Most were more atmospheric than substantive, but in this case, the symbolism may turn out to have profound importance. The shift toward closer Sino-U.S. relations gave China’s Asian neighbors the jitters. Clinton’s comments on Taiwan’s future status sent shock waves through Taipei. And rivals back in Washington had to admit that Clinton’s summit performance will make it difficult for them to turn China into an election-year issue.
White House officials insisted the summit had turned out much better than expected. ““At best,’’ said one, ““we were hoping for a wash.’’ On three occasions, Clinton was allowed to talk directly to the Chinese people via nationwide television or radio, uncensored and uncut. One venue was a meeting with students at Peking University, a TV platform of the type that was denied to Ronald Reagan during his own visit to China in 1984. Clinton took the opportunity to assert that ““certain rights are universal’’–including democracy and freedom of religion. For China, that was a startling thought, the more so when broadcast on the government’s own tightly controlled airwaves. ““Jiang has legitimized debate on once taboo topics,’’ a senior U.S. official said as the visit neared its end. ““You can’t totally put that genie back into the bottle.''
At home, a few of Clinton’s critics complained that he hadn’t been tough enough on issues like Taiwan, Tibet or the Tiananmen massacre. ““On human rights, President Clinton has said just enough for U.S. domestic consumption and not enough to produce results for the Chinese people,’’ charged a fellow Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, a frequent critic of Beijing. But even longtime rivals complimented the president. ““I think it was a huge success,’’ Jack Kemp told The New York Times. And at a final news conference in Hong Kong, Clinton said his nonconfrontational approach had been proven ““correct.’’ He hoped the Chinese would change their human-rights policies ““not because we’re pressuring them publicly, but because it is the right thing to do.’’ He said he thought China would become a democracy eventually, and he heaped praise on Jiang–““a man of extraordinary intellect’’ who is giving China ““the right leadership at the right time.''
That made the summit an anxious time for other Asians. India accused the United States and China of ““hegemonic behavior.’’ (““The Indians are going nuts, absolutely nuts,’’ said a White House aide.) In Seoul, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung asked visiting Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin if China and America were building a ““special relationship.’’ Replied Rubin: ““I wouldn’t characterize it that way.''
Many Asians didn’t know how else to take it. Between them, Clinton and Rubin spent more than two weeks in Asia without setting foot in Japan, long America’s linchpin ally in the Pacific. (After the summit, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flew to Tokyo to soothe the Japanese.) And when Clinton reiterated his ““three no’s’’ position on Taiwan (no U.S. support for independence, no support for a ““two-China’’ policy, no support for Taiwanese participation in organizations of sovereign states), the Taiwanese were aghast. The president had said nothing new, but the fact that he said it publicly, on the mainland, suggested to some that he was tilting toward Beijing. ““I just don’t think it was necessary to repeat the line at this particular juncture,’’ said Foreign Minister Jason Hu.
There were limits to Clinton’s cooperation with Jiang. The two disagreed over the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen during their televised debate on June 27 (Clinton said the way Chinese leaders handled the episode put them ““on the wrong side of history’’). Later, when the Chinese asked for an advance look at Clinton’s Peking University speech, White House spokesman Michael McCurry declined. He explained that Clinton would be making revisions until the last minute–““a very hard concept’’ for the Chinese to grasp, he joked later. But McCurry did tell his Chinese counterparts that Clinton did not feel a need to mention Tiananmen again. The president’s third live broadcast was a call-in radio show from Shanghai. Clinton was amused, he said later, by a caller ““who didn’t want to talk to the president, he wanted to talk to the mayor about traffic’’–proving that, even in China, all politics is local.
U.S. officials hope the blossoming relationship between Clinton and Jiang will lead to new progress on global problems. Clinton extracted a promise from Jiang that China would seriously consider joining the anti-proliferation Missile Technology Control Regime and would cut off the flow of missile know-how to Pakistan. ““A strategic dialogue is beginning,’’ says one aide. There were hints of conciliation on Tibet; Jiang acknowledged that he had established ““channels of communication’’ with Tibetan exiles, and he did not argue with Clinton’s characterization of the Dalai Lama as ““an honest man.’’ The personal dialogue between the two presidents can last only another two and a half years, when Clinton leaves office. By then, both leaders hope their countries will be on the same side of history–the right side.
title: “The Ties That Bind” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Nichole Comer”
In the summer of 1975, Watergate was still a national buzzword and Congress and the media were in an uproar over alleged meddling in the affairs of foreign countries by America’s Central Intelligence Agency. President Ford and his top advisers were looking quietly for a man of stature to clean up the scandal-ridden spy agency. At the time, a youthful Cheney was working as deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, President Ford’s chief of staff. In the job, Cheney was intimately involved in advising the president about awkward political problems and top-secret national security issues.
