The Endless Plight of Japan

Nothing could be more insulting to Japanese dignity than a “help-the-Japanese” charity campaign launched in Hong Kong with a bunch of sentimental and boisterous local Chinese singers, film starlets and models waving their V-signs, apparently in tears, and racing to give emotional lectures in their broken Cantonese on a TV screen while calling for the Chinese public to donate distilled water and instant noodles to their neighboring nation still blighted by devastation from the latest tsunami and radioactive leaks.

The Japanese consulate in Hong Kong issued a polite thank-you note calling for money to be donated instead. For those who understand the Japanese psyche a bit, the message in this understatement could read something like this: “save your cheap cries and melodramatic tears for your own fellow countrymen suffering from the much more tragic trauma of a communist dictatorship on the mainland. We don’t need your water and food for hygiene reasons. We are a nation of aristocratic dignity. Even if we needed any pity and requested any help, we would rather turn to civilized states of our own league such as the United States, Britain or other European countries. So, stop patronizing us.”

I have to stress that the above interpretation comes from me alone, a British-educated, politically incorrect cynic who admires not only Japanese sushi and Hokkaido hot spring spas, but also the cinematic genius in great movies such as “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.”

There is no need to interpret these patronizing acts by some Hongkongers in the light of a political conspiracy theory. No, they have not been sponsored by their Beijing masters as a ploy to embarrass the Japanese government or as a distraction for a possible military invasion of the Senkaku Islands. Even the word “patronizing” doesn’t exist in the Chinese vocabulary, so these Hongkongers couldn’t have possibly designed such a convoluted way of insulting a former enemy who invaded China more than 70 years ago.

The Chinese are simply an overtly sentimental people, having gotten used to tear-pouring politicized charity shows as a collective duty of patriotism after several tragic floods and earthquakes on the mainland. It is almost a conditional reflex at scenes of scattered dead bodies (something the Japanese media have self-censored for the dignity of the nation) to have everyone flock together to shout love slogans and sing “We Are the World” in a gaudily emotional manner directly copied from Bob Geldof. In the case of Japan, most Chinese simply itch to share their love as they are still under the impression that the earliest Japanese ancestors came from China during the Qing dynasty about 2,400 years ago, something the Japanese have angrily dismissed as a myth.

It is surprising how peoples know so little and culturally misunderstand so much about each other, even in the internet age. Sad.