When William Langer published The Diplomacy of Imperialism in 1950, reviewers commented on the magnificent scope of his research. But they also praised his studiously unpartisan perspective, one, many argued, that could only have come from an American, inasmuch as every European scholar (no one even considered African or Asian ones) would carry a national bias in his work.
Toward a History Beyond Borders is a testament to how much the historical profession has progressed. Its chapters are meticulously researched studies by Japanese and Chinese scholars on an impressive range of controversies in both nations’ histories. Motegi Toshio examines their initial post-Meiji encounters, from the first Sino-Japanese Amity Agreement to disputes over control of the Ryukyus and Korea. Subsequent selections include Kawashima Shin's survey from the first Sino-Japanese War through the First World War; Liu Jie's, Hattori Ryūji's, and Higuchi Hidemi's analyses of the difficulties over Manchuria and Japan's continental claims through the early 1930s; Daqing Yang's and Liu Jie's careful looks at the Nanjing atrocity and the Wang Jingwei regime; Mitani Hiroshi's and Ibaraki Satoshi's expositions of the great textbook controversies; Asano Toyomi's study of recent contested constructions of the history of Taiwan; Murai Ryōta's survey of the politics of historical commemoration in Japan, inevitably centering on the Yasukuni Shrine; Yang Zhihui's tracing of the war reparations issue; and Kawashima's closing essay on problems of dialogue and documentation.
Scholars, particularly those without access to the editions published seven years ago in Chinese and Japanese, will be grateful to the editors for producing this volume. It, along with other collaborative efforts, such as The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, edited by Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), stand as testaments to new cross-national efforts to forge comparative histories, if not exactly synthetic ones.
These studies, in fact, cast doubt on hopes of such a synthesis anytime soon. Mitani addresses these hopes directly, both in his chapter on textbooks and his despairing postscript to the Japanese edition. Beyond Borders had begun in 2001, its deliberate design to foster Sino-Japanese scholarship and cooperation. The times augured well. Both nations had experienced generational changes in leadership. The Cold War had ended. Yet by the book's completion five years later, major anti-Japanese demonstrations had erupted in China and South Korea, rivaling sentiments expressed a century earlier. New disputes had arisen in Japan as well, particularly over Japan's criminal responsibility for its imperial era's foreign policies. The witches' brew was completed by the rise of actual territorial conflicts that harkened back to Meiji issues.
If anything, these new contemporary troubles make the study of history even more imperative and, not coincidentally, the studies in this volume even more valuable. Mitani makes clear, for example, that Japan's textbook controversy revolved much more around domestic political debates than the initial wordings that sparked protests in China and Korea. Japanese rightists, furious that textbooks did a poor job in fostering young patriots, published their own texts, which secured governmental approval to be sold and which did sell—to under 1 percent of Japanese schools. Murai notes that much of the tempest surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine is generated by the Bereaved Families Association and the politics of pensions, politics that have metamorphosed yet survived to the present day.
China is not without its shibboleths. Its government renounced rights to reparations in 1964 and justified the step through its claim that the Japanese people were hapless victims of capitalists and militarists. It is a reassuring narrative, but of scant solace to Chinese “comfort women,” who have brought private lawsuits against Japan, or victims—in reality or memory—of the “Nanjing Atrocity.” Ironically, as that atrocity continues to stir visceral anti-Japanese feelings in Asia, its study is one of the few areas where active research by both Chinese and Japanese scholars, splendidly reported in Yang's chapter, is leading to a much clearer picture of what happened, if not why.
Much work remains to be done on the much more contested borderlands between Japan and China. Was Wang Jingwei a Chinese patriot, a traitor, or both? Was Taiwan the oldest and worst example of Japanese imperialism, or the successful experiment in pan-Asian modernization that Manzhouguo might have become? Focus on these issues highlights the one significant gap in this volume's coverage, as an extension of Motegi's work on Korea into the middle and late twentieth century would have been invaluable.
No grand synthesis, these chapters nevertheless form an exceptionally impressive gazette of both interpretation and historiography of complex issues fairly awash in traps of national and nationalist perspectives. In avoiding these traps, the contributors have done William Langer proud.
