EDITORIAL: Joint history study

Japan and China have released a report on a joint history study carried out by historians of both countries. There are indeed a slew of problems with the report, which was released Sunday. Discussions on postwar history have not been published at the request of the Chinese side, for instance. But we nevertheless applaud the fact that the project overcame many obstacles to produce this document.

Japan proposed the joint history study in an attempt to repair the damage to bilateral ties caused by Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to war-related Yasukuni Shrine when he was prime minister.

The idea was to leave contentious and divisive issues concerning the history of bilateral relations to cool-headed discussions by experts so that the two countries' political leaders could focus on future-oriented strategic and cooperative ties.

Tokyo and Beijing formally agreed on the project in October 2006 when Shinzo Abe, as prime minister, visited China.

Some Japanese experts initially doubted whether the politically motivated academic undertaking with China, where academic freedom and freedom of expression are not necessarily guaranteed, would produce any meaningful result. Chinese experts, for their part, were concerned that their Japanese counterparts might deny Japan's responsibility for the war of aggression against China.

It was, however, an unprecedented feat to bring Japanese and Chinese experts together for such public discussions and then publicize the results. Differences in views about history have overshadowed not just politics but also people's sentiments in both countries.

Under the original plan, the participating experts would write papers and exchange views on topics concerning ancient and medieval history as well as the early modern and contemporary times, including Japan's peaceful development in the postwar era. The plan called for a report, containing summaries of the discussions, to be published in 2008, which marked the 30th anniversary of the Japan-China treaty of peace and friendship.

If things had gone as originally planned, the report would have become a more useful guidebook for thinking and talking about the history of the two countries.

The study went smoothly until Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Japan in May 2008. After that, Beijing requested that all the theses written by the experts, as well as summaries of their discussions, be kept from the public. It cited concerns about the possible effects on the Chinese people.

Since these papers and discussion summaries contain information not available to ordinary Chinese, Beijing apparently feared that publishing them could create an unwanted situation. And so it requested that they not be made public.

It is profoundly regrettable that the initial promise to keep the project at a distance from politics was not fully honored.

Yet the report, published after a delay of more than one year and after many diplomatic twists and turns, doesn't include any big surprises. The academics remained far apart on the number of victims in the 1937 Nanking Massacre, with the Chinese historians insisting the death toll could be more than 300,000. But the report is marked by subdued expressions and restrained language. That suggests earnest efforts by both sides to keep nationalistic sentiment from their study and report.

The two countries have agreed to continue the joint study. We hope the postwar history section will be published soon. While the principal purpose is to deepen mutual understanding between Japan and China, such a study should not be reserved only for experts of the two countries. The two sides should be open to the opinions and academic achievements of a wide range of experts in other countries as well.

We hope this study will continue under quiet and calm circumstances.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 2