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SCMP Reporter

IF Shigeto Nagano was looking to rouse Chinese nationalism from its slumber, he could not have chosen a better way.

  The former chief of staff in the Japanese army, now justice minister in the new government in Tokyo, told a reporter from the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that the Nanjing Massacre was ''a hoax''. Japan's war in Asia was ''non-aggressive'', he opined, and anyone who said otherwise was mistaken.

  Hundreds of millions of Chinese must have got it all wrong then, because almost 50 years after Japan was forced to surrender, the pain and punishment the Imperial Army inflicted on them still burns within their hearts.

  All wars are twisted affairs, but the war that Japan brought to China in the 30s must rank as one of the worst the world has seen.

   From 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria, to its eventual surrender 14 years later, an estimated 10 million Chinese soldiers and civilians died, leaving a slow, smouldering fury easily fanned into nationalistic hatred.

   Today Westerners, at least those not directly involved, seem to think war as the Japanese waged it was all about bombers screaming down out of the sky on to Pearl Harbour or battleships in the Pacific, an impersonal clash of weaponry.

  But in China Japanese soldiers fought with bare steel blades on flesh, close up, hand to hand, face to face, as if in some vast medieval conflict before the age of gunpowder.

   When the Japanese seized Nanjing in 1937 they went through every house, raping the women and the girls, butchering and mutilating. There are photographs of the soldiers smiling insanely at the cameras as they display their precious booty: the severed heads of their victims.

  The war in the countryside was just as bitter, just as devastating.

  Fifty summers have passed since then, but the Chinese have not forgotten. In March this year 100 pensioners tried to petition the Japanese embassy in Beijing during the visit of then prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa's to China, demanding compensation and war reparations.

  It is not just those with living memories who remember. Even if they did not lose relatives in the war, the young have been brought up on anti-Japanese war films and their nationalism is never far beneath the surface.

  It does not take much to awaken it. In November 1987 the Chinese national soccer team pulled off a memorable victory against Japan. In the colleges and universities of Beijing the students let off fireworks and danced in the streets, while on Tiananmen Square one foreign student shouted in Mandarin ''down with Japan'' and sparked off a mini riot. Strange cases of protest crop up, as with the slogan printed on the $100 Hong Kong bill reproduced above.

  Even those who have gone abroad are not immune. One Western-educated mainlander with a master's degree from a British university said: ''I think I have lost my racialism. Even if my daughter came back home with a black boyfriend I could accept it now.

  ''But if someone told me to hate the Japanese, I would hate them. Not in a personal way, but as a nation. It is about the only bit of Communist propaganda that has stuck in my head.''   The Chinese Communist Party has taken a curiously ambivalent stance towards Japan. It allows films and books of the war to be produced, it celebrates the People's Liberation Army's sole battle against the Japanese, the One Hundred Regiments Campaign.

  But all that is the past, and what matters now is money. The Japanese have invested more than US$5 billion (about HK$39 billion) in China, half of it in the last three years. The Chinese run a regular trade surplus with Japan.

  In exchange, China abandoned all claim to war damages 22 years ago, and keeps a tight rein on the dissidents and the war victims who still protest. The pensioners outside the Japanese embassy in March were rounded up by the police and held for two days.

  But despite the government, among the people the old enmity simmers. If the right stages a comeback in Japanese politics, if Japan decided to go nuclear to protect itself from North Korea, who knows how the Chinese would react?   Like the dragon's teeth that Cadmus scattered in Greek mythology, the ghosts of the past may yet rise up and destroy each other.



Chinese hearts still burning