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Review of Amerika to Chūgoku （America and China） by MATSUO
Fumio. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, January 2017

TAO De-min*This is a remarkable book thatattempts to remind the Japanese peopleof the underlying history of the formidable symbiotic relationship between
the two great continental countries onboth sides of the Paciﬁc that is much
longer and deeper than the US-Japan
relations that began formally with
Perry’s visits to Japan during the early
1850s.
Born in1933 in Tokyo, Matsuo
Fumio（松尾文夫）is known as one ofthe foremost experts in Japan on
American political aﬀairs. As a correspondent for Kyodo News to New Yorkand Washington, D.C. during the Cold
Statue of Confucius (Center),War years, he wrote in 1971 theSupreme Court, Washington, D.C. (1937)
famous article, “Nixon’s America: Its
Formidable Approach to China,” shortly before Henry Kissinger’s secret visit
to China, predicting correctly the historic reconciliation of the two countries.
In recent years, he has published Democracy with a Gun: The Making ofAmerica (2004), and The Day When President Obama Pays a Floral Tributeto Hiroshima (2009). Obama’s May 2016 visit to Hiroshima is more evidenceof his insightful predictions.
Matsuo started this book-length research from 2004 when he was shocked
by the long list of 637 missionaries sent by the American Board to China,
which he obtained from Harvard’s Houghton Library. He had hoped to ﬁnd areasonable explanation for why the Japanese failed to understand the subtle
relations between the U.S. and China and launched reckless aggressive wars
against both countries in the 1930s and 1940s. The search for an answer took
him almost 14 years of frequent travels to the two continents and countless* TAO De-min is the founding President of the Society.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

interviews with scholars abroad as well as here in Japan, including myself
when I was visiting Tokyo and doing sabbatical research at Beijing
University in the summer of 2012. As he stated in the Afterword, because hedid not know the Chinese language well and lacked experience as a foreign
correspondent in China, he had to rely upon the help of many experts. Thus,
the book contains much of the latest research by Chinese, American, andJapanese scholars, which is very informative and impressive, and helps
readers to easily obtain an overview of the ﬁeld.
The ten chapters of the book are as follows:
1 Robert Morris (1734 1806) as a Founding Father of America: To
Find a Means of Survival in Trade with China
2 Confucian Thought that Impacted Early Modern Europe
3 The Relationship Began with Utilitarian Business
4 The Separation of Principle and Practice Started with the Opium War
5 Becoming a Great Power with a Pro-Chinese Image
6 The Age of a “Special Relationship” and Discrimination
7 The “Red Tie” between Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and America:From Baoding to Changsha
8 The “Red Tie” between Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and America:
The Deep Inﬂuence Left by John Dewey (1859 1952)
9 The Distance between Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and America
10 The Betrayal of the “Open Door” Policy: The Fall of ChiangKai-shek
The book has a stimulating prologue entitled “Beginning with Nationbuilding Energy from Philadelphia” and includes a 27-page-long Chronology
of US-China Relations, starting with the founding of the Shang (Yin)
Dynasty ca. 1600 BC, and ending with Obama’s ﬂoral tribute to Hiroshima in2016. Some readers may wonder why Matsuo traced the chronology toChina’s golden age in the Shang, the second of the so-called Three Dynasties,some thirty-seven centuries ago, when the history of US-China relations is at
most 230 years long if counted from the visit of the ﬁrst merchant ship
Empress of China to China in 1784 1785, which was ﬁnanced by RobertMorris. Taking a look at the Chronology and Chapter 2, “Confucian Thoughtthat Impacted Early Modern Europe,” one may ﬁnd that Matsuo sees theformation of the United States as an extension of the European civilizations
that had intensive cultural contacts with China and were profoundly inﬂuenced by Confucian thought in the early modern age. For example, BenjaminFranklin published articles on Confucian morals in the Pennsylvania Gazettein 1737, and the renowned Chinese play, Sacrifice (Zhaoshi guer in Chinese,

