Animosity between neighbouring countries isn’t really anything new. Growing up and living in Europe I’ve become accustomed to plenty of it, from funny stereotypes to nonsense bordering on xenophobia. One thing I’ve realised since working at a newspaper here though is how deep the animosity between Japan and China sometimes runs, and how far and low some people will seemingly act on it.
Like all good rivalries, it runs deep and both ways, but my knowledge of the issue isn’t that thorough if I’m honest. I know the Chinese hold a grudge, well one of the most recent ones anyways, against the Japanese for Japan’s WWII aggressions and past attempts at imperial expansion in Asia (google the rape of Nanking as a good starting point). As for the Japanese, I’m not actually quite sure where their grudge comes from, anyone with any enlightening knowledge please drop a comment. One thing I do know is that I’ve met my share of Japanese who have been vocal about their distrust of the Chinese and seeming belief that China and its people are up to no good (broadely speaking of course).
What’s been really enlightening and entertaining though is the Japanese media’s practice of jibing at the Chinese for anything they possibly can. The most obvious examples I see everyday are those at the newspaper I work at, which is the country’s second biggest, and also on TV. At the newspaper the Chinese jibes are literally everywhere it seems. I’ll be editing a story, and all of a sudden there will be a totally unrelated sentence making a remark, generally negative, about China. If it wasn’t so funny in the way it’s done, it would be scary.
One day I was editing a piece on a certain type of carbon molecule and its effect on global warming. The piece was about efforts to study the effects of the molecule but also its current impact on the country. Out of nowhere, at the end of the article, a sentence explains that China is the world’s biggest producer of said molecule, a fact that really has no bearing whatsoever on the story.
In a related pollution article a while back, the focus of the article was on transboundary pollutants coming to Japan and harming the local flaura and fauna. The pollutants were of course primarily coming from China.
In another one, we ran a picture the other day of Mt. Fuji set against the Tokyo skyline in the daytime, something worthy of news it seems because the day before Tokyo was apparently under a mist of yellow dust from, you guessed it, China.
Recently I’ve also had a story about rare Chinese butterflies taking over the Kanto region and threatening local indigenous species. Again the story was primarily about how the butterfly entered the country in the first place and the impact its spreading is currently having on local species, but in there, without much need for it, was a sentence pointing out that all the suspected killer butterflies in Kanto were from China, just in case the whole rare Chinese butterfly species wasn’t enough to convince readers.
The biggest news story of recent times that illustrates this seeming constant China bashing in the media is the poisoned gyoza scandal, which hit Japan about a month or so ago. There’s plenty online for you to google if you’re not up on it, but to keep it short about 10 people fell ill from eating frozen gyoza manufactured in China which apparently contained a poisonous pesticide banned in Japan, but still widely used in China. This sparked a disproportionate scandal about poisoned gyoza from China. Illustrating the apparent distrust of the Chinese, following the news of the first few poisonings, over a thousand people called in sick at centres around the country claiming they felt ill and may have been poisoned by frozen Chinese products, not just gyoza.
Meanwhile the Japanese authorities spent weeks claiming the blame and source of the poisoning lied firmly with the Chinese, while the Chinese said they’d done all they could and it wasn’t on them. The most interesting thing about working at the paper at that time was how unequivocal the Japanese staff were about making sure that each time the product was mentioned it was mentioned as Chinese made frozen gyoza. That and the insane amount of stories we ran on this, while TV kept running the same stories too, about how the poison got in the food, the Chinese plant that made the gyoza and so on. While the media’s coverage likely gave more weight to the whole scandal than was needed, it was also hard to not feel like it was also being kept alive by how Japanese society in general views the Chinese.
The joke around the office is that anything bad that happens to Japan is almost inevitably coming from China, one way or another. Some Japanese staff don’t seem to get the joke, which is fair enough, but still it’s funny when you’re in the middle of it and have to make it look like ‘news.’
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