According to documents now stored at the Ford Presidential library on the University of Michigan campus and unearthed by Newsweek, eight top Presidential aides, including Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld and Cheney, were asked to suggest candidates for the top job at the CIA. Cheney was one of only three of the eight Presidential aides to put George Bush, then head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in China, on his shortlist of CIA candidates. (Among Cheney’s other recommendations for the CIA job were Robert Bork, then a controversial Justice Department official, Supreme Court justice Byron “Whizzer” White and Lee Iacocca, working then as Ford Motor Co.’s president).
When all the recommendations were totaled up, Bush was not among the top eight candidates favored by the panel of Ford advisors. A canned biography of Bush prepared for White House staff said that Bush’s merits included his experience in government and “high integrity;” viewed as negative because of its political connotations was his past job as chairman of the Republican National Committee. (See document)
Despite the lack of enthusiasm of a majority of Ford aides, Bush several months later was chosen by the President for the CIA post. The documents do not show why other candidates were ruled out, but a “secret” cable from Bush in Beijing to Ford and Kissinger in Washington indicates that Bush was surprised by the offer. Kissinger sent a warm message of congratulation, (See documents) and in the end, Bush came home, took the job and was vice president four years later.
The assignments that Cheney carried out and the conservative policy advice he gave to Ford (one of the Republican Party’s more notable political moderates) have been preserved for history in the thousands of pages of documents now stored at the Ford library. And helping to choose a new CIA director was only one of the ultra-sensitive national security assignments that Cheney carried out while in the Ford White House.
On another occasion, Cheney was involved in coordinating a debate between White House officials, intelligence and defense agencies and the Justice Department over whether to launch a criminal investigation of The New York Times and an investigative reporter over a leak of top-secret intelligence information. In May, l975, The Times published a story by Seymour Hersh revealing that U.S. Navy submarines had tapped underwater telecommunications cables carrying high-level Russian military message traffic. In a memo to the President, Attorney General Edward Levi argued against trying to bring criminal charges for unathorized disclosure of classified information against Hersh or his paper. A criminal prosecution, Levi argued, would make a martyr out of Hersh and force the government to confirm the accuracy of his story.
Cheney and government officials kicked around various options. After learning from the Pentagon that the Soviets apparently had paid little attention to Hersh’s article, and that a new Navy spy operation was in the works, Cheney advised Rumsfeld that “if the operation can, in fact, continue, then we may want to avoid taking any legal action.” Apparently this soft approach carried the day. Neither Hersh nor The Times was ever prosecuted. Hersh told Newsweek that he had learned only after the Ford Administration left office that the government once had considered prosecuting him for the submarine leak.
Another document shows Cheney pushing an overtly conservative policy position to Rumsfeld and President Ford. In the summer of 1975, Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was planning to visit the United States. Questions were being asked in the media about whether the President, who was then pursuing President Nixon’s policy of detente with the Soviets, should meet with the author, a virulent anti-Communist. Cheney wrote a lengthy memo to Rumsfeld, which was read by the President, arguing in favor of a meeting between Ford and the Russian writer. Cheney argued that detente meant a lessening of tensions, not that “all of a sudden our relationship with the Soviets is all sweetness and light.” Ever a pragmatist, however, Cheney added that the Moscow leadership could be reassured quietly that such a meeting was “not intended as a slap at the Soviets.” In the end, Ford did not meet with Solzhenitsyn.
