Based on Masayuki Takayama’s Weekly Shincho column “Learning from Michizane,” this article examines the long relationship between Japan and China, from ancient times to the modern era and the Wuhan virus crisis. Through Chinese characters, the missions to Tang China, Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “Datsu-A Ron,” the Sino-Japanese War, and views of China, it discusses what Sugawara no Michizane, Fukuzawa, and Tsuji Masanobu perceived as China’s essential nature.

May 23, 2020
Chinese characters are convenient, but the way the Chinese use them is strange.
Because they are ideographs, every time a new phenomenon appears, they create a new character.
That, he says, is what fools do.
So the Japanese invented kana and filled in that defect.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serial column, which closes this week’s issue of Weekly Shincho, published under the title “Learning from Michizane.”
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
The emphasis in the text, apart from the headline, is mine.
The relationship between Japan and China is quite old.
In the first century AD, the famous “King of Na gold seal” arrived.
The Book of the Later Han records that an envoy came from Japan and that Emperor Guangwu bestowed a gold seal.
The characters on the seal were Chinese characters.
The Japanese had known Chinese characters since that time, but it was not until 500 years later that they began to use them.
And even then, they began using Chinese characters not as ideographs in their original sense, but as phonetic characters, as man’yōgana.
Chinese characters are convenient, but the way the Chinese use them is strange.
Because they are ideographs, every time a new phenomenon appears, they create a new character.
That, he says, is what fools do.
So the Japanese invented kana and filled in that defect.
Wondering whether there might be anything else to learn, Japan dispatched missions to Tang China.
Through them, Japan learned papermaking and gilding, but what else the Chinese were doing was the imperial examination system, eunuchs who castrated boys, foot-binding that bound women’s feet until they were “small enough to fit on a spoon,” as well as slavery and cruel punishments.
At the end of the ninth century, Sugawara no Michizane said, “There is no longer anything to learn from China,” abolished the missions to Tang China, and cast China aside.
China looked down on its surrounding countries as barbarians in every direction, yet the dynasties established in that China were almost entirely those of the very barbarians it despised, beginning with the Sogdian-related Yin, then the Xianbei Sui and Tang, and the Mongol Yuan.
When at last the Ming dynasty was created by the Han Chinese, Hideyoshi also made a little sortie.
The Chinese raised bronze guns, but the Tanegashima guns pierced their armor and destroyed their internal organs.
They had power comparable to the dum-dum bullets later invented by the British army.
In the midst of the fighting, Hideyoshi died, and the Ming escaped destruction.
At the end of the Edo period, Niimi Buzen-no-kami, who served as an envoy to the United States, returned to Japan from the Atlantic via the Cape of Good Hope.
At his last port of call, Hong Kong, he saw the Chinese of that time.
“The English raised their whips to control the Chinese, opened the road, and made them let us pass”; “The Chinese before the English were like small fish encountering a crocodile.”
He recorded that they did not appear at all to be the people of the virtuous country described by Ogyū Sorai.
Meiji Japan, opened to the world by the arrival of the Black Ships, swiftly began absorbing, through foreign experts, everything from the technologies of advanced Western nations, such as railways, communications, gas, and electricity, to their ideas.
At the same time, it dismissed the Chinese Confucianism that had supported the Edo period as something that “concerns itself only with outward ornament, has no knowledge of truth or principle, and even casts aside morality” (Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Datsu-A Ron”), and it cast aside China and Korea, which still cherished such things, saying that “China and Korea, lacking any spirit of self-reflection, have no way to maintain their independence” (ibid.).
In fact, the Chinese who fought in the Sino-Japanese War were contemptible.
Off Pungdo, Fang Boqian, captain of the Chinese cruiser Jiyuan, encountered Heihachiro Togo’s cruiser Naniwa, and after a short engagement, stopped his ship and lowered the battle flag.
It was the form of surrender in accordance with international rules, but as the Japanese ship approached, he suddenly fired a torpedo and fled.
They do not observe international agreements.
That is a characteristic of the Chinese.
The Jiyuan also appeared in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, where it performed the first flight before the enemy in naval history.
The land battles were also dreadful.
They had no concept of prisoners of war, and when they captured Japanese soldiers, they invariably massacred them by “cutting off their ears and noses and gouging out their eyes in acts of poisonous cruelty,” as stated in Yamagata Aritomo’s instruction.
They were a people without even a fragment of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, or trust.
Even so, the Japanese thought, like Pillsbury, that if they gave them education and prosperity, they might become at least a little better.
Thus, while fighting Chiang Kai-shek, who had fallen to the status of an agent of the United States, Japan built for them the greatest large wharf in the East at Tangzhan.
Gonjiro Inazuka, who created Norin No. 10, a high-yield wheat variety worthy of a Nobel Prize, was also sent there to improve varieties of everything from grain to vegetables.
Incidentally, after the war, Norin No. 10 was stolen by an American, who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, Tsuji Masanobu opposed policies aimed at improving the Chinese.
In his “If You Read Only This, You Can Win the War,” he wrote that placing trust in the Chinese is futile.
That China spread the coronavirus and made the world build mountains of coffins.
And it did so while deliberately concealing the true nature of the epidemic.
Even after that was exposed, there was no apology.
On the contrary, China abused other countries and defiantly justified itself.
That posture is not different in the slightest from the China seen by Michizane, Fukuzawa, and Tsuji Masanobu.
We shall not repeat the same mistake.
This time, we must certainly cast China aside.