Japan and China:
How Different They Are!
by
Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact ⓒ

iiCopyright ©2012 by Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei
Originally published as Tettei kaimei! Koko made chigau Nihon to Chūgoku
by Jiyūsha, Tokyo, Japan 2010.
English language copyright ©2013 by Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
All rights reserved, including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Japanese and Chinese personal names have been rendered surname first, in accordancewith Japanese and Chinese custom.
The hanyu pinyin Romanization system has been used to translate Chinese personal andplace names, with the exception of Wade-Giles translations that are still in common use(e.g., Yangtze River, Chiang Kai-shek).
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— Contents —Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One:
Recognizable Differences in Cuisine ................................................................................. 3• China: devoted to food .............................................................................................................. 3• A Madman’s Diary and “I beg you to consume me” ....................................................... 4• Food is a religion to the Han people .................................................................................... 6• A first impression of Communist China was that of the Taiping
Heavenly Kingdom ................................................................................................................. 7• Mao Zedong didn’t read Marx? .............................................................................................. 8• Downtown ramen is preferred to fancy, traditional Japanese dining ................. 10• The Japanese who have become “I ate it all up” people ............................................ 11• Shintō is pure water; Daoism is pig’s foot soup ........................................................... 12
Chapter Two:
The Native Japanese Language Breathed a New Life into Kanji ...................... 15• A new understanding of BC and AD .................................................................................. 15• Kanji is the devil’s script ....................................................................................................... 16• It shouldn’t be “hànzì” — it should be “qínzì” ............................................................... 17• Rubi are teachers standing off to the side ...................................................................... 18• Kana that are like a clear brook ......................................................................................... 19• Japan rejected eunuchs and foot-binding ....................................................................... 20• Viagra and “mistresses” at the graves of one’s ancestors ........................................ 22• “Wedding certificates” for a Korean star at mother’s grave ................................... 24• The hidden aim behind “simplified characters” .......................................................... 24• It was “pressure scrolls” and “calamitous officials” that hindered China’s
growth ...................................................................................................................................... 26
Chapter Three:
Sentiment-Sharing Japanese Poetry and Narcissistic Chinese Poetry ......... 29• Chinese poetry — nothing but personal experiences ............................................... 29• Waka and haiku — loving communal experiences ..................................................... 30• The Chinese who don’t get drunk and the Japanese who act as if they are ...... 31• People of like minds: Chinese and American disputes .............................................. 33• The envoys to the Tang who didn’t bring back sheep or pigs ................................ 33• The dragon’s talons are one toe short ............................................................................. 35• Korean anti-Japanese sentiment is karmic .................................................................... 36• The Chinese emperor and the Communist Party both make everythingof value in the land their own ................................................................................................ 37• Japan, where the emperor and the people are one .................................................... 39• Chinese language, which didn’t borrow from Japanese and isn’t practical ...... 40• Below the emperor were only servants (the bureaucracy) and slavesv(the people) ............................................................................................................................ 41
Chapter Four:
The Japan that Has “Public” and the China that Has Nothing but“Personal” ............................................................................................................................. 43• Japan puts the “public” ahead of the “personal” .......................................................... 43• Chinese “loyalty” is not “public”; it is for the imperial family ................................ 43• Confucius encouraged lies and disregarded the public ............................................ 44• If Confucius were reborn in Japan, he would love it .................................................. 45• The 17-Article Constitution was the world’s first democratic constitution ..... 47• China is “a large plate with a mountain of sand on it” and Japan is “small
pebbles growing to make a great rock” ....................................................................... 48• The fiction that the “Chinese race” doesn’t understand the world’s
sensibilities ............................................................................................................................ 49• Americans have never ever understood China ............................................................ 51• The great military power of a Confucian China is more terrifying than thatof Nazi Germany ................................................................................................................... 52
Chapter Five:The Chinese Illusion that They Can Make Every Country in theWorld Theirs ....................................................................................................................... 55• China had no name until the Treaty of Nanking .......................................................... 55• Shōtoku Taishi’s brilliant achievement rejected China’s “you’re either
Chinese or you’re a barbarian” system ....................................................................... 57• China’s “fight and kill” is man’s logic; Japan’s “enfold them gently” iswoman’s logic ........................................................................................................................ 58• In Japan, it’s not “right and wrong” — evaluation is based on beauty andgentleness ............................................................................................................................... 60• The Beijing Cuisine People’s Republic and the Peking duck flag .......................... 61• Countries with the word “People’s” in their names are no good .......................... 62• Skill at wining and dining: tactics or art? ....................................................................... 63• The ridiculous efforts of Mao suits, commander-in-chief uniforms, stand-up
collars, and jumpers ............................................................................................................ 64• China doesn’t have a single museum of Western art ................................................. 66• The artistic sensibilities of a samurai who traded a castle for a single
tea bowl ................................................................................................................................... 68
Chapter Six:
While the People Starved to Death, Mao Held Nightly Jazz Parties ............... 71• The Chinese and Korean ruling classes hated manual labor .................................. 71• “Chairman Mao” is Hong Xiuquan reborn ...................................................................... 73• The Asahi Shinbun headline as Mao died: “A Great Star Falls” ............................... 74• Belief in the UN began with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs mistranslation ......... 75• Beautiful confections were born out of the freedom of Japanese women ......... 77• Confucius ate human flesh in a paste every day .......................................................... 78• A father’s gift of an English dictionary and a massive kanji dictionary .............. 79• Laozi’s “small country, small population” and his diametrical opposite:
the Chinese Communist Party ......................................................................................... 81• A Lao-Zhuang parable: “the fat boar” ............................................................................... 82

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Chapter Seven:
A Spiritual Culture Cannot Grow under an Overly Brutal Government ...... 85• “Wisdom and self-preservation” camouflages self-interest .................................... 85• Japanese leaders who were deceived by “In spring nights I sleep past
daybreak” ................................................................................................................................ 87• 3,000 years a “paradise for government officials” ...................................................... 88• China gave birth to no Tale of Genjis or Shakespeares .............................................. 90• Romance of the Three Kingdoms is only interesting, but Tale of the Heike
describes the Buddhist idea of the evanescence of life ........................................ 91• Why the Forbidden City’s handicrafts are like acrobatic displays ....................... 92• Japanese think “I’ve wronged someone”; Chinese think “someone’s
wronged me” ......................................................................................................................... 93• Mao Zedong, Marx, and Engels all highly praised the Kingdom of
Heavenly Peace ..................................................................................................................... 95• The Germanic custom of cannibalism is the Catholic Eucharist ............................ 96• Japan’s emperor practices Laozi’s “heaven is unavaricious” .................................. 98• Zen, too, was perfected and shined in Japan ................................................................. 98• An episode of Liu Bei and of the brute Cao Cao in Romance of the Three
Kingdoms ................................................................................................................................ 99• Chinese history is the ideal of thorough evil ............................................................... 101• Kabuki, where the lead parts are commoners, vs. Chinese opera, where
they’re the emperor and the court officials ............................................................. 102
Chapter Eight:
Anti-Japanese Activities of the Calculating Chinese ............................................ 103• The Yellow race is the most admirable, followed in turn by the Whites andthen the Blacks .................................................................................................................... 103• The sour Sino–Japanese relationship is like the antagonism between
Christianity and Islam ...................................................................................................... 104• Fruitless criticism and discrimination born from an inferiority complex
without reflection .............................................................................................................. 106• How do the Chinese — who dislike black people — view President
Obama? .................................................................................................................................. 107• What the Chinese cannot abide above all: the Japanese ......................................... 108• China’s patriotic actions are based on bringing other countries under
their control ......................................................................................................................... 109• The wonderful sight of a Supreme People’s Assembly without a single
white head ............................................................................................................................ 110• China’s destiny after the Qing state fell the year after the Nanjing exhibition,and the Shanghai exposition ......................................................................................... 112• NHK’s false report of “China’s first international exposition” .............................. 113• America’s high birth rate wins over the ageing China ............................................ 115• Hey, China — drop the illusions of empire and embrace “small
countries, small populations” ....................................................................................... 116
Afterword ................................................................................................................................... 119

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Japan and China: How Different They Are! 1— Introduction —In Chinese, there is an ancient saying: wàng nián jiāo (忘年交 ), meaning“friendship between generations” or “friendship despite a difference in ages.” It is apresumptuous manner of speaking, but I (as a young person) feel such a “friendshipbetween generations” with my conversation partner in this book, Mr. Kase Hideaki.
From the first time we met, Mr. Kase has been my constant instructor in the journalistic life, with the kind understanding of a father. He has also been a good instructor, teaching me about international and diplomatic issues.
When we have met from time to time, whether publically or privately, I havelearned about various things, and it has always been full of intellectual stimulation. I
have enjoyed our conversations and his touch of ready wit.
What I have always been deeply impressed by in our interactions was Mr. Kase’ssurprising level of erudition and knowledge and his deep insight. Cutting through tothe true essence of the question with short words laden with a deep sense of humor is
Mr. Kase’s style, and I can say nothing but that his sharpness is thrilling.
What is still more surprising is Mr. Kase’s erudition concerning Chinese history
and culture and his sharp analysis of the inner psyche of the Chinese.
I was originally Chinese and grew up until my adolescence in China, experiencing
first-hand the actual chaos. I have always felt that Mr. Kase saw through to the depthsof my heart when we spoke, giving me a sense of intellectual tension.
Naturally time and again Mr. Kase’s provocative theses on China have given evenme much to think of concerning the question, “what is China?” I have also learned
much concerning “what is Japan?”
Having had these experiences, I recently asked Mr. Kase if, by talking carefully
with him, I might be allowed to fully draw out the essence of his theses on China andJapan in the form of dialogues.
He recently granted this overreaching request of mine. I was able to sit down andexchange views with Mr. Kase four times in 2010, from the cherry blossom season
through the early summer with its fragrant breezes.
For me, this can only be called an adventure in wisdom — a personal experiencethat was hard to get.
Each time I made various preparations, made way to Mr. Kase’s house with a door-die resolve, and — filled with a sense of trepidation — sat at the table opposite him.
When we finished our discussion, there was a sense of relief at “returning alive” fromthe adventure. In addition, I attained intellectual fulfillment and felt overwhelmed bya supreme ecstasy. I felt like a new man.
In these rich dialogues, Mr. Kase and I kept in mind each of our countries’ long
histories and — based on present realities — I believe we were able to talk freely
about “what is Sinocentrism?”, “how are China and Japan different?”, “what is behindthe beautified image of China?”, etc., until we were completely satisfied.
At least for me personally it was an extremely valuable opportunity to once again

2

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

delve deeply thinking about China and Japan. This was a fruitful intellectual exchangethat enabled a profound cognizance of the differences between Japan and China.
Setting aside the satisfaction we enjoyed at our spirited discussions, though wecarried out these talks and deepened an appreciation of the eternal theme of “China
and Japan,” was it productive? Did I succeed or fail in my plans in trying to draw out
the core of Mr. Kase’s theses on China and Japan?
I can only leave it to the impressions of those who read this book to determine theanswers to these questions.
I firmly believe that this book will be of use to those wanting to understand theChinese question, or the Sino–Japanese relationship. I would also like to hope all myfriends and acquaintances would give this book a read.
Finally, I would like to thank, from the bottom of my heart, Mr. Kase, who kindly
complied with my requests for discussions with a young fellow like me; and the great
assistance of Ishii Tatsuo and Ihara Manami of Jiyūsha in everything from the planning and setting of these discussions to the compilation of this book,; and all thosereaders into whose hands this book comes.
Truly, I thank you very much.
— Sekihei Hei

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 3— Chapter One —Recognizable Differences in Cuisine• China: devoted to food
Kase
Chinese culture is truly unique in the world. There isn’t another culture so devoted
to the concept of eating.
In the food culture of other countries, for religious, societal, or conventional reasons, there are taboos about some foods that therefore just aren’t eaten.
Commandments in Judaism and Islam about food, and Hindu taboos about eating
the meat of animals — those are religious factors. Even in Japan, not by religious taboo but by social convention there are lots of things that you should never ever eat.
Sekihei
In Japan, it’s mostly due to the influence of Buddhism. In the past, if an animal
had four legs, it wasn’t eaten, right?
Kase
In Chinese cuisine, though, nothing is out of bounds. China’s got the longest
menu in the whole world. They even eat bird’s nests. And one time, I was even treated to chicken’s tongues. How many hundreds of those tiny tongues had to be collected...?
SekiheiThat’s so sad!
Kase
Filleted bear paws are also famous.
Sekihei
I was born in Szechuan province, a region known for its pig farming. Pork is eaten
a lot, and there isn’t one part of the pig that’s not eaten. From the tip of its nose to thetip of its tail, everything is used in cooking. Even the ears and tongue.
Kase
And they eat cats.
SekiheiAnd they eat cats.
Kase
There is no culture so attached to food, is there?
Long ago, there was a kingdom in ancient China called Zhou. It lasted from 1121

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

4

BC to 256 BC. The last king, He, was the thirty-seventh of his line.
According to the chronicles, 4,000 people worked in King He’s palace. Of them,
2,171 were cooks and brewers. In Japan, we just can’t conceive of such a thing.
And there was a country called Chu. In Records of the Grand Historian, China’s
first national history, compiled by Sima Qian of the Former Han, it is recorded that in
the latter part of the seventh century BC, there was a King Cheng who was about todisinherit his son, the crown prince.
The prince learned about his plans, though. He assembled an army, surrounded thepalace, captured his father, and was getting ready to execute him.
King Cheng made a last request, saying, “There is one last thing I’d like to eat before I die. Bear paw fillets.”
The prince refused, and put his father to death.
Sekihei[Laughs.] That’s a famous story.
Kase
Now, three years ago I was invited to lecture in Hong Kong, and at that time I was
taken to a famous Chinese restaurant by my hosts. Afterward, I asked if I could speak
to the chef.
I’d never eaten bear paw fillets before, and it was the bear’s right paw, the one it
used to get honey, and they said that’s why it was particularly tasty. I asked the chef,“Exactly how long does it take to prepare bear paw fillets?” And he said, “Threedays.”
That’s just what I thought.
King Cheng had to have been thinking that if he had three more days, someone
might come help him, or if the chance presented itself, he might be able to escape...
SekiheiHe was trying to buy time, huh?
Kase
You know no one in Japan would think that he just had to have that before being
killed.

• A Madman’s Diary and “I beg you to consume me”
Kase
Lu Xun was a giant in the world of recent Chinese literature. He wrote A Madman’s Diary [Kuangren Riji] and True Story of Ah Q [A Q Zhengzuan]. When Jiang
Zemin was the leader of China and he came to Japan, he even went so far as to makeit to Sendai.1 Lu Xun’s house was still standing, and he went to see it.
The thing is, Jiang had never read Lu Xun’s works, had he? Even though A Madman’s Diary is a short book.
When Chinese youth decide they want to know their own country’s history, theycollect thousands and thousands of books and pull all-nighters reading. As they read,1

Lu Xun had studied medicine in Sendai in the first decade of the twentieth century, so Jiang’s visit
was a sort of literary pilgrimage.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 5

beautiful words like yi [義, “righteousness”] and ren [仁, “complete virtue”] appear infront of them — and gradually the sky in the east brightens. When their eyes growtired, the word “cannibalism” jumps off the page again and again.
These youths are tormented by fears that they, too, might be eaten. Lu Xun wrotethat Chinese history is one of eating up neighboring kingdoms, and eating up fellow
human beings.
Lu Xun’s story, “Medicine” [Yao] also had as its theme the fear of cannibalism. If
we read the things Lu Xun wrote when he was younger, there’s that line, “I consecrate
my blood to Xuan Yuan.”Sekihei
The meaning is “I will give my blood for China.”
Kase
Right. And Xuan Yuan is, of course, the given name of the Yellow Emperor, who
is supposed to have been the first ruler of the Han people. According to legend, theYellow Emperor was born in 4207 BC.
Publication in China seems to have become comparatively liberal since the timeof Deng Xiaoping. Kobunsha’s Kappa Books imprint published a translation of a
Chinese book that said during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards split into several factions, and from one end of the country to the other they were killing and eveneating each other. It was published in Japan in 1993 as Cannibal’s Banquet (Shokujin
en’eki), and was a translation by Kō Bun’yu of a book by Zheng Yi. It was a rather
gruesome story, so it didn’t sell too well in Japan.
Some while ago, I used to talk to an old wealthy Chinese man who owned a Chinese restaurant in Akasaka. He had cooperated with Wang Jingmei’s pro-Japanese
Nanjing government, so he had had to flee. One time, he sent me a letter. It was skillfully written, but if a Japanese had written it, it would have ended with keigu or sōsō.2
It concluded with shōsan.
SekiheiShōsan?
Kase
It means “I would beg of you to consume me.” 3
Sekihei[Strong laugh.] I’m sure people spoke like that back in the day.
Kase
When he was young, his family was rich, so he was sent overseas to study at Kyoto Imperial University.

2

Keigu and sōsō are usually simply translated as “sincerely yours,” although they do not actually haveany such meaning; they are merely the standardized concluding phrases of a letter. Keigu is literally“respect-tool” and sōsō is “briefly/hurriedly.”3
The joke sadly lost in the translation is that the speech used is very polite and humble (think of a selfeffacing Victorian shopkeeper addressing a very important aristocratic customer), something thatworks very well as a humorous point in Japanese but not so well in Chinese or English. The actual Japanese here is “Dōzo, watakushi o meshiagatte kudasai.”Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

6

SekiheiHo-ho! That’s the first tier of the Chinese elite.
Kase
There is no one else, any where in the world, that devoted to the matter of eating.

• Food is a religion to the Han people
Sekihei
Mr. Kase, you said that other people had taboos related to food, but that in China
there are none.
For the Han people, eating itself is a religion, and food is god. An ancient Chinese
proverb says “if the people have food, they become gods.” Now, that’s not the Christian God, or Allah of the Muslims, or anything like that — the Chinese don’t believein those. The Chinese are not strong in the belief of benefits gained through observing
religious precepts, and don’t believe in a transcendent God.
As to what they do believe in — eating until they are full is one religion. Eating
has become central to the culture over the past several thousand years.
Chinese culture has spread out all over in the world, but what comes up everywhere isn’t Chinese characters or the Analects of Confucius. It’s Chinese food. And
why is that? The common people of China have always been harshly tormented by thepolitical structure on the continent. The Japanese were unending in their adoration ofChinese culture, but for the common people of China there was not a single thing thatwas outstanding. It was all they could do to stay alive. It was hell.
Yes, Lu Xun wrote of the Chinese history of eating people in his maiden work, A
Madman’s Diary. But the one thing that made the commoners happy, that made themfeel fortunate, was that they could say, “today I was able to eat my fill.” There was asense of hopelessness at the base of it.
The success of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms was because of that. Unlike the idealism
Mao Zedong, Deng placed a strong emphasis on policies that would feed the common
people, and he succeeded in governing China.
Kase
Food shows up even in greetings, doesn’t it?
Sekihei
There’s the greeting, “have you eaten?”4
Kase
Not like the Japanese “good morning,” “good day,” or “good evening”...
Sekihei
In other words, that “have you eaten?” meant an end to the idea of starving peasants. That was a misfortune of China’s history.

Kase
4

In Chinese, “nĭ chī fàn le ma.”Japan and China: How Different They Are! 7

The first time I went to China was in 1979, on invitation by the People’s Liberation Army.
General Li Da, deputy chief of staff of PLA held a dinner party to welcome me at
the Great Hall of the People, with delicacies from both the mountains and the seas.
That was still the time of Hua Guofeng, so everyone — men and women — were
wearing “Mao suits.” It was a time when women wore not a smidgen of makeup, andwe thought that Communism stressed the importance of simplicity and was unaffected
and sincere — but the food was magnificent. Li sat next to me, placing on my platewith long chopsticks one by one each new food that came by. There was so much I
couldn’t eat it all.
He saw me off at the entrance to the Great Hall of the People, where there was agigantic luxury car — a Hongqi — that General Li had come in, waiting.
Sekihei
Li Da was a famous soldier. He was an old comrade of Mao’s on the Long March.

• A first impression of Communist China was that of theTaiping Heavenly Kingdom
Kase
The first time I went to Communist China, before Deng Xiaoping’s open economy,
I thought, “This is a country that has realized Taiping tianquo (a peaceful paradise).”All the people — both the men and the women — were wearing the same humble,
dark blue uniforms.
Hong Xiuquan was born in 1814 to a farming family in the Huadu district of the
Guangdong province, near the city of Guangdong. He was incredibly gifted from anearly age. He took the state civil service examinations four times, but all four times hefailed. This was partially due to his being a member of the discriminated Hakka minority, and partially for his poverty leaving him unable to produce a bribe for the
Qing officials.
After that, he had a vision. The Christian God appeared to him as Shangdi — China’s greatest deity — in a dream. He was given a mission to “save China.” His revelation said, “you are the brother of Jesus Christ.”
At the age of thirty, he created a new Christian sect: the “God worshippers.” Then,at thirty-seven, he gathered poor farmers, laborers, the unemployed, and members of
the intelligentsia, and began an armed uprising.
Three years later, in 1850, he occupied Nanjing and changed its name to Tianjing(“Heavenly Capital”). He taught that Heaven was the “Great Heavenly Hall,” andEarth was the “Little Heavenly Hall,” making this Heaven on Earth. All people wereequal, and he wanted to make the distinction between rich and poor disappear fromthe world. A doctrine of equality between men and women slowly spread. Ownershipof private property was disallowed. Foot-binding was also forbidden.
At the same time, his military power grew swiftly and amazingly, and the Qing
tried to suppress his movement. The forces of his “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom”
stretched out over fourteen of China’s eighteen provinces. The Qing were shaken.
Western Christians, too, admired Hong. Several hundred people, including missionaries, joined him. Still — Jesus doesn’t have a little brother.
Sekihei8Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei[Roar of laughter.]
Kase
The army of Zeng Guofan of the Hunan province and the army of Li Hongzhangof the Anhui province fought to suppress Hong. An English general named Gordon
joined with them, leading the “Ever Victorious Army” of mixed Caucasians and Chinese.
SekiheiRight.
Kase
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom forbade the taking of opium, so the British andFrench supplied the Anhui and Hunan armies with modern military equipment.
Hong was up against a wall in 1864, and committed suicide in Nanjing, which hehad renamed Tianjing. That was the end. Since occupying Nanjing, his officers had
grown soft indulging in luxuries, and they fell into struggling amongst themselves andlost power. When I first got to China, I thought it was the country of the Taiping
Heavenly Kingdom.
Sekihei
What you just pointed out was really spot on. The People’s [Republic of] China
and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Nothing changes in China’s history. Hong
Xiuquan claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and took control. But after
making a capital in Nanjing, what kind of life did he live?
First, he made a palace, and after moving in, for the next fourteen years until his
suicide, he didn’t set foot outside of it. And what did he do inside? First, he got together several hundred handpicked beauties to slake his own lusts.

• Mao Zedong didn’t read Marx?
Kase
Saying that, he really does resemble Chairman Mao of the “second Taiping Heavenly Kingdom,” doesn’t he?
SekiheiHe sure does. And all because a Chinese intellectual dropout foully misused Jesus
Christ, and tried to take over the country.
Later Mao and his compatriots had the same M.O. — they used Marxism in creating a country. In truth, I doubt whether Mao ever even read Marx.
Hong, locked away in his palace, indulged himself in luxuries every day. There
was no reason for him to want to go out. There was a bevy of beautiful women surrounding him, and he was supplied every day with the choicest of delicacies. But
where was Jesus Christ ever surrounded by hundreds of beautiful women?
Originally, he was just another typical failed test-taker, and probably in his youth
he actually had an understanding of things. Then, one day, he suddenly gets power...
and China’s traditional consciousness is reborn.
Kase
Hong Xiuquan is one of the big names in China’s 4,000-year history. He pretend-

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 9

ed to be the king of heaven, and the social background and his life were certainly interesting.
SekiheiThings that are interesting are interesting, yes. But the problem is, for Chinese,when one of those big names one day takes power, the common folk cease to matterto them.
All they care about is their own pleasure, unrelated to spirituality, philosophy or
religion. Bluntly put, it’s all about their physical pleasures.
That’s what I mean by saying Hong Xiuquan and Mao Zedong were the same.
Kase
Hong was supposedly basing his movement on Christianity, but looking at thethings he did — it was Confucianism, wasn’t it? He himself was the “person of virtue,” and as the person with the monopoly on virtue, everyone had to follow him.
Given that, the slogan the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom put out was “follow Heaven and destroy the barbarians.” What that meant was that the Qing dynasty were foreigners to the Han people of China. They had been the kings in Manchuria, and sowere the “barbarians” to be destroyed.
Everyone in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom cut off their queues, which had been
mandated for the Han subjects to wear by the Manchu Qing. They wore their hair instead like the Han people during the previous Ming dynasty had, so they were called“the long-haired rebels.”
Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang were both ethnically Han Chinese, but Zeng and
Li raised banners proclaiming, “protect the teachings of just cause, the teachings ofpropriety.” And they put the rebels down.
I suppose you could say Hong Xiuquan’s “follow Heaven and destroy the barbarians” was the same as the slogan “crush with the Manchu, restore the Han” that wasused in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which ended the 280-odd year hegemony of
the foreign Manchu Qing.
SekiheiThat story of eating of people in A Madman’s Diary — a story that just should not
be — appears frequently in Chinese history. The Chronicle of Zuo, 5 there are accounts of people exchanging their children with one another to stave off starvation.
Even though the banner referred to a “teachings of just cause” and “teachings ofpropriety,” it was a cruel and inhuman ideology. It started with neo-Confucianism, but
in that “just cause,” for example, a woman was married off at fifteen, but if she were
widowed at eighteen, she wasn’t allowed to remarry for the rest of her life. What’smore, she wasn’t ever allowed to touch another man. They had to forever consign to
oblivion the springtime of their lives.
If, by chance, this woman had a son, after the death of her husband she had to rely
entirely on her son. For the average commoner, under such a societal structure this“just cause” was inflexible.
Kase
I wanted a mother like that, too.
5

The Zuo Zuan, also called the Commentary of Zuo, is the earliest Chinese narrative history. It covers
the period 722–468 BC. It was compiled no later than 389 BC.

10Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Sekihei[Loud laughter.] Yes, but the guy who seized authority indulged in pleasures,
while commoners, on the other hand, were forced to live their lives in abstinence.
Today, by raising the question starting from “food culture,” I think you’ve hit thenail on the head on the true nature of Chinese culture. At one sitting, a Chinese emperor would be presented with several hundred dishes. They were all lined up on one
long, endless table...
Kase
In the American film The Last Emperor, there was a scene like that. At the palacein Beijing’s Forbidden City, servants carrying food from all over the country arranged
the plates in rows, with several hundred servants respectfully laying them out.
The emperor takes only a little with his chopsticks. Using the chopsticks on thesefoods from all over China is a sort of ceremony of unification.
In Japan, with the enthronement of the emperor, there is a ceremony called theDaijōsai. There is no eating or use of chopsticks, but there is rice and vegetables fromall over Japan, so I guess you could say it’s the same idea.

