Nearly eight years have lapsed since the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals (JINF) was inaugurated in Tokyo—a small privately financed think tank dedicated to help Japan establish itself as a responsible, sovereign, and independent democracy. During this period, the world has constantly seen upheavals. No longer can anything be taken for granted. For instance, Japan has followed the US lead since the end of World War II, but now, in his second term as US President, Obama says, in effect, that Japan can continue following the US but it can no longer promise to protect Japan forever.

　　　Last September, Obama explained to the American people why the US would not intervene militarily in Syria, emphasizing that the US is no longer the policeman of the world. As of July 2014, the Assad administration is believed to have killed at least 160,000 civilians; 120,000 had already been murdered by last September. There is proof that sarin gas—a deadly chemical weapon—has been used.

　　　Nations from every area of the world—including those in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia—were eager for the US to intervene as the world’s military superpower, preventing Assad from continuing his atrocities.

　　　And yet, Obama declared the US would not intervene. Subsequently, Obama has faithfully practiced what he has preached—refusing to intervene in such other areas as Iraq and the South China Sea—contributing significantly to the ongoing chaos in international geopolitics.

Japan: Sandwiched by Two Big Powers

　　　What, then, is Japan to do?

　　　The survival of Japan as a sovereign democracy—sandwiched by the US in the east, and China in the west—significantly depends on its ability to adroitly and sensitively interpret every step these two giants make. Bearing that in mind, JINF has devoted a great deal of thought to the future direction Japan should take by analyzing the actions of the US and China.

　　　As a result, we concluded—four years before Obama openly turned his back on the world—that we would be making a mistake by regarding the world as revolving only around the US axis.

　　　The center of international geopolitics had shifted from the Atlantic—the central body of water for the U.S., Europe, and Russia—to the Pacific and  Indian Oceans, shared, among others, by Japan, the US, China, and India. It was obvious to us that new developments in these four nations would hold the key to future developments in the world. With this conviction in mind, JINF organized an international seminar in 2000 in Tokyo, titled “The Race for Hegemony in the Indian Ocean: A Grand Strategy for the 21st Century and The US-Japan Alliance.” It may sound like boasting a bit, but what we predicted has come true.

　　　For any nation, China is a tough customer. Of course, from the economic angle, ties with China are critically important to many nations and must be valued as such. And yet, Beijing’s expansionism by force can never be acceptable. China’s absurd and unreasonable policies won’t make anyone happy—Chinese or non-Chinese.

Encounter with a Great Contemporary Chinese Intellectual   

　　　It is not too much to say that I am always thinking in terms of how to understand and deal with China. Just at such a time, I had the fortune of making the acquaintance of a great Chinese scholar—Professor Liu Anwei of the Foreign Language Research and Teaching Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. I was encouraged from the bottom of my heart by this chance encounter with a Chinese national so profoundly cultured, compassionate, and internationally minded as Professor. Liu. He first came to Japan to study in 1982.

　　　Professor Liu’s work was brought to my attention by Dr. Sukehiro Hirakawa, a leading literary scholar and professor emeritus at Tokyo University. Having read Goethe in German and Maupassant in French when he was just 18 years old, Dr. Hirakawa is a uniquely refined scholar who in my eyes is a genius without question. It was he who introduced Prof. Liu to me as a possible recipient of the “Japan Study Award” which JINF established this year to help promote Japanese studies by promising foreign researchers and scholars. Subsequently, Prof. Liu was awarded the Japan Study Special Award, second class.

The Japan Study Award

　　　Allow me to explain a little more about the award, which has been made possible thanks to the generosity by Ms. Mari Terada, a Japanese who divides her time between Honolulu and Tokyo. We at JINF have been very concerned about the lack of proper understanding of Japan on the part of the international community, which in turn has led to misunderstandings about various issues concerning the war. In point of fact, the world’s perception of these issues is often based on fabricated reports. This is a serious misfortunate for contemporary Japan and its people. The only way to try and rectify the situation is by first creating an opportunity for interested non-Japanese to study and gain proper knowledge about Japan. With this in mind, JINF established the Japan Study Award.

