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The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (review)

September 2009 saw the landslide victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the general election. Not lost on observers of Sino-Japanese relations is the fact that the new prime minister of Japan, Hatoyama Yukio, is the grandson of Hatoyama Ichirō, prime minister in the 1950s and a keen advocate of Sino-Japanese reconciliation. Under (the new) Prime Minister Hatoyama’s stewardship, hopes are high that the relationship between China and Japan can move toward what Yinan He calls in her book “deep interstate reconciliation.” However, as her study illustrates, tremendous efforts will be required on both sides in order to rectify the problems accumulated over the last 70 years in the form of a yawning gap in historical memory. Developing a theory of national mythmaking, He sets out to disprove traditional realist thinking that “memories and myths are epiphenomenal, changing in accordance with the external environment” (p. 4). Rather, He argues that not only “international constraints, but also domestic political needs and societal context can shape the ways in which a nation remembers its past; once formed, historical memory can take on a life of its own” (p. 4). This is problematic since “national mythmaking . . . generates considerable memory divergence between nations and causes mistrust and mutual antipathy” (p. 9). Comparing the German-Polish case with that of China and Japan, but also touching upon other instances of bilateral reconciliation in the concluding chapter, He aims to demonstrate when interstate reconciliation is likely to occur and why it varies across cases (p. 5). After setting out the methodological framework in chapter 1, the author then considers the German-Polish success case in the second chapter, but the bulk of the book focuses on the evolution of postwar Sino-Japanese relations and the emergence and ongoing impact of the history problem. She breaks down the various phases of reconciliation to the 1950s and 1960s (“Initial Isolation”), 1972–81 (“The Honeymoon Period”), the 1980s (“An Old Feud Comes Back”), and the 1990s onward (“Volatility and Downward Spiral”).