• Downtown ramen is preferred to fancy, traditional
Japanese dining
Sekihei
When I came to Japan, the first thing that shocked me was the food culture. That’s
because I was taken aback by its simplicity. But now, I’m totally captivated by it. It’s
luxurious. I’ve had Japanese sake, sashimi, sea bream, uni (sea urchin) — there’s
nothing like it. It’s bliss.
Seen from the perspective of a Chinese, though, it’s a terribly “lightweight” cuisine. Some time ago, when I worked at a research center in Kyoto, we had some important visitors come over from China. The center’s top people took them to one of
Kyoto’s traditional Japanese restaurants, and treated them to a kaiSekihei meal.
From my perspective, there is nothing as beautiful as that luxurious and incredibly
aesthetic food. After two or three hours of chatting, though, our Chinese visitors hadvery unsatisfied looks on their faces. It was like, “what is this?”
After dinner, I was asked by the center’s top men to show the visitors to their hotel. On the way, it occurred to me to ask, “how did you find the dinner?” All of them
replied, “it was totally no good. We weren’t able to eat our fill.”
So what did I do? I took them to a neighborhood ramen place, and ordered each ofthem a ¥680 bowl of Chinese noodles. All of them were delighted, tucking into theirmeals, and they returned to their hotels satisfied.
These people were not Chinese common folk. They were prominent leaders withsocial standing. In other words, how much for each of them at the restaurant...
Kase
Was is about ¥40,000 or ¥50,000 per person?
SekiheiYet rather than that, they were most satisfied with ¥680 bowls of ramen. How
about that? Chinese cuisine, in other words, is a physical thing — as I see it, it’s aJapan and China: How Different They Are! 11

human survival instinct. Rather than being civilized, basically it’s right up there with
sex.
Kase
Yes, but Chinese cuisine is delicious. In Japan, food and sex are considered “secret things,” but putting that extremely close relationship aside, in front of people, aman should not say, “that is delicious,” or “this tastes bad.” That’s how I was raisedby my parents.
SekiheiAh, I see. It’s that Japanese samurai reserve, then?
Kase
But there’s more. A big difference between Japan and China is that thing of putting out more than you can possibly eat. In Japan, we only put out as much as we areable to eat.
In China, it is rude to eat all the food that is put out. You have to leave something
behind. What that meant was that the next person who comes in has a turn to eat.
Korea was a vassal state of China, so until Japan’s annexation of Korea there wasa term, Sojunghua, or “Little China,” for Korea. They were very proud of copying
China, their overlord state, calling this the “yearning for China ideology,” or “mohuasasang.” That’s why in Korean they say “put out so much food the table’s legs
break.”
Japan is unique in the world in that our court aristocracy and the samurai rulingclass ate simply. Those who ate luxuriously were not the ruling classes. There is noother country that was like that.
Sekihei
Really? That’s interesting. I’ve learned quite a bit since coming to Japan. For example, there’s the menu of the daimyō in the Edo period. It’s written about in many
books. It’s really extremely plain — more so even than the food of the underling bureaucrats of China.
Kase
The last shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, habitually had meals of “one soup, onevegetable.” That meant, in addition to miso soup, he had one vegetable as a side dish.
Only two times a week would he have a fish fillet or seconds. The meals of the aristocracy, too, were what we would consider “poor foods.”• The Japanese who have become “I ate it all up” people
Sekihei
I really think that if we look for the difference between the food cultures of China
and Japan, it’s definitely a difference in their spiritual cultures.
Religiously, we offer food to our ancestors. But in the hinterlands of the Szechuanprovince, the splendor of the food we offered competed with its deliciousness.
What really surprised me, having read about it in a book — and I haven’t actuallyseen it myself — was, for example, that every day at the Ise Grand Shrine, food is offered to Amaterasu Ōmikami. The idea — it is the aesthetic itself. It’s the purity. Just

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

12

rice, and some old, traditional rock salt, some seaweed, and radishes — the idea of
offering just that to a goddess...
Kase
In Japan, you shouldn’t leave any food on the table when you’re done. You must
eat nicely, leaving nothing. If you do leave anything, you are harshly scolded by yourparents. That’s why we feel guilty when we eat out at restaurants and have food left
over, so we have it wrapped up and take the leftovers home with us.
SekiheiAh, so you can’t leave behind anything that’s been brought out.
I’m also captivated by food. Since coming to Japan, something I remember feeling uncomfortable about in China was that, when you ask “have you eaten,” the response that comes back is, “I ate it all up.”
In Japan, food is just something you finish up; but for Chinese, the three times a
day they eat are the happiest times. When eating out, there is a façade they put on.
And when putting out more than anyone can eat, it would be fair to say thatthey’re trying to show off or make a statement that “no one but me can put out thismuch food.”
But there are many outstanding peoples who have cultures that transcend materialistic desire. Both Christianity and Shintō do. Unfortunately, China doesn’t. In othercountries, they are grateful for anything, even though they are eating.
In China, conversely, nothing sacred exists outside of food. There is nothing likethe purity and simplicity as in Japan’s Shintō.

• Shintō is pure water; Daoism is pig’s foot soup
Kase
In Chinese culture, there’s really no concern for cleanliness, is there?
SekiheiNo, there isn’t. In the times of the Wei and Jin kingdoms,6 men of letters and noblemen would wear the same article of clothing for half the year, and it became thefashion not to wash it.
Kase
Now, this was about five years ago. I was invited over to the official residence of
the American deputy chief of mission, near Roppongi. There were about twenty
Americans there, and among them was someone in the travel business — so he knew
Disneyland in California and Disneyworld in Florida pretty well.
Before coming to Japan, he went to the Hong Kong Disneyland, and it was filthy.
He spoke of how bad it was, and how people would just hock up phlegm, relieve
themselves, or just toss just-eaten chicken bones, any old place.
After that, he went to the Japanese Disneyland, and there wasn’t a single piece of
6

The Wei kingdom (which lasted 220–265) was one of the ChineSekiheingdoms that rose and fell during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280). The establishment of the Jin state on the bones of the Wei
marked the end of that turbulent time. The Jin state would last in one form or another until its fall to theSouthern Song dynasty in 420.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 13

garbage anywhere. It blew him away, because he couldn’t conceive of that even in theAmerican Disney theme parks.
SekiheiWell, yeah, but, Mr. Kase, Japan really stands out as a rarity as a culture that putsthat much importance on cleanliness. I was shocked by my experience at the Ise
Grand Shrine. The sanctuary of the Inner Shrine has absolutely no ornamentation. It’s
just simple, plain wood. The wood is just put together to produce that sacred space.
I was shocked by that sensation of purity. Although spirituality and purity are
there even in the details in Japanese culture, that is absolutely not the case with China.
Even aesthetically, China and Japan are totally different.
Kase
In China, they just pile one thing on top of another, don’t they?
SekiheiThat’s it exactly. And the food that way, too. In Japan, sashimi is what it is.
Kase
In Japanese cuisine, we present food stressing the simple taste of the basic ingredients as much as possible. Chinese food, on the other hand, uses all sorts of ingredients, boiling them or frying them or whatever, dumping congealed sauces on them,making flavors nothing like that of the raw materials they started with. That’s Chinese
cuisine. It’s like experiments in metamorphosis. French cuisine is the same way.
The symbol of the Japanese cook is his knife, because it is important for him to
cut and prepare the raw materials beautifully. When you tell people from China thatthe knife is the symbol of the chef, they respond with surprise. In China, they just playa supporting role. Japanese cuisine doesn’t use heavy iron pots for anything but making rice.
Sekihei
In Shintō — at Ise Grand Shrine, or just any regular shrine — you stress the importance of purity everywhere, right? When we talk about traditional Chinese religions, we talk about Daoism. Mr. Kase, have you ever been to a Daoist temple?
Kase
I have. It was painted in bright, rich colors all mixed together. To me, as a Japanese, it really solidified that sense of the foreign. For us Japanese, we just don’t likethose over-emphatic, rich colors. We prefer the natural look of the raw materials, or
neutral colors.
SekiheiThat Daoist temple is the messy world of Chinese ramen. You wouldn’t eventhink it’s a religion in there. If we were to say that a Shintō shrine is a glass of purewater, the symbol of a Daoist temple would have to be a bowl of pig’s-foot soup.

14

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 15— Chapter Two —The Native Japanese Language
Breathed a New Life into Kanji• A new understanding of BC and AD
Kase
The biggest question all over the world — not just in Japan — is, “Where is China
headed?”In 2010, China overtook Japan’s GDP, and had the greatest economic power inthe world.
With China seizing the world’s hegemony, American academics, are looking at
the old Christian calculation of BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini), and aretaking “BC” to mean “Before China”...
Sekihei(Laughs) If that’s so, then “BC” would be “the good old days.”Kase
So then, the “AD” would be the “After the Day” of China’s seizing the hegemony.
So what would it be like? China is a great mystery.
Chinese culture is difficult to understand. And China isn’t just a single country,
you know. That’s a major point in understanding China’s culture.
The Chinese Empire began two centuries BC with the Qin and ended in the twentieth century with the overthrow of the Qing. All of those empires were known by thedynastic ruling names, not a country’s name. The Han, the Sui, the Tang, the Song,the Yuan, the Ming, the Qing — all of them were the ruling dynastic names. There
wasn’t a state name.
Why would that be? It was because the Chinese emperor ruled over the wholeworld, and they didn’t need a country name. There could not have been a country anywhere that was her equal.
Then China lost to Britain in the First Opium War. In 1842, she was forced to sign
the Treaty of Nanjing on board the British warship HMS Cornwallis, and for the firsttime China needed a national name.
Expediently, the dynastic name “Qing” was used to make the name “China.” After
that, China had a name.
When we speak of the origins of civilization, it’s the Mesopotamia of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Indus River Valley, and China.
All those civilizations from Mesopotamia to Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Imperial
Rome are now all long gone. Why is it that today only China survives? It’s a mystery.

16

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei• Kanji is the devil’s script
Kase
The things that China has that makes the Chinese — or perhaps that the Han people have that makes the Han people— are Confucianism and kanji. I have long maintained that kanji is the devil’s script.
SekiheiHa ha! The devil’s script!
Kase
Mr. Sekihei, you may laugh, but Ōkuma Shigenobu, a man who served as foreign
minister and prime minister and established Waseda University, was a samurai whocame out of the Saga domain. Late in life, he dictated an autobiography that has comedown to us. Unlike the autobiography of Fukuzawa Yūkichi, Keiō University’sfounder, it’s not very popular. I suppose that’s because Ōkuma went into politics. Anyway, it’s an interesting read.
Ōkuma went to Kōdōkan, the Saga domain school. At the age of fifteen, he cameto believe “kanji is the devil’s script,” and he stopped writing kanji.
SekiheiThat’s incredible. He must’ve been a genius!
Kase
It really caused a ruckus, so he was kicked out of the school. The lord of the domain, though, recognized that Ōkuma was an eccentric, so he told him to get his ass
over to Nagasaki and study English and European learning. Now there’s a memorial
hall for Ōkuma in Saga City, but there is nothing written by him in kanji in it after theage of fifteen.
I think kanji is the devil’s script, too. When I think of ideographs, though, Mesopotamian cuneiform writing comes to mind. Ancient Egypt used hieroglyphs, looking
like little pictures, that show up in pyramids and ruins. China used kanji.
In civilizations that used unintelligible ideographs like cuneiform, hieroglyphics,
and kanji, only the ruling classes could read and write. They had a monopoly on literacy, and a despotic rule over the ignorant common folk.
Of all those, only kanji has survived.
On the other hand, literacy spread easily and the literacy rate was high in civilizations using phonograms like alphabets and the Japanese kana syllabary. They developed soundly.
What I want to know, though, is why we call it kanji. In Chinese, it’s hànzì —“Han characters.” When those hànzì were unified, it was during the reign of the firstemperor of the Qin, Shi Huangdi.
The Qin only ruled for fifteen years, though, from 221 to 206 BC. The Han dynasty came after them. But combining the Western Han and the Eastern Han, their empire lasted over 400 years, so that’s probably why we call them “Han characters.”
Sekihei
The Western Han were called “Western” because their capital, Chang’an, was in
the west, and the Eastern Han was “Eastern” because their capital, Luoyang, was inJapan and China: How Different They Are! 17

the east.

• It shouldn’t be “hànzì” — it should be “qínzì”
Kase
My thing is, they shouldn’t be called “hànzì.” They should be called “qínzì.”SekiheiHa ha! Because they were characters created in the Qin dynasty, right?
Kase
When we say “Shina” in Japanese, we get a lot of criticism from many people in
China. In English, though, it’s “China”; in French it’s “Chine”; in German, “China”;
in Italian, “Cina.” In English, the country is “The People’s Republic of China.”“China” originally came from India, where it was a Sanskrit reference to “Qin.”
SekiheiThat’s right. “Shina.”
Kase
But they get upset when Japanese say “Shina.”
Anyway, putting that aside... In China, the Chinese language is called “Hàn’yŭ”— “Han speech.” So why isn’t it “qínzì” [“Qin characters”] for the writing, “Qínrén”[“Qin person”] for the people, and “Qín’yŭ” [“Qin speech”] for the language? It’s because the Chinese are a bit megalomaniacal, and like larger things. It’s because theQin didn’t make it past fifteen years.
Sekihei
They weren’t cool enough. [Laughs.]
KaseThat’s why they took the Han, who lasted more than 400 years, and so now wehave “Han characters” and “Han people” and so on.
Sekihei
While listening to what you’ve just said, it occurs to me that I have to mention myadmiration on how well you know Chinese history. You’re not even looking at notecards or anything. If it were me, I couldn’t come up with when the Qin dynasty began,or when it fell that quickly. You remember everything.
I heard from someone that you memorized everything in the books you read fromthe age of fifteen to twenty-five.
Kase
No, no. It’s just that China is a neighboring country....
They say “the soul of a child of three is the same as his soul at 100.” Even today,
the Chinese all maintain that the distant ancestor of all the Han people is the Yellow
Emperor. The Yellow Emperor, in heaven, is revered as the greatest god.
There are a lot of words for good things that have that same “yellow” character.
They include Huang He, the Yellow River, China’s second longest; Huang Long, theYellow Dragon, who appeared as a harbinger of good fortune before the Yellow Emperor; the huáng páo, or yellow robe, the outer garment of the Yellow Emperor; theKase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

18

huáng yuè, the golden axe carried by the emperor when he goes out to chastise or subjugate; and the huáng wū, or “yellow roof,” the umbrella over the emperor’s carriage.
The Chinese consider “yellow people” to be better than anyone else in the world,
surpassing white people. We Japanese feel discomfort when we are called “yellow.”
SekiheiThat’s because the relationship with Western culture is long, and deeper than China’s.
Kase
I’ve said that kanji is the devil’s script — but with the mingling-in of kana, Japan
was able to dilute the kanji’s poison and splendidly neutralize it.
In Japan, when the streets are packed and cars can only move slowly, we say thecondition is “jūtai,”7 and that’s a great expression. Without kanji, we would not beable to describe this condition in a single word and with only two characters.
This is also a term in classical Chinese literature. In Bai Juyi’s “Song of Everlasting Sorrow,”8 when Emperor Xuanzong, driven from the capital of Chang’an, accompanied by Yang Guifei, reaches Sichuan, there’s a part where his long baggage train,laden with treasure, got delayed. That was the An Lushan Rebellion. Xuanzong wasan emperor who expanded the flourishing Tang empire.
Do they say “jūtai” in China when the streets are full of cars?
SekiheiNo. They say “dŭsè.”9• Rubi are teachers standing off to the sideKase
To be sure, kanji have enriched the Japanese language and have been of great use.
Still, kanji in China, where they originated, are pictographs or ideographs, so they
are utilitarian, rich, and persistent. Since Japanese itself is simple, after kanji entered
the Japanese language, they came to be used as virtual phonograms and became distanced from their origins.
Still, when I think of kanji, I can’t help but get a whiff of fatty Chinese food.
[Laughs.] That the menus in Chinese restaurants are smothered in kanji is totally suited, but it’s still cloying. [Laughs.]
SekiheiHa ha, I see! Everything about Chinese culture — including the writing system —has the aroma of Chinese food.

7

The normal translation would be “congestion,” as English would say in “traffic congestion.” Theword jūtai is written 渋滞, and made up of the characters 渋, the root of the verb shiburu (to hesitate),and 滞, the root of the verb todokōru (to be delayed).
8
Cháng hèn gē (長恨歌), written in 806, tells the story of the beauty Yang Guifei, and the Tang emperor who loved and lost her.
9堵塞, conventionally meaning “blocked up.”Japan and China: How Different They Are! 19

Kase
It comes down to rubi.10 Japan is the only country to have the resourcefulness touse small letters — called rubi — to provide the pronunciation. No other country has
them. They’re sure useful. My teacher in middle school told us, “think of them asteachers standing off to the side.”
Although kanji were originally ideographs, thanks to rubi, they have grown all themore closer to being purely ideographical.
The kanji to the Japanese and the kanji to the Chinese are totally different things.
SekiheiThat’s true. Ultimately, in China, kanji is more than just a means of communication. From the start it was a means of giving orders.
Orders go downward. Why did Qin Shi Huangdi unify the writing system? Well,
he wasn’t planning on communication between people, between common folk.
What I mean is, he unified the writing system so that he could communicate hisorders throughout the entire country by means of the written word. Thus, since Chinese characters were originally imperatives, there are piles of dense kanji with highstroke-counts.
There was little consideration for the aesthetic sensibilities of the people viewing
them. They were formed for administrative paperwork. That’s where they came from,so from the beginning there was no thought given to using kanji reciprocally, or any
planning for actual communication.
Shapes for administration and commands — how overbearing! “This is an order!
You lot, listen up!” That’s where it started.

• Kana that are like a clear brook
SekiheiOn the subject of kanji — for example, in Osaka, there’s the Takarazuka Kabukidan. Their school motto is, “purely, properly, beautifully” [清く、正しく、美しく].
In that motto, both kanji and kana are used. It’s quite lovely. Its appearance — its visual image — is incredibly beautiful.
But, you know, what if all the kana were taken away? You’d just have the three
kanji lined up there: PURE PROPER BEAUTIFUL [清正美]. It would look like thename of a brand of sake. [Laughs.]
The image — the impression — that people get is totally different. From the beginning, kanji were used in the form of orders. They were China’s governmental letters.
That’s why, when writing texts in Chinese, you can’t express things really movingly as with Japanese waka poetry. This in particular is one of the strong points of
the Japanese language. Chinese is an extremely political language!
Kase
Japanese, when they want to deeply touch the heart of the person they are com10

Small kana appearing along the side kanji (when written vertically) or above them (when writtenhorizontally) are used to provide the reading when it might possibly be questionable or difficult. These
are called furigana, but they are also widely called “rubi” — a term taken from an old English typesetters’ term for a very small typeface (“ruby”).

20

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

municating with, will not say the Sino–Japanese word “kokka” when referring tosomeone’s homeland. They will instead say the native Japanese word, “kuni.” Likewise, the word “seimei” — “life” — doesn’t move anyone.
SekiheiSo instead it’s “inochi” for “life.” I see. I get it!
Kase
Likewise, using the Sino–Japanese “betsuri” for “parting” and “dōkei” for “longing” are no good. We prefer the native Japanese “wakare” and “akogare.” I could
give you any number of examples like those. If you want to try to court a Japanese
woman, you have to use “Yamato kotoba” — native Japanese words. You’ll neversucceed with kanji words. [Laughs.] Even though it’s been nearly 2,000 years since
kanji came to Japan, they’re still not close to our hearts.
Sekihei
What that means is that, ultimately, Yamato kotoba have breathed a new vitality
into kanji, right?
Kase
It’s that “purely, properly, beautifully.” Those are Yamato kotoba in that motto.
SekiheiThat word “purely” — kiyoku. It leaves you with a good feeling, doesn’t it?
On the other hand, Chinese kanji, upon entering Japan, became empty shells. With
the Japanese kana, though, they are able to function.
Yamato kotoba breathed a different vitality into them. With the kanji for “life”
now being read — in Japanese — as “inochi,” that pleasant echo and nuance brings a
new life to it. That is Japanese beauty, and a superb part of it.
It’s like our previous discussion about food, with the contrast between the sticky
Chinese cuisine and the simple, visually beautiful Japanese cuisine.
Kase
Kana are like a pure brook, here and there striking hard rocks called kanji andsending up a beautiful spray.
It is in Yamato kotoba that the perpetual life of the Japanese is secured.

• Japan rejected eunuchs and foot-binding
Kase
You’ve said that the original Chinese kanji were oppressive, and a harsh disposition lives in them. Throughout Chinese history there were eunuchs and there was
foot-binding. Eunuchs were a custom from people who raised horses and cattle and soon. They castrated horses, cattle, and sheep.
Confucius said, “you received every inch of your body from your parents,” so you
shouldn’t even harm a single hair on your head in the slightest. Despite that, there
were eunuchs, and women were made to bind their feet. Confucianism went astray.
In Europe, boys were castrated so they could sing in church choirs, but in 1878
Pope Leo XIII prohibited the admission of new castrati into choirs. The repulsive cus-Japan and China: How Different They Are! 21

tom died out after that.
Since there were castrati until fairly recently in Europe, the love of Christianity,
too, must have been a thing of outward appearance. The West, too, was a truculent
civilization.
SekiheiWow. That’s a surprise. So there were eunuchs in Christendom, too?
Kase
They raised stock animals in Europe, too, so, yes.
SekiheiWell, well. That’s where... that’s where I see Japan’s uniqueness. The eunuch system was introduced even in Korea, during the Joseon dynasty. Only Japan obstinately
rejected it.
Kase
Until the Japanese annexation of Korea, eunuchs were the power in the Joseon
court.
SekiheiNow, I know the basics about this, but they were also in the West?
This is the first I’ve heard of them in Christendom. When I think about the reasons for it, rulers in both China and the West were considerably removed from thepeople from ancient times and had an absolute existence oppressing the people.
In the case of the West, there was a single absolute God, and all the people had toworship Him. In the case of China — it was the emperor. So all the people had toworship the emperor.
Kase
Because he was the Son of Heaven.
Sekihei
The Son of Heaven, yes! I suppose it’s only natural to be willing — for the Son of
Heaven — to cut off what matters to a man. But only in Japan is there no such culture.
The goddess is enshrined in Ise Grand Shrine. Amaterasu Ōmikami is worshipped.
But Amaterasu Ōmikami has never ever made such a demand of people. She
doesn’t oppress people. She doesn’t require people to be sacrificed, either.
For example, when going to worship Amaterasu Ōmikami at Ise Shrine, all you
need to bring is rice, salt, seaweed, and maybe some sake. Civilizations having thetaking of a human life and offering it up as a sacrifice to the gods or to the emperor —those are Chinese or Western civilizations. That is totally different from the Japaneseculture.
Kase
It’s the food and alcohol offerings to the gods. For Japanese gods, if you offer
meat — even if it’s fresh — it’s a pollutant and would surely be disliked. Fish areokay, though.

22

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

SekiheiRight! And that, right there, is the aesthetic of Japan. The rice that is offered to
Amaterasu Ōmikami is cultivated on exclusive shrine lands for that purpose.
Kase
Most shrines in Japan have their own lands set aside for their own rice cultivation,
but lately they’ve grown fewer and smaller. It’s too bad.
Sekihei
How the concept is different in China is that, in China’s case, of course there’sancestor worship. And what do you offer on religious festivals when you honor yourancestors? Pig’s heads. Whole chickens. Things that smell of blood. It is not a world
where there is a sense of purity transcending the mundane. It has the atmosphere ofour departed ancestors and their living descendants both just tucking in and digging at
greasy foods together, in the same way.

• Viagra and “mistresses” at the graves of one’s ancestors
Sekihei
Recently in the Chinese news I read a strange story about tomb-sweeping day.11
It’s April fifth.
Kase
On April fifth in 1976, 100,000 came to mourn Zhou Enlai, who died in Januarythat year. They assembled in Tiananmen Square, and there was a riot.
Tomb-sweeping day has taken place in China for several thousand years, but under Mao Zedong it was forbidden.
Then, around that time, it became openly done and the tradition was reborn.
SekiheiThat’s right. In other words, worshipping a person who had passed away. It corresponds to the O-Bon festival in Japan. On tomb-sweeping day, everyone goes to visit
the tombs of their ancestors taking offerings to them.
The problem is, giving offerings is fine — but what did we give the ancestors thisyear on tomb-sweeping day? Everyone would be surprised. It was really somethingelse.
Alcohol or pork, that would be fine. Of course, money was the first thing, but just
Chinese renminbi wouldn’t do. Of course, again, it was play-money, fake bills madefor that purpose. Also, fake dollars and Japanese yen.
Everyone has a cell phone now, so now we are offering up model cell phones toour ancestors.
Kase
What? But your ancestors wouldn’t know how to use a cell phone, would they?
[Laughs.]
11

The holiday where Chinese visit and pray at the graves of their ancestors has many names in English
translation: tomb-sweeping day, ancestors’ day, clear bright day, and even the qingming festival. In
Chinese, it is qīng míng jié (清明節) and is usually held around April 5.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 23

Sekihei[Explosive laughter.] Ha, no, but if that were all it would be okay. Viagra. That is,
medicines that men could take to get energy for sex. That’s what we’re seeing offeredat graves!
Kase
Chinese are very progressive, aren’t they? Men like their sexual enhancement
drugs...
Sekihei
They like ’em.
That is, people who are alive like them — but to offer them to your ancestors!...
And what’s more, that merchants are selling different kinds of them...? I guess Chinese are just good at business.
And what is really booming? In addition to sexual aid medicines being offered toour ancestors, there are dolls made in the likeness of women, with the word “mistress” written on them, that you can offer up. [Laughs.] And, no, I’m not kidding, either.
That kind of news came out on the Chinese internet. Although they’re both called
ancestor worship, the Japanese reverence for their ancestors is totally different. No
matter how odd he may have looked, no Japanese would offer an ancestor Viagra or
an inflatable love doll. [Laughs.]
In Asia, regardless of whether it’s Confucian or Buddhist, there is a tradition ofholding events to give thanks to your ancestors. Closing your eyes and joining yourhands in prayer toward your ancestors — that’s where our ethics that correctly govern
our bodies is born. Originally, ancestor worship was a moral and ethical act.
Kase
In Japan, the foods that have been offered to the gods are afterward taken down
and everyone eats them. We call it “naorai” — a “ceremonial feast.” I presume it’s
the same in China...?
SekiheiYes, they’re eaten by everyone.
Kase
Well, I suppose that means you can use the love doll yourself, then, too?
[Laughs.]
SekiheiHey, that’s it! They’re showing their own wants! Their own shocking desires.
Kase
Taking Viagra, and then there are those cell phones — if they were the real
McCoy, they’d be useful.
SekiheiOh, they’re useful.

24

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei• “Wedding certificates” for a Korean star at mother’s grave
Sekihei
In China, originally, ancestor worship was the only “religion.” There really was
no religion.
It’s the same in the Confucian world. Through reverence of your ancestors, you
can correct your conduct. The idea is sort of, you can make apologies to your ancestors if you have done something bad. With that as the lever, you can live your life on
an ethical norm.
Now, however, we’ve become a world where we’ll offer up Viagra to our ancestors. Conversely, it doesn’t matter however bad a thing we may have done — now
that we’ve bribed our ancestors, we don’t have to worry about being scolded.
The theory is, our ancestors have done the same bad things we did, so no matter
what bad things we do, it doesn’t matter. I think today’s Chinese society is alreadynear its end.
Kase
Well, you can say it’s near the end, but really, haven’t they been doing exactly thesame thing all along since the beginning?
SekiheiOh, brilliant!
But getting back to tomb-sweeping day.... It seems there are also people who takephotos of a famous Korean actor, or make a certificate for their wedding to a Koreanstar, and offer them at the graves of their late mothers. They are offering up wedding
certificates. [Laughs.] What a brilliant idea!
Kase
Yes, but that’s a fake wedding certificate, right?
Sekihei
Of course it’s a fake. There’s no way a famous Korean star would marry an old
Chinese woman. Especially a dead old Chinese woman. But the idea — it’s interesting, isn’t it?
Anyway, what I see as the problem is this: having taken ancestor worship to thatpoint, it has totally lost its ethical and moral meaning. In fact, I’m worried that, to thecontrary, we might actually be encouraging bad things.
With our ancestors happily gulping down Viagra and taking lovers into their arms,
it doesn’t matter what we do. That’s the logic of an accomplice....

• The hidden aim behind “simplified characters”
Sekihei
You know, I really think Korea’s having done away with kanji was a mistake. I
think it would have been better if, like Japan, they mixed hangul — like kana — withthe kanji.