Cheney also urged President Ford in November 1975 to press the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a conservative icon, for an early endorsement as he prepared to launch his 1976 re-election campaign. “You should be very tough and very forceful. This is not time to be understanding or sympathetic with respect to his perceived problems,” Cheney told the President. Whatever Ford said, it did not immediately sway the crusty Arizona senator. He waited to endorse Ford until the following June.
title: “The Ties That Bind” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-27” author: “Linda Lentz”
Basic biology dictates that Emperor Kammu was half Korean. But for centuries Japan’s insistence on its sacred kokutai, or national essence, has obscured that legacy–along with a mountain of historical, cultural and genealogical evidence that demonstrates how much the country owes to its East Asian neighbor. The denial of that shared history continues to bedevil relations between the two countries. Koreans say the amnesia is cultural, part of Japan’s inability to own up to the atrocities committed during its brutal annexation of the peninsula, its exploitation of forced laborers and the use of “comfort women” to provide sex for Japanese troops. Japanese resent the Koreans’ fixation with the past. It is more than ironic that they will cohost the World Cup finals this summer, for the nations remain fierce rivals off the football pitch as well.
A recent attempt to ease the longstanding tensions came from an unlikely source: Emperor Akihito. Last December, he marked his 68th birthday with a stunning revelation. “I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea,” he told reporters during a news conference at his palace in Tokyo. Citing Japan’s oldest history books, he said: “The mother of Emperor Kammu was of the line of King Muryong of the Kingdom of Paekche.”
Not since the Meiji Restoration in 1868 has Japan’s imperial family acknowledged its blood ties with Korea. And the timing was no coincidence. The emperor, say palace watchers, is hoping, before the World Cup, to mute Japan’s right-wing nationalists, who last year championed a new textbook that denied Japan’s worst wartime abuses. His acknowledgment of Korean contributions to Japan (in his remarks he mentioned three: music, Confucianism and Buddhism) was an effort to assuage–but not deny–the memory of Korean suffering during Japan’s brutal 1910-45 annexation of the peninsula. “I think Emperor Akihito himself really wants to attend the World Cup opening ceremony in Seoul,” says an acquaintance of the imperial family. “His comments reflect his own views.”
Experts consider Akihito’s remarks the most poignant–and political–of his 13-year reign. They resonate across East Asia, where activists in both China and Korea regularly decry Tokyo’s dissembling over its war record. Now the emperor is borrowing their rallying cry–“Remember history!”–to end the 50-year-long shouting match. His strategy is not to bow low and apologize. Rather, the plan is to win trust and heal wounds by acknowledging China’s and, in particular, Korea’s many contributions to Japanese civilization.
The shift in mind-set is revolutionary. One young historian, who asked not to be mentioned by name, expressed “shock” at the emperor’s reference to his Korean roots, adding: “I felt, in this atmosphere, that it was still a taboo subject.” Indeed, Japan’s Imperial Household Agency has steadfastly refused to let archeologists excavate any of the 230 tombs now recognized as belonging to past emperors and empresses, arguing that they’re private property. Scholars say the agency actually fears exposing evidence of the family’s Korean heritage. Textbooks barely touch on Japan’s Korean influences, and daytime television (where imperial gossip flows like cheap sake on payday) ignored Akihito’s birthday remarks altogether. Even the mainstream media, which control information through a rigid press-club system, played down the emperor’s statement–which, not surprisingly, made headlines in Korea.
Only recently have re-searchers begun to explore the Korean influence upon Japan in a systematic way, prompted in part by increasing cultural exchanges that have broken down resistance to the idea that the two countries are linked. Anthropologists now postulate that a horse-riding Korean tribe migrated to Japan at the dawn of the first millennium. Linguists theorize that the ritual phrases still used by Japan’s imperial family echo the language of Korea’s ancient Shilla Kingdom. In Princess Niigasa’s day, old records show, perhaps a third of the clans living around Japan’s capital were Paekche –refugees who fled that kingdom’s collapse around 660.
Yet even now Masaaki Ueda, professor emeritus at Kyoto University, says the biggest flaw with this scholarship is its fixation on exchanges of technologies and ideas, instead of the messier subject of people. “The emperor’s remarks were particularly important in that he mentioned a Korean woman,” he says. “Who was she? What was she like? Why did her family come to Japan, and what kind of lives did they lead? Only when their lives are included does history become interesting.”
