Written on 2019-05-24.
This essay by Masayuki Takayama argues that the resentment of losing territory, and the historical obsession with taking it back, still shapes issues involving China, Russia, Taiwan, and the Northern Territories.
It is a sharp reflection on the true nature of war and territorial disputes, and on the resolve required for real diplomacy.

2019-05-24

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column published in the issue of Shukan Shincho that went on sale yesterday.

The Resentment of What Was Taken

In the past as in the present, when people speak of war, they mean a war of conquest.
Conquest means taking the other side’s territory.
In the age of the Old Testament, the God of the Jews ordered Moses to conquer the land of present-day Israel, to kill the people living there one after another, and to seize their territory.
The Book of Numbers describes in detail the conquest of the Midianites.
First the soldiers were all slaughtered, then their towns were attacked, and the order was given: “Kill even the baby boys,” and “Kill the married women as well.”
Only “the virgins may be kept for yourselves as gifts.”
This method of war was not limited to the Jews.
The Mongols and the Spaniards also imitated it and expanded their territories.
The Americans too, upon arriving in the New World, spent 300 years exterminating the native inhabitants and thereby gained the territory they have today.
Herman Melville even wrote rather proudly that “the Americans are the modern Israelites,” in reference to the massacre of the indigenous peoples.
Modern civilized people refrain from making uncultured statements like Melville’s, and even when the aim is territorial seizure, they do not call it conquest, but simply war.
Alsace-Lorraine on the Franco-German border is, in that sense, an ideal example of such “war.”
Germany first conquered it in the Franco-Prussian War, made German the language taught in the classroom, and even renamed Lorraine in the German style as Lothringen.
The French writer Alphonse Daudet was so bitter over this that he wrote The Last Lesson.
Then, when France took it back in the First World War, French classes resumed.
In the Second World War Hitler occupied it and it returned yet again to German, but after the war it reverted once more to French.
As this repeated game of taking back territory shows, when land is taken by war, the resentment runs deep.
One thinks of taking it back someday.
Conversely, if one takes someone else’s land, it is a national victory, and there is nothing more pride-inducing than that.
That sentiment is still alive today.
Take China, for example.
In the last war, it betrayed Asia, sided with the white powers, and fought Japan.
Roosevelt said to Chiang Kai-shek, as a reward for that betrayal, “I’ll give you Hong Kong and French Indochina” (C. Szon, The Pacific War for Britain and America).
That was the acquisition of territory as proof of being among the victors.
And both had originally been Chinese territory.
To recover territory that had been taken away is the highest joy, but Chiang declined because he feared offending the white great powers of Britain and France.
What Chiang really wanted, as a matter of Chinese pride, was to recover Korea and Taiwan, which had been taken by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War.
If the opponent is white, one can resign oneself to it, but when the taker is another yellow people, the bitterness of the loss is doubled.
But the Soviet Union had already moved into Korea.
Chiang Kai-shek had to content himself with Taiwan alone.
In fact, the same sentiment exists in the present Chinese Communist regime that drove Chiang Kai-shek out.
Xi Jinping in particular is fixated on the Sino-Japanese War.
Just a few years ago, at the ceremony marking the 120th anniversary of that war, he spoke of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”
He probably thinks that now China would not lose to Japan, and that at the very least it could seize Okinawa.
Taiwan naturally enters into that line of thinking as well.
Only when, as President of China, he incorporates the taken-away Taiwan into his own territory will the 120 years of enmity be avenged.
But at present the situation is very incomplete.
The “One China” doctrine has been brushed aside by Trump, and even the Taiwanese are saying, “Don’t call us Chinese.”
Xi Jinping now speaks of the military annexation of Taiwan.
That is how deep the feeling runs over territory once taken away.

The Northern Territories are the same.
At that time Russia waited for Japan’s disarmament and then invaded.
It was an utterly disgraceful act, but the resentment over having lost the Russo-Japanese War and being deprived of territorial interests ran so deep that it went that far.
In truth, they intended to conquer even Hokkaido, but even after disarmament the Japanese forces were still strong.
In the end, they managed to seize only the four northern islands, but Stalin was overjoyed.
Regarding such a territory issue, into which so much emotion is invested, Diet member Maruyama Hodaka inadequately stated the logic that “territory can only be resolved by war.”
The point itself is sound.
If one seeks to resolve by other means a problem that can only be settled by war, then one must have the resolve for measures such as an economic blockade or a severance of diplomatic relations.
And yet Edano and the convicted Tsujimoto shriek, “Oh no, he said war.”
Diplomacy is beyond people like you.