Officially, China still is, if you can refrain from guffawing, under the "dictatorship of the proletariat", in the sense at least that it is ruled by, officially, a communist party. In reality, China is an indispensable cog in the world capitalist order. Politically, the best that can be said for China is that it is a sort of semi-democracy in that to get to the top of the pecking order you have to win the backing of other people every step of the way. This isn't something to be sniffed at. The leaders of China would probably have been the same bunch under fully democratic rules as under current conditions.

Japan by contrast is a fully functional democracy. No one there becomes prime minister if not through national elections. Japanese democracy was founded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, an ultra-conservative with the soul of a tinpot dictator (also something of a military genius), who achieved this feat by personally absolving emperor Hirohito and the Japanese nation in toto of any sort of war guilt, but only after he wreaked personal vengeance by having Gen. Masaharu Homa, the Japanese commander who evicted him from the Philippines, hanged.

There's still more to Japanese democracy. Japan has been ruled, practically all of the time since the 1950s, by the Liberal-Democratic party, making it the only highly developed nation that can be said to be also virtually a one-party state, not properly an African invention but in the Post-War a mostly African political modality. Japan is an openly racist society in any sense of the term. The Japanese still believe is racial purity. Being "pure" Japanese is considered a valuable quality in itself. Foreigners in Japan are seldom integrated into Japanese society. The norm is discrimination of foreigners and foreignness in general. The media in Japan follow the basic social norm, which is conformity, and this means that although freedom of the press in Japan is formally impeccable in practice it is only occasionally effective.

Recently, there have been manifestations in various parts of China, including very cosmopolitan Shanghai, against Japan and all things Japanese, particularly recognizable Japanese property. There is no evidence that the Chinese government has been sponsoring or orchestrating all of these manifestations. However, when the Japanese government demanded an apology and compensation, the Chinese government said that it had nothing to apologize about.

The main cause of the sourness between the two countries is that the Japanese Ministry of Education approved a history textbook in which the horrendous slaughter and the unspeakable atrocities (burying Chinese alive, for example) committed by the Japanese in Nanjing, China, in 1937, among others war crimes, are practically described as justified military operations. So who is right and who is wrong: Japanese democracy or Chinese authoritarianism?


It is not really a question of right and wrong. Fundamentally, peoples have long memories. Sharon may have imposed his roadmap with the complicity of Mahmoud Abbas, but Palestinians are not going to forget Sharon soon. Bush might just be thinking he got away with mass murder in Iraq, but history probably already has him down as a war criminal.

With its economic might, Japan might have bought many minds in its former "Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". And maybe not. It was a Filipino who once told me that Japan had the lowest civilian-casualties losses of any of the World War II belligerents, the USA excepted, and he added to emphasize his point that Japan had not so much suffered as exploited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.