Chastising little brother

Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius?

Shaun O’Dwyer

At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-48), convened to try Japanese military and civilian leaders for war crimes, one defendant delivered a puzzling explanation for Japan’s 1937-45 war against China. The aim of the struggle, he said, had been to make ‘the Chinese undergo self-reflection’, adding: ‘It is just the same as in a family when an older brother has taken all that he can stand from his ill-behaved younger brother and has to chastise him to make him behave properly.’ That defendant was General Matsui Iwane, commander of the army that devastated Shanghai before perpetrating the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937. According to the Military Tribunal, at least 200,000 were murdered and 20,000 women raped in the first weeks of the city’s occupation.

For Iris Chang, author of the controversial bestseller The Rape of Nanking (1997), Matsui’s words ‘summed up the prevailing mentality of self-delusion’ among the Japanese that the war against China was intended to create a better China integrated into Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. Yet when we dig deeper into Matsui’s background, other puzzles emerge. He was the son of a former samurai and Confucian scholar, and shared his father’s deep interest in Chinese culture. Prior to the war, Matsui often visited China, becoming acquainted with Chinese nationalist leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen, whom he admired. Like Sun, Matsui professed to be a Pan-Asianist.

According to Matsui’s Pan-Asianism, Japan had a mission to unify Asia, first by rescuing it from the oppressive yoke of European imperialism. This mission included relieving China from its ‘miserable condition’ of subjugation. But if China’s leadership proved disobedient to Japan’s brotherly paternalism and succumbed to foreign ideologies such as communism, it needed to be ‘punished’ and brought to its senses. Matsui’s liberationist rhetoric on behalf of China also coincided with material interests in enforcing a Japanese ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for Asia.

Matsui was far from alone in his belief that China’s punishment was for the sake of lofty Pan-Asianist ideals. Leading Japanese Confucian scholars shared his convictions. It seems incredible, on the face of it, that Confucians would support what was nothing more than military aggression. Originating 2,500 years ago in the Warring States era, Confucian tradition typically emphasises the cultivation of virtue and ritual propriety as a basis for ‘Kingly Way’ rule by moral suasion, rather than by force. Confucians like Mencius chastised rulers who ignored the welfare of their subjects while they emptied their treasuries to build up military power. So how could Japanese Confucians moralistically uphold Japan’s wartime aggression against the homeland of Confucius himself?…

https://aeon.co/essays/japans-war-on-china-and-the-weaponisation-of-confucianism

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