How Japan sees China

East Asian relations The view from Tokyo

TOKYO What Japan makes of China

The first reliable records of an official mission from Japan to China date to 238ad, when Himiko, a Japanese queen, dispatched a delegation to China’s Wei kingdom, offering as tribute ten slaves and two 20footlong textiles. By the 7th century the Yamato, a clan that ruled much of Japan at the time, was regularly sending envoys with tributes to the Sui and Tang courts. Japan adopted China’s system of writing; Japanese monks and scholars absorbed China’s religions.

Japan has remained a close, if wary, observer of its bigger neighbour over the centuries. In the late 1970s and 1980s, motivated in part by guilt over wartime atrocities, Japan helped China modernise. Japanese firms were among the first to tap into its growing market. Japanese leaders also raised early alarms over Chinese expansionism, especially after the two clashed between 2010 and 2012 over some uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea, which Japan calls the Senkaku Islands and China calls Diaoyu. “We warned the us: this is not a small compartmentalised issue between Japan and China, but a sign of a growing power in the region,” says Sasae Kenichiro, a former Japanese ambassador to America. Such views fell on deaf ears in America and Europe, where leaders were focused on the benefits of integrating China into the global economy. Yet in recent years Chinese aggression in Hong Kong, repression in Xinjiang and sabrerattling around Taiwan have made many Western governments more suspicious, too. As they enter an era of competition with China, Japan’s perspective is being sought anew. Some prominent American and British officials have begun to talk of bringing Japan (and others in the region, including South Korea) into the Five Eyes, an Anglophone intelligencesharing network, in the hopes of improving their understanding of China. “Fifteen years ago, if I talked to [Western colleagues] about the negative aspects of China, I was treated as a rightwing, Chinahating, Japanese scholar,” says Matsuda Yasuhiro, a China specialist at the University of Tokyo. “Now people listen to us.”

Japanese observers of China now speak of three worrying trends. The first is Chinese overconfidence. “They truly believe that the West is in decline,” says Kanehara Nobukatsu, a former Japanese deputy nationalsecurity adviser. Japanese scholars reckon that Chinese leaders are not posturing when they claim their political system is superior to America’s messy democracy. Some notice worrying parallels with Japan’s own cocksure stance in the runup to the second world war. “We are always reminding them of our past mistakes before the war,” says one former senior Japanese diplomat. “They say, ‘Are you joking, we are totally different.’ But in our eyes there are increasing similarities.”

The second is a shift from collective to individual leadership under Xi Jinping, China’s president. Japanese officials fret that in its dependence on the decisions of one man, China is becoming more like North Korea. Indeed, Mr Xi, in this view, may be even more isolated than the Swisseducated Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator. “Xi doesn’t know the free world at all— I’m sure that Kim knows our world better,” says Mr Kanehara.

Lastly, there is the state of the Chinese economy. Mr Xi’s recent crackdown on large private companies amid a push for

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