KaseJapan and China: How Different They Are! 25

They’ve completely stopped using kanji in newspapers and magazines in Korea.
That word for constriction in traffic — jūtai — well, Japan was ahead in motorization and coined the “kanji-word” jūtai. Koreans then borrowed it, but in Korean it’s
pronounced jeong-che. The character we pronounce as jū is in Korean jeong, and thetai is che. But if you ask a Korean what the original kanji for jeong-che is, most ofthem would get a funny look and say, “I don’t know.”
SekiheiThat’s true, kanji do have a convenient aspect.
Kase
In the People’s Republic of China, though, they use a simplified form of kanji thatthey call făntīzì. It’s completely different from the original kanji. For example, takethe word Chūka, meaning China. That “ka” is written like this —華 — but the simplified form has it written with “change” over “ten,” this way: 华. So that means“change ten times,” I guess. [Laughs.] Even the “kan” in “kanji” is changed, from this— 漢 — to this: 汉.
I’ve been invited to China by the People’s Liberation Army and gone seven oreight times, and have been shown around all over the country.
One time, at a banquet in Beijing, I met an old Communist Party boss who was
fluent in Japanese. Thinking to broach a harmless subject, I said, “both Japan and
China have created many simplified forms for kanji, but in the interests of mutual understanding between our two countries, wouldn’t it be better to talk it over and do it ina unified manner instead of just making them all separately?” “Oh no,” he said, “wemade the simplified forms so that people wouldn’t be able to read the dangerous materials written before the people’s liberation.” That is, before the communist revolution.
Sekihei
Mr. Kase, you are amazing. You’ve brought out the true face of the Communist
Party government. That right there is a key point of the ideological training of theChinese Communist Party.
Kase
Why is it that although Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome have all fallen, China still
remains?
In ancient times, China gave birth to printing, gunpowder, magnets, compasses,
paper money, and the blast furnace. It’s said that paper was discovered by Cai Lun of
the Eastern Han in the second century. Paper entered Europe in the twelfth century.
Until then, Europeans used vellum or parchment.
When Europe entered the Age of Discovery, Vasco da Gama and Magellanrounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and reached Asia. But in the fifteenth century,
Zheng He, a Ming eunuch, was admiral of a large fleet that voyaged seven times to
Africa and back, and he made a map showing the more than thirty countries they visited.
The displacement of the ships of Christopher Columbus on his expedition to
America was at best 200 tons, but ships in Zheng He’s fleet were 7,000 or 8,000 tons.
Despite that, as we neared the modern age, the impact of the Chinese civilizationon the world was zero. Why was that? It was because of the Chinese civil service ex-

26

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

ams. People were so totally caught up in preparing for the harsh civil service examinations that took place throughout China, that their ability to think with originality
was stolen from them.
SekiheiThat’s it exactly. I believe that, also.

• It was “pressure scrolls” and “calamitous officials” thathindered China’s growth
Kase“Yājuàn” [圧巻] — literally “pressure scroll” — is a word that comes from theexamination paper of the person receiving the highest grade in the civil service exams
being placed at the very top of the mountain of other examination papers, and forcing
them down.
The examinations to promote men of genius continued for 1,300 years — from thetime of Emperor Wen, the founder of the Sui dynasty, to just before the fall of the
Qing.
From the end of the sixth century to the twentieth, the whole country was caught
up in an examination hell, and no Pasteur, Edison, Einstein, Renoir, or Cezanne
emerged from China.
Sekihei
They may have been Confucius’ ideals, but it was Japan’s samurai who made it
real.
Kase
Japan revered purity, and was gentle, so eunuchs and foot-binding never madetheir way in.
Now, during the Nara period, when Japan was copying the Tang legal system, fora time we tried conducting civil service examinations. Fortunately for Japan, it wasquickly done away with.
Speaking of purity: in China there were practically no officials who were clean
and took no bribes. It’s probably no different now.
From long ago, there was a saying in China: “shēng guān fā cái” — “be promoted
and gain wealth.”
There are some words in Chinese that have no parallels in Japanese. “Qīngguān”[清官], literally “clean official,” is one of them. “Guānhuò” [官禍], meaning “calamitous official,” is another. When they entered Korean, they became “cheongri” [清吏]and “gwanjae” [官災], and they are still used there.
Even today in Korea there are shamans called mudang who can be found at
jeomjip, which are fortune-telling houses. They are all over the place, even in Seoul.
They sell jip — paper amulets to ward off misfortune. There are many varieties ofthem. There are amulets for protection against fires, protection against floods, amulets
to keep your husband from having an affair....
One of these was an amulet for protection against gwanjae — disastrous government officials. I bought one in Seoul and brought it home.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 27

Throughout history, in Japan, officials have been clean and didn’t behave improperly. That’s why the Japanese language lacks such words as “clean official” and “calamitous official.”
To avoid offending the officials, Koreans used to carry their “protection against
calamitous officials” amulets in the sleeves of their jackets. Now they just carry themaround in their wallets.
Although Japan has imported many words from China, it didn’t seem that there
would be any need for “clean official” and “calamitous official,” so those words
weren’t borrowed.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 29— Chapter Three —Sentiment-Sharing Japanese Poetry andNarcissistic Chinese Poetry• Chinese poetry — nothing but personal experiences
Sekihei
Why wasn’t Japan corrupted by Chinese culture the way Korea was?
Kase
While Korea was on an extension of the continent, Japan was defended by the sea.
It might also be because from around the Jōmon period,12 Japanese had done nothing
but work hard at farming, and they were a gentle people.
For example, if we look at Chinese poetry, it’s all about personal experiences,whereas waka and the later haiku are all communal experiences. Western poetry isjust like Chinese poetry.
Japan’s culture has always been one of harmony, unlike China’s, which is individualistic — a culture of the self. I suppose that’s why we didn’t grow used to a styleof expression like the Chinese have.
Let’s consider a poem by Li Bai, a major Tang-dynasty poet I’ve always admired.
With the dawn of the Tang period, he was acclaimed as the greatest poet of the six
dynasties. His “Drinking Alone Under the Moon” goes:Amongst the flowers is a pot of wine.
I pour alone, with no friend at hand,
So I lift the cup to invite the shining moon;
Along with my shadow, a fellowship of three.
Elsewhere, in a poem called “Bringing in the Wine,” Li Bai wrote, “I only wish I
could be forever drunk and never sober up.” Man, that’s lonely.
Li Bai, is popularly called one of the “boozing poets.”
He poured his wine all alone, and speaking of human pride, sighed at the brightly
shining moonlight. Ultimately, these are Li Bai’s personal experiences.
SekiheiThat’s true. The things expressed in Chinese poetry are ultimately all personal.

12

The Jōmon period (c. 14,000–300 BC) was an early society named from their predominant remaining artifact — pottery. “Jōmon” means “rope pattern” and comes from the designs commonly used on
their work. It is widely believed that the Jōmon people created the world’s earliest known pottery (dated to the fourteenth millennium BC) and some of the earliest known ground-stone tools.

30

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei• Waka and haiku — loving communal experiences
Kase
In a poem of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro in the Man’yōshū, the moon also makes anappearance, but Hitomaro says, “On the eastern plain is seen a flickering of glowing
dawn; looking back, I see the moon setting in the west.” Then there is Bashō’s famous
haiku, “An old pond — a frog jumping in. The sound of water.” These are straightforward, and anyone who saw those things — you, me, anyone — could have written
them. Everyone can share these common impressions. And it’s because Hitomaro,Bashō, us — we’re all Japanese.
Western poetry is also about strong personal experiences. That’s why I don’t likeit. Unlike the Chinese, living in a culture all about the self, Japan has been a culture ofharmony since the beginning. That’s why the Chinese style of expression didn’t fit inwell with us.
Sekihei
I guess so. That haiku of Bashō’s about the frog — I suppose anyone who heard
the frog could have written it. It’s clearly not a personal piece.
Kase
Japan is not a culture of the individual with that “I, me, my” fixation.
Sekihei
I see. Japan takes communal experiences to be good things. Japan admires them.
Although China is also a part of the Pacific culture, given China’s individualism, I
suppose ultimately we should say they’re closer to Americans or Westerners than
Asians.
There was also that absolute power of a single emperor. It’s easy to understand theissue if we compare the Chinese emperor to the Japanese emperor. The Chinese emperor was all about himself.
KaseThat’s true.
Sekihei“This country is all mine, and I am everything to the country. The country, thewhole realm, it’s all mine.”That’s the polar opposite of the emperor of Japan, right? For the Japanese emperor,
the realm is not a personal possession; it’s a place to pray for the good fortune of all
men.
Kase
That’s right. The national characters are very different.
SekiheiA minute ago you mentioned that Chinese poetry is all personal experience. In the

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 31

Japanese language, there’s this common usage. There’s “XYZ was believed,” 13
there’s “XYZ was thought,” and so on — but we have to wonder: who is believing it?
Who is thinking it? But it’s not that. Everyone is thinking it.
In Chinese, though, there’s no such thing. There is absolutely no usage of any
such expression as “XYZ was believed.” In Chinese, one absolutely has to say “I believed.”
Kase
You can say the same about every language in Europe.
English is full of I’s. When writing in English, only “I” is written in capital letters;
all the other pronouns — you, he, she, they — are all written with lower-case letters.
It’s like you’re swaggering, so when you write “I,” you have to make yourself small.
[Laughs.]
SekiheiThat’s right, English is the same way. In Japanese, you can go several pages on
standard composition paper without a single “watakushi” [I] showing up. That’s because everyone is thinking of communal experiences. But you can’t do that in Chinese. You just can’t help but say “I believed XYZ.”
A friend of mine who came over to Japan as student from China just can’t break
the habit, no matter how much he studies Japanese. He’ll never break it. Whenever hetalks in Japanese, he always starts with “I...”.
Kase
When you write essays or letters in Japanese, you try to suppress egoism as muchas you can, and you try as much as possible to avoid writing the word “I.” Starting
things with “I,” “I,” “I” just comes across as vulgar.
SekiheiRight, right. You don’t write “I.” But in China, it’s impossible not to. That friendof mine — his whole life, he’s never been able to overcome that habit. When he starts,
it’s always “I think” or “I believe.”• The Chinese who don’t get drunk and the Japanese who act
as if they are
Kase
When I’m out with Chinese people, many are Communist Party officials and military officers. The way Chinese and Westerners drink alcohol is exactly the same.
SekiheiOh? How’s that?
Kase
13This is a hard concept to translate exactly. In Japanese, the subject is often unexpressed. This is only
very rarely possible to do in English, but when done it is similar to the extremely informal written expressions where one may write “Glad to hear you’re okay” — where the unspoken subject (the person
who is glad) is “I.” In poetry and literature, this “missing subject” can create considerable leeway ininterpretation and emotive response.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Japanese, like Koreans, prefer to act as if they’re a little drunk even when they’renot. That way, everyone can enjoy themselves. In Japan, sake is said to be a sacreddrink, and sake drunk behind the rope curtain [at the bar’s door] can also be said to be
so. In getting drunk together, we can lose ourselves, and all of us thereby becoming
one is a divine act.
Sekihei
I see.
Kase
Chinese and Westerners, even when they’re totally wasted, will pretend they
aren’t.
SekiheiThat’s right! Yes!
Kase
When we’re drunk, even if we lose control and cause a big ruckus, the next morning we say, “Last night was really fun. Let’s do it again soon.”
Sekihei
I see.
Kase
But for those guys who drink however much and still don’t get drunk, we feelawkward around them and say, “That guy — he’s really no good at hanging out.”
Alcohol is the same for Japanese and Koreans. That’s why when we drink, we getalong fine. [Laughs.]
Sekihei
Koreans are the same way?
Kase
But for Chinese and Westerners, when they get drunk and lose themselves, they
get really embarrassed.
Sekihei
I get it. I suppose I should drink a lot, too... You’re right, though, drinking in Japan is enjoyable. Sitting at the table drinking, you’re allowed to get drunk, as long as
you don’t make a really big slip. It really helps you fit in with your friends.
When you’re drunk, it becomes a kind of communication, and a mutual sense ofunderstanding increases.
You’ve said that China is a politico-centric society. Great people with a lot of
power can’t be drunk no matter how much they’ve had. This is because of an obsession for preserving their sense of dignity.
It’s a compulsion. They have to emphasize themselves, and they have to do it all
the time. I mean, the Chinese have a deep sense of dread about losing themselves.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 33• People of like minds: Chinese and American disputes
Kase
Westerners are exactly the same. Spain, Italy, and countries in the Mediterranean
region are more tolerant, though.
SekiheiWesterners are like that. They really haven’t got a great sense of self. If they did,they could get completely wasted and totally let themselves go tonight with no concerns about ruining themselves.
What that means is that Chinese and Americans are actually alone. And in thatisolation they have to invent themselves as strong.
It’s really sad that there’s just not going to be any satisfactory outcome for the recent strategic Sino–American talks and whatnot, no matter how much dialogue takes
place.
The Chinese government is also the same way. If you look at disputes between theAmericans and Chinese, they’re the disputes of people of like minds. The feeling you
get is that they’re both thinking, “I’m number one!” Then again, that’s China’s verybasis, after all.
Kase
Both Chinese and Americans are trying to put themselves out there as people todeal with. And they’re both always right.
It is only natural that they become garrulous and egoistic. So, for example, if theywant ten of something, they’ll ask for twelve, thirteen, fourteen, or even fifteen ofthem.
Japanese people don’t do that. Even if there’s something we want, rather than going on about it or making a strong request, we try to get our counterparts to sympathize with our needs.
If we want ten, we get them to sympathize with a need for just seven or eight —and then, in our hearts, we hope that our counterpart will increase it another two or
three. This is because ours is a mutually sympathetic society.
SekiheiJapan, which did not bring over civil service examinations, eunuchs, and footbinding, is really quite good when compared to the Korean neighbors.
To pick up on the one good thing from continental China that fits with Japanesestandards, consider this: Confucius’ ideals were realized by the samurai of Japan. The
Japanese seriously put into practice those things Confucius was talking about, sobushidō — the samurai code — was born.
It was a fascinating phenomenon.

• The envoys to the Tang who didn’t bring back sheep or pigs
Kase
The kanji used to write the word “beautiful” — utsukushii [美] — is a combination of the kanji for big [大] and for sheep [羊] — because they considered big sheep

34

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

beautiful. Strangely, however, the Japanese envoys to the Sui and the Tang didn’t
bring any sheep back to Japan. They didn’t bring any pigs back on the boat, either.
Sekihei
Ha! That’s good!
Kase
There weren’t any pigs in Japan — but we do have wild boars. That’s why in theoriginal Chinese and Korean twelve-animal zodiac cycle, there is a “year of the pig”
— but in Japan it became the “year of the boar.”
SekiheiHey, that’s right. Japan’s “boar” is a “pig” in China.
Kase
Children born in the year of the pig in China and Korea are said to be destined for
wealth.
SekiheiThat’s true, it’s the symbol of prosperity. They still say so today.
Kase
The sexagesimal system was originally created in Babylonia, and made its way toChina. And in that vein, in Viet Nam, there are no rabbits, so the “year of the rabbit”
is the “year of the cat.”
Even now in China and Korea, when a “year of the pig” comes around, people say
you should hurry up and have a child.
SekiheiRight — so they won’t have to worry about money.
Kase
And “beautiful” is beautiful because big sheep are beautiful. But in Japan, the ideaof “beautiful” isn’t connected to the salivary glands. When you see Japanese food —yeah, it’s beautiful, but...
In the case of Japanese food, everything about it — flavor, color, and shape — is
its aesthetic object. For the Chinese people, all it has to be is tasty.
Sekihei
I see. So when Japanese go along with China, the rejection of the bad parts is aparticular Japanese aesthetic? And the rejection of the tradition of bribery is also theJapanese aesthetic....
Japan has been introducing various Chinese things since before Shōtoku Taishi,14but Japan hasn’t been stained by China. What is the secret that preserved this civilization from things from China?
Kase
14

Prince Shōtoku (574–622) was an imperial regent who introduced many critical reforms to Japanesesociety and government. He was one of the most pivotal people in Japanese history.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 35

Of the countries around China, the only one that didn’t fall under the “new Chinese order” and bring tribute to China was Japan.
SekiheiThat’s right, that’s absolutely right!

• The dragon’s talons are one toe short
Kase
About thirty years ago, when I went to South Korea, there was a friend of mine
who was a government official — a cabinet minister — who had been a middleschool student during the Japanese rule of Korea and so was fluent in Japanese.
While the two of us were rearranging our drinks and speaking freely, he suddenly
scolded me with a loud voice. “What are you saying? You who come from a country
where the dragons are short a toe?”
Sekihei
What on earth does that mean?
Kase
Well, I was dumbfounded — I didn’t understand what he meant. I found out later,
though. The Chinese dragon has five-toed talons. Korean dragons have four, and Japanese ones have three. All the statuary and pictures of them in Korea show four toes.
SekiheiAh, I get it. [Laughs.]
Kase
When you go to the palace in Beijing’s Forbidden City, there are a lot of carvingsof different dragons at the big staircase, and all of them have five-toed talons.
Korean and Vietnamese dragons have four toes. Because Japan was at the bottom
on China’s old classification of “vassal states,” China only allowed Japan to havedragons with just three toes.
I saw the dragons on the flags flying on the right-wingers’ propaganda trucks running around by the National Diet. They have only three toes.
Sekihei[Loud laughter.] That’s lower than Korea!
Kase
I saw the name of the group, so I called them. I’m a conservative, too, so theirchairman got on the phone, and he politely asked what I might be calling about. I
said: “Today, I saw your organization’s flags and noticed that the dragons only havethree toes.” Then I explained. He said, “Wha....?”
Sekihei[Laughs, unable to stop.] A nationalist really should study up more on that sort ofthing.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Kase
During the Edo period, Dutch and Chinese trading ships landed at Nagasaki. Since
it had been decided that Japanese dragons got three toes, when Chinese ships brought
anything with images or carvings of dragons to Japan, all the dragons in the cargo
were made with three toes.
Japanese artists, when depicting dragons, generally did three toes. The Portrait of
St. Nichiren by Hasegawa Tōhaku, a representative artist of the Momoyama period,15
is famed as a masterpiece. And sure enough, the dragons he painted on it have three
toes. Dragons by Katsushika Hokusai are three-toed, too.
SekiheiThat’s what I thought it was going to be about when you started. [Laughs.] So Koreans were boasting about having had an extra toe for these 2,000 years, huh?
One digit’s difference? For that, being all up in Japan’s face...? Now it makes
sense. The Korean anti-Japanese stance and contempt started with that one toe’s difference.
The grounds for the Korean argument that “we’re better than you” is that they arecloser to China. Korea is like, “still, Japan has become an economic superpower, andthey bully us around. They’re putting themselves above us.” The root of that hostility
toward Japan was a toe!

• Korean anti-Japanese sentiment is karmic
Kase
I don’t know — without asking a Korean — whether Korea has been an unfortunate or a fortunate country. [Laughs.] Physically Korea was a continuation of China
so Korea ended up becoming a state under China’s suzerainty. They were deeply
submerged inside the muddy jug that was China’s culture.
The kings of Korea, unlike the kings of the West, received letters of rank from the
Chinese emperor. They were essentially hereditarily appointed regional Chinese lords.
And with that, Koreans boasted that they were “Little China,” and looked down on
Japan.
One more big reason for Korea’s anti-Japanese stance was that when the Koreanruling dynasty changed, all the actions of the previous dynasty were repudiated.
When Japan annexed Korea, it was during the Joseon dynasty. Some 500 years
before, a general of the Goryeo dynasty named Yi Seong-ge received an order to mobilize his troops and cross the Yalu River to regain territory lost to the Manchurians.
Instead, before crossing the Yalu, he wheeled his troops around and returned to thecapital — Pyongyang — where he overthrew the Goryeo. He then established theJoseon dynasty.
SekiheiHe pulled a yì xìng gémìng, huh.
Kase
In Korean, they pronounce it yeok seong geukmyeong. It’s a “mandated revolution,” an ancient political concept from China. When the Son of Heaven has lost the15

C. 1573–1598. The Momoyama period is considered to have been a “golden age” of Japanese art.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 37

mandate of heaven, a new ruling house with the virtue to rule appears to found a newdynasty and there is a change in power.
There were repeated incidents of mandated revolution in Korea, too. And eachtime, the new ruler thoroughly repudiated everything that had been done by the previous dynasty.
The predecessors of the Joseon were the Goryeo, and they had made Buddhism
the state religion. The Joseon repealed Buddhism, instead making Confucianism thestate religion. That’s why today in Korea the heads of Buddhist statuary, all having
been cut from the torsos, are being sold in curio shops.
No matter where you look, there are no whole, old Buddhist statues. The Joseon
dynasty suppressed Buddhism so the monks fled into the mountains. That’s why
there’s not a single Buddhist temple on the flatlands.
Under the Joseon dynasty, Buddhist monks were treated as lowly people; but after
Japan’s annexation of Korea, Japan revitalized Buddhism.
SekiheiIs that so?
Kase
And now today the Republic of Korea has to repudiate everything done during theJapanese annexation of Korea. It’s always the same thing. We Japanese are just likethe Buddhists at the start of the Joseon dynasty.
That’s why I understand perfectly what everyone in Korea is doing. But you justhave to throw up your hands, and it’s best for the Japanese to just not pay any attention to it.
Sekihei
I get it. What a sad people they are. What that must mean is that the current antiJapanese sentiment is just some karmic energy trying to repudiate everything from theJapanese annexation without rhyme or reason.
No, it’s that toe. The Koreans have to be thinking, “what is it with Japan trying to
make out like they’re better than we are, even though a long time ago, we got a dragon with more toes than the Japanese ones did?” They must be flying into a rage —“Why is Japan putting on airs?”
Kase
Mr. Sekihei, you don’t by chance have seven fingers, do you? Two more digits
than me?
Sekihei[Loud laughter.] Sorry. Unfortunately, I only have five.

• The Chinese emperor and the Communist Party both makeeverything of value in the land their own
Kase
In Japan, there is an unbroken line of emperors — so a mandated revolution suchas took place on the continent never occurred once. The Japanese emperor doesn’t
have a dynastic name like those borne by houses that arose due to such revolutions.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

The emperor has existed since the misty age of legends, a time before even thelong memory of the people. The imperial family is different from royal families in
Europe or China who, since they arose from the midst of the people, bore familynames.
To expose the trick in the mandated revolution: someone says he has received the
mandate of heaven — but really all he is is a strongman out to become the supreme
ruler through violence.
Both China and Korea were the same. With a change in dynasty, the new emperor
or king would wring every drop of blood and sweat possible from the people and,thoroughly exploiting them, give themselves over to every extravagance. In the palacein Beijing where successive generations of emperors lived, the golden roof tiles
spread out overlooking everything and are enough to take your breath away.
That’s why there was usually a tense antagonism between the common people of
China and Korea and their emperors and kings. They were not unified.
Sekihei
Mr. Kase, you’ve just pointed out a fundamental difference — the emperor fromJapan’s unbroken imperial line and China’s ruler who just happened to be an emperor.
Whether there is or isn’t a dynastic name has one more important significance.
That there is always a surname for the Chinese emperor clearly shows that he is nothing more than a representative member of a specific family.
During the Tang dynasty, the imperial family’s surname was Li. The Han dynastic
surname was Liu. What does a surname indicate? First, that the family was central. It
was at the heart of the realm, and affairs of state were all the personal property of thatfamily.
It’s a famous story from long ago, but the founder of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang,
was a hooligan. In his youth, he didn’t work seriously, so he was often scolded by his
father. “Your older brother works every day as hard as he can. You’re the only one
who loafs around instead of working to increase the family fortunes. Can’t you dosomething?”
So since Liu Bang was a hooligan, how was he able to become emperor? Just as
he became emperor, he called his father and answered him back. “Father,” he said,“long ago you said I would do nothing to increase our family’s fortunes. Well, look atme now. Which is better — the fortunes I have gained, or those of my older brother?”
What Liu Bang was saying was that the fortune he added to the family was nothing less than the state itself. In his view, China itself was his own personal property,
his family’s fortune. This is what a mandated revolution is.
There is no example of a family having an unending dominion over the land. Sureenough, someone always shows up and takes the other’s place.
Kase
The idea of mandated revolution is just a façade. Someone has “virtue” so he getsthe mandate of heaven from God....
Sekihei
Ultimately, all they are trying to do is justify the privatization of the realm. In reality, they’ve taken the realm as their own, and made it their own personal treasure.
To gain the assent of the people, they make the excuse that they have taken control ofthe land because they have the requisite virtues.
KaseJapan and China: How Different They Are! 39

That’s why I maintain that Confucianism is nothing but a façade.
SekiheiThat’s right! Liu Bang certainly had no virtues. In his youth, he was famous foreating and drinking without paying his bills. But as he was taking over China, he was
spreading this rumor that he had virtues. [Laughs.]
Kase
Marxism is exactly like that, you know.
Sekihei
It is, yes. It’s nothing more than theories to justify the substitution.
Kase
Marxist socialism, too, is a theory on the mandate of heaven.
SekiheiYes, yes — a mandate of heaven theory! It’s a type of Christian mandate of heaven theory.
A millennial theory that, with the inevitability of history, communism will havethe final, certain victory on Earth — the millenarian ideal — either way, it’s bogus.
Kase
Marxism, too, can be seen as a Christian sect — given the point that someone absolute and all-powerful runs things from the top.
SekiheiCommunist China is a monster created from a combination of China’s traditional
despotic government and Marxism. That’s today’s Communist Party government.

• Japan, where the emperor and the people are one
KaseThat stands in contrast to Japan, where the emperor and the people are one. In
1868, Emperor Meiji issued the Charter Oath. In it, he vowed, “all things shall be decided by open discussion” and “all classes, high and low, shall be united.” Everyone,high to low, from the emperor on down to individual common folk, would be boundtogether.
In 1890, the Imperial Rescript on Education was issued. That said, “in common
with you, our subjects,” both the emperor and the people “attain the same virtue.”
Eight years earlier, the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors said, “being one
with us in spirit do your utmost for the protection of the state, our people will longenjoy the blessings of peace, and the might and dignity of our empire will shine in theworld.” The emperor and the people would protect the country together.
Such things must surely be unthinkable in China. Unlike Japan, from the get-go
the emperor and the people were not united.
SekiheiThat’s true. To continue with an earlier line of discussion, even though the Chi-

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

nese emperors (and the Korean kings) completely inherit their governing traditions,they privatized the realm.
It’s their own treasure. And since it’s their own treasure, they exploit it without
any sense of compunction. For them, the people are nothing more than tools to use inincreasing the value of their treasures. There’s no way the ruler and the people could
be united.

