Chinks and Japs

Let me preface this writing by confessing that I know very little about Japanese -- their culture and their history. Excepting my acquaintance with a few Japanese scientists, my love of Sushi and eel over rice, and my fondness of Japanese anime, I have no knowledge of Japanese literature and art, or its customs and mores. I have not read a single Japanese literary masterpiece, or seen more than half a dozen Japanese paintings, or known its long history, or visited any Japanese city, or learnt hiragana, or spoken its language. Recently, this began to alarm me. Having lived and been educated for twenty three years in China, a strait away from Japan, I feel uncomfortable about my ignorance about my neighbor. What concerns me more, though, is Chinese's collective ignorance about Japan. Nothing is taught about Japan in Chinese schools except the bigoted notion that the Japanese culture is rooted in the Chinese culture, and that Japan invaded China in the 1930's and was driven out after eight years of bloody war. Few Chinese learn the Japanese language, and no Japanese book is included in the school syllabus. In contrast, most of my Japanese friends at least have some knowledge of the Chinese language and the Chinese literature.

Yet there is an ingrained hatred in many Chinese for the Japanese, a neighbor they barely know except that some of their great grandfathers have died fighting this neighbor in the eight-year war. This hatred may date further back to the end of the nineteenth century, where the Japanese Navy defeated the Chinese Beiyang Navy in a series of short and decisive battles. These two Chinese-Japanese wars should be reason enough for the Chinese to learn more about Japan. Instead, they fostered blind animosity.

Blind, and humorless too. The Brits and the French have fought each other for centuries, and even today they have a contempt for each other. But they express their nationalistic prejudice by laughing at their old foes. I recently listened to Monty Python's John Cleese in a speech. Being British, Mr. Cleese opened by making fun of the French:

"Why did the French have so many civil wars?"
"So that they can win one."

"How many Frenchman does it take to defend Paris?"
"Nobody knows, it has never been tried before."

I do not remember hearing a Chinese joke about the Japs, neither would I know if the Japanese ever joke about the Chinks. How do you make up a joke about something you barely know?

There is, however, a true story that is almost funny. My mother-in-law's college classmate in China has been a professor in Japan for twenty years. Recently he took a vacation in China. To his surprise, many of his Chinese friends sympathetically asked him if the Japanese ever harassed him because he was from China. "It must be difficult for a Chinese to live in Japan." his friends said to him. When he returned to Japan, he was again surprised. Many of his Japanese colleagues sympathetically asked him if the Chinese harassed him when he was traveling China. "It must be hard for a man from Japan to travel in China." his colleagues said to him. This is probably the closest to a joke that the Chinese and the Japanese can tell about each other.