Previously Japan’s foundation myths dealt only in gods, not men. On the southern island of Kyushu, in a gorge below a town called Takachiho, the sun goddess Amaterasu is said to have hidden in a cave after battling her evil brother. She refused to emerge until her sibling had been banished, and afterward her descendants–including the rice god Ninigi–were allowed to populate the land. Amaterasu is worshiped as the supreme deity in Japan’s animist Shinto faith, and her great-great-grandson Jimmu is celebrated as the country’s first emperor. To this day, Japanese descend a steep trail into the gorge to pray along the gurgling stream, where they scribble their wishes on small stones, then stack them to resemble tiny pagodas. “Our great imperial Japan is blessed with an imperial family that is unlike any other,” reads a guidebook from the prewar period. “Its eternal imperial line began with heaven and earth.”
A competing theory has emerged in the postwar period: that the legends either tell of, or were brought to Japan during, a foreign invasion. Tokyo University historian Namio Egami first examined that possibility in 1967, when he postulated, based on research into Mongolian horsemen, that a warlike, equestrian people from northern Korea and Manchuria, the Tensons, had landed on Kyushu some 2,000 years ago. They rapidly consolidated power on the island, then expanded eastward to establish the Yamato dynasty.
More recently, philosopher Takeshi Umehara, one of Japan’s best-known men of letters, has taken up the theme. In his view, the rice god Ninigi was a Tenson seafarer from Korea who introduced intensive rice cultivation and imported an advanced culture, called Yayoi, which displaced Japan’s more primitive Jomon tribes. His followers farmed in Takachiho and, after A.D. 300, interned their dead at Saitobaru, a broad plain where hundreds of round and keyhole-shaped burial mounds still dot the landscape. The biggest resemble royal tombs found in Korea and Manchuria; several smaller tombs excavated in the 1910s yielded terra-cotta ships shaped like ancient Chinese vessels and saddles made of gold and copper similar to artifacts found in Korea. “That mingling of the native Jomon people with the Yayoi people, who came from abroad with rice-growing knowledge, created the Japanese people,” he concludes.
A similar Korean influence has been exposed in the formation of the Japanese imperial state in the seventh century. Ueda, the Kyoto University historian, was the first to note the signs: in 1965 he publicly identified Niigasa, the Korean princess, as Emperor Kammu’s mother and credited the period’s greatest religious relic, a massive bronze Buddha at the Todaji Temple in Nara, to a Korean artisan. He was upbraided by his peers and threatened several times by ultranationalists. “One right-winger wrote me a letter warning: ‘You’ll be punished by heaven’,” says the dapper 74-year-old scholar.
Now a spate of recent discoveries has proved his point that migrants, technology and culture from Korea were a defining force of the age. Around A.D. 660 some 100,000 refugees from Paekche flooded into the Yamato region–a broad valley where ancient courts in Asuka, Fujiwara and Nara ruled Japan from A.D. 592 to A.D. 784–bringing with them Buddhism, the written Chinese language and new techniques for making pottery and casting metal. The town of Asuka, often described as the crucible of Japanese civilization, was a cosmopolitan melting pot in the seventh century. Its most enduring legacy–a collection of 4,516 poems called “Man’Yoshu,” or “10,000 Leaves”–has been found to have several Korean contributors, along with Japanese writers who composed verses about travel to Korea. The region’s burial mounds are Korean in appearance. The Takamatsuzuka Tomb, discovered in 1972, for example, is a horizontal crypt the size of a large phone booth. Its frescoed walls feature men and women adorned in the fashions of mainland Asia. Its occupant, an unknown aristocrat, was most likely Korean, says a guide at the tomb. Asked if its discovery was controversial, he tells visitors: “Let’s just say it took some time to come up with theories to explain it.”
The most controversial reality, though, is the fact that Korea’s primary contribution to Japan was its people. That record directly challenges Japan’s self-image as a homogenous, racially pure land–a racist ideology that itself emerged only in the 17th century. Historians have identified migrations dating back to 300 B.C., and by some accounts anywhere from a third to half of all Japanese have some Korean ancestry. Most immigrant families were forced to assimilate in one way or another. One of them, the Koma clan, arrived in Japan in A.D. 666 led by a royal family member named Jakko. Today, Jakko’s 60th linear descendant, 35-year-old Fumiyasu Koma, is a Shinto priest at his family’s ancestral shrine. Built in Korea’s shamanist tradition, the building took its present form when the Meiji government forced all worshipers to adopt state Shinto. It’s one of hundreds of Shinto shrines across Japan that were built by Korean immigrants.