• Chinese language, which didn’t borrow from Japanese andisn’t practicalKase
In Japanese, we have the word “jinmin” [人民], meaning “the people.”
SekiheiRight.
Kase
In Chinese, the word used was “live people” — “shēngmín” [生民]. When Japanbegan to modernize at the end of the nineteenth century, shēngmín didn’t have a themeaning of “people” in the modern sense, so in Japanese the term jinmin was newly
created to serve that purpose. It was a new Japanese word created with the old kanji
compound. Now, take the Chinese for the People’s Republic of China: Zhōnghuá
Rénmín Gònghéguó [中華人民共和国]. That Rénmín — “people” — is that same
Japanese “jinmin.” Likewise, the Gònghéguó — “republic” — is Japanese too, where
it’s pronounced “kyōwakoku.”
SekiheiRight, and take out the “country” and you have gònghé — or kyōwa — which isalso Japanese, meaning “cooperation.”Kase“Gònghé” — at the start of this dialogue, I brought up the palace kitchens of theZhou dynasty. King Li of the Zhou was a tyrant and he was forced into exile by the
nobility. Since the throne was vacant, two ministers conducted the affairs of government at the same time. They used the word “Gònghé” as the era name because of thecooperation of the two officials. It wasn’t the “gònghé” as in “republic” by any means.
In Japanese, though, we use the word “kyōwa” as a republican idea.
Japan preceded China in achieving modernization, and because China came in lateand learned from Japan, there are some 10,000 words that have entered the Chinese
lexicon from Japanese.
Sekihei
If it weren’t for such loanwords borrowed from the Japanese, there could be nomodern Chinese language. “Zhèngzhì” (政治, “government”), “jīngjì” (經濟/経済“economy”), and “shèhuì” (社会 “society”) are all originally from Japanese.
Kase
The Korean language is the same. North Korea — the Democratic People’s Re-

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 41

public of Korea — is, in Korean, “Joseon Minju Juui Inmin Gonghwaguk.” The minju
juui [民主主義], inmin [人民], and gonghwaguk [共和国] were all Japanese.
Sekihei
Other than the “Joseon” — all of it is!
Kase
The “worker” [労働] in Workers’ Party of Korea — “Joseol Lodong Dang” [朝鮮労働党] — is also a word from Japanese.
SekiheiIt’s Japanese. But China and North Korea aren’t paying very much to Japan for all
they’ve borrowed. [Laughs.]• Below the emperor were only servants (the bureaucracy) andslaves (the people)
Sekihei
About that word “people,” or “rénmín” — what did those successive dynasties in
China call the people? In official documents, the people are not called “people” using
today’s conventional terms. Instead, it’s “shēngmín” ( 生 民 “live people”) or“xiăomín” (“small people”). Sometimes it’s even “căomín” (草民 “grass people”).
Grass!
Lu Xun said that Chinese history is a history wherein people literally ate otherpeople, but to use the word “grass people” — that really shows the true nature of theChinese government. What that means is that people are no different or no better thangrass. If they’re cut down, they just grow back. However many you kill, or cut off —it just doesn’t matter.
What’s more, this isn’t a secret word. It’s written in official royal documents, boldas you please, the word “grass people” being used to refer to the general population.
For over 2,000 years, the Chinese government, while being hailed as virtuous andConfucian, has viewed their people as no better than grass. What a brutal government.
In that, it’s fundamentally different from the unified Japanese political culture with
the imperial house at the center.
Kase
In Japan, too, though, the populace were referred to as “sōsei” (蒼生 “blue life”)“tamigusa” (民草 “people grass”) and “sōmō” (草莽 “grass field”). Of course, thosewere extant terms that originally came into Japanese from China, and upon entering
the Japanese lexicon, their meanings changed.
Sekihei
They sure did change. The “mō” in “sōmō” is a grassy field, and while is used tothere to refer to people, there’s a sense of an Elysian field about the word. It’s completely different from the Chinese idea of “grass.”
Kase
In Chinese, there’s the word “jūncáng” (君臣 “master and servant”), but that referred only to the emperor and officials employed in the service of the dynasty. In the42Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Japanese understanding of the term, where it is rendered as “kunshin,” the second
half of that equation is expanded to mean the whole population of Japan.
Sekihei
For the Chinese emperors, they alone are the lords. Everyone else falls into one oftwo categories. First are the bureaucracy who are servants who act as his hands andfeet, and everyone else is the population at large who are slaves.
In the case of the Japanese emperor, though, there is a very Japanese idea where
the emperor and the people are united in virtue — as laid out in the Imperial Rescripton Education. As you have often pointed out, in the case of China, only the emperor
has virtue.
In China, the person most lacking in virtue is the one who has a monopoly on it.
This outrageous policy continued for God only knows how many thousands of years.
Its result has been that from the start, virtue is absent from the existing Chinese social
structure and national character. Beyond that solitary person at the very top, they havecome to exist with virtue as an irrelevance.
In Japan, the emperor does not have the monopoly on virtue. It’s everyone’s, isn’tit?

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 43— Chapter Four —The Japan that Has “Public” andthe China that Has Nothing but “Personal”• Japan puts the “public” ahead of the “personal”
Kase
In Japan, everyone aspires to be moral. This caused looking out for one another tocome about, and for everyone to share in the ownership of all things “public.”
This “public” does not refer only to the imperial court; it includes everyone in the
country.
I’ve given lectures in America and Europe on Japanese culture. The attendees arealmost all of the mistaken belief that Japan falls within the sphere of Chinese or Confucian culture.
I begin my argument stating that Japan’s culture is, rather, an extremely characteristic one. I point out that the differences between Japanese and Chinese cultures are
greater than the gulf separating the cultures of European Christendom and Islam.
Then I offer Confucianism as an example of this. In the original Confucianism,
the most important thing is filial piety. Filial piety is the foundation of Confucian
moral ideology, and all else is subordinate to it.
When Confucianism crossed over to Japan, the placing of filial piety ahead of
everything else was something the Japanese didn’t take to. Although filial piety had
the greatest value in Chinese Confucianism, when Confucianism made it to Japan,“loyalty” leapt ahead of “filial piety” to create something new: the word chūkō, combining loyalty and filial piety.16• Chinese “loyalty” is not “public”; it is for the imperial family
Kase
In Japan, putting “loyalty” ahead of “filial piety” was because of the importanceplaced from ancient times on a public spirit that gave preference to benefits to the village community that exceeded any familial connections.
In China, there was no such notion of “the public.” It is still the same today.
Sekihei
As a corollary to that, even though both Japan and China have “loyalty,” the loy16

Discussions of Confucian virtues often cause difficulty in translation. The Japanese word kō (孝; in
Chinese, xiào), is usually translated as “filial piety,” and chū (忠; in Chinese, zhōng), is “loyalty.” Mr.
Kase often prefers to translate them in his talks as “personal” (or “private’) and “public,” based on the
directions that they point — filial piety being very internalized and very much involved with the family,
while loyalty is more external and directs the point of its value away from the self and towards another.
Chūkō (忠孝) was a Japanese neologism that did not exist in Chinese.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

alty in Japan is different from the loyalty in China. Loyalty in China is something thatis owed to the imperial family — it is not a loyalty directed to the public. In Japan,
loyalty is the public at large itself. It’s a loyalty for the people in common. Perhaps
through loyalty to the emperor, the core of the everyday people, it becomes loyalty to
all the people in common.
In Chinese culture, which puts filial piety ahead of everything else, it’s making theparent-child relationship — that is, families with the same family name — important.
In itself, that’s fine; but if you make filial piety the be-all and end-all, what happens
then? You lose the public aspect. Filial piety is, ultimately, something directed to thefamily, or to the parent. If you put filial piety ahead of everything else, the good of the
public and the good of the family end up in opposition, and the public gets sacrificed.

• Confucius encouraged lies and disregarded the public
Sekihei
Ultimately, the Chinese didn’t have a sense of the public. There’s a famous story
in The Analects. Confucius said this. It’s the story of a father steeling sheep. A certain
person said, “My friend is an honest person in his home town. When he found out that
his father had stolen a neighbor’s sheep, he exposed his father.”
Kase
And Confucius got mad.
SekiheiHe got mad, saying that wasn’t good. Above everything, it’s filial piety. No matter
how evil the act of your father, you can’t talk about it to others.
Kase
It’s in The Analects.
Sekihei
There are two important points. First, Confucius is encouraging the telling of lies.
Second, Confucius shows no regard for the public concerns.
Kase
Also, in The Analects, Confucius states that the son must conceal any misdeeds of
his father.
SekiheiThat’s right. And if the son has done anything wrong, the father has to hide thatfact. Confucius advocated just such a warped filial piety and familial relationship.
That’s why in China you have the family, but you don’t have the public.
Kase
In The Analects, Confucius taught that even the Son of Heaven could make mistakes, and if he did, they should be concealed.
SekiheiThat’s right. It was the same for the emperor’s retainers.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 45

Kase
There was the suppression of the poisoned dumplings incident,17 and the hiding of
the truth about the Tiananmen incident. As China is a Confucian state, that’s only to
be expected.
SekiheiThat’s an important point. China has no concept of the public because it is rooted
in Confucian ideals.
Kase
In China, if your father was seriously ill back at home, you had to leave the emperor’s side and return home even if there was some serious affair of state at hand.
That was what was expected of you. It was the same in Korea.
In Japan, however, if your father was ill back home and there was some importantaffair in your fief, you stayed at the side of your lord and did your duty to the fief.
That was what was expected.
Before Japan annexed Korea, several hundred Japanese soldiers were surroundedby several thousand Korean soldiers at the capital of Hanseong, near present-day
Seoul. (The “Han” was there as a reference to the capital of China, or “the Han.”) Anyway, word was gotten out that the father of the Korean commanding general had
died, so the general rushed back to his home town — without arranging anything withhis subordinates. As a result, the account goes, the Japanese forces escaped their predicament. It’s said this is a true story.
Sekihei
In China, if the father of one of the bureaucracy died, they received a three-yearlong leave of absence where they weren’t expected to undertake any duties. No matter
how critical their job was, no matter if they resigned their job, it didn’t matter. If you
didn’t go back to your father’s place, you were criticized.

• If Confucius were reborn in Japan, he would love it
Kase
When I have given lectures in America and Europe, I speak in English, but I translate “filial piety” — kō — as “family” and “loyalty” — chū — as “public.” Throughout history, Japan has put the public ahead of the family.
With the exception of Japan, the other Asian nations have made the family more
important than the public. Why was Japan, alone in Asia, able to stave off the threatof Western Imperialism in the last half of the nineteenth century and to carry out successful modernization? It was because the Japanese people, as a body, placed the public over the family. What that means is that Japan’s closer to America and Europe
than it is to the rest of Asia.
Sekihei17

In 2008, several people in Japan developed symptoms similar to food poisoning from eating imported Chinese dumplings (gyōza). A banned toxic pesticide was found on the dough wrappers at 400 times
the safe level. A major recall was instituted, certain food imports were banned, and an anticipated business merger was abandoned in the fallout. Ultimately, one man in China was arrested and charged withdeliberately tampering the wrappers reportedly due to his displeasure over his salary.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

There’s an important point there. Could we say it’s the public Japan and the personal China? There are many places where the cultures of Japan and China resemble
one other. They use the same kanji. Japan also took up Confucianism. The actual essence is totally different, however. Confucianism for the Japanese and Confucianism
for the Chinese are completely different things.
Kase
Thinking they’re the same is an incredible error on the part of the Japanese.
SekiheiThat’s so right. But you know, though both foreigners and Westerners make that
mistake, even the Japanese — who have such a profound association with China —make the mistake. It boggles the mind. [Laughs.]
Kase
If Confucius came back, if he were born again, and if he came to Japan....
Sekihei
It would be so wonderful. He’d love it.
Kase
Yes, but he wouldn’t be able to eat human flesh.
Sekihei[Laughs.] No, but the sashimi is delicious over here, so he’d be fine with eating
fish.
Kase
If he were reborn in Japan, he’d have to make do with Matsuzaka beef.
Sekihei“Venerable sir, can you make do with Matsuzaka beef and sashimi?”
Do you think Confucius would get mad at whatever country he might go to today?
If he went to today’s China, he’d get really pissed.
If he were reincarnated, he’d be ready to die again after only once around theShanghai Expo. They’re doing everything completely contrary to Confucius’ teachings. They stole a Japanese song and used it as the theme for the Expo,18 there was adisagreement over the order of letting people in, there was yelling, there was shoving
people about....

• The 17-Article Constitution was the world’s first democratic
18

A brief international upset occurred when the theme song for the Shanghai Expo 2010 (1 May – 31
October, 2010) turned out to be the same tune made popular by Japanese singer/songwriter Okamoto
Maya in 1997 in her “Sonomama no kimi de ite” (“Stay as you are”). The Chinese song, performed byseveral famous stars including Jackie Chan and Andy Lau, used the same music without attribution or
permission. Complaints came in, and the song was quickly scrapped, and actually replaced with Okamoto’s original Japanese song. The Expo was the latest in a series of international World’s Fairs, so it
was a considerable embarrassment.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 47

constitution
Kase
Originally, there was no single absolute ruler in Japan who could enforce despotism. It didn’t fit with the society. Everyone had to get along and work together.
Let’s go back fourteen centuries to the seventh century, in 645, when the Taika
Reforms were instituted under the regnant empress, Kōtoku. This became the firstyear of the Taika era. The Sui dynasty in the Chinese mainland and Silla19 on the Korean peninsula were expanding their power. Kōtoku adopted the Chinese system ofgovernment to deal with this dangerous threat to Japan’s security.
Up to that point, noble families in Japan had divided the country and ruled theirown domains, but with the Taika Reforms, the emperor took direct governance of thewhole of Japan. Emperor Meiji’s dissolution of the feudal domains and turning theminto prefectures was the same thing.
With the Taika Reforms, Emperor Kōtoku issued an imperial decree saying, “nowfor the first time I intend to govern all the provinces,” and “the governance of all thepeople can not be a solitary governance; the assistance of the people is necessary.”
Forty-one years before, Shōtoku Taishi established the Seventeen-Article Constitution,and commented, “Harmony is to be valued.” They’re along the same line, aren’t they?
The important thing about the seventeenth article was, “everyone please talkthings over well and then decide.” He had established that everyone talking things
through and then reaching a conclusion was the correct way to do things. This was theworld’s first democratic constitution. For the name of Japan, the word “Yamato”20
appeared in it, and through great harmony, Japanese came to be tied together. I suppose we could also translate that “harmony” as “peace.”
Sekihei
Incidentally, the word “daiwa” doesn’t really translate into English.
Kase
If we were forced to translate it, I suppose we could use “harmony.”
Sekihei
In Chinese, too, there’s no translation for the meaning of “daiwa.” Anyway, after
the Taika Reforms, Japan also imported the ritsuryō system21 from China. They werecreating a centralized rule as national polity with the emperor at its heart.
With the Korean peninsula sandwiched between them, Japan was advancing aneeded national defense given her adversarial relationship with China. What thatmeans is that the Meiji Reformation was virtually the same thing. They had to adopt
the ritsuryō system to make a strong country.
On the other hand, the ritsuryō system, as it was centralized, was at odds with Ja19

Silla was one of the three kingdoms that historically occupied the Korean peninsula. The other two
were Baekje and Goguryeo. Silla existed as a state entity from 57 BC to AD 935.
20
“Yamato” is the historical name for Japan, and it is written 大和. These kanji would normally beread as “daiwa” (meaning, literally, “great harmony”). The actual trouble with the translation is thatthough wa is usually rendered as “harmony,” it has nuances of “peace,” “cooperation,” “understanding,” and so on.
21
The ritsuryō system was the foundation of laws (ritsu) and regulations (ryō) that were used to organize everything from the central government to the various governmental organs and offices, the criminal codes, religious observations, etc.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

pan’s traditional spirit. Even though Japan imported the Chinese-like ritsuryō system,
there was the Seventeen-Article Constitution in place to act as a sort of antidote, so
Japan’s spirit was preserved.
As the oldest democratic constitution in the world, the Seventeen-Article Constitution transcended the Chinese-style ritsuryō system, and the Japanese can rightly
boast of it. The Japanese spirit, the Buddhist spirit, and the Confucian spirit — all arein there.

• China is “a large plate with a mountain of sand on it” andJapan is “small pebbles growing to make a great rock”
Kase
Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, famously lamented that Chinese people
are “just like a heap of loose sand” — that is, they are virtually a large plate piled up
with a mountain of sand that is soon utterly scattered.
The Japanese national anthem, “Kimi ga yo,” was taken from a poem in the Shin
Kokinshū.22 In English, it says, “May thy reign continue for a thousand, nay, eight
thousand generations, and the eternity it takes for small pebbles to grow into a greatrock and be covered with moss.” That idea of small pebbles growing together overtime into a single great rock demonstrates the diametrically opposite national character to that of China.
SekiheiRight. Notwithstanding what was said earlier, even though China has a concept offamily and clan, it has none of the public. China is nothing more than an assemblageof families. There was no existing national community as an organism. They just
don’t do it. I was raised in a rural part of Szechuan, and there was no communal solidarity outside of the family.
Conversely, Japan’s is a society like that great rock formed by those tiny pebbles
coming together because there is the imperial family representing the public as its
core.
Kase
So the unbroken imperial line made Japan, and Japan made the unbroken imperial
line.
Sekihei
They’re the same, body and soul. Which came first, which came later — it doesn’t
matter what was first.
Kase
Clapping your hands when praying. Japan is the only place where that’s done.
When meeting, we clasp hands — shaking hands. In China and Korea, they don’t
have that. While clasping hands, everyone stops thinking and becomes as one. It is a
symbiotic culture. This hand-shaking ritual is part of that.
22

The Shin Kokinshū (“New Kokinshū,” or “New old and modern [poetry] collection”) was the eighthof twenty-one imperial poetry anthologies, and was compiled between 1201 and 1205. It was named
after an earlier anthology, the Kokinshū, compiled 300 years earlier.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 49

When clasping hands, we savor our good fortune, thinking, “oh, yes, I’m Japanese.” According to Westerners, when people stop thinking, they become useless....
Sekihei
When I came to Japan, I learned. That momentary stoppage of thinking — it’s not
becoming useless. If anything, it’s transcending yourself, surpassing yourself, and becoming one with the other person. You produce a self that transcends the self.
KaseThat’s ceremony.
SekiheiRight! It’s an important ceremony connecting people together. In the West, however, according to Christian tradition, the moment of transcending the self can only
happen in a relationship with God.
Kase
In China, is there a moment where the self is erased?
Sekihei
Hardly at all! In ancestor worship long ago, there was such a moment in fortifying
a feeling of solidarity with your ancestors. Recent family worship has deteriorated
considerably, though, to the point that energy supplements are being offered up to theancestors. There is virtually no moment where you view yourself objectively. It’s total individualism.
What we can take from this is that China now is more completely individualistic
than America and Europe.

• The fiction that the “Chinese race” doesn’t understand theworld’s sensibilities
Kase
What is frightening about the Chinese culture is that it is completely distanced
from the sensibilities of the world. First of all, there is that phrase, “Chinese race.” 23That “Chinese race” encompasses the Han race, Mongols, the Islamic Uyghurs,
Tibetans.... all of them are included. There are fifty-six minority nationalities included.
SekiheiThat’s right. Fifty-six minority nationalities are represented by that “Chinese
race.”

Kase
23

This is not as odd as it may sound in English. The term used here in Japanese is minzoku (民族; inChinese, mínzú), which refers to people specifically as in a nation or a tribe. Though “Chinese race,”“Japanese race,” or even “American race” may sound odd or perhaps off-putting to English ears, rather
than translate it to the more common English usage of “Chinese people” (etc.), it is important to preserve that nuance that race or tribe has that the general word people does not always have in order tokeep Mr. Kase’s points clear about the Chinese usage of the term to define themselves.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

All of them are called members of the Chinese race. India is also a country withmany different peoples, and rupee notes have fifteen different languages printed onthem. America is also a country of many different peoples. We don’t use the oddballterm “American race” or “Indian race” to refer to them. We don’t call those of the Ainu race members of the “Japanese race.”
Sekihei
The term “Chinese race” is, of course, a fabrication. There is no “Chinese race”
anywhere. Since the Han race is made up of a variety of other races, the Chinese race
is like a hodgepodge stew. Everything gets thrown in.
What is extremely dangerous is that if it’s under Chinese rule, whatever race it is,
it becomes part of the “Chinese race.” If a Japanese person were under Chinese rule,he, too, would become a member of the Chinese race. You’d probably not like it, Mr.
Kase.
If Japan’s national defense and national polity aren’t properly prepared for, it’s
just possible that that may someday come to be.
Kase
Subjugation by the Chinese race, and the Chinese Empire, was not caused by “aggression.” The term they use is to “moralize.”24 Thus, to this point, they have not put
aggression into play.
SekiheiThat’s how they explain it. The truth is, the morality is nothing.... The truth is,with the feigned ideology of morality, they carry out aggression....
Kase
Even though we say Chinese race and Han people, people in Beijing and people inShanghai are different in their physique and their constitution. Coastal people wereoriginally related to a south-east Asian people called the Baiyue and Minyue, and soare mostly different.
They are all called “Han people,” but are they really?
SekiheiThat’s one political concept. The number one issue in China is that despotism has
grown excessively.
Kase
To think that in China there was a “virtuous” emperor —Sekihei
Virtuous?! No such thing.
Kase
But Chairman Mao Zedong was a traditional Son of Heaven, so the façade wasthat he was “virtuous.”
Sekihei
24

The term in Japanese is tokka (徳化; in Chinese, déhuà). The idea being expressed is that only China
has “morals,” and uncivilized nations need to be influenced by China to get morality.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 51

There was no virtue anywhere! Especially with Mao Zedong — a thug as thuggish
as he was, was damned rare.
Kase
You say that, but the Confucian order is that a ruler who seizes power is a person
imbued with “virtue” acting in the place of Heaven, and he leads the people — so interfering in the people’s lives is to be expected. Those under him have to do everything the guy in authority says.
Sekihei
The problem is the misfortune of those people upon whom the authority was used.

• Americans have never ever understood China
Kase
Many in America who are considered Sinologists argue that it is apparent that the
Chinese people will seek more democratic rights to accompany the rise in their per
capita income, so China will become more democratized. President Clinton, too, during his term in office, believed that and said so in speeches.
SekiheiThat is an incredible misunderstanding by the Americans. An incredible misunderstanding. I think President Obama’s administration is caught up in that same misunderstanding. The dictatorship will only grow stronger the more the Chinese economy develops.
Kase
To be sure, China’s middle class is growing now; but if the middle class loses its
present political clout, they won’t be able to continue with that comfortable lifestyle.
At present they’re enjoying the favor of the present regime, so it’s to be expected thatthey would defend it.
There are 1.3 or 1.4 billion people there, and a huge percentage of them are still
incredibly poor. The income disparity between those in urban areas and in rural areas
is by more than a factor of ten. It’s even been said to be twenty times greater.
Those who have become wealthy are but a fraction of the urban residents, andthere are required permissions for residency and for employment for residents of cities and agricultural communities, and they are legally differentiated. Beyond that, thegulf between rich and poor is growing all the more deeper and wider.
SekiheiThat’s true. China today has become the number one socially disparate society inthe world. The disparity of wealth between the ruling class, making up ten percent of
the population, and the bottom ten percent of the impoverished class, is a factor of
more than twenty-three times.
Kase
If everyone were given equal rights, and if free elections were held, the wealthyrising rich and middle class would take great pains to buy and enjoy showing off theirexpensive Shiseido cosmetics, Rolex watches, Chanel products, Roberta Di Camerino

52

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

handbags, shiny cars, and so on. Even so, they would get dragged down because of
the great many poor people and will become unable to maintain their privileges.
I’ve said before that democratization would fail, but American Sinologists say,“Not so. If they become wealthy, the merchants would come to seek political freedoms. Britain and France were both like that.”
I can only think that China is still a Confucian state, and merchants would earnestly collude with government officials to raise their profits rather than seek politicalrights and freedom. Chinese merchants have always been that way, and are that way
now.
Sekihei
I’m honestly convinced that democracy will never come to China.
America has never once understood China. Mr. Kase, they just need to learn fromyou.

• The great military power of a Confucian China is moreterrifying than that of Nazi Germany
Kase
It’s just that China is a Confucian state. What is frightening is that even after
2,500 years, the Confucian order is still continuing. During Mao Zedong’s time, it
was said that Confucius had been overthrown and that Confucius and his teachings
were the enemy, but that was just something the Communists put out there for show;
their Communism was Confucianism itself.
The Red Guards, far from being the swelling democratic masses working together,were created to operate with orders from above because of power struggles.
The history of the People’s Republic of China, ultimately, is nothing more than
one of piddly power struggles. After the death of Chairman Mao, as we saw on TV,
three parties — the funeral service committee, the Workers’ and Farmers’ Militia, andthe Red Guards — formed the escort for his corpse. The People’s Liberation Armywasn’t there. I thought this was due to the instigation of Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing.
Within on month of Mao’s death, the “Gang of Four,” including Jiang Qing, werearrested by Hua Guofeng, who seized the public security, and Wang Dongxing, thecommandant of the 8341 Special Regiment (Mao’s elite bodyguards), who until thenhad been as much a Leftist as they were. Thereupon, a charge was made that Jiang
Qing, who surely had to have been on the extreme Left, was starting to use Frenchcosmetics and Japanese face cleaner, indulging in luxuries every day.
Confucianism is totally chaotic within and has rotted out; it is only clean on thesurface. Politicians use beautiful words like “benevolence” and “righteousness,” butonly to camouflage their own self-interest.
Sekihei
The Japanese also like The Analects, and China as a culture is fine. Making Confucianism a state ideology, however, is completely no good.
Kase
The most frightening thing is, the Chinese Empire was a culture, not what we
usually would call a “state.” A culture dressed up as a country.
They thought of themselves as the center of the world. While in Japan we speak ofJapan and China: How Different They Are! 53“inside and outside,” we use the character for “inner” as that “inside” — but in China,
they use the character “center” for their “inside.”25
SekiheiThat’s right. The problem is something related to that. It would be really bad if
they had nuclear weapons and a gigantic military force. They would be more dreadfulthan the Nazis.

25

Contrasting the Japanese naigai (内外) with the Chinese zhōngwài (中外). That zhōng (literally“middle” or “center”) is the first character in the name China, Zhongguo (中国), which is often translated as “Middle Kingdom.”

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 55— Chapter Five —The Chinese Illusion that
They Can Make Every Country in the World Theirs• China had no name until the Treaty of Nanking
Kase
In 1939, the First Opium War began. The British were the bad guys in this one. In
1844, the Qing court capitulated and signed the Treaty of Nanking.
I’ve said this before, but the very premise for China’s Son of Heaven is to control
every nook and cranny of the world — so China was not just one country among
many. The high Qing officials, with their queues, reluctantly used the name of theirdynasty on the Treaty of Nanking. But until that point, you see, there had been nocountry on Earth their equal, so the Chinese empire didn’t have a name.
Sekihei
Before that, China didn’t have a flag, either. So someone hurried up and painted
that dragon and they had a flag. It was the simple image of a dragon. Of course, it had
five toes. [Laughs.]
Kase
Since it was an international treaty, in the interest of expedience they used the dynastic name — Qing — at first for the name of the country. To this day there is still
no sense in China, however, that they are a state.
Sekihei
The concept of statehood encompasses different kinds of states, and your own
country is one of them, but in the concept of China before the signing of the Treaty of
Nanking, there was no idea of statehood. Following the argument that “all the countries in the world are mine,” there was the idea of the Chinese race.
Kase
We may say “China,” but during the so-called Sixteen Kingdoms period26 the Han
actually created nineteen states.
SekiheiThe Han were pulling the strings, but in actuality it was an age of chaos.
Kase
26

So-called from the number of short-lived sovereign states in what is now considered China properand its environs during 304–439. It was one of the most devastating periods in all of Chinese history. It
commenced with the retreat of the Jin state, and ended with the consolidation of rule into the so-called
Southern and Northern Dynasties (the Northern Wei and the Southern Song).

56

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

It lasted from 304 to 439.
SekiheiWow, you even remember those dates?
Kase
The five “barbarian” states were the Xiongnu, the Jie, the Xianbe, the Di, and the
Qiang. That “xiong” in the Xiongnu name is said to mean someone who is boisterous
and dirty, and the “nu” is “slave.” “Jie” is a castrated sheep. The “xian” in Xianbe is awild animal. “Di” is a bowing, servile person. “Qiang” means a slovenly barbarian.
Those were the five barbarian states in that period.
The Chinese idea is that they alone are correct and proper. Even Queen Himiko of
Wa27 — that “wa” indicated a person of small stature, a dwarf, and someone dirty.
Calling Japan “Wakoku” — “the dwarf country” — was just plain rude. And giventhat Himiko was a real person, do you really think she would use a character meaning“humble” or “lowborn” as the first character of her name?
SekiheiThat is strange.
Kase
The Waren dian appears in the “encounters with western barbarians” section of
the Wei zhi. It gives the names of Himiko’s great officials, such as Yakuyako, whosename means “repulsive dog near the gate”.
SekiheiThat’s horrid.
Kase
Many bronze mirrors with inscribed kanji from the time of the Waren dian havebeen unearthed in Japan, so surely those characters must have been readable here at
the time. There is a country called Kuna — “dog-like slaves” — that was recorded tohave been fighting with Himiko’s Yamataikoku. Who on Earth would bear such aname themselves?
It was around that time that the Chinese began to embrace the ideology that if you
weren’t Chinese, you were a barbarian. Long ago, they called people living along thecoast of Fujian province “edge beasts” or “edge worms.”
Sekihei
The Chinese race considers people in their surrounding environs as something
they can gobble up. Ultimately, that’s what it is.
Kase
That whole thing about Chinese and barbarians — only China had the proper culture, and they called other people in the four cardinal directions from China “eastern

27

Himiko (fl. 248) was a queen of a confederation of states in early Japan called Yamataikoku. “Wa”
was the name by which Japan was known in the early Chinese chronicles. She doesn’t appear in any
Japanese histories, but is referenced several times in the “Waren dian” (Account of the people of Wa),a part in the Wei zhi (Records of the Wei), in the Sanguo zhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), writtenc. 297, and it is quoted in part in several other texts.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 57

barbarians,” “western barbarians,” “northern barbarians,” and “southern barbarians.”28
Sekihei
In The Spring and Autumn Annals, one of the five classics of Confucian teaching,
Confucius defined “barbarism” as “hú” — not being in subjugation to China.” That
hú is actually another word meaning “barbarian.”• Shōtoku Taishi’s brilliant achievement rejected China’s“you’re either Chinese or you’re a barbarian” system
SekiheiJapan’s history of being at-odds with China has to begin with Shōtoku Taishi.
“The Son of Heaven of the place where the sun rises sends word to the Son of
Heaven of the place where the sun sets. I hope you are well....”
Kase[Applauds.] According to the Chinese chronicles, Emperor Yang of the Sui waslivid when he saw that, decrying it as “a barbaric letter, such insolence!”
SekiheiInsolence, insolence! Oh, he was mad, wasn’t he? Still, this one state document
totally turned the Sui dynasty’s central international order on its ear. It was a brilliant,historical achievement.
The letter said, essentially, “yeah, you’re an emperor, but we have a Son of Heaven here, too, so we’re on the same level. What’s more, this is where the sun comes up,
so we’re better.”
I believe that with that one letter, Japanese history changed completely. It didn’t
become like Korea — it was able to become Japan. That’s what that moment was.
Kase
The Japanese really should know better about this fact.
SekiheiAt the moment Emperor Yang of the Sui read the letter from Japan, Japan established itself as an independent state. It was an amazing thing. What’s more, about thatsame time, the Sui were unifying China, and they were a great power that everyone
feared. And despite that, Shōtoku Taishi sent them a such a letter. Incredible.
The administration of today’s Democratic Party of Japan and others should take alesson from that.
Kase
What the Japanese were really racking their brains about at the time was the word
“tennō.” It wasn’t exactly the same thing as “emperor” but it was on a level with it.