Book Review

85and Shina no koji in Japanese), was performed in Philadelphia in 1757, whichwere four and two decades earlier, respectively, than the 1776 War of
Independence that led to the founding of the United States.
It seems to me that Matsuo is a bit too critical of American attitudes
toward China. Although he mentions many good things the Americans did forChina, such as restrictions on the opium trade, the Burlingame Treaty of1868, the “Open Door” policy proposed by John Hay, the educational andmedical undertakings by missionaries as represented by the Yale-in-China
association’s involvement in Changsha, Hunan Province, and so forth, heemphasizes that there were a series of “serious” betrayals. He states thatthese started with the conﬁdential Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905 that gave
mutual assurances on the status quo in the Philippines and Japan’s suzeraintyof Korea, and the desirability of Japan, the U.S., and Britain of cooperating
to achieve peace in the Far East. He argues that the consolidation of Japan’s
position in Korea gave Japan better and more opportunities to invade themainland from the peninsula. In other words, although American imperialism
had a pro-Chinese image, on critical issues related to their national interests,
the Americans would never compromise.
My viewpoint is, however, is that there have always been diﬀerent groups
and opposite opinions at any given time, just as the present-day U.S. is called
the “divided states” because of the conﬂicts between pro-Trump and antiTrump groups concerning policies on immigration, Obamacare, and global
warming countermeasures. It is also diﬃcult to deﬁne the real national interests of a nation at any particular moment. But we do see some diﬀerences
between nations. For example, my own research on Samuel Wells Williams,
a close colleague and friend of Anson Burlingame during the latter’s tenure as
the American Minister in Beijing in the 1860s, shows his concern and eﬀorts
for promoting an amicable working relationship with China. This included aproposal for establishing a Sino-American college using the surplus of thereparation money obtained from the Qing government to train diplomats,traders, and interpreters, which was approved by President Lincoln, though
Williams was also known for the successful insertion of the tolerance clausein the Tianjin Treaty of 1858 to allow Protestants to preach in China.
With the help of such scholars as Tang Zhouyan 唐洲雁, author of Mao
Tse-tung’s Views of America (Mao Zedong de Meiguo guan), Matsuo realized
there was a “red tie” between Mao and the U.S., as symbolized by John
Dewey’s inﬂuence on Mao during Dewey’s lecture tour in China in 1919 interms of taking a realistic view of and pragmatic attitude toward the world.
Matsuo believes this may well explain why Mao was able to respond sosensitively some ﬁfty years later to President Nixon’s formidable approach toChina that was based on the latter’s ﬁve-power centers thesis presented in his

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Kansas City speech in 1971.
In the meantime, however, we should not forget that Mao, during hislifetime, had absorbed much wisdom from Chinese history and statecraft,such as the diplomatic tactics displayed in the Romance of the ThreeKingdoms (三国演義). At the end of the 1960s, both the U.S. and China
needed to overcome a dilemma: the U.S. was eager to escape from the bog of
the Vietnam War, and China wanted to avoid a potential atomic attack by theSoviet Union. Thus, they approached each other to ﬁnd a way out, and acted
as formidable players in the multipolar world newly deﬁned by Nixon.
In the epilogue entitled “The Symbiotic Relationship of Two Competitors,”
Matsuo again uses his preferred Japanese expression of shitatakasa todescribe a perfect combination of idealism and pragmatism in Chinese andAmerican attitudes toward each other. I like this wording, too, because I
believe it reveals the truth of US-China relations. Like any bilateral relations,the US-China relationship also has the nature of promoting and checking eachother at the same time (相生相克). I think that just as the purpose of Ezra
Vogel in writing Japan as Number One was to warn the American people thatthey would fall behind the rising Japanese industrial power if they continued
the status quo without making further eﬀort, the motivation of Matsuo topublish this study was to try to reconsruct a better US-Japan relationship bywarning the Japanese people that they have to better understand what is goingon in current US-China relations, the relations between the two biggest andinterdependent economies. These relations have deep roots, as symbolized by
the Empress of China’s visit to China in the early modern era, a visit that
occurred seventy years earlier than that of Commodore Perry to Japan. As
Matsuo’s mentor, Matsumoto Shigeharu (松本重治, the founder of I-House in
Roppongi, Tokyo), has frankly pointed out, Japan-US relations are nothing
more than Japan-China relations, and Japan-China relations are nothing morethan Japan-US relations (日米関係は日中関係である。日中関係は日米関係である).