Sharing the pain

The emotional fallout in China from Japan's disaster offers a walk down memory lane of Sino-Japanese love-hate attitudes.

My first exposure to screen depictions of nuclear disaster was in 1984 when a Japanese television drama called Akai Giwaku was aired in China. Roughly translated as "Suspicion of Blood" in Chinese, it portrays a 17-year-old student who is accidentally contaminated by radiation. This happens in the first episode, and for the remaining 28 episodes, she fights a losing battle against blood cancer. However, it is more an affirmation of love and family than an indictment of nuclear mismanagement.

Like me, most of my countrymen shed tears for the continuously frail protagonist with her beguiling smile and sunny disposition. Pop icon Momoe Yamaguchi, who essayed the role nine years earlier in 1975, became an instant superstar in China. This tear-jerker even provoked spasms of pessimism, with reports of a couple of teenage girls in China committing suicide because Yamaguchi's role was doomed from the beginning and no miracle happened by the end of the series.

In a sense, this television hit, in an era when most Chinese families could receive no more than three channels if they owned a set, introduced the specter of nuclear threat just as The Day After, shown a year earlier in 1983, got Americans thinking seriously about the same issue. Unlike Hollywood disaster epics, though, it focuses on the human dimension.

That was also the golden age for Sino-Japanese relations when the air seemed to be filled with a palpable breeze of goodwill between the two countries. Many Chinese productions - movies and television alike - zeroed in on the suffering of both Chinese and Japanese people during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

For the next 20-plus years, things took a bad turn. Conflicts flared up from time to time, giving rise to increasing hostility on both sides. Even a concert of J-pop in Shanghai a few years ago, a retrospective of popular songs performed by the original Japanese singers, now with age carved into their faces and voices, met a tidal wave of vicious responses online, clearly from younger generations who were ignorant of the nation's hearty embrace of J-pop that trickled into the mainland, sometimes through local renditions.

They got a surprise education when one of these songs, Star, was used in Feng Xiaogang's blockbuster movie If You Are the One. Feng said the song never failed to get him teary-eyed, and the youngsters now seem to share his sentiment. This film also put Hokkaido on the map for Chinese tourists. Some of the film's locations, which now carry a special meaning for us, were hard hit by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, Chinese media reported.

The triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis is having the sudden effect of warming a lot of Chinese hearts to Japan and its people, especially many of those who have been proudly calling themselves Japan-haters. Even though the Web still has its share of gloaters, many seem to have learned to differentiate between opposing Japanese policies and actions involving the Diaoyu Islands and the Yasukuni Shrine and showing empathy for the Japanese people in a time of devastation.

In the early days of the disaster, as recounted in a tweet on Sina Weibo, a kindergarten boy was asked for his opinion about what happened in Japan, and he blurted out: "That's great. They're our enemies, aren't they?" That failure to tell a humanitarian tragedy apart from a national rivalry is by no means limited to the very young. It is rooted in a simplistic view of the world, which is akin to George W. Bush's "You're either with us or against us" line of thinking.

Chinese authorities have always applied a dichotomy to the war between our two countries: "It was Japanese militants who inflicted so much pain on the Chinese people," we are told, but also, "and the Japanese people were also victims."

The nuance seems to be lost when an emotional issue like Japan's downplaying of the Rape of Nanking in its textbooks come to the fore. Voices are drowned out when they point out different opinions in Japanese society regarding these controversies.

The reasons are manifold: For one thing, we are constantly reminded of wartime sufferings at the hands of Japanese invaders; for another, we are conditioned to look at a country as one big box of machine programmed people with the same thinking and actions. It is inconceivable to many that even a homogeneous society like Japan's has diversity and the most vociferous ones may not be the majority.

In a lot of ways, those indiscriminate J-haters are the mirror image of the segment in Japanese society that hates China, whose opinions are based on long-held convictions rather than evolving realities.

It is certainly interesting to see Chinese positions diverging in the past decade. Take Japan Sinks, a disaster film made in 1973 and remade in 2006. The assumption of Armageddon as a result of tectonic plates shifting underneath the Japanese islands gave some people here vicarious gratification as they essentially applied the logic of the above-mentioned kindergarten boy. Then, another group of people came forward and said: This shows how crisis conscious Japanese are and we should learn from them in assuming such a mentality while rushing headlong into prosperity.

The outpouring of compassion from ordinary Chinese is an indication that people are becoming increasingly aware of the common threat we face as humanity. Natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis and man-made disasters such as terrorism do not make a distinction between nationalities or ethnicities. They strike randomly. When one country is hit, people everywhere feel the pain.

How long this surge of friendliness and togetherness will last depends on the resolve and foresight of politicians in both countries - whether they will be able to place common interests above differences and whether they see good neighbors as more important than bitter rivals.

It is impractical to expect a smooth ride into infinity, but hopefully some of the bumps will get smoothed when we take a broader view of the cosmos and the vulnerability of mankind.

The stricken area of northeastern Japan is not familiar to most Chinese - with one exception. Sendai, the biggest city closest to the epicenter, made its first appearance in the Chinese consciousness in a high-school textbook. In it, Lu Xun, the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th century, recalled his student days attending Tohuku University in Sendai. His teacher, a certain "Mr Fujino", came through as an exemplar, though subdued, of decency, benevolence and respectability.

When you get to know people of a foreign land on a personal level, stereotypes begin to shatter and a shared humanity emerges.