28

Each of these uses a different word in Chinese after the direction-word, all of which translate, essentially, into the English word “barbarian.” These four groups are, in order, dōngyí, xīróng, bĕidí, andnánmán.

58

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

The title “tennō” was a Japanese idea.29
If Japan were to have used the same word for the Japanese emperor as for the
Chinese emperor, it’s just possible that the Chinese emperor might have gotten all
worked up and launched an attack on Japan with an army of 100 or 200 thousand men.
Sekihei
There’s no other moment so thrilling in Japanese history. I learned about thissince coming to Japan, you see.
That’s why leftist teachers repudiate everything up to the existence of Shōtoku
Taishi. For them, Shōtoku Taishi is someone they would rather have not existed. He
was incredible, though. The basis for the relationship between Japan and China wasestablished because of him.

• China’s “fight and kill” is man’s logic; Japan’s “enfold them
gently” is woman’s logic
Kase
From time to time I’ve been invited to go to China, and I’ve noticed that China’s
is a man’s logic. Japan is a country with a woman’s logic.
Sekihei
Really?
Kase
In a nutshell, Japan is a feminine, gentle country. Zhong Kui in Chinese Daoism isa vengeful spirit. Once he entered the Japanese milieu, where he is known as Shōki,
he became this kind old uncle figure.
On my first visit of the year to a shrine at New Year’s, I go to Toyokawa Inari
Shrine in Akasaka Mitsuke near my home. Because it’s an Inari shrine, they venerate
the foxes.
The god worshipped at Toyokawa Inari Shrine is Dakini. Originally, she was afemale demon in India who served the great mother goddess Kali. In Tibet, Dakini isa yaksha, a terrifying deity who eats the flesh of men. But when they get to Japan,
they all become gentle gods.
SekiheiYeah.... That’s the magic of Japanese culture — embracing everyone and everything gently.
Kase
There are a lot of aspects where you can say Christianity is a religion of hatred.
It’s written right down: from the Jews are “the Devil’s children” and cursed for all
time. But when Christianity came to Japan, it became a gentle religion, too. That’s
29

The English word emperor has several equivalents in Japanese. The ones being discussed here are
the generic term kōtei (皇帝; in Chinese huángdì), and the word tennō (天皇), which is reserved for theemperor of Japan and did not exist in Chinese. Tennō is made up of the kanji for “heaven” and “majesty.” When speaking of a Chinese emperor, the word used here is kōtei/ huángdì. The other generally
equivalent term that comes up in the dialogues is “Son of Heaven” (天子; tenshi in Japanese, tiānzǐ in
Chinese).

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 59

good, isn’t it?
Japan is not a country with a man’s logic. Amaterasu Ōmikami is a goddess.
When Amitabha Buddha, the bodhisattva Maitreya, the bodhisattva Guanyin, and soon, came to Japan, they were female, and that is why they became the objects of suchstrong faith. It is probably because the Japanese islands were peaceful that we worshipped gentle females.
Sekihei
I see. Female or maternal logic is the foundation of the logic of the Japanese society.
Kase
According to the Old Testament, which is observed by both Judaism and Christianity, God created man in His own image. But the God of Judaism, Christianity, andIslam is a wrathful and absolute God who interferes in men’s lives and gives detailedorders. You get the feeling God was created in man’s own image.
Japanese gods, in contrast, live quietly and peacefully in their natural shrines.
They don’t interfere with men. Clapping your hands in prayer at shrines to attract
their attention is sometimes called “tamafuri.”30 When a worshipper claps his hands
together those three times, he is drawing the attention of the gods. He has to invoke
them.
When I talk with Westerners, something I find to be difficult is that they don’t understand when I say “the gods are resting calmly.” There is no word they have for theidea that a god can rest calmly, or that a god patiently “calmly rests.” 31 I have tospend a great deal of time explaining the concept.
In Japan, we have to live proper lives so as not to cause worry to the gods who are
resting calmly. We’re not doing it because the gods compel us to.
SekiheiThat’s right.
Kase
The kanji “matsuri”32 is made up of elements representing “meat,” “hands,” and“god.” This is because at the matsuri, people ate their fill of meat. But if you eat a lotof meat, you will reek of blood.
In Chinese history, a cycle came about from the struggle where if they weren’tkilling each other, they weren’t able to eat their fill.
SekiheiAnd that’s why there was a warring man’s logic.
Given that, that “gentle” term you keep using — yasashii — is something that’s

30This is one of those hard-to-translate terms. The tama is tamashii, or soul, and the furi is comparable
to a sort of “pitch” (as in, writers “pitching” an idea to a movie producer to make into a movie, or asalesman making a “pitch” to a potential customer).
31
The verb used here is “shizumaru,” which is an active verb indicating an inaction. It describes a certain attitude of being settled down, or of performing calm, laid back, patient non-activity.
32
Matsuri is commonly translated today as “festival” (originally, technically, a religious one), but it
also relates to spiritual observances, governance, and so on. In its verbal form, matsuru, it indicatesworshipping a deity or deification. In Chinese, the character is pronounced jì.

60Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

only in Japanese, too.33 When you are discussing these things in English I imagine it
takes a lot of effort. Is there a term for expressing that in English?
Kase
There’s not a single word that encompasses everything that “yasashii” does inJapanese, no.
Sekihei
There’s not one in Chinese, either. I suppose there’s none in Korean, as well.
Kase
That’s because Korea is a male country, too. Japan, and women, are different.
Japanese pursue the affection and kindness of women.
SekiheiWhat’s important is the Japanese aesthetic. This holds true even in Buddhism.
Beauty has nothing to do with Buddhist imagery in Chinese and Indian Buddhism.
After it came to Japan, Zen produced gardens that are beautiful to look at from
whatever vantage point you take. The beauty of the gardens in the temples of Tenryūji
and Daisen’in in Kyoto are characteristic of Japan.
Kase
They say Chinese gardens reproduce the Buddhist paradise, but eroded limestone
and Taihu Lake stones are all piled up and they’re just grotesque. When we Japaneselook at them, they seem strange, and it chills our hearts.
SekiheiThat’s it. That’s it exactly. The gentleness of the heart itself, and beauty of theheart itself, are to be found in Japan.

• In Japan, it’s not “right and wrong” — evaluation is based on
beauty and gentleness
Kase
We Japanese, when considering the things people do, don’t use a logical measureof whether something is right or wrong. We base things on the sentiment of what isbeautiful or what is not beautiful.
Sekihei
There’s no ending the theological debate of what is right and wrong. No matter
how much you argue the issue, it never ends. As to what is beautiful, however — anyone would quickly understand that.
Kase
Regardless of right or wrong, the French killed over 50,000 of their own country33

Yasashii is, in fact, one of those words that requires a full sentence or more to properly translate. For
simplicity, we have used “gentle” in the text. In its full meaning, it implies gentleness and gentility, acalmness, a sense of kindness, and a sense of looking out for the other person.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 61

men in the French Revolution. With the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong killed tens of millions. In Japan, we judge these things based onwhether they are beautiful and kind, or not.
Logic is like a dangerous sword. It’s because Japan is a compassionate country....
Sekihei
Both Christian theology and Confucianism stress only the importance of logic.
KaseThat’s very continental. Japan is an island nation, peaceful — and thanks to theblessings of the good fortunes of her seas and mountains, there has seldom been much
hunger. Because of that, fortunately, there have been no wars with people killing eachother brandishing such logic and fundamentals.
SekiheiIs it pure or not, clean or not, beautiful or not? That’s all there is.

• The Beijing Cuisine People’s Republic and the Peking duckflag
Sekihei
I firmly believe that the rise of Qin Shi Huangdi was a watershed in Chinese history. Wouldn’t it be good, I wonder, for China to return to the way it was before him?
Kase
I love China, too, so I think it’s kind of lonely that there’s just the one country.
Sekihei[Explosive laugh.] I get it, it would be better for China to be broken up, right?
Kase
I think it would be better with six or seven Chinas. Even eight or ten would be fine. Right now, there are three countries with Chinese people, right? China, Taiwan,
and Singapore.
I’m thinking we should divide China up by the different cuisines. The different
dialects of Chinese spoken — Beijing Chinese, Shanghai Chinese, Guangdong Chinese, and Fujian Chinese — could become a set with the various cuisines.
SekiheiHuh. Well, that’s clear and simple. ’Cause we’re unifying cultural spheres andcuisine spheres.
Kase
The Beijing Cuisine People’s Republic, the Shanghai Cuisine People’s Republic,
the Guangdong Cuisine People’s Republic.... The cuisines would be better for peacethan the present People’s Republic of China, don’t you think? [Laughs.]

Sekihei62

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Well, then, Mr. Kase, on the issue of national flags, Sichuan could have a chili
pepper on it.... [Laughs.]
Kase
The flag of the Beijing Cuisine People’s Republic would be a Peking duck. For
the flag of the Sichuan Cuisine People’s Republic, how does mapo-tofu sound?
Second only to Japanese food, the Japanese love Chinese food best. The Japaneseflag is already a “Hinomaru bentō [‘Rising Sun’ boxed lunch]” with a single red pickled plum placed on a bed of white rice, so we don’t have to change it. [Laughs.]• Countries with the word “People’s” in their names are no
good
Kase
As I think about it, countries that have the word “People’s” in their names are justno good. The perfect example would be the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
SekiheiDamned straight. And the People’s Republic of China is no different. They haveto make a point of calling on the spirit of morality because there is no morality given
their Confucian traditions. There is no “People’s” anything there, so they stick on that
“People’s.”
Kase
This was a little before my father’s time, but once Matsumura Kenzō from the Diet and Inayama Yoshihiro, chairman of Nippon Steel Corp., met and were discussing
China and the topic turned to classical Chinese literature. Japanese back then werelike that.
My father’s generation had an admiration for Chinese culture. A firm grounding
in the Chinese classics was considered central to a good education. They felt that it
was as if Chinese culture was the source of Japanese culture.
SekiheiThat was the tradition in middle schools and high schools under the old order,
right? Those high schools in the old days were something else. Those old school
songs... The song of the First Higher School34....
Kase[Singing:] A-ah, with flowers in a jade cup....
SekiheiThat’s it, yes. I’ve heard it, too.

Kase
34

The “First Higher School,” officially the Kyūsei Dai-ichi Kōtō Gakkō (or just the Kyūsei Ichikō), fed
into the Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). Their school dormitory song, written in
1902, was famous all over Japan. Ichikō is now the Tokyo University Faculty of Liberal Education.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 63

There was a man named Mikami Taku who was one of the ringleaders of the May
15 Incident.35 That no-good naval lieutenant carried out the assassination of Prime
Minister Inukai in broad daylight. The young officers of the February 26 Incident later on loved to sing a song written by Mikami: [singing] “The clouds of Witch Mountain fly wildly about...”SekiheiOh, wait. That’s Wushan, a mountain in China, on the Yangtze River.
Kase
It was called “The Song of the Shōwa Restoration,” but it was full of Chinese references. Phooey.
Sekihei
Yeah.
Kase
Saying that Japanese morality and Chinese morality are the same — it’s a mistake.
Sekihei
I feel the same way.
Kase
[Singing.] “The clouds of Witch Mountain fly wildly about, and if I rise in thisworld of chaos...”Sekihei[Laughs.] Those young officers back then certainly had high aspirations.

• Skill at wining and dining: tactics or art?
Kase
When I started going to go to China, what I came to admire was that they had cultivated a history of 4,000 years, and there is no country more skilled wining and dining people. When I’m invited to China, I’m exceptionally warmly received. It’s theart of thoroughly wining people over.
Sekihei
It would be fair to call that a tactic. [Laughs.]
Kase
The Chinese are almost neurotic about the care they take in observing the proper
hierarchy. The first time I was invited China, I was the chairman of the Defense Research Institute. I was invited along with my number two at the time. When we were
getting ready to fly back to Japan, just before they closed the doors on the plane, a
35

The May 15 Incident was an attempted coup d’êtat in 1932 led by right-wing radicals from the Japanese navy assisted by army cadets and civilian elements resulting in the assassination of the prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, and accomplishing little else.

64Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

number of the top brass of the Liberation Army came aboard to give us going-away
gifts. They gave them to us on the plane.
Sekihei
Surprise! What a production!
Kase
It was impressive.
SekiheiOh, yeah.
Kase
They gave me a big present, and to my number two they gave one that was slightly smaller. [Laughs.] All are not exactly equal in the People’s Republic of China.
Sekihei
They chose their timing well! Moments before the plane closes its doors, theygive things to their very important visitor....
Kase
In China, wining and dining people is an art form. My wife and I were invited todinner at the Chinese embassy in Azabu. At the time, it was something the other embassies just did not do. They asked me to provide the names and addresses of four orfive other couples, and the embassy sent invitations out to everyone. Because everyone would be thrilled to be invited to the Chinese embassy. And the dinner at the embassy — of course it would be delicious.
Sekihei[Laughs.] And? Was it? I’ve never been invited.

• The ridiculous efforts of Mao suits, commander-in-chief
uniforms, stand-up collars, and jumpers
Kase
Since Jiang Zemin became China’s head of state, he’s been standing up there withthe others at the top of the Tienanmen wall at the anniversary celebrations of thefounding of the People’s Republic. It’s really critical in the ranking of who is next towhom. If you make a single mistake in your order, that’s it for you. [Laughs.]
Sekihei
It sounds tough. Who walks one step ahead, who comes second, who comes
third.... It can get really tough.
Kase
That’s the democracy of the People’s Republic. If you make a mistake, you get
liquidated.
Sekihei
If there’s a mistake, it can be a big political problem.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 65

Kase
When I watched the first anniversary celebrations of the PRC’s founding after
Jiang Zemin became the head of state, of all those lined up on the wall of Tiananmen,
Jiang — and only Jiang— wore a Mao suit. He had to distinguish himself from theother men. All the others were in suits.
That made me think of Hitler. Hitler had designed a special “commander-in-chief”
uniform for himself that he alone wore. Goering and the other army generals followed
Hitler with their chests festooned with medals.
Only Hitler wore a simple uniform as commander-in-chief, and he wore on his
breast only the Iron Cross that he’d earned when he distinguished himself as a corporal on the western front in the First World War. He was being a representative of
the masses.
Stalin was the same. Only he seemed like a Russian peasant, wearing a coat with astanding collar. Dictators all make ridiculous efforts.
North Korea’s Kim Jung-Il, likewise, is the only one there who wears a jumper.
The generals of the Korean People’s Army are conspicuous with their chests covered
in medals that look like the cheap prizes you get in boxes of candy.
SekiheiThat jumper — it’s really dowdy.
Kase
Of course, the Son of Heaven, who has morality, has to distinguish himself fromthose who follow him — so people will know right away who he is. [Laughs.]
Speaking of great people, a particular distinction of Chinese cuisine is the roundtable, and the host sits in the best place.
SekiheiThat’s how all the banquets in China are.
Kase
Like the conductor of an orchestra.
SekiheiRight. The person sitting in the head seat takes control. He’s in charge of everything.
Kase
It shows just how important the meal is. In Japan, the host humbles himself andsits at the lowest seat. From a Chinese cultural perspective, that’s careless and evenirresponsible.
Sekihei
To Chinese, dining is a sacred thing. Since the meal is like a religious observance,
the officiant sits in the middle. Cultural differences crop up in such traditions. It’s thedifference in the way people think about eating.
Kase
It would have been better if we’d started this conversation talking about food.

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Sekihei[Laughs.] Like the old Chinese saying, “food is the paramount necessity of thepeople.”• China doesn’t have a single museum of Western art
Kase
There’s a Chinese saying: “After long unity is division; after long division is unity.”
SekiheiYes, there is. There’s that cycle.
Kase
It’s the cycle of unification and separation. Even so, a great majority of the Chinese people believe that China has a single, perfect culture. It’s like it’s imprinted intheir DNA. You can only see something like this in China.
That’s why even though there were many incredibly wealthy people in China before the Second World War, and we can start with those in Shanghai, there isn’t a single museum of Western art anywhere in that vast country. That’s astounding.
Sekihei
What you’ve just said — that’s an incredible fact.
Kase
In pre-war Shanghai, there was a billionaire named Soong — Charlie Soong.
Charlie Soong was Sun Yat-sen’s greatest sponsor. His father had been the son of apoor peasant in Hainan during the Qing dynasty, but became a member of the underground Chaozhou Gang, smuggling opium and other things. The surname “Soong”
wasn’t his original name, either.
SekiheiThat’s right. He was originally a gangster overlord.
KaseCharlie Soong had three daughters: Ai-ling, Ch’ing-ling, and May-ling. His second daughter, Ch’ing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen and ended up becoming the honorary president of the People’s Republic of China. Ai-ling, his oldest daughter, became
the wife of H. H. Kung, the finance minister of the Republic of China. His thirddaughter, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Think of it. Ch’ing-ling, the grand-daughter of an unsavory opium-smuggler, became the honorary president of the People’s Republic of China.
Though they amassed great riches, not a single Chinese billionaire created a museum for Western art. Rich Chinese merchants in Indonesia and Malaysia feverishlycollected Chinese art objects, but they had no interest in local or Western art objects.
Recently, rich Chinese, like people in the party leadership, have been coming toJapan. What are they coming to Japan for? To buy Chinese antiques that are in Japan.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 67

SekiheiIs that so?
Kase
That’s the impression I get. The present casinos and bubble economy in China areall but hopeless, they’re taking the money overseas. As long as they have Chinese art
objects, even if the bubble economy bursts, they’re probably going to be alright withit.
When asked, “Are you also buying Japanese art objects?”, they respond with astunned, “Wha...?”
Sekihei[Laughs.] It’s like, “what are you talking about?”
Kase
Their way of thinking is that there is nothing of any value outside of Chinese art.
They don’t recognize the value of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir, Hiroshige, Utamaro,
Yokoyama Taikan, Shinkō Munakata.... They think of the Japanese arts as nothing but
insignificant and unsophisticated.
They like Western music, though. At the Chopin Concours, Chinese and Korean
pianists placed highly alongside Japanese pianists. Chopin’s hands were small, so he’s
popular with Asians, you see. We also hear stories of rich Chinese buying violins
made by master luthiers for their daughters. Music is the only exception.
SekiheiThat’s not so. Those buying those things, originally, were viewed as abnormal
Chinese, and they had a so-called Western infection. That is, those who did so wereconsidered Chinese infected by the West. Those who played the violin or piano wereoriginally considered peculiar by other Chinese.
In China, such people were criticized as Westernizers who worshipped the West.
Kase
It’s really strange, though, isn’t it, that in all of China — in all that great landmass — there’s not a single museum of Western art?
Sekihei
Mr. Kase, you have impressive insight! You get right to the meat of the matter. In
Japan, there are many Western art museums just in Tokyo alone. There’s one in Ueno,
one in Roppongi — you’d run out of fingers if you try to count the ones in the cityalone. There are many even out in the countryside and at tourist resorts. But in Beijing? Nope. Nor any in Shanghai.

• The artistic sensibilities of a samurai who traded a castle fora single tea bowl

68Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Kase
They totally fail to acknowledge the value of Japanese works of art. They see
them as unsophisticated.
In Chinese, Beijing’s Forbidden City is also called the Former Palace. That was
the place from which Chiang Kai-shek carried off ivory, gold, and silver art objects to
Taiwan to create the National Palace Museum. Even though some of them were melted or broken, there are many things made of valuable materials. In the West, too,
there are many art objects made of gold and silver.
We Japanese — and perhaps this is from a frugal spirit — don’t like to use things
made of valuable materials.
Sekihei[Laughs.]Kase
If you go to Beijing’s Forbidden City or to Western palaces, you’ll see that they’reradiant with gold, silver, chandeliers, treasures on display, this, and that. There’s not asingle thing like that in the palace of Japan’s emperor, however. Instead, there is acalm and dignified atmosphere like at a shrine. It’s cleansing. When Japanese things
get broken, they are, of course, of no value.
Sekihei
And if a tea bowl breaks, it’s just no longer any good.
Kase
It wouldn’t be worth a sou. During the period of civil wars in the last part of thesixteenth century, Western Christian missionaries in Japan sent home enthusiastic reports. In one of them, a missionary wrote of a conversation with a samurai who told
him of someone in Japan who had traded a castle for a single tea bowl.
SekiheiOh, yes, yes! A tea bowl a dog wouldn’t even want somehow got traded for a castle.
Kase
This missionary — he asked, how could something of no value become something
so important. A cheap chamber pot had been brought over from the Philippines —then a colony of Spain and called “Nueva Espania” — and it came to be used as a tea
utensil. And it was prized. [Laughs.]
SekiheiThat makes me think of Oh Seon-hwa. She said that if Japanese tea utensils andtea bowls classed as National Treasures were taken to Korea, they could be used asbowls for dog food.

Kase
Oh Seon-hwa is my Japanology teacher. To get back to that samurai — he responded to the missionary’s question with a question of his own: “Why on earth doyou people pay incredible sums of gold for such small rocks?” He was talking aboutJapan and China: How Different They Are! 69

diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. [Laughs.]
SekiheiIn the time of Oda Nobunaga,36 a single black tea bowl was traded for a castle.
Kase
What’s even more out there is aromatic wood.
SekiheiWhat’s that?
Kase
In Japan, the incense ceremony, where you sample fragrances, was very popular.
We don’t say you “smell” the aroma — we say you “hear” it. That’s because it’s avery faint aroma. It’s like straining your ears at a subtle sound — do you hear it, do
you not — so that’s why. That’s different than the strong odor of perfume used byWestern women. [Laughs.]
A single small piece of aromatic wood brought from the tropics of the South Seas
had the same value as an entire castle.
SekiheiSo in other words, in everyone’s minds that piece of aromatic wood had a highworth.

36

Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) was the first of the three great unifiers to try to bring all of Japan undera single ruler.

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Japan and China: How Different They Are! 71— Chapter Six —While the People Starved to Death,
Mao Held Nightly Jazz Parties• The Chinese and Korean ruling classes hated manual labor
Kase
Both the Chinese ruling class and the Korean yangban37 hated manual labor. Theyboth would summon an attendant to fetch them things they could easily have reached
out for and picked up themselves. When they rode horses, they were lifted into thesaddle by grunting servants.
SekiheiThat’s right, they did absolutely no work. They scorned physical labor, and they
took pride in doing none.
Kase
In Japan, however, samurai would till the fields and do manual work. They didn’t
scorn getting out there and sweating.
Sekihei
The yangban society was ridiculous.
Kase
At the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea, they made up almost half of the population. In the Edo period, the ruling samurai class made up just under eight percent ofJapan’s population. In Korea, only the underclass, the samnomu, did physical labor.
The yangban totally exploited the samnomu.
Sekihei
Joseon-dynasty Korea was a complete mess. Bribery of officials was a common
thing, and yangban status was something that could be bought.
Kase
In Korea, they have generational family registries called jokppo. In Korea, because nothing is more important than family lineage, these things are huge, multivolume books — not like those in Japan that are just like simple scrolls. Even today
they always have a “main line” for their families. They’d receive money from thesangmin who wanted to become a yangban, and then enter their names into the family
37

Yangban were hereditary nobility in the kingdom of Korea until the end of the Joseon dynasty in
1894. They were the Confucian ideal of scholarly officials, and may or may not have been landed aswell. Their status as yangban could be repealed if they failed to produce any government officials inthree generations, so their status was based on civil service examinations rather than actual landedness
as with European nobility.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

register.
SekiheiThat’s preposterous. Buying and selling yangban status like that — it’s an absurd
society. If Japan hadn’t entered Korea, the place would still be hell.
Kase
Now that you mention that, when you look at the differences between Japaneseand Chinese cultures, you see that Japanese and Korean cultures share some of thesame features.
Sekihei
Such as?
Kase
When you’re drinking alcohol in China, you need to be dining, too.
SekiheiOh, right!
Kase
Even starters work, as starters are a part of the meal. It’s because the meal has begun. In Korea and Japan, we enjoy drinking before dining. That’s because we havesmall snacks to munch on.
SekiheiIt’s not dinner per se: it’s snacks, tsumami.
Kase
In Japan and Korea, we put out snacks to bring out the best in the drinks. In Korean, they call snacks “anju.” It’s the same thing as the snacks we put out in Japan.
Sekihei
In China, whatever it is, ultimately it’s all about the food. What that means is, it’scompletely different on whether we put the emphasis on drinking or put the emphasison eating.
That’s why, when you take Chinese people to a bar in Ginza, it’s just not enoughfor them. They eat some seedy-looking snacks, have something to drink, and then get
all surprised at how high the bill is.
Sekihei
In China, the substance of the food really varies depending on your social standing. It’s like that in the People’s Republic of China today, too. It’s a kingdom where
Chairman Mao was the first generation Son of Heaven. In Japan, there is not so muchdifference.

