The China problem in postwar Japan: Japanese nationalism and Sino-Japanese relations, 1971--1980

My dissertation is a study of the history of Sino-Japanese relations in the 1970s. This is a crucial period during which relations between the two nations were transformed in response to dramatic changes in the Cold War in East Asia, especially Sino-American rapprochement. A series of political agreements---normalization of relations in 1972, the signing of a peace treaty in 1978, and the beginning of Japanese economic aid to China in 1979---laid the basis for cooperative relations between Japan and China in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet the way in which Japanese interpreted and responded to these changes went beyond the question of what Japan's policy toward the PRC ought to be. The debate regarding policy toward China was always part of a larger 'China problem' in postwar Japan that revolved around the contentious issue of what the state of relations with China revealed about Japanese national identity. The China problem in postwar Japan was a contest to interpret and thereby appropriate relations with the PRC as part of a domestic Japanese struggle to define national identity.;The establishment of cooperative Sino-Japanese relations in the in 1970s depended not only on changes in the international political environment, but also in part upon a transformation in the place of the PRC and relations with China in Japanese nationalist discourse. Whereas up until the early 1970s support for closer relations with the PRC generally supported a progressive nationalist narrative opposed to the conservative postwar political order and alliance with the United States, by the end of the decade the promotion of Sino-Japanese cooperation became a crucial component of a conservative nationalist narrative that called for more assertive foreign and defense policies and an affirmative view of modern Japanese history. At the same time, the most vocal criticism of Japanese government policy toward China was taken up by the right-wing of the conservative camp. Thus, the changes in discourse on the China problem supported cooperative relations between the two countries but also contained the discursive elements that underlie contemporary conflict.