Asia Without America, Part 2: Japan's Tang Renaissance

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World War II, however, was a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge. Only a handful of Japanese war veterans are still alive. Few living Asians have memories of Japanese atrocities. It is difficult to imagine Asia demanding from Japan anything but“symbolic” gestures of atonement.

But in the land of thymos, symbolic gestures, like teaching war atrocities in Japan's schools or removing war criminals from the Yasukuni Shrine, are the most difficult to swallow.

On November 25, 1970, novelist Yukio Mishima, aided by four disciples, stormed a military base in central Tokyo, tied up the commandant, barricaded the doors, donned a white headband, stepped onto the balcony and delivered a rousing speech to soldiers gathered below.

Yukio Mishima at the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces' Eastern Region on the day of his death. Photo: AAP

Meant to inspire a military coup d'état restoring direct rule to the emperor, the speech was met with puzzlement and jeers. Shortly after his speech, Mishima apologized to the tied-up commandant and committed hara-kiri (seppuku), disemboweling himself like samurai of yore before being decapitated by a disciple.

Mishima spent all his adult life trying not to be a“man without a chest.” In the hopeless last days of the war, Mishima avoided almost certain death by getting rejected from the army for an erroneous tuberculosis diagnosis, which he may or may not have faked.

Cheated from or having cheated the glory of battlefield death, Mishima lifted weights obsessively, became a skilled kendo swordsman and lamented the emptiness of modern Japan. Mishima identified Japan's men without chests decades before Francis Fukuyama:

In 1959-1960, protests erupted across Japan in opposition to the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Anpo in abbreviated Japanese. The treaty would formally allow the United States to maintain military bases in Japan.

Opposition was immense from both the left and the right. At its height, hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's parliament in Tokyo. On June 15, 1960, students breached the building, resulting in violent clashes with police.

The original Anpo contained egregious terms:

• no specific end date or means of abrogation,
• allowing the US military to use bases for any purpose without consulting the Japanese government,
• authorization for US troops to put down domestic protests.

The 1959-1960 protests were in opposition to Anpo, even with those terms specifically removed. Despite the protests, the revised Anpo was ratified, but at the cost of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi's resignation and the cancellation of a celebratory visit by US President Dwight Eisenhower.

The revised Anpo provided abrogation opportunities at 10-year intervals, with student protests erupting again in 1968-1969 but in much-attenuated form. Today, opposition to Anpo is largely confined to residents of Okinawa who bear the brunt of the environmental impact (noise pollution, chemical run-offs, live-fire exercises) and service member criminality of the US occupation.

Yukio Mishima was radicalized by the Anpo protests. In 1961, Mishima wrote the short story“Patriotism,” which was made into a popular 1966 short film in which he directed and starred.

The film climaxed with Lieutenant Takeyama, unable to reconcile loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty to his comrade-in-arms, committing hara-kiri, with the strings of Wagner playing in the background. In an interview, Mishima explained:

Mishima's suicide at the prime of life was a political call to arms, a personal cri de cœur, an artistic expression of ultimate beauty, a reclamation of the glorified death that slipped through his fingers as a young man.

This all proved too much for 1970 Japan. Just when the nation was coming into its cosmopolitan own, its most famous writer makes a feudal spectacle of himself, gratuitously conjuring up unpleasant memories. The stunt was certainly beyond the pale in neighboring China and both Koreas, whose inhabitants likely had had enough samurai swords, bushido and hara-kiri for a few centuries.

Mishima was on a mission to Make Japan Great Again. Unfortunately, World War II survivor guilt bound him to the most objectionable period in Japan's history.

After Commodore Perry and his black ships forced open Japan under threat of cannon fire, shattering 250 years of splendid seclusion, tumultuous changes swept through Japanese society, toppling centuries-old institutions like the shogunate and the samurai.

The Meiji restoration overturned the isolationist Edo period, centralized government and industrialized the economy, but ultimately went down an unfortunate militarist path. The rest is, shall we say, history. Any hint of Meiji-Shōwa militarist revival surely would set off ear-piercing alarm bells across all of Asia.

Fortunately, Japan's renaissance need not begin with Commodore Perry's black ships. Modern Japan has almost certainly retained more of the Tang Dynasty than modern China.

Kimonos, geisha make-up and Kyoto-style architecture would look less out of place in the ancient Chinese city of Chang'an (present day Xi'an), capital of the Tang Dynasty, than anything in Beijing, Shanghai and even Shenzhen.

Emperor Taizong (Li Shimin), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, ruled from 626 to 649. A follower of Confucius and a rationalist, he saw himself as a servant of the people. Japan learned much from the Tang Dynasty. Photo: National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons

The Tang Dynasty (605 to 907, minus a 690-705 interregnum) had a profound impact on all facets of Japanese culture, from aesthetics to language to religion to government.

The Tang was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of China's dynasties, with 25,000 foreigners living in its capital. Japanese, Turks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Persians, Indians and Central Asians filled Chang'an's restaurants, wine-houses and temples (Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Zoroastrian).

In this atmosphere, Tang China was in constant contact with Japan, receiving 19 official missions (kentoshi) of up to 600 people who made the two-year round-trip journey (some staying decades before returning).

Japanese envoys and scholars who had completed kentoshi instituted Chinese-style laws, bureaucracy, calendars and measurements in their official capacity. In their unofficial capacity, they brought back Chinese fashion, literature, musical instruments and artistic taste.

Fears of China collecting on Japanese blood debt in draconian fashion are highly misplaced. Without a barbarian military on China's maritime border, the Communist Party of China can relax into its Confucianism. While the political West swings left and right, political China swings between Legalism and Confucianism.

In anxious times, Legalism and its authoritarian impulses prevail – there can be no fun and games when Qin Shi Huang is consolidating the Qin Dynasty. And only after Emperor Taizong defeated the Eastern and Western Turks could the Tang Dynasty relax, allowing Chang'an and Yangzhou to become cosmopolitan cities where commerce, poetry, painting, calligraphy, drunken parties and dancing girls flourished.