• “Chairman Mao” is Hong Xiuquan reborn

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 73

Kase
After Chairman Mao’s death, his personal physician, one of those who had been
by his side, moved to America. He wrote in his memoirs that though several tens of
millions of people starved to death during the Long March, Mao enjoyed extravagant
meals in Zhongnanhai.38 He wrote about the pain in his heart as he ate.
Though Mao had forbidden decadent Western dance and jazz and so forth in the
People’s Republic of China, he had the People’s Liberation Army Band play jazzstandards, and enjoyed dancing with groups of beautiful young women. If a woman
struck his fancy, he escorted her to his bedroom. It was as if Hong Xiuquan had beenreborn. Though Mao forbade the people from playing mahjong, he himself indulged
in the game.
SekiheiRight, right!
Kase
Although everyone is supposed to be equal in the People’s Republic of China, thepeople who are fat have always been — and are even now — the ruling class, and you
can tell that with one look.
Sekihei[Laughs.] That’s right.
Kase
All the other people are slender.
SekiheiWell, then, if you and I went to China, we’d become members of the ruling class!
[Laughs.]
Kase
The first time I was invited to China, the People’s Liberation Army didn’t have
any ranks. Generals, colonels, insignia of rank — they’d junked all of that. Instead,they’d say “division commander” or “leader,” and they’d distinguish high and low by
their duties, like “regimental commander” or “company commander.”When I asked what would happen if the front line on the battlefield was in disorder, I was told they’d be able to tell who mattered by the number of pockets. The lowest soldiers only had two pockets, and above that, the number of pockets gradually
increased.
In addition to that, the cloth and tailoring of the uniforms of the top brass are also
different.
SekiheiIn creating a façade of equality, they gave rise to something farcical.
Kase
38

Zhongnanhai is an area adjacent to the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the crème de la crème of
the Chinese government lives.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Even though Zhou Enlai wore a Mao suit, too, he wore one made of the finest
cloth that was well tailored.
Zhou Enlai was like France’s Joseph Fouché, that incredible schemer from the
French Revolution on through to the reign of Louis XVIII. Fouché was a cruel man
who held the power of life and death over people.
Zhou was worse than Mao. In Mao’s waning years, he hated Zhou; and when
Zhou contracted cancer, Mao wouldn’t let them take Zhou to a hospital.
SekiheiYeah, well, it was mutual. All of them were gangsters. [Laughs.]• The Asahi Shinbun headline as Mao died: “A Great Star
Falls”Kase
The newspaper that could be called foremost in all of Japan is the Asahi Shinbun.
Sekihei
Yes.
Kase
When Chairman Mao died in 1972, the Asahi Shinbun plastered a huge headline
on the front page with white letters outlined in black: “A Great Star Falls.”
Sekihei
Really? A great star falls?!
Kase
I brought with me a copy of the evening edition of the Asashi Shinbun from the
day the late Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei first set foot at Beijing Airport to try tonormalize relations between Japan and China. Look. Here they’ve got a big photo of
the two heads of state shaking hands on the tarmac next to a special JAL plane, next
to a headline with inch-tall letters saying “Japan and China Now Shake Hands.” This
is what it says:
Dateline Beijing on the 25th, special correspondent Nishimura.
How can I express the ponderous, sharp silence of that moment? A silence that didn’t
miss a single sound descended over the whole expansive Beijing Airport. November 25, 1972,
at 11:40 AM, a red carpet waited, laid at the airplane’s gangway. Prime Minister Tanaka, in a
black suit, descended the steps turning slightly to the left and right. He looked to the dazzlingsky and with his mouth set firmly in a straight line, he made his way to Prime Minister Zhou.
.... Is this a dream? No, it is no dream. No, it is unmistakable that the hands of the premiers of Japan and China are firmly clasped together.
In truth, it couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. It’s possible the American and European reporters in the journalist pool must have raised their audacious voices. It felt longer
than it was. It feels like there is nothing making a sound. The bitterness that has continued forforty years came to an end at that moment. I got the feeling in a seeming moment of sudden
giddiness of all the blood and tears shed by both the Japanese and Chinese people over thatlong time rising up to the shimmering bright sunlight....

Reading this now, I’m ashamed for this reporter. The low level of Japanese jour-Japan and China: How Different They Are! 75

nalism!
At the time, the journalist Mizaki Masaharu was working for the publisher
Rōmansha,, and right after this he asked me to write a book for them. This is what I
wrote: “A newspaper reporter, regardless of the situation, must never write of giddiness. We want him to be level-headed. In addition, whether it is Japan or overseas,
reporters are always raising their ‘audacious voices,’ aren’t they?”
SekiheiWhat’s more, he’s missing a fundamental point. Even today, the Japanese mass
media largely ignore serious financial and social problems that can be tied to China,
and they’re putting out “China worship.”
Kase
I’ve said it before, but the first time I was invited to China, I didn’t think I wasdreaming that I was coming face to face with the Empire of Heavenly Peace.
Sekihei[Laughs.] Oh, Mr. Kase. You’re the only one who’s seen through it to see it as the
Empire of Heavenly Peace. Even all those people who’ve seen it don’t understandthat that’s what it is. For me, that’s the point. That’s why I’m really fortunate to beable to talk to you like this.
Kase
After arriving at Beijing Airport, I rode off in the car they’d sent for me, and I
looked out the car’s windows. All I saw were poorly complexioned people dressed inshabby, dark blue Mao suits.
SekiheiIt’s all in the traditions. That’s why Qin Shi Huangdi, the Empire of Heavenly
Peace, and Mao Zedong were all the same thing.

• Belief in the UN began with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs
mistranslation
Kase
Mr. Sekihei, you’ve said that Japan calling the UN the “Kokusai Rengō” — inEnglish the “International Alliance” — is wrong, and that China and Taiwan are correct in calling it, as we would say, the “Rengō Koku,” or “Allied Nations.”
SekiheiYes, right.
Kase“Allied Nations” is correct. North and South Korea both call it that as well.
Though they say it “Yeonhap kkuk.”
On January first, a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt
gathered all the nations fighting Japan in Washington and proposed, “We shall becalled the United Nations.” That’s how it was decided. At that time, the governmenttranslated this as Rengō Koku, or “Allied Nations.”

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The international body that is the United Nations, or as it is now called in Japan,“the International Alliance,” or Kokusai Rengō, was born in San Francisco with
America taking the lead while the battle for Okinawa was being desperately fought.
The requirement to join those United Nations was to be a “peace-loving country” —but they had all issued declarations of war against Japan. [Laughs.]
Until October of 1945, Japanese newspapers correctly translated “United Nations”
as “Rengō Koku.” That grated on the nerves of the Foreign Ministry, though, so they
took a page from the prewar League of Nations — the “Kokusai Renmei” — and they
deliberately mistranslated “United Nations” as “Kokusai Rengō.”Japan’s faith in the UN was born by that mistranslation. If they had left it as
Rengō Koku, probably no one would be worshipping it these days. [Laughs.]
Sekihei
Postwar Japanese polishing up things and renaming them — like “defeat in war”
as “ending a war,” an “occupation army” as a “stationing of troops,” and “forced
Constitution” as a “peace Constitution” — has become a sort of special skill.
[Laughs.]
Kase
I personally think that all the members of the UN should have to come together
wearing the national dress of their people. Of course the Japanese would be kimono,
the Chinese would wear pigtails — no, wait. The uniform of a Confucian scholar. On
their heads they should wear those round caps that represent heaven, and on their feetthose square shoes that represent earth. North and South Korea should wear Korean
costume.... The national character has remained unchanged for 100, 400, or 500 years.
If they did that, everyone would understand the reality of the world.
Sekihei[Laughs.] That would certainly be easier to understand than everyone wearing
suits.
Kase[While eating.] Mr. Sekihei, I shouldn’t let you overeat. You don’t want to getlike me.
SekiheiWhat’s that?
Kase
You shouldn’t get fat like I am. Ladies’ men are all fat. We’re troubled when rivals put on weight. [Laughs.]
Sekihei
Oh, is that so! Well, then, I’m going to do my best to out-fat you!
Kase
In the PRC, those who get fat are the leadership.

• Beautiful confections were born out of the freedom ofJapanese womenJapan and China: How Different They Are! 77

Kase
The confections have come out now. You know, only Japan and European cultures are the ones who make the world’s most beautiful and sublime confections.
China has moon cakes and so on, but it’s an unfavorable comparison when we
look at them. It’s a shame, too, since they’re that fanatical about cooking.
There are no decent confections in Korea, either. India doesn’t have any, and there
are none in the Middle East. All the way from China to the Middle East, it’s just thesame.
As you know, it’s been a study of mine to see why that’s so. [Laughs.] It’s because in Japan and Europe, women are free to go out and about.
Sekihei
They had the high status.
Kase
Women were able to go out and meet up with each other. Since women had footbinding in China, they couldn’t readily go out freely. And in Korea, with the exception of visiting the family graves, the wives and daughters of the yangban were hardly
ever allowed out.
In China, bound feet were seen as like little gold lotuses, so they were called jínlìn
(“golden lotus”), and they were as pretty as bamboo shoots in the springtime, andwere called chūnsŭn (“spring bamboo shoots”). They thought of a woman’s artificially small foot as beautiful.
SekiheiThat’s atrocious.
Kase
It is atrocious. And they castrated men to make them eunuchs. A lot of people
died trying for that. Only about five in ten survived the process.
As for the bound feet, many women died from inflammation or suppuration.
Korea copied their Song Chinese overlords, so until the Japanese annexation of
Korea, there were eunuchs at the Joseon court. Every year, the Korean court presented
many eunuchs and gisaeng39 to China.
There are some historians who maintain that a [Korean] horse-rider tribe subjugated Japan. There was nothing of the sort, though. As evidence, there is absolutely
no horse furniture to be found in Japanese tombs of the period. That there was not asingle eunuch is also a piece of evidence. There was no introduction to Japan of a eunuch system as there was no cattle-raising culture, either.
There was no castration of horses or cattle in Japan. Pure things are important inJapan, and there was no harm made to nature.
SekiheiTaking eunuchs to be impure shows the purity of the Japanese heart.

• Confucius ate human flesh in a paste every day
Kase
39

Simply defined, gisaeng were female entertainers trained in the fine arts, poetry, singing, etc.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

I first thought that Confucianism was bogus when I saw that, according to Chinese
historical records, Confucius ate human flesh every day. It was called jiàng; that is, it
was a made into a paste.
SekiheiThat must be fairly tasty. Not that I’ve ever had any. [Laughs.]
Kase
For Confucius, the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, and so on, were things
for those of the ruling classes.
Sekihei
There was a sense that the people who were eaten just weren’t considered people.
Kase
Confucius’ favorite disciple was Zi Lu. According to Chinese records, Zi Lu lost a
dispute and was eaten by his disputant.
Sekihei
Ah! He was made into human miso.
Kase
At one time, I was writing about Confucianism, and there’s a place in Saitama
prefecture, the Yasuoka Masahiro Memorial Hall....
SekiheiOh, yes. I’ve been there.
Kase
I was asked to go there to give a talk. I emphasized to them that I was going to
speak ill of Confucianism there at their center, and that the original Confucianism wastotally bogus.
Sekihei[Laughs.]
Kase
At the end of my talk, sure enough, Yasuoka’s disciples made a proper bow, andthanked me. “We appreciated your very nice talk.”
Sekihei[Laughs.]
Kase
In Japan, we have the tea ceremony, and in a proper tearoom there is a very small,half-height entrance door for guests which forces them to bend over upon entering.
It is unthinkable that someone like Mao Zedong, Jiang Zemin, or Hu Jintao would
enter through such a door. In Japan, those who stand tall will make themselves small.
SekiheiJapan and China: How Different They Are! 79

Even great warlords like Oda Nobunaga, or the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu — oreven the current prime minister — would do exactly as you’ve described. I rather
doubt Mao would have. If Mao were told, “Please enter via the guest door,” the firstthing Mao would have done would have been to break down the guest door. [Laughs.]• A father’s gift of an English dictionary and a massive kanji
dictionary
Kase
If I may speak of my personal experience, during my middle-school years, I
would often go on walks with my father.
One summer, we were walking by a place with blooming flowers. “These are
poppies,” he said. He usually taught me things that way. The poppy blooms in earlysummer with white and red blossoms.
During the last days of the Qin, there was a great military leader named Xiang Yu.
He had a lover named Yu Ji. He fought a battle against Liu Bang, who was to become
the first emperor of the Han, and lost. You mentioned Liu Bang earlier.
When Xiang Yu told Yu Ji, “From now, you shall serve the Han,” Yu Ji replied,“It is said that one cannot serve two rulers, and a faithful woman must not serve twolords.” And drawing Xiang Yu’s sword, she cut her own throat and died.
When grass began to grow over the place Yu Ji was buried, these beautiful flowers blossomed there amidst the grass. My father told me this story, and said, “That’s
why the formal name of these flowers is gubijinsō”— or in English, “Yu the beauty.”
SekiheiAnd so the beauty Yu was reborn.
Kase
In my third year of middle school, my father told me that I could improve myEnglish ability by using an actual English dictionary rather than a dictionary where
you look up the word in English and get a Japanese translation. So he gave me an
English dictionary and a massive kanji dictionary. I flipped through the kanji dictionary, and it was jam-packed with difficult characters. Was I blown away.
It explained the way kanji were made, though, and it had explanations of the characters....
SekiheiYup, they have those.
Kase
As I looked over the explanations for the characters, I thought they were completely fascinating. I spent all my energy reading those explanations. I can still remember them well. For example, it explained that the kanji for “sheep” has two horns
on its head, four legs, and a tail.40 In the kanji for hand,41 the central vertical line is
the palm, and there are one, two three, four, five fingers. That makes up the hand.
40

The kanji is 羊. One can see the head at the top with its horns, the four legs, and the tail pointing
down.
41
The kanji is 手.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

I became the pride of my classmates, and the knowledge spread. The kanji for“speak”42 has a mouth at the bottom, and the four horizontal lines above it represent
the sound coming from the mouth. The noise coming from the mouth is the voice. It’s
just like a speech bubble in a comic book.
Sekihei
I get what you’re saying.
Kase
At that time, I didn’t know it, but the Chinese — and Westerners, too — were absolute chatterboxes. Compared to them, the Japanese people are the most reticent in
the world.
If kanji had been invented in Japan, there would only have been a single horizontal stroke above the mouth. And it would have been a short stroke, too. We’re just notthat talkative. [Laughs.]
Next is “neck.” At the top are three strands of hair, and right below that, goggling,
is an eye. So it really means “head.” In China, they use a different character for theneck, that thing between and connecting the head to the torso.43 For some reason, inJapan we use the first kanji for “madly in love” (kubittake) and “necklace” (kubikazari). We also use it for words meaning “boss” or “chief” (shuSekihei and shuchō).
SekiheiRight. That’s interesting. The kanji for “neck” in shuryō, meaning “chief, or leader,” means “head.” In Chinese, the kanji the Japanese use for neck is not used for thisthing. [Pointing to his neck.] When kanji came to Japan, some of their meanings
changed in various ways.
Kase
My father was a product of his time. He liked the Chinese classics.
Sekihei
Before the war, all the intellectuals in Japan were like that.
Kase
Oh, and Chinese poetry — Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and so on. He had many anthologies
of Chinese poetry. I read most of them during my high school and college years.

• Laozi’s “small country, small population” and his
diametrical opposite: the Chinese Communist Party
Kase
Laozi is a Chinese philosopher who I have an interest in. And Zhuangzi. There42

The kanji is 言.
The kanji for “neck” as used in Japan being talked about is 首 and is pronounced kubi in Japaneseand qiú in Chinese. The other character in use in China for neck (also pronounced kubi in Japanese, butjĭng in Chinese) is 頸. “Head” is 頭. The kanji 首 is also mentioned in several compound words, where
it is pronounced with the Sino–Japanese reading shu (e.g., shuSekihei 首席 and shuchō 首長).
43

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 81

was Laozi’s famous “small country, small population.” It was his ideal state. Since
there would be no want, there would be no using of any machines. Even if there werechariots and boats, no one would ride them.
SekiheiYes, right. There would be no use for “conveniences of civilization.”Kase
And therefore, military armaments...
Sekihei
Wouldn’t be needed.
Kase
And there would be no coming and going between neighboring countries.
SekiheiThat’s right.
Kase
The neighboring country...
Sekihei
The sound of birds.
Kase
Right, they’re so close you can hear their chickens clucking and their dogs barking.
SekiheiAnd they never get together.
Kase
I dislike international exchange and internationalization. I think it undermines
people’s spirit.... [Laughs.] I think it’s also better not to be able to understand a foreign language. In today’s world, Japan has to go out so it can eat, but that’s a necessary evil.
One should avoid international travel as much as possible. And then we have
Laozi’s teachings — we shouldn’t fiddle with his ideology.
SekiheiBut Mr. Kase, Laozi’s posterity, the Chinese Communist Party, are doing the exact opposite of everything he said. [Laughs.]
Kase
After him came Zhuangzi, and their ideas were combined, and came to be called
the Lao-Zhuang ideology. Laozi, you know, was a man who lived in the time of Confucius.
Sekihei82

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Right, and there’s a legend that says that Confucius asked Laozi to instruct him on
some things.
Kase
It’s written in Records of the Grand Historian, the Shiji, yes. That legend of Laozi
appears in Shiji. I’ve read it, and it said Confucius was younger than Laozi. I don’tknow whether it was actually based on any historical truth.
SekiheiRight, we don’t know. But for what it’s worth, there is such a story.
Kase
I like what Laozi said. From time to time, I admonish myself. [Laughs.]“Life and death are two faces of the same coin” and “keep to your poverty andyou will reach fifty.” That last one preaches that it’s better to be poor.
“To attain comfort, do not be comfortable; to attain renown, do not be renowned”— this tells us riches and fame are fortuitous things, they are nothing but relative
things. It’s like, the desire for a worldly life is really something vulgar, so your heart
should be made one of poverty.
SekiheiYes, but of course it would be impossible to adapt such a social view and such aview of the state as advocated by Laozi to present-day society. But you know, I reallywish Hu Jintao and those others would study even a little bit of that ideology of
Laozi’s that you mentioned.
A small state with a small population and no military armaments. If they were to
take it from Laozi, I think both people and society would be happier.
If the Communist Party leadership of the People’s Republic of China were to seriously attempt to realize even just a bit of Laozi’s philosophy, the Chinese people
would all be happy. Unfortunately, though, they’ve taken a diametrically opposite position.

• A Lao-Zhuang parable: “the fat boar”
SekiheiYou’ve already mentioned the Lao-Zhuang ideology. Its most attractive points are
its idleness and its frankness.
Kase
Laozi valued disinterest and quiet. He said there is no artificiality in nature.

Sekihei
I have to wonder if Japan’s samurai didn’t inherit that frankness long ago.
Kase

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 83

Laozi’s ideology was very close to Japan’s concepts of wabi and sabi,44 you know.
Sekihei
Oh, I see, I see! Right! With randomness, the result is we get the birth of wabi andsabi! It’s all done without the input of human hands.
You know, there’s a parable that Zhuangzi often used. In this forest, there lived aboar. Every day he was covered in dirt and was filthy. There were days he ate, anddays he didn’t eat. But Zhuangzi said that this boar was happy. He was in the forest,in nature, living an idle life. Doing whatever he wanted.
One day, the boar was captured by someone. In captivity, at first, the owner gave
him delicious feed every day. The boar was happy. “How fortunate that I wascaught,” he thought.
One day, out of nowhere, the owner showed up and he put the boar in a bathtuband cleaned him up nicely. The boar was beyond thrilled. He had never been so clean
in his entire life. [Laughs.]
Then the owner came again! This time, he put a beautiful robe on the boar. The
boar was beside himself. “I’ve never been this happy!”
You know what happened the next day? That boar was sacrificed!
It was for the sacrifice that he was given good things to eat, got washed, and was
dressed in fine clothing. At the end, the boar thought, “Oh, I’ve been such a fool!”
What did Zhuangzi mean in telling this tale? He used it to show that people were
full of desires. They want to eat good things. They want to wear fine clothing. If you
go on that way, in the end, you’ll live a life where you can only end up being someone’s sacrifice. The wisdom is deep in Zhuangzi’s stories, isn’t it?
Kase
It’s like that with today’s consumer economy. We are that boar.
SekiheiRight. With our present capitalism and consumer economy, it’s exactly like that.
Kase
Lao-Zhuang ideology is completely incompatible with Confucianism, isn’t it?
SekiheiYes. It’s the total antithesis of Confucianism.
There’s something interesting, though. Long ago, Chinese intellectuals were Confucian in outward appearance. Confucianism was their façade. Their real nature,
though, was Lao-Zhuang.
That’s why the intellectuals long ago, when they came to power or entered government service, all spoke of Confucianism. When they were out of office, when they
couldn’t do anything, when they’d retired or whatever, they played in Laozi’s garden.
They enjoyed themselves.
And there’s one more interesting thing. When those old Chinese intellectuals werereading Confucius’ Analects from childhood, they were setting up that Confucian façade. But when they were making hanging scrolls or decorating their rooms, no one
was writing down sayings from the Analects. It was all Lao-Zhuang.
44

Wabi and sabi are two paired aesthetic concepts that emphasize simplicity, naturalness, austerity,
rusticity, and so on. It may be considered as “natural simplicity” or “flawed beauty.”

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Confucius and the Lao-Zhuang ideology were in confrontation. Among the intellectuals, when they were writing hanging scrolls and giving them as gifts and so forth,they were all Lao–Zhuang sayings. In their heart-of-hearts, they really liked LaoZhuang best.
Kase
Be that as it may, it totally failed to become the ideology to regulate conduct.
SekiheiRight, there’s that, too.
Kase
For example, there is a proverb of Laozi’s: “who places himself in the backgroundwill find himself in the foreground.” There’s also “good fortune brings calamity, andin calamity lies good fortune.”
SekiheiThat’s right.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 85— Chapter Seven —A Spiritual Culture Cannot Grow underan Overly Brutal Government• “Wisdom and self-preservation” camouflages self-interest
Kase
My dad had a copy of the Dao De Jing by Laozi. It was a very short book.
SekiheiIt’s short, too — only 5,000 characters long.
Kase
Yeah, it’s only about 5,300 characters. There was a translation of it that I readwhen I was in high school. I admired the Dao De Jing and thought of it as a set ofprecepts for living. There’s that aphorism: “wisdom and self-preservation.”
SekiheiOh, yes — “míng zhé băo shēn.” It’s a behavioral principal of the Chinese intellectual.
Kase
If your senses become clear, you can protect your body. The current Communist
Chinese leadership also say such a thing, but it is not something achieved through morality. Rather, it’s just ultimately used as conventional wisdom on how to get by inlife.
SekiheiThat’s right.
Kase
What that means, though, is that their real intention is using Confucianism.
Sekihei
Really? That’s interesting. There are two sides to what Laozi is saying there.
There’s the plain intent, and then there’s the other one: the art of living well in society
without taking any risks.
The thing is, the samurai of Japan inherited the... the integrity, that is that “plain
intent” part of it, but they did not adopt Laozi’s other side: the crafty, cunning side.
The self-preservation side — that saving yourself at all costs — was what the Lao–
Zuang school emphasized, and that was the aspect that the Chinese followed. No surprise, though. China is a political society.
Why did the Chinese intellectuals gratefully buy into the art of self-preservation?
Because their politics have always been excessively cruel. It was a world where you

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

might get killed right away for just making the slightest mistake.
Speaking with you now, it just now occurred to me that there are two different
parts — the Laozi of Japan and the Laozi of China.
Kase
The Lao–Zuang ideology has had a strong influence on the Japanese.
Sekihei
I believe so. It’s tied in with the ideals of bushidō.
Kase
Confucianism had great power during the Western and Eastern Han dynasties.45 In
subsequent dynasties, Confucianism was in decline for a bit, and the Lao-Zhuang ideology was popular.
SekiheiThat would be during the time of the Northern Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties.46
For a time, Confucianism was extolled and became the dominant doctrine during
the Western and Eastern Han. As China fell into civil war, however, people became
disenchanted with Confucianism. Literati and poets of the Wei and Jin felt that such athing was just a façade meant to deceive people.
Kase
Buddhism also came into China from India during this period and spread out far
and wide along with the Lao–Zuang ideology. Though they called Confucianism amoral ideology, they used its beautiful surface dressing to camouflage their selfinterest.
SekiheiThat’s right. The people of the Wei and Jin saw right through that. That’s why
there were so many people like the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 47 and manyother different people who were brimming with stubborn individuality during theNorthern Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties.
Every day these people would do the same seemingly pointless things over andover. For example, there was this one fellow, one of the Seven Sages, Ruan Ji. He
traveled for 300 kilometers to pay a visit on a friend. Then, just as he reached the45

The Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) was created on the ashes of the Qin by the rebel leader Liu Bang.
The four-century regime is considered a golden age in Chinese history. It is divided generally into twoparts: the Western Han and the Eastern Han. The Western Han (206 BC–AD 9) was a period of consolidation and expansion of power. After a usurpation of power by a court official created the short-lived
Xin dynasty (9 BC–AD 23), the Han dynasty regained power and moved their court east, earning them
the name Eastern Han (25 BC–AD 220).
46
The Northern and Southern States Dynasties period (420–589) was an age of civil war, where rival
dynasties quickly rose and fell, with some even ruling parts of China at the same time. The Northern
Wei dynasty (386–535) existed concurrently with the Jin, which is broken into a Western Jin (265–316) and an Eastern Jin (317–420). The Wei itself would break into an Eastern Wei (534–550) and aWestern Wei (535-556).
47
The “Seven Sages” were a group of Daoist Qingtan scholars, writers, and musicians who got together in the third century. They were linked to the Daoist state of the Cao Wei, and feared the avowedly
Confucian Jin state. Their works celebrated personal freedom and criticized the court.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 87

gates of his friend’s house, he thought, “Meh. I’ll just go home.” So, without seeing
his friend, he turned around and went home. [Laughs.]
Ruan Ji said, “I had already more than expressed my desire to visit; after that,whether we met or not was of no concern.”
Kase
Ruan Ji and the other six gamboled in the bamboo grove, rejected conventionalmanners, and indulged themselves in heavy drinking. Confucianism has continued tothis day in China, forcing everyone into a rigid mold and crushing their individuality.
China is still like that today. That’s why China is still an unchanging Confuciansociety.

• Japanese leaders who were deceived by “In spring nights I
sleep past daybreak”
Kase
We were made to dutifully study kanbun48 in school. If you’re Japanese, you haveto know the poem “Spring Dawn” by Meng Haoran,49 which begins “In spring nights
I sleep past daybreak.”50 Even well before the start of the Meiji period, kanbun wasseen as a part of one’s fundamental accomplishments.
Then, getting back to our compulsory education, Li Bai’s 51 “Thoughts on a Still
Night” was also one of those we had to learn.
SekiheiYes, yes!
Kase
Even now I still remember it. “I raise my head and look at the bright moon / I
lower my head and think of home.”
Then there are the words of Tao Yuanming: 52 “Returning home — the fields arenigh to ruin. Somehow, I must return home.”
Tao Yuanming is called a pastoral poet. Seeking nothing but things that weregood, he took up a hoe and spade and tilled the ground and he became a mere farmer
with no connection to Society.
SekiheiThat’s a very beautiful poem.
Kase
48

Kanbun, literally “Han text,” is Classical Chinese literature as read in Japanese.
Meng Haoran (691–740) was one of the major Tang-era poets. As a bureaucrat he was a failure, but
as a poet he earned great fame in writing of his birthplace.
50
The poem that Kase quotes begins 春眠不覺曉 (chūn mián bù jué xiăo). The kanbun rendering inJapanese is 春眠暁を覚えず (shunmin akatsuki o oboezu). It is variously translated into English as“Oversleeping in spring I missed the dawn,” “I can barely wake up in spring slumber,” “I slept in thespring night so well I didn’t know it was dawn,” “Sleeping, not knowing it’s morning,” etc.
51
Li Bai (701–762) is also known as Li Po. He is possibly the most famous of the Tang-era poets, andabout a thousand of his poems survive. He is particularly famous for his poetry extolling the pleasuresof drinking.
52
Tao Yuanming (365–427) is also known as Tao Qian. He idolized the pastoral life, and this is reflected in his oeuvre.
49

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

I can still remember the beginning. In a different poem — one also loved by theJapanese — Tao Yuanming said, “In courtyard before my door is no rubbish nor
mess; in the open I take my leisure.”
SekiheiThis is interesting, too. You know, those Chinese poets whose work is also widely
made to be read in Japan.... By and large they’re folks who follow the Lao–Zuang
ideology.
Kase
Japanese admire the Tang dynasty. That’s because the Tang poets liked peacefulnature without wars.
The Daoists’ ideology of “calmness and self-control” and “when the great is eventhe small are hale” — meaning “when governance is fair and even, the populace will
be cultured” — fit in with Japanese tastes.
SekiheiThat’s right. During the Tang and Song dynasties, poets who had been forced outof the political makeup or estranged from power popped up in great numbers. Li Bai
was one of them.
Kase
Tang and Song poets, in particular, praised wine.
Sekihei
The thing is, while drinking, you could break out of the world of the bureaucrat alittle bit. It was an escape. That’s why wine and poetry are closely connected in China.

