# Growing anti-Japanese sentiments among Chinese - Author: Joichi Ito - Date: 2004-08-10T09:20:24Z China Photosvia ReutersThe New York Times has an interesting story about the rowdy anti-Japanese crowds at the recent Asian Cup soccer match in China between China and Japan.The New York Times"Kill! Kill! Kill!" the Chinese fans yelled. Or, echoing a patriotic song from another era, they shouted, roughly: "May a big sword chop off the Japanese heads!" What's surprising is not that there were anti-Japanese sentiments, but that the article asserts that such sentiments are on the rise. According to the article, "... increasingly, the most strident criticism of Japan now comes from a generation born long after the end of the war, which in China is known as the War of Resistance against Japan." My impression is that most of the anti-Chinese sentiment in Japan is fueled by people like Governor Ishihara of Tokyo who remember the war, and not young post-war Japanese. (UPDATE: Mizuka just told me that there were a bunch of right-wing Japanese demonstrating in Kasumigaseki yesterday and they were mostly young.) There is a revisionist movement in Japan, but I have heard only 0.3% of school actually ended up using the controversial revised texts and the movement is considered a failure. However, I don't have a good sense of whether anti-Chinese sentiments are increasing or decreasing, but they are clearly here as I've blogged about in the past. The "new anti-Japanese" in China represent a bad trend. At the Brainstorm conference in 2002, I heard Shimon Peres say, "What can you learn from History? Very little... History was written with red ink, wth bloodshed. We should educate our children how to imagine, not how to remember." I think his words are extremely relevant. The article also quotes a Mr. Lu saying, "Like many young Chinese, he believes Japan is returning to militarism. 'I want China to be strong again,' Mr. Lu said at lunch the day before the game. He said China needed to be strong so it would not again succumb to foreign invaders." This is also quite an odd image. At a recent conference I went to, it was clear that the American no longer viewed Japan as a military threat. At this conference, it was pointed out that since Japan is aging so quickly, it can not be motivated very strongly to grow its military. Most countries which expanded security forces were usually countries that had a lot of young people. It was noted that the Kim Jon Il said during his trip across Russia on the train, that he had "too many people." This is one reason why he might be happier to send troops to war than Japan where there are so few young people. In other news on the topic, it appears Japanese hackers went after a Chinese site and now the Chinese hackers are retaliating. --- #### Categories Global Politics, Japanese Culture