the CCP won the war almost single-handedly, the party has finally moved towards a more realistic and honest assessment that recognises the pivotal role played by the KMT in defeating the Japanese. The rationale for conceding this point is ultimately linked to the question of nationalist legitimacy. At a time of increasing socio-economic uncertainty and in an effort to fill the ideological void left by the demise of Chinese Marxism, the party is trying hard to bolster its nationalist credentials. One way that it is doing this is by presenting a united patriotic front on the war against Japan, with itself at the helm. However, things have not materialised in the way the party had anticipated. Along with strong expressions of national pride in China's war effort, some members of the public have responded with sympathy towards the KMT veterans who fought the Japanese. With this sympathy has come antipathy towards the CCP who are accused of persecuting KMT soldiers after 1949, of re-writing the history of the war for its own propaganda purposes and of betraying the nation by, amongst other things, avoiding armed conflict with Japan and leaving the KMT to fight the war on its own. In light of this growing (although not necessarily majority) public reaction, we argue that instead of fortifying the party's nationalist legitimacy, the official reappraisal of the KMT's role in the war runs the risk of eroding that legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2005 anti-Japan protests in China inaugurated a new era of Chinese popular nationalism with their pervasive visuality and virtuality. The outpouring of emotions in cityscapes and cyberspaces – anger, outrage, zealousness and even pleasure – requires us to take emotion, passion, hope or sheer delight seriously and to recognize the power of some of the more alarming forms of popular nationalist sentimentality. This chapter analyses one instance of Sino-Japanese relations: the epithet of ‘riben guizi’ or Japanese devils in Chinese popular culture in four historical moments: late-Sinocentric imperium, high imperialism, socialist nationalism and post-socialist globalization. I want to suggest that while this ‘hate word’ performs an affective politics of recognition stemming from an ineluctable trauma of imperialist violence, it ultimately fails in establishing a politics of reconciliation. I argue that anti-Japanism in China is less about Japan than China's own self-image mediated through its asymmetrical power relations with Japan throughout its modern history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Chinese nation building in the post-Cold War era from the perspective of foreign policy. It focuses on the role of Japan and the United States as significant 'Others' in Chinese leaders' construction of three major variants of Chinese national identity: as a victim (past), as a developing country (present) and as a great power (future). The article argues that Japan occupies a primary place in the enactment of the past aspect of Chinese identity, while the US plays a major role in its present and, especially, future aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reinterpretation of Japan's responses toward China's pressure over the Yasukuni issue. It is generally taken for granted that Japan's official responses to China's pressure over the issue are determined by the personality of individual leaders, the emergence of Japanese conservative nationalism and the calculations of Japan's national interests with regard to China's strategic role. With the examination of two cases during the Koizumi and Abe administrations between 2001 and 2007, this paper offers an alternative interpretation by highlighting the rationality of individual political actors and the primacy of domestic political survival. The article suggests domestic political legitimacy of individual leaders is a vital factor that affects Japan's official responses to China's pressure over the Yasukuni issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Sino-Japanese relations are quite stable presently, it was as recent as 2004–2005 that the two nations slid into the worst bilateral quagmire in decades. When in 2007 Japan was China’s third largest trading partner and China surpassed the US to become Japan’s largest trading partner, what is eating these two otherwise very pragmatic traders? History, nationalism and face, enabled by recent changes in the strategic environment, are the factors that have been most salient in bringing about the plunge in Sino-Japanese relations in 2004–05 and though Sino-Japanese relations have been much better since, these factors hang like a storm front over Sino-Japanese relations today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent naval ship visits and exchanges of goodwill between China and Japan suggest an improvement in the two countries' bilateral relationship, which had been steadily deteriorating since the late 1990s. In the longer term, however, Sino-Japanese relations will likely be tested or constrained by five key sets of issues: (1) territorial and resource disputes, (2) nationalism and issues of mutual antipathy, (3) Taiwan's political status, (4) the rapid rise of China's military power, and (5) the U.S.-Japan security alliance. The manner in which these issues are managed or resolved will likely play a major role in shaping the Sino-Japanese relationship and thus the overall geopolitical environment in East Asia. A key complicating factor in the relationship, however, is the persistence of divergent worldviews: Chinese leaders appear to be more consistently persuaded by realist notions of international politics, whereas Japanese leaders tend to favor liberal-institutionalist values. The two countries may use these different lenses to view the same incident or issue, potentially creating misunderstanding and miscalculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Sino-Japanese relations by looking at how negative sentiments towards Japan among the Chinese population are deployed as a form of political capital in struggles among the Chinese Communist Party elite. It gains insights into this process by looking at how such sentiments have been deployed to challenge the legitimacy of three CCP leaders since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, resulting in the downfall of two. The conclusions from these case studies are then used to understand how the current Chinese leadership has engineered the 'new starting point' in the relationship with Japan in the context of the movement from a 'winner takes all' type of factional politics into one characterized by 'power balancing' among the elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Chinese intellectuals understand mass nationalism in China. Understanding their perspective is useful when analyzing the meaning and repercussions of nationalist trends throughout the 1990s, as well as its future course. While playing a major role in its revival, Chinese intellectuals actually have a very pragmatic view of nationalism based on China's goal of building a prosperous and powerful nation. They also play a role in influencing public opinion and the government's policy-making process. In the short to mid term, the public expression of anti-U.S. or anti-Japanese sentiments through nationalism is not likely to become extreme, as this would run counter to China's current development strategies and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]