• 3,000 years a “paradise for government officials”
Kase
Since my father had a large collection of Chinese poetry anthologies, I would readthem. When I did, I thought, what a splendid thing wine must be. So when I grew up,
wine became my friend. [Laughs.]
Tao Yuanming had been a government official, too. Something interesting about
China that they don’t let other countries see is that, when you speak about China,
you’re talking about government officials. There is no other country where the officials so much had their own way — no matter what period you’re talking about —than China.
Sekihei
There was no path available to intellectuals but that of becoming government officials.
Kase
That’s right. Even today, the most exalted people are government officials.
Sekihei
They try the hardest.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 89

Kase
Good grief. For over 3,000 years, not a thing has changed.
SekiheiTrue. You’ve just pointed out something incredibly important. During the Edo period, there were scads of cultured people in Japan who were free and who weren’tsamurai, right?
Bashō,53 Chikamatsu Monzaemon,54 Ōta Nanpo,55 all kinds of Confucian scholars— all of them were like that. You’d get money from this domain to teach here, andafter that you’d move to that domain there. There were also many free people who
were, so to speak, standing out as “the opposition.”
In China, it was like that until the fall of the Qing — no, wait, strike that — even
until the People’s Republic of China now, but free speech and people standing out as
the opposition were not tolerated.
The period of Mao Zedong, in particular, was that way. All the intellectuals wereabsorbed into the political force. The only thing for them was to become the hands
and feet of the emperor.
Kase
In the whole world, the only place where virtually all the poets were government
officials....
Sekihei
Was China.
Kase
A paradise for government officials. [Laughs.] That is the distinctive peculiarityof China. Tao Yuanming, for example, worked as the director of the educational administration.
Sekihei
What today we might consider the minister of culture.
Kase
He also served as a staff officer in the town militia. Finally, he worked as chief of
his locality.
Ultimately, he said that a simple life in the country was best, so he returned to thefields of his youth. That was where his words about “returning home” came in.
SekiheiRight. For him, becoming an intellectual meant he first had to leave his positionsof government service. The significance of this is that historically there was no free
literary world independent of governmental authority in China. There was virtually
53

Bashō (1644–1694) is possibly Japan’s best known poet internationally. He is considered a master ofthe haiku form.
54
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) was a playwright first of the puppet theater (jōruri andbunraku) and later kabuki. He is considered one of the greatest of Japan’s dramatists, and has beencalled “the Shakespeare of Japan.”55
Ōta Nanpō (1749–1823) was a poet and writer of fiction.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

none.

• China gave birth to no Tale of Genjis or Shakespeares
Kase
In Japan, there were many samurai who were also poets. To give a famous example, there was Ōta Dōkan,56 who founded the city of Edo....
SekiheiAnd he also built Edo Castle.
Kase
It was right after the end of the Ōnin War, with Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado. I believe he was the 103rd emperor. Anyway, Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado asked Dōkan,“What kind of house do you live in?” He composed a waka poem and presented it to
the emperor. Taking up his brush, Dōkan fluently wrote:
My humble abode
Adjoins a pine field
Near the sea.
From its eaves
I see Fuji’s peak.
And then there’s the poem Date Masamune57 composed when he looked up at Mt.
Fuji:
Each time I see it,
Mt. Fuji,With its ever-changing scenery,
It is as if I am seeing it
For the very first time.
All the samurai were poets. Poetry was the education of the samurai.
SekiheiIn the case of Japan, in addition to the samurai poets, there were many, many cultured men and Confucian scholars who were not members of the ruling class. In Europe, there were great numbers of such writers who were apart from political power.
In both Europe and Japan there were many free men of talent, but historically in
China, there was traditionally no such society. That’s why there were no independent
poets, men of culture, or masters of calligraphy.
China is a nation of calligraphy, but all the great calligraphers (of whom Wang
Xizhi58 was considered the best) have been government officials up until recently.
56

Ōta Dōkan (1432–1486) ruled the Musashi province from his seat in Edo. He was a warrior, a great
strategist, and a good poet.
57
Date Masamune (1567–1636), also known as “the one-eyed dragon” due to the loss of one eye, was
one of the most powerful daimyō in the north east. He was a great patron of art and culture.
58
Wang Xizhi (303–361) was famous even in his lifetime as a calligrapher (and a master of all formsof script). His work even influences Japanese calligraphy today.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 91

That, too, is a peculiarity of China.
Kase
Bai Juyi59 was the same. He was a near genius, and started writing poetry at theage of five or six. And then there’s the civil service examinations. The first test hepassed was the local-stage examination.
SekiheiThat’s right.
Kase
Then he passed the next test above that, the one at the provincial stage. Then hepassed the civil service test for officials overseeing government appointments anddiscipline. The fourth test was an elite version of the conventional higher civil service
examinations. He took his examinations one after the other without a single stumble.
SekiheiYes, that’s right. He was a heck of a bureaucrat.
I like Chinese poetry, too; but in the literary world, there has been no literatureborn in China capable of moving people all over the world.
For example, you have Shakespeare. Or take Japan’s Tale of Genji. China has
nothing like that.
What I mean is, there is no spirit of freedom without independent literature. For
men of letters, or for bureaucrats, poetry was entertainment. They did the work of abureaucrat and in their spare time, well... they drank and wrote poetry. There was no
scope for a literary world that could plumb the depths of the human soul.

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms is only interesting, but Taleof the Heike describes the Buddhist idea of the evanescenceof life
Sekihei
When you read Tale of the Heike, you get a sense of the deep world of the evanescence of life. There’s really not much like this in Chinese literature. For example,
there’s the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s interesting when you read it, andthere are all these characters who appear in it, but as for deep characters... well....
Kase
Absolutely none.
SekiheiNone. It doesn’t delve into the deep, inner psychological world. But it is interesting.
Kase
It’s the “interesting” like a Hollywood movie spectacular.

59

Bai Juyi (772–846) was a poet whose works often reflected his duties as a provincial governor.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

SekiheiThat’s it exactly! No matter how many times you read Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, it doesn’t make you think of your own soul or the depths of humanity.
When you read Shakespeare, though, or when you read the Tale of Genji, there arethings that touch you. If there’s no independent literary spirit, you just can’t have real
literature.
Kase
It’s because it was a government officials’ paradise.
Sekihei
There’s no helping it. In short, government officials were not of the common people. They existed only to serve the Son of Heaven. In other words, they were nothing
more than knights and rooks and pawns on the political game board. Under the Chinese civil service examination system, “intellectual” equals “bureaucrat.” The only
path for an intellectual was to take and pass the civil service exam and become a bureaucrat. All of them were underlings of the emperor. Poetry and literature were nothing more than mere pastimes of the bureaucrats.
That tradition has continued to this day. For example, there is a governmentestablished organization called the Chinese Writers’ Association. Writers, that is, menof letters, all join this organization and are paid wages by the government. It is a“writer officialdom.”
It’s the invocation of an independent human spirit, though, that creates real literature. As you said a bit ago, they’re all bureaucrats, so from the get-go there’s been no
molding of any independent spirit, or human spirit.
There are exceptions. Li Bai and any number of people worked and tried to extricate themselves from that world.

• Why the Forbidden City’s handicrafts are like acrobatic
displays
Kase
Chinese artworks, too, were the property of the emperor.
SekiheiThat’s so.
Kase
I visited Beijing’s Forbidden City and Taiwan’s National Palace Museum manytimes, and these little, delicate things....
The ridiculous thing was, there were magnifying glasses placed in front of them tolook through.
SekiheiIt’s because they were obsessed with the details.
Kase
Of course it was something presented to the court.
SekiheiJapan and China: How Different They Are! 93

Right, it was tribute to the powers-that-be.
Kase
They’re competing with the skill of their fingers like some performance of an acrobatic troupe just to elicit the reaction, “Wow, you can even do that?” But there’s
absolutely no sense of it as a work of art.
SekiheiThat’s so. It’s a world with no passion for beauty.
It’s the same with Chinese pottery. Let’s consider the world of Japanese ceramics
and tea bowls. The craftsmen express their own colors and shapes. They are expressing the world of their own spirit. For Chinese ceramics, though, historically all thegood pieces were made for the emperor. They weren’t expressing their own humanspirits; they were making things for the emperor. Ultimately, everything in China resolves to the government. It’s a frightening country.
On this point, you said you were going to praise China, but there’s absolutely
nothing to praise about it. [Laughs.]
Kase
No, I’ll praise them. Am I not praising the Lao–Zhuang ideology? The Lao–
Zhuang ideology is good.
Sekihei
Really? It’s a great ideology, but the Chinese people have unfortunately not personally inherited it.
That, too, is the fault of the Son of Heaven. The Son of Heaven is not just any person. He’s a person qualified to eat other people. The solitary protagonist. Everythingis embodied in that one person, and he has the monopoly on morality. He completely
violates the antitrust laws. [Laughs.] That’s why the healthy spirit has been snatchedfrom Chinese society.

• Japanese think “I’ve wronged someone”; Chinese think“someone’s wronged me”
Kase
The Japanese “Japanized” Confucianism. We idealized it and tried to implement it.
To do that, we came to view China, the font of Confucianism, as a more beautiful
country than Japan.
Mistakenly, we believed that China had a better culture. This continued from theEdo period right up to the Shōwa period. Looking through the lens of Japanese-madeConfucianism, however, we just were dreaming on it.
SekiheiTrue. Let me try to put in my own words what you’re saying. The Japanese of thattime had taken in all of the good things about Confucianism from China since way
back. They adopted the spiritual parts that had long ago been forgotten by the Chinese
and they remodeled it through the Japanese spirit, making it into something wonderful.
Until the Meiji period, all the Japanese people followed it. But they never thoughtthat the part that they alone came to hold — the best part — was only Japan’s; they

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always believed that the source was in China.
Alternatively, they were convinced that China had more of that wonderful part
than Japan did.
Kase
Even today, there are many in Japan who are under that impression.
Sekihei
There are. What the Meiji Japanese thought was wonderful was something that,even though it originally had nothing to do with China and had been created in Japan,
and they were convinced that the Chinese still had something even better.
Chinese Confucianism and Japanese Confucianism are now totally different things.
Whenever something happens, a Japanese will think “I have done wrong to someone”; a Chinese will think “someone has done wrong to me.” [Explosive laughter.]KaseIf, for argument’s sake, like Japan at the end of the shogunate and the start of the
Meiji period, Qing China adopted a “self-strengthening movement,” undertook a revision of their laws, adopted Western technologies and organization, and if there had
been someone like Deng Xiaopeng, and if — as with today’s China — the Qing
economy had developed and they had had a strong military power, they would havecrushed such dreams as Japan’s.
Sekihei
I see! That’s how it would have been.
Kase
China was called “the sick man of Asia.” It was very weak, so we were unawareof China’s disappointing side.
SekiheiOn the other hand, I feel sorry for China. They thought that they were the greatest
country in the world.
Kase
We didn’t know anything of China but what we could get from writing with thesame characters.
In high school and college, I read George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, André
Gide’s Retour de l’U.R.S.S., Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and other books to
get an understanding of socialism. After reading this and that, I came to realize veryclearly that communism and socialism were nothing more than a con.
I also burned through the complete works of Marx and Engels. It was tedious going and... well, it was boring.
As I read them, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace popped up. Marx and Engels
praised the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, saying that it was the leader in socialism
born in Asia.
SekiheiRight.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 95• Mao Zedong, Marx, and Engels all highly praised the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace
Kase
Of course, to the Qing court, Hong Xiuquan was a traitor, but Sun Yat-sen,
Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong all valued the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
Sekihei
They all thought they were successors to it.
Kase
Marx and Engels wrote that the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace was the first to implement socialism.
SekiheiThat was a complete mistake, too.
Kase
Because of all that, I have an interest in the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. It
strongly resembles the Chinese Communist Party. Both championed the cause rescuing the masses from corrupt government officials.
The People’s Liberation Army is also a reincarnation of the Kingdom of Heavenly
Peace, and as such, military regulations are strict. They absolutely forbid looting andmaking personal collections. They were also strict concerning sexuality.
SekiheiRight, they were incredibly strict.
Kase
In the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, they totally disapproved of personal possessions. The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom made China into a commune.
Sekihei
It did, indeed.
Kase
As I said before, when I was first invited to China, I thought I’d landed in Hong
Xiuquan’s Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
Sekihei[Laughs.] The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace and Mao Zedong were the same — no
doubt about it. Military discipline was strict in the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, andthere were restrictions on sexual relations. Even if you were married, you weren’t allowed to live together.
KaseYes, but after establishing their capital in Nanjing, Hong Xiuquan and the top
leadership were the only ones who gave into dissolute sexuality and indulged in every
luxury to their heart’s content.

96Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Sekihei
The PRC’s Mao Zedong and the Kingdom of Heavenly’ Peace’s Hong Xiuquan— two peas from the same pod.
Kase
China has much in common with the West. They’re pushy with their ideas, andare clear about who’s friend and who’s foe. And they don’t mind committing massmurder.
Europe, too, has a history of rivers of blood. And their kings — they were absolute rulers. And their cities were encompassed by tall, deep castellated walls, like
China.

• The Germanic custom of cannibalism is the Catholic
Eucharist
Kase
The origin of Christianity is in Judaism. Some scholars still debate whether Jesus
even lived at all, though. Christianity crossed the Mediterranean and with its spreadthroughout Europe became a world religion.
SekiheiRight.
Kase
Even now in the Catholic Church, they have something called “the Eucharist.”
During the Mass, the priest says, “Jesus said, ‘This is my blood,’” and drinks some
red wine. This red wine is symbolic of Christ’s blood.
SekiheiRight.
Kase
In the Eucharist, saying, “the body of Christ,” the priest places a bread wafer,
symbolizing Christ’s flesh, on the tongue of the faithful.
Sekihei
I see.
Kase
In Judaism, however, blood is an absolute religious taboo. In Judaism, the bloodof animals must not be consumed, and so of course the blood of people must not bedrunk. In kosher cooking, the blood is completely drained from the meat.
Sekihei
Really?
Kase
Whether sheep or cattle, after slaughtering and after completely draining off theJapan and China: How Different They Are! 97

blood, they can be eaten. We would think that wouldn’t be too tasty, though.
Sekihei[Laughs.] I probably wouldn’t like it, either.
Kase
When Christianity crossed into Europe, the Germanic tribes were practicing cannibalism. There were many cases where Christian holy days were the continuation ofEuropean polytheistic holy days. It was syncretism with the polytheism that had lasted
to that point.
Celebrating Christmas by putting up an evergreen tree, too, comes from a Germanic custom. In Israel, they didn’t get snow or have evergreens. There are scholars
who argue that the European practice of cannibalism merged with the Eucharist where“body and blood” are eaten.
Sekihei
Really.
Kase
It’s atrocious that there were still castrati at the Vatican until the nineteenth century.
SekiheiAnd the implication is that there is an omnipotent God, and there is an omnipotent
emperor. It’s the same.
Kase
Europe and China are really close, aren’t they?
Sekihei
They sure are. As to the monopoly on morality, in Europe, it’s Christ.
Kase
And Christ’s representative on Earth is the pope.
Sekihei
The pope! In China, it would be the Emperor. The idea is terrifying. The thoughtthat any one person could have a monopoly on morality is truly terrifying.
Kase
For a long time in Europe, kings and emperors ruled by what was called “divineright.” They claimed to rule as God’s representative. In China, the Son of Heaven receive the mandate of heaven from Tiandi, the god of heaven.
SekiheiThat’s right.

• Japan’s emperor practices Laozi’s “heaven is unavaricious”
Sekihei98

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

You know, what I think that means is that Japan is the most moderate of all. Japannever had a supreme being.
The emperor has never issued an absolute order to his people. And the Japanesepeople don’t serve the emperor like the people of Europe or China serve the pope oremperor. Rather, Japan’s emperor works as hard as he can to serve the people.
Kase
The present emperor is the 125th in his line. For ages it’s been said that, “there isno ‘self’ for the emperor.” A selfish spirit would just not do.
SekiheiThat’s right. He has no holidays or assets. This is a phenomenon unique to Japan.
And that’s why there’s an unbroken line of emperors.
And with that, I return to Laozi. Until Japan was defeated in the Second World
War, the emperor’s birthday was called “tenchō setsu.” The word tenchō comes from
Laozi.
Its meaning, so to speak, is that heaven (ten) is eternal (chō). Why did Laozi saythat heaven was eternal? Because heaven has no avariciousness. Because it has no
selfish spirit. Heaven is eternal. Laozi is appealing to unavariciousness. If you havewants, you cannot live long. It whittles down the lifespan, making it a brief existence.
Therefore, what that means is that the Japanese emperor practices Laozi’s teachings on this. What a wonderful, interesting concept!
Kase
The Japanese imperial house, too, has been strongly influenced by China. Era
names and names of the houses of imperial princes are all taken from the Chineseclassics.
Until the Meiji period, the emperor wore Chinese-styled robes replete with embroidered dragons at his enthronement.

• Zen, too, was perfected and shined in Japan
Kase
After Buddhism entered China, Zen was “perfected” during the time of the Tang.
Sekihei
True.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 99

Kase
There was a famous Zen monk named Baizhang Dazhi. 60 When I was young, I
embraced an interest in Zen, and I read up on Chinese Zen.
SekiheiMazu,61 and Linji Yixuan,62 founder of the Linji sect of Zen, were both people ofTang, too.
Kase
The Tang dynasty was really magnificent.
Sekihei
It was magnificent. All sorts of culture and civilization are included in it.
To get back to something we talked about earlier, an interesting phenomenon
about the relationship between Japan and China is that the Chinese people did not put
into practice ideals that were born in China. The Japanese picked them up and did.
It’s like that with everything. Zen is the same, isn’t it? The ones who are seriously
doing Zen now are the Japanese.
Kase
Yes, but surely, there is no Zen in China any more.
Sekihei
There is no Zen! The people who are leading figures in expositing Zen are Japanese, like D.T. Suzuki.63 The ones who brought forth the Zen philosophy were Japanese. Now, the only ones doing Zen in Kamakura and at Gozan and Jussatsu in Kyoto
are Japanese. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
You could say this is one of the rules of history. It is said that the culture still remains in the frontiers, but the highest spiritual ideas born in China are not practiced
by the Chinese. Who is doing it? The Japanese, off to their east. That’s who.
Kase
There is a saying in China: “In Buddism there’s the void; in the Dao there’s thenothing.” The only place where there are both of these, though, is Japan.
Sekihei
Only Japan.

60

Baizhang Huahihai (720–814). In Japanese, he is called Hyakujo Ekai. He was awarded the nameDazhi Juezheng (“great learning enlightenment witness”) after death.
61
Mazu Daoyi (709–788). In Japanese, he is called Baso Dōitsu.
62
Linji Yixuan is known as Rinzai in Japanese, as is the sect of Zen that bears his name.
63
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki (1870–1966) was a Japanese author of works on Buddhism, Zen, and Far
Eastern philosophy. He was born Teitarō Suzuki and given the name Daisetsu by his Zen master.

100

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei• An episode of Liu Bei and of the brute Cao Cao in Romanceof the Three Kingdoms
SekiheiTaking the example of the Heike Monogatari that you brought up a bit ago, theChinese equivalent is, of course, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The thing is, no matter how I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I get no senseof the evanescence of life. It tells that, in a world of greed, of course the strongest
greedy guy is going to win.
Kase
The first time I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms was in my first or second
year of high school. Something that really surprised me was when the protagonist, Liu
Bei, loses a battle in the area, wonders around a bit, and then a young hunter lets him
stay the night at his home.
SekiheiYes, that’s in there.
Kase
And then after receiving great hospitality, he plans to depart the next morning, butwhen he peeks into the next room, he sees the young wife of his host dead — butchered. He presses the hunter for an explanation, and the latter replies through his tears,“to offer proper hospitality to you, I killed my wife and fed you with her meat.”
The book then says that Liu Bei was moved. So what does he tell the hunter?
“This is an admirable thing. When I have won and rule the land, come to me and I
will raise you up.”
I read Yoshikawa Eiji’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and right after this
there’s a long footnote. Yoshikawa debated with himself whether he should include
this passage, but he said, since it was in the original, there was nothing he could do
but include it. Then he wrote, “it’s a reference to understand the Han people.”
Sekihei[Laughs.] Oh, it’s a reference.
There’s another interesting story, one about Cao Cao. One time, defeated in a political strife, he fled alone and went to the home of the family of an old friend where
he was welcomed. The brothers of the family go to the kitchen to discuss preparing abanquet for Cao Cao. They bind a pig, and discuss how to prepare it: whether theyshould behead it, disembowel it, and where would it be best to cut it, and so on.
Perking his ears up, Cao Cao hears this. Cao Cao is a man of deep distrust, and iscertain that it is he they are talking about killing.
Kase[Loud laugh.]
SekiheiHe thinks, “they’re going to cut off my head? Well, then, I’ll have to do them infirst.” Cao Cao takes his sword and barges into the kitchen and kills all three brothers
right off. After killing them, he notices the pig tied up there. “Ah, that’s what that was
all about,” and for the first time he realizes his mistake.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 101

Up to that point, it was fine. The problem was that the head of the house had gone
off to buy wine to welcome Cao Cao. On his way back, carrying the wine, he runs
into Cao Cao, who has fled the house.
He asks, “Cao Cao, what has happened? My sons are cooking some pork rightnow, and I’m bringing back the wine so we can welcome you properly. Why are youleaving so soon?”
What did Cao Cao do next? Without a word, he cut the man in half.
Then he says, “I’ve just completed the evil thing I started. If I let the father live,
and he returned home, when he saw that his sons had been killed he would certainly
have become angry. He would go get the government forces and then come after me.
So I had to kill him.”
That’s the Chinese ethic. If you’re going to do something evil, do something thoroughly evil.

• Chinese history is the ideal of thorough evil
SekiheiIn short, “whatever bad that I do to the realm doesn’t matter; however, the realm
had better not do anything bad to me.” Chinese history is this ideal of thorough evil.
Kase
That’s how the People’s Republic of China is today, too.
SekiheiYes, exactly! “We don’t care how bad a thing we do all around the world, but theworld had better not do anything bad to us.” That the thorough logic of Cao Cao.
What’s interesting, though, is that neither the Chinese nor Japanese can bring themselves to hate Cao Cao.
Kase
It’s like a story in a comic book. You’re right.
SekiheiThat’s right. [Laughs.] No one can hate such a great villain. They just can’t hatehim. In other words, the guy just cheerfully does these horrible things. I guess it’s because no matter how evil a thing he does, he does it as if it’s perfectly normal, so hecan’t make you hate him.
Mao Zedong is the same. If he did some extremely evil thing, contrarily, he became a good guy or a hero. It becomes that monopoly on morality. [Laughs.] This is afrightening world.
In Japan, isn’t what Oda Nobunaga64 was criticized for that he didn’t thoroughly
do evil things? [Laughs.]
It was half-assed, so he was made a villain.

64

Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) was a provincial warlord who managed to bring much of Japan under
his control. He was considered particularly brutal and vicious in his conquests. Historical depictions of
him waver between a pragmatist willing to go to whatever extreme was necessary to a cold-blooded
psychopath. He was killed in a rebellion led by one of his own generals. The vagaries of his personality
make him today one of the most popular characters of his era.

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Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

Kase
Japanese can’t thoroughly do evil things. They don’t want to, and they can’t.
Sekihei
They can’t. But people who can’t do bad things can be made into the bad guy inthe end. Those who do thoroughly bad things are made into great men. What kind ofworld is this?
Although the prewar Japanese empire and the Japan of today really didn’t do anything bad, Japan was made into the world’s number one bad guy. This logic really
works.
Kase
About Japan and China, they say “separated by a narrow strait,” and “same scriptand same race,” but the way Japan and China came about and their national characters
are totally different.

• Kabuki, where the lead parts are commoners, vs. Chinese
opera, where they’re the emperor and the court officials
SekiheiIt’s completely different! I want to tell people that they shouldn’t think that theJapanese and Chinese understand each other because we use the same writing system.
Classical Chinese opera and kabuki absolutely and completely do not resemble
one another. The characters that appear in Chinese opera are all emperors or highranking court officials.
Kase
In the West, it’s the same as Chinese opera. The main characters of Chikamatsu
Monzaemon’s works are all commoners, though. Store clerks. Things like that.
Chikamatsu came along a bit more than a hundred years after Shakespeare andthere are those who call him “the Shakespeare of Japan,” but that is just wrong. Mostof the characters in Shakespeare’s plays are royalty and nobility.
In Japan, the commoners had power. That was particularly true in the Edo period.
What this means is that here, too, the West and China closely resembled each other.
Sekihei
They do, indeed. Only Japan has a really individual culture. If you see Chinese
opera, you’d be aghast. From beginning to end, it’s nothing but the emperor and his
officials. There is not one instance where the common folks were treated as people in
China.
The bureaucrats are called “great people” and the commoners are all called “little
people.” Are we really great people or little people? [Laughs.]

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 103— Chapter Eight —Anti-Japanese Activities of the Calculating Chinese• The Yellow race is the most admirable, followed in turn by
the Whites and then the Blacks
Kase
If you don’t mind changing the subject a bit, the anti-Japanese activities of theChinese people are a bit calculating, don’t you think?
Sekihei
They sure are.
Kase
In Japan, we feel uncomfortable when we’re called “the yellow race” — but in
China, the yellow race is the most admirable race in the world. Then come the whites.
The blacks are at the bottom. They’re specifically slighted.
SekiheiTrue. Despite that, if you were to ask why they were anti-Japanese, it’s because
they were frightened of white people, and took a step back. Why are they antiJapanese? “In the first place, it’s because you guys are in Asia and are beneath us, andwithout our permission you went off on your own and joined forces with those whiteguys and left Asia and moved into Europe.” That lack of permission is crucial.
[Laughs.]
Without permission we went off on our own and modernized, and without permission we went off on our own and became a major economic power. All that going off
and doing things on our own volition! [Laughs.]
Kase
China’s anti-Japanese activities began with the May 4th Incident of 1919. In 1919,
the First World War was over, and the Chinese thought Qingdao, a territory leased
and controlled by the losing Germans, would be returned to them; but the Treaty ofParis turned the region over to the Japanese instead. Students were displeased withthat and began to agitate, and that turned into a large-scale anti-Japanese action and it
spread.
The one who tormented the Chinese the most, though, was Britain; and then cameFrance, Russia, and the United States. Japan was only riding on their coat-tails. The
Japanese weren’t the main players — they were only acting in a supporting role, so to
speak.
The thing is, they looked upon Japan, the non-white nation among the great powers, as an extremely weak country. Though they couldn’t get away with it against thestrong “white” countries, they could against Japan. Even their recent anti-Japaneseactivities stem from their viewing of Japan as weak.

104

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

SekiheiRight. Ever since the Opium War China has been put upon by the West. Even
when they were defeated by the West, though, it wasn’t that much of a shock. What
shocked them more was the First Sino–Japanese War. Losing to Japan! But Japan...
Japan used to be a barbarian state!
Losing to that was just unbearable. [Laughs.]
No one really knew where these Westerners came from, and they were like devils
from some strange land. Losing to those foreigners — well, there was just nothingthat could be done. But to Japan! The shock of losing to Japan — How the hell?! —was huge beyond description. [Laughs.]• The sour Sino–Japanese relationship is like the antagonism
between Christianity and Islam
Kase
Looking at the relationship between Japan and China, it seems to be exactly thesame as today’s sour, antagonistic relationship between Christianity and Islam.
SekiheiRight.
Kase
And why is that so? For a long time, the civilization of the Islamic world wasmore advanced than that of the Christian West.
SekiheiThat is so.
Kase
Islam had a golden age. Navigation, health, medicine, mathematics, astronomy,
law, literature, philosophy — everything was more advanced in the Islamic world.
Sekihei
The Islamic world inherited and preserved Greek civilization.
Kase
In Western history, there’s a period that is known as “the Dark Ages.” The authorities are enforcing strict censorship in China today, so I suppose we could call that a
Dark Age, too.
During the Dark Ages of medieval Europe, the Pope was the most powerful person, and the Church imposed its principal doctrines everywhere and put a halt to all
progress in European learning. Heretics to that doctrine were censured or killed. Galileo knew someone in the Vatican, so he was fortunate in that some money was spread
about and he wasn’t killed.
Sekihei
True.
KaseJapan and China: How Different They Are! 105

Islam’s advanced learning, though, spread via the Iberian and Italian peninsulas,
gradually entering Europe and the Renaissance occurred.
One incident that must be considered a critical link in the Renaissance was in
1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg
cathedral, challenging the Pope.
This was the starting point of Protestant Christianity. It was a door that opened inEurope and changed the Dark Ages into an Age of Enlightenment.
History is an interesting thing. The very year before, 1516 was also important inIslam, as that year the Ottoman Turkish army defeated the Mamluk army near Aleppo,
some hundred kilometers north of Damascus. After that, the Ottoman Sultanate expanded across northern Africa, gaining lordship and control over the broad Islamic
world.
Sekihei
I see.
Kase
With the Turks in control of the whole Islamic world, the growth of Islamic culture came to a complete halt. The age of Islamic glory was over. Contrary to Europe,
Islam went from an age of light to an age of darkness. In Europe, rotating on an axis,
they went from darkness to light.
When you go to the Middle East, there’s a superiority complex that’s hard to getpast as Muslims remember the days when the Christian West was behind them andthey in the Islamic world taught them everything from science to literature.
Sekihei
I see...
Kase
Conversely, however, they also have an inferiority complex that’s also hard to getpast. Since the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany during the First World War,upon their loss the empire was dismantled. It was only a short time when compared to
the long Turkish hegemony, but afterwards Britain, France, Italy, and Spain divided
up the Middle East amongst themselves.
The Muslims living in the Islamic world realized for the first time that they had
been defeated by the Christian West, whom they had long looked down on as being
behind them, and this was a wide gulf they could not deal with.
Added to that, there’s this Islamic edition of Sinocentrism that says Islam surpasses everything in the world, and the whole world needs to be brought under Islam.
SekiheiIt’s certain that there are several examples of Sinocentrism all over the world. Butthat belief that you alone are the only one who is right — it’s an awful narrow view.