     It has never been our intent to give out this award simply to garner praise for Japan. We are convinced that if the world knows the truth about Japan, including both its negative and positive aspects, then any criticism will be reasonable criticism. In fact, such reasonable criticism will, we believe, help Japan strive to be a more mature and fully realized democracy, contributing to the stability of the world. We also hope that not a small number of those who study Japan will come to respect and love our country.

Unexpected Gift of $1 Million  

　　　It was just when we at JINF were thinking along these lines that a like-minded benefactor, Ms. Terada, offered to give JINF a gift of US$ 1 million. The world may be full of wealthy individuals, but I know there aren’t too many like Ms. Terada who have made so large a donation for such a useful purpose. We gratefully accepted her offer, utilized it as the seed money, and set up the Mari Terada Japan Study Award at JINF.

　　　The first prize—the Japan Study Award—went to Professor Kevin Doak at  Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. , for his work Sing the Anthem Loudly (PHP Institute, Kyoto; 2009) and a series of academic theses on Catholicism, Shintoism, and nationalism written since he first came to Japan as a Rotary exchange student in Nagano Prefecture in 1977. Having maintained his initial interest in Japan, it is not an exaggeration to say that Prof. Doak has come to grips with Shintoism and the Japanese imperial family system far more deeply than most Japanese. He will be my guest at my weekly Internet TV show entitled Your Small Step Will Change Tomorrow’s Japan on July 18. I hope the reader will get a chance to watch the show.

A Great Chinese Man of Letters Named Zhou Zuoren

　　　Prof. Liu won the second prize—the Japan Study Special Award—for his two-volume work entitled Zhou Zuoren—An Intellectual History (Minerva Shobo, Tokyo; 2011). His work is a magnum opus, each volume exceeding 400 pages.

　　　Zhou (1885-1967) is a brother of Lu Xun (1881-1936), well-known in Japan as a leading figure in modern Chinese literature. Four years younger than his brother, Zhou followed in his footsteps, going to Japan to study, arriving in 1906—a year after the end of the Russo-Japanese War. From then until he died at 82 in China in 1967, Zhou studied the breadth of Japanese literature, amazing both Japanese and Chinese with the insightfulness of his work. His wife was Japanese.

　　　Declaring that “a nation’s glory lies in its culture, i.e., its scholarship and literature,” Zhou became a deeply committed supporter of Japan, once writing: “In China, there is no one capable of understanding the true glory of the Japanese people.” In fact, the extent of Zhou’s study is truly astonishing, ranging from The Kojiki (legendary stories of old Japan) to Greek classics to Greek mythology, and encompassing the literature of all ages and civilizations.

　　　Because he understood and loved Japan very much, and because he was a uniquely cultured man, Zhou found himself persecuted during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Prof. Liu writes Mao (1893-1967) had come to hold an abnormally strong bias and grudge against educators and intellectuals because he never forgot that, as a young librarian at the University of Beijing, he had constantly been snubbed by a well-known professor. Mao’s hatred of intellectuals never dissipated throughout his life, and during the Cultural Revolution the young Red Guard persecuted the well-educated as though driven by Mao’s enmity. The last years of Zhou were extremely lonesome and pitiable; in the last year of the Cultural Revolution he passed away in a dilapidated shack with no one present at his death bed, according to Prof. Liu.

Hope

　　　For the last 25 years, Prof. Liu has followed in the footsteps of this legendary Chinese man of letters so well versed in Japanese culture. The eloquence of Prof. Liu’s Japanese writing, reflecting his thorough mastery of Chinese writing coupled with the depth of his message, cannot fail to touch the reader’s heart. While reading his voluminous work over many days, there were fleeting moments in which the images of Zhou and the author subtly overlapped in my mind. That is why I believe that as a relatively young scholar still in his late 50s, Prof. Liu has reached the standard in Japan studies accomplished by Zhou only at a much later age.

　　　How fortunate we are to have an intellectual like Prof. Liu in China today—someone who genuinely loves Japanese literature and understands Japan more deeply than most Japanese. This discovery has enabled me to have hope for the future relations between Japan and China, encouraging me to continue my journalistic activities in order to beak down in my own way this seemingly insurmountable wall that now exists between Japan and China, perhaps the worst period of relations between our two countries since the last war.

(Translated from the July 16, 2014 issue of Yoshiko’s Email Magazine)