MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

East Asia in the 20th century was a continent dominated by a westernized, aggressive and nationalist Japan. This week we learned of the last dynasty of China, the Qing and the factors that led to their downfall and thus the dissolution of the state. With the impact of European ideas of identity, the Manchu Qing were quickly seen as distinct and a minority within the large Chinese population they ruled. Combined with the Opium wars, which placed China firmly under Western control through forcing Opium into China as a replacement of the depleted silver the West could no longer provide. The opium wars showed the population about the true weakness of the Imperial government in contrast to the West, which was directly shown by the opening up of embassies in Beijing. China’s fall as the hegemon of Asia resulted in resentment within the population, one aspect of which was shown by the people led boxer rebellion which sought to drag Westerners out of China because the government could not. The eventual overthrowal of the imperial government was expected after the humiliation placed on the nation.

In contrast Japan, who had been under Chinese hegemony reacted in a completely different way to Western Imperialism. Instead of open defeat by Western powers, they used the fact that the United States was able to open up the country by force as a means of rationalising the need to modernise. Like China, Japan too overthrew their government but in direct contrast to them, it was by the elites in order to perserve the cultural traditions through the ascension of the Meiji Emperor as the head of state. Japan was able to selectively keep their sense of cultural identity while still modernising in order to not be colonised and dominated in a Western controlled world. Through this then Japan was able to quickly militarise and consolidate an Empire by invading and subjugating Korea and even going further and starting to colonise their former overlords by taking over Manchuria.

The key difference between the two countries was the nature of their response to a Western dominated world. While Japan modernised, knowing that not doing so would allow it to be dominated, China, who was eclipsed by multiple issues across the nation, from the worst civil war humanity has ever seen to the racial tensions spread out across it’s society, was unable to do the same. Resulting in Japan overtaking China as the premier Empire in the region.

From our discussion last week on Friday we can see there are people who see the reformation and modernization on Japan to be a good thing. In the end that can be said with decent certainty but that of course is ignoring the human aspect of it all. The Japanese empires history in east Asia is one paved in horrible conditions and death.

Japan made the switch to be an empire in the 20th century. This to them meant adopting the industrial life style ad reforming the position of men and women. Women especially were effected by this. While education was made available to them it was a vastly different education as it focused around their new role in society rather than literacy and subjects of great importance at the time. In the end woman had it rough, and that may be an understatement. Countless reports of women being forced into role of sexual servants to the military and others of Women who have achieved power being seen as false figure heads who get places because of connections alone. That last point reminds me a fair bit of our own political sphere in the U.S.

So why is this all important. well for starters it did not help the role of women in society at all. There were trapped in a sense because they received and education but in the end were treated as tools to the government more than anything else. The Japanese government justified this as their role in the new society but it certainly lead to unrest within. Japan hardly managed to maintain its protectorates and their main focus, Korea, easily broke off to form its own national identity, yet remained mostly unsuccessful but that doesn’t help the point here. Japan built a military that stepped on its people rather than with them. So in the end it really is hard to justify that Empirical rule in East Asia was a good thing but without it Japan probably wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today.

The era of Japanese modernization and expansion provoked a great deal of resentment from China and Korea. Even before the start of the 20th C., there had been a significant amount of tension between the three East Asian countries. In the late 16th C., Japan launched an invasion of Korea that nearly succeeded before the Ming dynasty in China came to Korea’s aid. These early invasions were Japan’s first forays into the realm of imperialism while it was also the beginning of anti-Japanese sentiment in both Korea and China. Japan remained relatively isolated for the next two centuries, through the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing dynasties, but when Japan reinstated the Meiji and decided to modernize, relations with China were once again deteriorating. This culminated in the first Sino-Japanese War fought over and in the territory of Korea. The Qing’s humiliation in that war was a significant factor in its fall and the rise of Chinese nationalists such as Sun Yat-sen. After both Japan and China entered WWI on the side of the allies, Japan was rewarded with control of former German colonies in China, which sparked a wave of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism protests, including the May Fourth Movement.