• Fruitless criticism and discrimination born from an106Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

inferiority complex without reflection
Kase
Islam holds a co-existing difficult-to-eliminate superiority complex and a difficult-to-cure inferiority complex toward Christian Europe and America.
Muslims wonder how the Christian West was able to make such rapid developments. They refuse to see the good aspects and advantages of the West, and they can
only explain how we outstripped them by saying that we are brutal and crafty.
SekiheiSo they’re avoiding looking at reality.
Kase
It’s the same for China, too. They’re just determined not to see Japan’s good
points. They just don’t notice that Japan values harmony, has an ordered society, andhas put forth straightforward efforts.
They just can’t think of reflecting on things. Koreans, being included in the Chinese cultural sphere, are the same.
The sour antagonism of the Christian and Islamic worlds applies exactly to the relationship of China and Japan. It’s so sour that it just chokes them up. But the relationship with China and Japan has only been like that since around the middle of thenineteenth century, only with Japan...
SekiheiAnd without any permission!
Kase
Right. In the middle of the nineteenth century, by the time they realized it, Japan
had shot past them and they weren’t able to catch up. That was when the difficult-toeliminate superiority complex and the difficult-to-cure inferiority complex began toco-exist.
SekiheiBut that’s not all. It gave rise to one more interesting construct.
Chinese don’t know that the good aspects of their real culture and traditions live
on in Japan and they don’t know that they’ve lost the good things themselves. Holding their noses in the air, they think they will always be the best and that they are heirs
to the excellent Chinese civilization, the greatest culture in the world. But it’s an illusion. An illusion that the Japanese have always been taught, from ancient times.
Japan, too, has “committed” its own Japanese illusion. No matter how good Japan
becomes, no matter how splendid, no matter how developed — of course we learned
it all from China long ago!
We just can’t seem to sweep that inferiority complex away.
And that’s despite the fact that Japan has left China in the dust. Yet Japanese thinkthat China somehow, somewhere, is splendid. This two-layered illusion exists between Japan and China.
Like you said, it’s a construct like that inferiority/superiority complex the Arabworld has concerning the Christian West.
It’s impossible to discover a common language within this two-layered illusion.
[Laughs.] I believe this is the conclusion when it comes to Sino–Japanese relations.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 107[Laughs.] It took me twenty years to realize that.

• How do the Chinese — who dislike black people — view
President Obama?
Kase
Why is it that black people are so disliked in China?
Sekihei
They think that blacks have absolutely no civilization.
Kase
Several thousand students demonstrated in Nanjing in 1988. They demanded thatblack exchange students be deported. It went on for several days, spreading to Shanghai and other major cities in China. Some African exchange students were killed,
lynched, and it was a huge thing. Although African exchange students were steadily
attacked by students and other people, the Chinese security officials just stood by andwatched.
An African friend of mine who lived in Beijing and Shanghai told me that when
he would get on a nearly empty bus and sit down, the Chinese person sitting next to
him would make an uncertain face and quickly stand up and move to another seat.
The Chinese internet was horrible toward Condoleeza Rice, the secretary of state
under President Bush. It would have been unthinkable in Japan, but there was nomoderation with them calling her things like “black dog,” “black pig,” “bitch,”“chimpanzee,” “devil,” and “dog shit.”
SekiheiOh, no. That’s their frank impressions being exposed. What it is is, they think
black people, white people, Japanese people — everyone — are all beneath them.
The thing is, white people are strong and they all have to study English, so they
can’t make such frank, hateful expressions about white people.
Next come the Japanese. Well, their abilities are surprising. Seen from a Chinese
viewpoint, Japanese are more or less better than whites.
Where are Japanese better? Japanese can also understand kanji. But if a black person can more or less read kanji, isn’t that some redeeming point there? No, they’re
still less than monkeys in Chinese eyes.
Kase
They must really have problems with Obama having been elected president.
Sekihei
They sure do. They can’t forgive an uncultured monkey coming to their country
and bringing up the Taiwan question and the problem of Tibet.
Koreans are somehow impertinent. Seen from the Chinese point of view, it’s likethey feel, “a long time ago they studied a lot of things under us, and now they’ve become really cheeky.”
But seen from the Chinese perspective, Koreans are still a bit above the Japanese.
They valued the Chinese civilization more than the Japanese and adopted it moreclosely. Up to the Joseon dynasty, Korea was a satellite state of China, so the Koreans108

Kase Hideaki and Sekihei Hei

still understand courtesy as the Chinese see it. [Laughs.]• What the Chinese cannot abide above all: the Japanese
Kase
At the beginning, I mentioned the old man at the Chinese restaurant in Akasaka.
One time, he said that the one thing the Chinese cannot abide above all other things is
the Japanese. In the old system of “either Chinese or barbarian,” the Chinese are themost important, and then comes...
Sekihei
Koreans.
Kase
This is what the old guy said. During the time of Emperor Yang of the Sui, 65 theJapanese embassy of Ono no Imoko came to China bearing that letter with the line,“the place where the sun rises...”Sekihei“The Son of Heaven of the place where the sun rises sends greetings to the Son of
Heaven of the place where the sun sets.”
Kase
Yang was an emperor of the Sui, but after that letter from Shōtoku Taishi, Japannever again entered into that international system that was so central to China.
The old man at the Chinese restaurant said that Japan had been an eyesore to China ever since. That's what he said the Chinese thought of Japan then.
Sekihei
For the Chinese, there’s this sense of “when will we be able to completely doaway with the Japanese?” They want to avenge themselves. Just once they want tobeat Japan until she can’t stand back up.
Such subconscious ideas are reproduced through education. The problem is thepatriotic education that was started by the Japanese during the Edo period. It led tosentiments of nationalism and also a cool-headed national strategy.
Kase
The fearfulness of China was unchanged from the time of Qin Shi Huangdi.

Sekihei
I think so, too.
Kase
65

Emperor Yang (569–618, ruled 604–618) was a great builder of roads and canals and rebuilt theGreat Wall, but his expansion into Korea, Vietnam and other neighboring states, along with his ambitious projects, cost millions of Chinese lives. He was killed by one of his own generals. He is thoughtof as one of the greatest tyrants in Chinese history. His grandson held the throne for less than one year,
and then the Sui fell to the Tang.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 109

That’s because the Chinese Son of Heaven wants to rule every nook and cranny of
the world. After China was bankrupted by communist ideology, the administration’s
dependency on orthodoxy brought about a move from Marxism to nationalism.
SekiheiExactly, they moved toward nationalism.

• China’s patriotic actions are based on bringing othercountries under their control
Kase
Chinese patriotism is not the same as that of other countries. China is not a “country” per se.
SekiheiAnd that is the most profound basis and the most frightening thing.
Kase
It’s not what we usually think of as patriotism. It’s Sinocentricism. If China can’t
control the whole world, they just won’t be satisfied.
Sekihei
Chinese nationalism is different than the usual definition of the term. It’s not nationalism; it’s what could be called “tianxia-ism.”66 In the Chinese view, “the tianxia
is all mine! — everything under the sky is mine!” That’s tianxia-ism.
Kase
To repeat, China isn’t a country. It’s a culture that has a country.
Even today, the Chinese believe that the Chinese culture and civilization are theonly true culture and civilization in the world, and that China is the center of everything. They think there is no culture outside of China. This way of thinking is stillthick in the Chinese DNA. Nothing is nearer or dearer to the hearts of the Chinesethan Chinese culture.
SekiheiThat’s right.
Kase
Even if Chinese move to another country, they don’t assimilate. One-fourth of
Malaysia is made up of people of Chinese descent. There are also many Chinese overseas merchants in Indonesia and other southeast Asian countries.
No matter where they go, though, they form an insular society of Chinese people
and look down on the local populations.
Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as the Olympic torch relay went from Canberra, Australia to Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hong Kong,
66

Tianxia (天下, in Japanese tenka) is a Chinese term literally meaning “[all] under heaven.” It is usually translated as the whole land or realm (based on political reality), but the real all-inclusive nature of
the word clearly indicates that in a larger sense it means the whole world, not just one part of it.

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Chinese overseas merchants beyond count lined the route waving flags, cheering, andwelcoming the torchbearers with wild enthusiasm.
It was the same at Nagano. The only difference was that Japan didn’t have to give
permission to foreigners.
China’s economic development since 1980 was greatly helped by the contributions made by Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and southeast Asian.
Taking India and Russia as examples, however, it is contrastive that we can’t say
the same for Indians or Russians who have moved overseas.
Sekihei
There is nothing more frightening than this tianxia-ism. That’s because they really
believe “everything is ours.” And that means that they think every country in theworld should be a vassal state of China. Today they have Mongolians, Uyghurs, andthe Tibet Autonomous Region. They honestly believe it is only natural that all thepeople in their environs should become autonomous regions in the Chinese empire.
Kase
They calmly use the term “Chinese people” though there is absolutely no conceptof that term in the world. Uyghurs, Mongols, Tibetans, Manchurians, Korean people— they’re all “Chinese.”
Sekihei
If it were just nationalism, it would be fine. Patriotism is usually just loving yourown country. What is loved in tianxia-ism, however, is everything being yours. Whatthat means is, they just can’t “allow” Japan to be.
It’s like they think, “You don’t have our permission. How do you get off doing
things the way you want to?” [Laughs.]• The wonderful sight of a Supreme People’s Assembly
without a single white head
Kase
I think Chinese politicians today are no different from the powerful men of imperial China. It’s a very Confucian state, after all.
SekiheiThat’s true.
Kase
It’s a Confucian state. I’ve discovered something funny, though. I was watching
the Supreme People’s Assembly — what could be called the Chinese parliament —on television. All of the highest leadership was there and there wasn’t a single whitehaired man in the bunch.
Mencius said that the very old should not be given heavy duties, and that theyshould be cared for. [Laughs.] White-haired men should not be burdened with important posts.
SekiheiThat’s why they all dye their hair!

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 111

Kase
It stems from the teachings of Mencius. [Laughs.] Oh, my.
Chinese culture came to rule via kanji and Confucianism. Even though the People’s Republic of China that Chairman Mao led repudiated Confucius and Confucianism, the communist system was supported by Confucianism. That’s why even though
the ideas of Mao Zedong and communism are bankrupt as ideologies, the dictatorial
system didn’t falter in the slightest.
Two or three thousand students and other civilians must have been massacred in
the Tiananmen Gate Incident. That was in 1989. Despite that, a scant ten years later
there was absolutely no deep emotional scar in the Chinese people.
Such a thing would be completely unthinkable in a normal country, and if a politician had caused such a thing he would not have a job and would not be forgiven.
In Confucian politics, the most powerful people have the virtue and the people
just shut up and follow. Chairman Mao was made the avatar of virtue, but it was nothing more than Confucianism clad in the robes of Marxism. In Confucianism, the people were only to be made to obey, and whatever lies were necessary were fine.
SekiheiExactly. Getting back to something we were talking about earlier — if a country
that follows such tianxia-ism has a huge army and nuclear weapons, it could becomea serious thing. For ages, even though it had a different ideology, China lacked thecapability to rule the world — and that was good. Now, however, China is gradually
accumulating that strength. This fact is going to be the cause of great unease in theworld.
Moreover, as each years passes, their military strength is intensifying. The Chinese navy has begun deliberately advancing into the South China Sea and threatening
Japan’s security.
Kase
The little over one century since the Qing empire was defeated by the British has
seen China pass through an “age of humiliation.” Since Deng Xiaoping made theplunge into an open economy in 1978, the “return to the Chinese empire” has begun.
China is now increasing its strength, and it’s like “all roads go through China.”
But I don’t think we will see the realization of a world ruled by China.
SekiheiWell, that’s good, then.

• China’s destiny after the Qing state fell the year after the
Nanjing exhibition, and the Shanghai exposition
Kase
To speak briefly of Expo 2010 Shanghai, three days before its May first opening,

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when I was watching an NHK TV broadcast, I heard the announcer say something
about “China’s first international exposition.” But that was a lie.
SekiheiWhat? Really? It wasn’t the first?
Kase
It wasn’t. I wrote about it three months before in a magazine article. The first international exposition was held starting in June of 1910 in Nanjing.
SekiheiThat was during the Qing dynasty, wasn’t it?
Kase
Right. Fourteen countries — European ones, Japan, America, and so on — took
part. That’s because there weren’t that many independent countries back then. It was a
big spread near the Yangzi River. I made copies of the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun and othernewspapers of the time that I found at the National Diet Library. Many large articles
about the Nanjing Exposition appeared over several days.
The next year, however — 1911 — Sun Yat-sen’s Xinhai Revolution took place.
The Qing empire collapsed and was defeated.
The Chinese people didn’t change for 3,000 years, but they were superstitious.
SekiheiThat's true.
Kase
The Beijing Olympics loaded up on the lucky number eight. They started at
8:08PM on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008. It’s strange that communists
would be superstitious like that.
Sekihei[Laughs.] No, that’s because there isn’t anyone who really believes in communism.
Kase
The Chinese government closed their mouths tightly and didn’t speak a word
about the exposition actually being China’s second international exposition.
Sekihei
I see. Because the year after the first one, the Qing dynasty fell.
Kase
Maybe if they believed that, the Chinese people were also superstitious.
SekiheiSo next year, perhaps, the People’s Republic of China might.... [Laughs.]
Kase
Maybe they think it might collapse.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 113

SekiheiWell, whether it falls next year is neither here nor there. The time Expo 2010
Shanghai is being held is about the same time as was the first exposition, and a lot ofchanges have happened in China economically and socially. First, there’s the exposition itself. When it had been going on for two weeks, the number of attendees at the
Shanghai exposition was less than half of what had been expected.
There’s another phenomenon. In the Shanghai index, the price of Chinese stocks
experienced a sharp drop of eighteen percent since the opening of the exposition. It
became a market celebrating the fall.
And there’s one more. During about the same time the Shanghai expo was held,
the real estate bubble began to burst. There have been many opinions about the average value of Beijing real estate over these two weeks, and there are some who say it
fell ten percent, but there are others who say it was thirty percent.
And there was yet one more serious thing to happen in China about the same timeas the Shanghai exposition. Inflation. It was a drastic rise in prices. Taking vegetables
as an example, it is said prices tripled in the space of one month.
There are now 200 million out of work in China. Inflation has really hit the large
strata of the poor, and it’s possible that the increased prices were due to orders by theauthorities.
Perhaps it’s by divine arrangement. At the same time the Shanghai exposition wasstarting, many changes were coming about in China.

• NHK’s false report of “China’s first international exposition”
Kase
Most extreme was right after the Tiananmen Gate Incident. Many American, Japanese, and European Sinologists predicted the imminent fall of the People’s Republicof China. Train robberies became a frequent occurrence in the provinces about then.
It’s said that at present there are some 100,000 incidents of uprisings in the provinces
each year.
It was like that then, too. There are frequent incidents where people stop the trains
and rob all of the passengers of their valuables and then take off — just like in an
American western.
Sekihei
How has China been able to hold on till now since the Tiananmen Gate Incident?
Because the economy is growing. After this year, though, it’s possible the economy isgoing to go into decline.
The Chinese economy hasn’t been making a real recovery since the outbreak of
the American financial crisis. Thanks to the bubble, on the surface it looks like it’srecovering, but there will be a serious crisis for China when the bubble finally bursts.
When China is hit with a real economic crisis, all their problems will probably
come gushing out all at once. Somehow or another they’ve been doing something tokeep the economy growing while still having all these problems. Moreover, eventhough the economy in China is growing, right in the midst of all this prosperity, tensof thousands of uprisings are still occurring all over the country.
Kase
Nearly 100,000, and those are only the ones that are reported.

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Sekihei
After this year, the economy will wane. When the bubble goes away, social unrest
will increase. Like you said, that first international exposition was a hundred years
ago. Chinese history may make another big change in hundred year increments.
Kase
We can’t have any faith in NHK since they said this was “the first international
exposition held in China” while they knew that it was the second. I recently met someNHK nabobs at a party, and raised an objection: “I’d like to speak frankly aboutsomething...” When they told me, “we meant the first one for this China,” I questioned them again. “What? The Qing dynasty isn’t included with ‘this’ China?” They
calmly replied, “No, it’s not.”Sekihei
Sophistry.
At least seventy million people should have visited Expo 2010 Shanghai, but thisestimate is probably way off.
The historical truth that China held the first international exposition in Nanking
100 years ago and the next year the Qing dynasty fell is giving China premonitions
that China may fall a second time.
You know, I think it’s a really important thing for future relations between China
and Japan that I’ve been able to engage you in this dialogue about China’s true nature
at this important moment.
Kase
People came from all over China to visit the Shanghai exposition, but you know,
folks in China hate the people who live in Shanghai.
SekiheiThat’s true. They say they’re all uppity and rich.
Kase
Jiang Zemin is also from Shanghai.
Sekihei
I think the reason the number of attendees at the Shanghai expo is not what had
been expected may be connected to political struggles with the Shanghai faction.
Why was the number of attendees down? Because everyone expected complementary tickets would be strewn about to all the regional bureaucrats so they could all go
and see the exposition on the country’s dime. The authorities put a brake on that andorders came down that they weren’t going to be allowed to do it, so the bureaucrats
were unable to go.
This is good. It was an omen for the political struggles. It’s a portent that a great
turning point in history is coming with the increasing strain brought about by internal
political struggles in China. [Laughs.]
It’s the importance of that hundred-year cycle. What is the second exposition in
Shanghai foretelling? That’s what I think is important.

Japan and China: How Different They Are! 115• America’s high birth rate wins over the ageing China
Kase
Looking ahead ten or twenty years, if China’s system continues, I think they’ll be
all the more dangerous. Japan has to become a strong country. China won’t throw
down against a powerful opponent. They always sacrifice weak countries. They’reshrewd that way.
SekiheiJapan is meeting a “second invasion of Perry’s fleet” now.
Kase
Let’s look forty years ahead, to 2050. In 2009, the American population was 307
million. By 2050, it will have increased to 400 million. America has a pretty highbirth rate. On top of that, immigrants are moving in steadily.
Sekihei
I see.
Kase
The immigrants to America, Europe, and Japan are all good people with ambitions
to better themselves.
SekiheiWith that, it’s always going to be a young country.
Kase
What is strange about America is its ability to assimilate its immigrants. America
doesn’t discriminate against immigrants as Europe does.
At any rate, in 2050, only a quarter of America’s population will be over sixtyfive. China’s aged population is already rapidly increasing. Those over sixty-five
make up forty-one or forty-two percent of China’s population. In Japan in 2050, they
will make up about thirty-one percent of the population.
America is a country overflowing with energy. In the coming forty years, they
won’t tolerate being beholden to anyone in the world when it comes to scientific andtechnological strength. In military might, too, they are outdistancing all the othercountries.
I don’t know whether the People’s Republic of China has another ten, twenty, or
thirty years. Nevertheless, Japan has completely lost the will for national self defense
under an administration that introduced a public election with the slogan “life rightnow is number one.”
I’m worried that Japan has traded places with where China once was, and now wehave become “the sick man of Asia.”
Sekihei
If things don’t change, there is high danger that Japan may be gobbled up.
Kase
In China, the ageing of the population is a serious problem.

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Sekihei
Ageing and resources. Pollution and environmental problems are serious. There isno other country where water is in such short supply and so polluted, and they have aproblem with the disparity in their increasing population. The Chinese economy will
have to fail at some point.
Kase
That’s because it’s a casino economy.
SekiheiIt’s entirely due to the bubble. Put simply, the Chinese economy actually has no
substance.
Does the country have any industry with an international competitive ability? No,
it does not. Are Chinese cars being sold all over the world? No, they’re not. Are Chinese computers being sold all over the world? No, they’re not. Whatever else we cansay, in the end, what’s there is there because of the feeling of expectation that is the
bubble, and that bubble is going to burst at some point.

• Hey, China — drop the illusions of empire and embrace“small countries, small populations”
SekiheiThis is all why, in the end, I go back to our earlier talk of Laozi. China itself
should abandon those ideas of grand empire from the time of Qin Shi Huangdi and getback to Laozi’s admonitions for “small countries, small populations.”
Kase
I’m all for that!
Sekihei
And I’m all for that, too!
Kase
Looking at history from the viewpoint of the twentieth century, the history of thetwentieth century is a history of the dismantling of empires. In the First World War,the German Empire and their allies the Austro–Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman
Empire lost. The Ottoman Empire controlled a huge amount of territory all throughNorth Africa.
Then, after the Second World War, the British Empire, and the colonial holdingsof France, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and the Japanese Empire, all weredismantled. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and the giant Soviet empire crumbled.
The last remaining empire in the world is the People’s Republic of China, whichkeeps all manner of people under their control by dint of force. It is an empire that isout of date.
In Japan, though, there are loopy people who mistake the People’s Republic ofChina for the People’s Friendly Republic of China. In the Washington Post, there wasJapan and China: How Different They Are! 117

a column that criticized a certain head of state as “increasingly loopy.”67 [Laughs.]
Sekihei[Explosive laugh.] Ah, well. I don’t think there’s a bright future for the world aslong as the Chinese Empire remains intact. Conversely, though, I can’t imagine any
way that empire will be able to continue forever.
Sooner or later the Chinese Empire will be dismantled, and the system in placesince the days of Qin Shi Huangdi will collapse. The people would be happiest if a
Chinese commonwealth, with small countries and small populations, comes about. It
would also be best for the world, too, and China’s nearby countries.
Kase
In my heart I pray that China will cease to be a Confucian state and become a
Lao–Zhuang state.
Sekihei
When that happens we’ll have to share a celebratory drink!

67

Al Kamen, who writes Beltway gossip for the Washington Post, said this in April, 2010: “By far thebiggest loser of the extravaganza was the hapless and (in the opinion of some Obama administration
officials) increasingly loopy Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.”

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Japan and China: How Different They Are! 119— Afterword —I first met Mr. Sekihei Hei right after leaving the Kyoto Institute.
Mr. Sekihei’s discernment profoundly impressed me. Since then, we have become
close.
In March I was asked to give a talk about Chinese history and culture in the Ginza.
The site was a Chinese restaurant.
Mr. Sekihei was seated in the front row.
I was a bit flustered and babbled, “I’ve come here today to talk about China. I’m a
bit discombobulated today since Mr. Sekihei, for whom I’ve long had respect and affection, is seated there, but still — fools rush in and all...” Then I added, “Not meaning Mr. Sekihei, of course...”From my last year of middle school, I was something of a “China junkie.”
There were dozens of volumes of Chinese poetry and publications in my home.
Seized by curiosity and yearning to know about a country I’d never seen, I started
reading them.
After that, I came to be invited to visit China from time to time. I went to learn
about Chinese history and culture in my own way, and I was able to really experience
China. I visited everything from Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to Tibet.
Here, Mr. Sekihei and I are publishing this book of dialogues about China. I wasfortunate in having the opportunity to have Mr. Sekihei as an examiner asking mequestions.
This is the fourth book of mine to take the form of a dialogue. The first was withbiblical scholar Yamamoto Shichihei in the book Isuramu no hassō (“The Islamic
way of thinking”) (Tokuma Shoten, 1979), which has been variously republished in1985 published by Gakushū Kenkyūsha in Yamamoto Shichihei zentaiwa: kami no iru
kuni (“Collected conversations with Yamamoto Shichihei: The country where Godis”) and in 2005 by Shōdensha in Isuramu no yomikata (“How to read Islam”). The
second was Nande Nihon wa kō natta (“How did Japan get like this?”) with Hatano
Akira, the former minister of justice and former superintendant general of the Tokyo
Metropolitan Police, released in 1997 by Kōsaidō Publishing. Third was Okite! Nihon! (“Japan, rise up!”) with leading conservative pundit Watanabe Shōichi, published in 1999 by Takagi Shobō.
I am not a specialist in China. China is a major power and a neighbor, however, so
one has little choice but to be interested in it. Moreover, until my father’s time, astudy of Chinese classics was required, so topics and publications celebrated in China
have been near to me since my tender years.
When thinking of China lately for these dialogues, I came at Mr. Sekihei hard. In
our discussions, Mr. Sekihei was in agreement with my way of seeing things, so thetensions we held just before the conversations were easily relieved afterward.
When Mr. Sekihei and I decided to have these conversations, we thought to begin
them with the culture of food. Food expresses the character of a nation’s people. The
sixteenth-century Portuguese missionary Gaspar da Cruz, who sojourned in China,
wrote, “when one speaks of what in all the world makes a Chinese person happy, it
always comes back to food.” I wanted to see what Mr. Sekihei’s thinking was.

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Whatever it was that Mr. Sekihei said, it was full of intellectual stimulus. I learned
a great deal about Japan and China. It was a great result.
From my student days, I was of the faction that championed Taiwan, so I frequently went there. Even though it was through friends in Taiwan, I was still able tolearn about China’s culture.
I have been able to learn about Chinese culture through the kindness of my manyfriends in Taiwan and China. I would like to thank those friends from the bottom of
my heart.
— Kase HideakiJapan and China: How Different They Are! 121

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Sekihei Hei (Shi Ping)

Born in Szechuan province, China, in 1962. Graduated Beijing University in 1984 with a degree inphilosophy. While in college, he was awakened from Mao Zedong’s brainwashing and began vigorously pushing for democratization in China. After working as a professor at Szechuan University’s department of philosophy, he went to Japan in 1988. Taking advantage of the Tiananmen
Gate Incident in 1989, he emotionally bid his native China farewell. In 1995, he completed his
doctoral studies in culture at the graduate school of Kobe University. As a commentator, he beganwriting and giving lectures. His many principal publications include Naze Chûgokujin wa Nihonjin
wo nukumu no ka? (“Why do the Chinese hate the Japanese?”, PHP), Watakushi wa Mao
ShuSekihei no kosenshi datta (“I was a little soldier for Mao”, Asuka Shinsha), Kore ga hontô noChûgoku 33 no tsubo (These are 33 pressure points of the real China”, Kairyûsha), Chügoku
daigyakusatsu shi: Naze Chûgokujin wa hitogoroshi ga suki na no ka (“A history of massacres in
China: What makes the Chinese such lovers of murder?”, Business-sha), and others.

Kase Hideaki
Born in Tokyo in 1936. He studied at Keiô University, Yale University, and Columbia University.
He was the first editor of the Britannica Encyclopædia International. From 1977, as special advisor for the cabinets of prime ministers Fukuda and Nakasone, he contributed to negotiations
with the United States. He has also written extensively on the imperial household. Among otherpositions, he has served as director of the Japan P.E.N. Club and as an advisor to the Matsushita
Institute of Government and Finance. He is also a great-great-grandson of Inô Tadataka. His many
publications include Kosei no jidai (“The age of individuality”, Kodansha), Igirisu: Suibô shinai
dentô kokka (“Great Britain: The traditional nation that will not fall”, Kodansha), Tennô-ke noJapan and China: How Different They Are! 123
tatakai (“The battle over the imperial house”, Shinkôsha), and Toku no kokufuron (“Morality: thewealth of nations”, Jiyûsha).