Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Yakashumi shrine in December last year, to pay tribute to Japanese soldiers who died in the Second World War. This has kicked off waves of aggressive protest in China, as well as a noticeable trough in Sino-Japanese relations, further fuelling security disputes such as that over the Senkaku-Diayou islands. But why has this simple visit caused so much trouble between the two countries? To understand China’s unwillingness to give ground against Japan, we must understand the historical context in which the two nations are situated.

When we look at history from a western perspective, we often cannot get to grips with other civilizations’ historical conception. The Holocaust was a horrific and defining historical experience for Europe, all the more so because it is so historically and geographically close, and it was committed by those supposedly culturally similar to us in the systematic way in which one might butcher cattle. As a consequence, it was an emotionally destructive event within western culture and beyond.

Consequently, we pay less attention to crises that happen further afield. We recognize the Cambodian self-genocide, or the Rwandan genocide as awful events. But we do not act in the same way as in cases closer to home, such as the Srebrenica massacre, despite the massive relative disparities in casualties. For a western audience, we perceive such events as particularly awful because they occur within our own cultural ‘space’.
This colouring of the lens has also left many in the western audience unable to understand quite why China has taken such an aggressive tact to Abe’s continued visits to the shrine.

The Sino-Japanese war was perhaps the most brutal conflict of the Second World War, with around 20 million Chinese people being killed. If you want to understand why the Chinese public still holds generally very negative views of Japan, read an account of the Rape of Nanking. In 1937, Japanese troops entered the city. Over the course of several days, they raped, mutilated, looted and murdered their way through the city, killing around 300,000 people. The accounts can be found online, and they make for a truly chilling read.

Japan has shown little public remorse to the Chinese side, especially in comparison to those apologies made to Western states. One verbal apology in the mid 90’s is all that has been said on the issue. It is not surprising that this has not been enough for China, when the western comparator, Germany, has public prostrated itself on many occasions to show it is a changed state.

As Ambassador Wu explained in a recent talk to LSE students, Chinese criticism of Chinese Prime Minister Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni shrine in Japan is the western equivalent of Angela Merkel visiting and commemorating a shrine to Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, and giving the Nazi salute. Clearly, from Britain and the rest of the EU, if this were to take place, we would demand Merkel’s immediate resignation. Yet we do not transfer this cultural understanding to emphathise with the Chinese view of Japan in the same light, seeing it merely as Chinese aggression.

Historical experiences of states play a crucial role in their foreign policy, especially when the monolithic Chinese state has been opened up to the role of Chinese public opinion. Thus, it will take a cultural shift, perhaps started by a Japanese apology for its actions during the war, and a cross cultural exchange, rather than the current demonizing of each by the other, to resolve this issue.
A political compromise alone, to put it bluntly, will not work, without a corresponding cultural shift. Until that occurs, more Senkaku-Diayu disputes will ensue.