From Mineo Nakajima’s essay “The Normalization of Japan-China Relations Was a Mistake.” Nakajima examines the group within Japan’s Foreign Ministry commonly known as the “China School,” its personnel and policy networks, the Zhou Hongqing defection incident, and what he regarded as an opaque process of information-sharing and policy formation on China. He argues that the structural defects he identified in 1971 remained fundamentally unchanged more than forty years later.

August 12, 2020
The following is from an essay by Mineo Nakajima, president of Akita International University, published in a Hanada magazine selection under the title “The Normalization of Japan-China Relations Was a Mistake.”
【Originally published in the October 2012 issue of WiLL, edited by Kazuyoshi Hanada】
This is an essay that should be read not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
【The Responsibility of the “China School”】
As the Shenyang incident demonstrated, Nakajima argues, the tendency toward excessive entanglement with China concealed beneath the attractive slogan of “Japan-China friendship” had existed within the Japanese government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even before the normalization of diplomatic relations.
In diplomacy toward China, he writes, Foreign Ministry officials whose loyalties seemed difficult to distinguish from those of another country had moved freely within the ministry and formed what came to be known as the “China School.”
The Foreign Ministry’s China School consisted primarily of career diplomats who had selected Chinese-language training, though at times it also included career diplomats from other training backgrounds.
According to Nakajima, it developed through a centralized pyramid of posts: principal officer in the China Division of the Asian Affairs Bureau, director of the China Division, sometimes Consul-General in Hong Kong, Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau, and ultimately Ambassador to China.
The China Division traditionally handled diplomacy not only toward China but also toward Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, making the post of principal officer particularly important.
Those occupying that position often later became director of the China Division, Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau, or Ambassador to China, thereby exercising substantial influence over Japan’s China policy.
Nakajima then looks at the succession of China Division directors.
He gives particular attention to Tadashi Hashimoto, who served for an unusually long period of around five years beginning in 1968 under the Eisaku Sato administration, spanning the decisive period leading to normalization with China, and later became Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau and Ambassador to China.
Earlier, in October 1963, the so-called Zhou Hongqing defection incident occurred, an episode that Nakajima believes helped shape Japan’s subsequent China policy.
Zhou Hongqing, an interpreter accompanying a Chinese delegation to Japan, attempted to defect to Taiwan but was ultimately returned to China.
Nakajima recalls Hashimoto speaking with satisfaction about the Foreign Ministry’s handling of the incident and its decision to send Zhou back to China.
Nakajima sees in this episode an early indication of the attitude that would later characterize the Foreign Ministry’s China policy.
Koichi Kato, who moved from the Foreign Ministry into politics and later became secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party, attracted widespread criticism for arguing that Japan should stand in an equilateral strategic relationship between the United States and China.
Kato had served as deputy principal officer under Hashimoto in the China Division.
From 1969 to 1971, Nakajima himself served at the Japanese Consulate-General in Hong Kong as a special research fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This was immediately before the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and China and during the period of U.S.-China rapprochement.
Drawing on his experience inside the Foreign Ministry, he wrote an article after returning to Japan titled “The Nature of ‘Kasumigaseki Diplomacy’: Japanese Diplomacy at a Crossroads,” published in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun on June 8, 1971.
In it, he wrote:
“When one examines the process by which Japan determines its China policy, the Foreign Ministry’s policy-making process appears excessively arbitrary and opaque. Precisely because issues are handled within such opacity, the channels of information and communication in policy-making—who sends what information to whom, who receives what information from whom, and who ultimately makes responsible policy decisions—are themselves unclear. Under such circumstances, it seems impossible to respond adequately to the perceptive, persistent and rapidly developing diplomacy of China.”
More than forty years later, Nakajima concluded, this fundamental institutional character had still not changed.
To be continued.