The second Sino-Japanese War, which merged with WWII, was a war of Japanese aggression in which significant war crimes against Korea and China proliferated. The Nanjing massacre in 1937 saw an unknown, but certainly massive number of people fall victim to murder, rape, and looting. Women such as Kimiko Kaneda were taken and treated brutally, forced to become sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. The anti-Japanese sentiment in China was understandably virulent, evidenced by the scathing tone of the tabloid article on members of the pro-Japanese puppet government in Japanese-controlled China. After Japanese surrender and the end of the war, Chinese territory was returned to China’s rule, but which party would rule China was another question. The Nationalist Kuomintang party did not fair well during the war; they were left weak and unpopular while the Communists, under Mao Zedong, had gained popularity and military strength. The Civil War ended in 1949 with a victorious Communist Party of China establishing the People’s Republic of China, leaving Mao Zedong poised to play a major role in the politics of not only East Asia, but the Cold War as well.

Mao’s elevation to Chairman was the beginning of a new era in China, headlined by the Great Leap Forward and the resulting death on tens of millions of people. After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping’s selective implementation of Maoism transformed China’s economy into what it is today, one that is currently in the midst of a trade war that even has roots in early 20th C. China’s massive borrowing from foreign powers, such as the US, in an attempt to modernize. All of this, in a way, can be traced back to Japanese imperial ambitions.

One could make the argument that the women of East Asia were most negatively affected by the Japanese Empire throughout the early 20th century. While the rest of the region was beginning to grant women equal rights and opportunities, Japan used their control over the area to continue exploiting and oppressing women.

After reading the three stories from women of different origins in East Asia, it was clear they all suffered horribly at the hands of the Japanese, but at the time felt as though there was nothing they could do, no matter how much they wanted to help themselves. These survivors decades later were able to come forward and tell their story but not before irreparable psychological and physical trauma occurred.

Most of the women included in the primary sources have now come to terms with their experiences not wanting to hold grievances or anger for the faceless soldiers who traumatized them. One individual woman, Kimiko Kaneda, even expressed feeling sorry for the injured soldiers who she heard screaming in pain from the trenches.

The events described in the primary sources were not unlike the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing, that we discussed in class. It is obvious that throughout East Asia the Empire of Japan metaphorically and literally violated the people and land of East Asia in order to assert their dominance and continue their reign of power.

East Asia in the early 20th century had a main theme of nationalism. The most powerful nations in East Asia in the early 1990s were China, Japan and Korea. All three shared similar political ideals that were drawn from Confucianism; these shared principles created a zone of sustained political engagement and occasional warfare. Occasional warfare with each other bound China, Japan and Korea together. Along with invasions of other nations and territorial expansion, this showed that these three were each equally powerful so the best solution was in a way, to co-rule East Asia with peace between one another. These characteristics gave all three nations their sense of nationalism. All shared a common written language of Chinese. Not to mention they all had geographical and cultural familiarity; via mainly trade routes and economic interdependence. They were economically interdependence, through metals, medicines and manufactured goods which increased global integration. This commonality and shared strengths also gave them their pride and nationalism. Along with turning their silver imports to commodities; like opium and ginseng,

The nations of China, Japan and Korea also shared a zone of cultural interaction and adaption. In post WWI Eastern Asia, this interaction and adaptation lead Japan to gain many Germany territories and several Chinese territories. This represented an extension of Japan’s rise to prominence after the Meiji restoration. With all of this Japanese expansion, the Japanese honestly had no other choice but to have a strong pride in their nation. The Japanese had no reason not to be satisfied and proud of their country, proud because of their expansion, their dominance and their economic success.

 

 

Eastern Asia during its history was one which had most of its countries under the rule of a single autonomous ruler who held authority both politically and culturally. This absolute autonomy was one which presented political forms of superiority in the form of imperialism, however, it also presented a cultural form of superiority, we see this in how women were viewed when having power vs the ladder. A dichotomy is presented between the testimony of Kimiko Kaneda and a tabloid article about Mo Guokang, a politician of that era. The disparity between the treatment of men and women is depicted very graphically when Kimiko describes her coercion into becoming a “comfort women”. one account she stated “as many as 20 men would come to my room from early morning”, a result of this obscenity is her obligation to receive a hysterectomy, just so she did not have a child out of rape. Moreover, we see the other end of the dichotomy when we see how a woman of high political status is characterized. in this article Mo Guokang is depicted as someone who does not deserve her political power, in fact, it was said that “there are many people who joked about Mo Guokang being “the committee member for seduction.”. this dichotomy is indicative of just how much disdain was shown towards a woman of power during this era vs one who is a victim of treatment no living thing should experience. These differing depictions are indicative of how people were naturally inclined to view women of power vs ones who were under power in the most sadistic ways. This type of culture and behavior only implemented itself more and more in the coming years when the atrocities of war were committed across eastern Asia during the 19th and 20th century.