Friend or foe? Or both? On the streets of Tokyo and Beijing, the ties between Japan and China remain complicated and often contradictory, 50 years after the two Asian countries normalized relations as part of the process that brought Communist China into the international fold.
Chinese official media and textbooks memorialize the victims of Japan’s brutal invasion during World War II, even as young urbanites slurp “ramen” soup noodles in a two-story restaurant row made to look like Tokyo’s narrow alleyways.
In the real Tokyo, Japanese flocked to a festival last weekend to try Chinese dumplings, even as they worried about the growing military prowess of their much larger neighbor and its designs on the self-governing island of Taiwan — which happens to be a former Japanese colony.
“Politics is politics, it has nothing to do with the exchanges between us people,” said Zheng Bin, baking a Chinese leek pie at the festival in Yoyogi Park. He has spent half his life in Japan, coming as a student 30 years ago, and now runs six Chinese restaurants in the Tokyo area.
Politics influences people, though, and critical views are on the rise as the two countries mark the 50th anniversary of the agreement to establish diplomatic relations, which followed U.S. President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China earlier in 1972.
A survey last year by Japanese think tank Genron NPO found that 90% of Japanese had a negative image of China, and 66% of Chinese felt the same way toward Japan, up from 53% the previous year.
“It’s normal that there are problems at the 50th anniversary,” said Li Tingjiang, the director of a Japanese studies center at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He cited geopolitics and the social and economic differences between the two countries. “But we shouldn’t deny the longstanding positive impact from mutual understanding and cultural exchange over the past 50 years.”