My opinion of Japan has changed a great deal since I started religiously following China-US relations.

Pretty much everyone is at least vaguely familiar with how the Empire of Japan, without provocation, continuously invaded China on manufactured pretexts between 1894 and 1945, colonized an ever-growing chunk of Chinese territory, held the Chinese to be an inferior race, and perpetrated Satanic acts against the civilian population. I looked up photos from the Rape of Nanjing; I won’t put any here, but suffice it to say I found a Japanese officer posing in a meditative position behind a square of about 50 severed Chinese heads, each one arranged upright on its neck so its face would appear in the photo. There were many women.

One estimate for the number of Chinese murdered by the Japanese between 1937 and 1945 is 3.9 million. Yet, only about 900 Japanese officers out of a couple hundred thousand were executed for war crimes.

When Japan had the power, it looked like China would soon cease to exist.

Today, on the other hand, when China holds the power, Japan is doing just fine, and the entirety of real problems between China and Japan consists of the following:

The dispute over the Senkaku Islands, a cluster of uninhabited rocks, the largest of which has an area of 4.3 square miles.

It’s fair to say that China has been good to Japan. To be honest, China tolerated many offences even after the Japanese defeat in World War II.

Japan followed its new puppet-master the US in recognizing Taiwan as the real China, instead of the PRC which had 99.9+ percent of the population and 99.6 percent of the territory. Japan didn’t recognize China until 1972 — so right from the beginning it squandered a golden opportunity to apologize, show respect, show it had changed, and turn over a new leaf with China. Japan has refused to acknowledge its horrific atrocities against China in any meaningful way. Japanese textbooks continue to only make brief mention of them. The Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the remains of several thousand recognized war criminals, continues to be visited by Japanese leaders up to the highest level (prime minister). And the Japanese continue to be one of the most Sinophobic peoples on earth, with 86 percent having a negative view of China as of 2020, and only 9 percent having a positive view. Not much has changed since the days of the Empire of the Rising Sun; Japan simply lost its power, and shrugged off its guilt. This is the norm.

But even so, for the past ten years Japan has been anti-China to a stunning extent. The fact that Japan has now joined the Quad (in fact, the Quad was Shinzo Abe’s idea in 2007) and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, expanded its relationship with Taiwan, honoured the Dalai Lama and called for the secession of Tibet from China, contributed warships to US “freedom of navigation” exercises held very close to the Chinese coast, and intensified its anti-China rhetoric in a bow to its American puppet-master, makes me believe there is a deeper reason to Japan’s hostility than the historical Sino-Japanese tensions of the past couple thousand years.

What can that reason be?

• It could be jealousy. China’s where Japan was in the 80s, except it’s definitely not surrendering in a US trade war or signing a suicidal Plaza Accord.
• It could be the stupidity of Americanization. If I’m Japanese, my country is basically Hawaii #2. I mean, the US nuked me twice and yet 67 percent of my people today view the US favourably. “One of the most pro-American nations in the world.” (Ouch — I’m not even Japanese and that sentence still hurts my dignity.) Not only are Japanese the most Americanized Asians after Filipinos, but I’d also have 23 US military bases on my soil (partially supported by my taxes) and the President of the United States can slap tariffs on me, threaten to dump his illegal immigrants in my country, or demand $8 billion more for maintenance of said military bases, and I’d still idolize him. I’m basically an American already, just not a US citizen. So I hate what America hates.
• It could be the arrogance of belonging to a Western style democracy. Even if, ruled by that democracy, my country has the same problems in 2021 as it did in 1991 (i.e. 30 years of stagnation), at least I have “freedom,” whatever that means. I can vote for a prime minister every 4 years, so I’m free, and those who cannot are barbarians who need the light. At least I’m not “enslaved” to “communists.”

But in the end I think it’s just hatred of China and the Chinese that is keeping Japan so bizarrely anti-China-aligned. Sort of the same hatred that enabled the Rape of Nanjing, only now it’s totally emasculated.

Japan couldn’t beat China as an Empire, nor did it ultimately surpass China as a would-be superpower in the 70s and 80s… But instead of burying the hatchet it’ll keep trying to beat China any way it can, even if it’s as a US lackey. It can no longer be a threat, so it decided to become a pest.