Even during the period when Japan was supposedly closed off to the world–after the Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated power and moved the capital to Edo (Tokyo) in 1604–Koreans kept arriving, providing a needed conduit for technology and culture. Emissaries from southeastern Korea led delegations of generals, Confucian scholars, painters, musicians and doctors to Japan. Once onshore, they paraded on horseback toward Edo in journeys that took half a year or more and involved visits with leading clans along the way. In all, 12 delegations visited over a 200-year period until, burdened by famine and financial hardship, Japan stopped bankrolling them.
Not all exchanges were voluntary. In 1592, Japanese samurai invaded Korea. Raiding parties preyed on coastal settlements, where they would land, loot, then kidnap the peninsula’s greatest commodity of the age–its potters. Dubbed the Abduction Wars, the incursions constituted intellectual-property theft on a massive scale. In all, some 50,000 people were forcibly brought to Japan, where artisans among them provided the elite with the fine porcelain integral to Japanese tea ceremonies. Chin Jukan is the 14th in a line of master potters, the first of whom was kidnapped by a powerful clan and taken to Japan in 1598. His pottery, known as Satsuma ware, carries the name of his abductor’s ancestral county. “Our experience and endurance made us strong,” he says. “Nothing can break me down.”
Koreans in Japan have long needed that fortitude, given the circumstances under which many of them arrived. In 1910 Tokyo dispatched troops and forcibly annexed Korea. Koreans were given Japanese names and forced to learn their conquerors’ language. Then, as the country mobilized for war in the Pacific, Japan imported some 2.5 million Korean laborers–many virtual slaves–to work its mines, farms and factories.
Today much of Japan’s Korean population continues to face tremendous discrimination, if not subjugation. Some 600,000 forced laborers and their descendants live in quasi statelessness. Known as “resident Koreans,” they have the right of abode but can’t vote. Until recently, they could not become citizens unless they adopted Japanese names (an insult to those with memories of the war years). One prominent scholar in his 40s sums up his career choices: “gangster or professor.” A younger resident Korean, a 35-year-old Web-page designer, recalls being cursed as a “garlic eater” and has a mother who still hides her background. “When she’s with people in her dance club she goes by her Japanese name,” he says.
Korea’s perceived victimization is a powerful subtext in this year’s World Cup. Ostensibly a cooperative venture, the contests–in which Korea and Japan will participate but neither harbors realistic hopes of winning–have become a study in one-upmanship. The two countries competed to host the games, kept independent coordinating committees even after they were named partners and bickered about things such as whose name would get top billing (Korea won, in return for giving up the championship match to Japan). Korea’s national-team coach, Dutchman Gus Hiddink, is sometimes baffled by his players’ fixation with their neighbor. “When we lose to France 4-0 it’s OK because Japan lost 5-0 four weeks earlier,” he says. “For me, those comparisons are ridiculous.”
Knowing they will be on the world stage, though, Tokyo and Seoul have been trying to smooth relations ahead of the contest. Last week the two countries announced that a joint commission of scholars was being appointed to study the intermingling of their histories. Later this month Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will visit South Korea to determine who in Japan’s imperial family will attend the opening ceremony in Seoul. So far the Imperial Household Agency remains mum about the emperor’s travel plans. But Hong Youn Ki, a Japanese-literature professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, says Akihito’s appearance at the opening ceremonies would help greatly to heal old wounds. “His visit would be better for South Korea than a visit by [North Korean strongman] Kim Jong Il,” says Hong.
Many Japanese pundits contend that Akihito’s statement was “nothing new.” But they also say Japan’s Korean heritage is a well-known fact–which, judging from one Kyoto neighborhood, simply isn’t true. Princess Niigasa is a mystery even to her closest neighbors, the families who live beside her 1,200-year-old tomb. That hilltop mound, shrouded in bamboo groves but accessible up a winding dirt trail, is popular for area hikers and dog walkers. A signpost at the trailhead reads: THE TOMB OF EMPEROR KAMMU’S MOTHER. At the top, another gives her name. Yet nowhere is her story told. “She’s Korean? I didn’t know,” says a housewife who has lived in the area for 30 years. It’s about time she and her fellow citizens learned: the story of the Korean princess is their own.
