“China Image for Japanese in Postwar period: from defeat till the Cultural Revolution and re-establishment of diplomatic relations.” (Shinyosha, 2010)

Kimihiko Baba (Senior Managing Editor of Editorial Division in Iwanami Shoten, Publishers)

I am honored to receive the 28th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Special Prize, and I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the members of the foundation’s Operations and Selection Committees. I am especially thrilled to receive an award which bears the name of Mr. Ohira, who contributed so much as foreign minister when relations between Japan and China were normalized 40 years ago.
　 In my book, I focused on intellectuals and researchers rather than governmental officials like Mr. Ohira as the drivers of the Japan-China relationship. In the 27 year period from the end of diplomat relations due to Japan’s defeat in World War II to the resumption of those relations, I analyzed the articles on China published in the Japanese press and academia, and researched what sort of image of China that the Japanese had developed. I collected 2554 different articles discussing China in that era from a total of 24 general magazines..
　 It has been around 30 years since I began working as an editor of magazines and books in the publishing world. In working on the related articles, I developed a sense of solidarity with the editors of the magazines the articles were published in. The criticism of that era was faced with the task of describing a scenario of competition, whose ending was unclear. Furthermore, how do you grasp the huge, complex, constantly changing subject of China? The destiny of Japan hinges on that. Unbiased opinion involves both responsibility and risk. Editors place their trust in the character of their writers, accept the risk that their predictions will fail, and send their opinions out to the critical world.
　 During the Cultural Revolution which began in 1966, the press was filled with a debate on its pros and cons. Later the Cultural Revolution was officially and totally rejected in China. Support for it in Japan was treated as a discourse of the losers, and the former supporters of the Cultural Revolution have remained silent. After the Sino-Japanese war, it was as though the academics and intellectuals who supported and cooperated with the war withdrew from academia and the world of criticism. Future generations pass judgment on the morality of their forerunners’ discourse, based on the hindsight of history, and this causes writers to shy away from their responsibility as public intellectuals, and severs the numerous arteries of previously accumulated intellectual history.
　 Today, general magazines are in era of decline, and the very phrase “world of criticism” has almost vanished. The publishing industry itself is declining in prestige. What is booming in its place is Twitter, blogs, and other forms of Internet speech. Those forums of speech directly connect writers and readers, in some cases even integrating them together, and they are like an arena where the winner is determined by the number of approving followers. There is no mediation by editors like us in that world. I hope a day will come when people will look again at the business of publishing and the profession of editing, as means of connecting academia, the world of criticism and readers, while winning the respect of writers who stake their entire existence on fair analysis.

Profile
Hokkaido University: B.A., 1981, Hokkaido University: M.A., 1983, Waseda University: Ph.D., 2009, Part-time Lecturer in Chiba University,2011 Editor, in Toho Shoten, 1984, Editor, in Shiso,1989-1991 and in Sekai, 1995-2002, Senior Managing Editor of Editorial Division, 2010-, in Iwanami Shoten, Publishers Ph.D. in International Studies, Waseda University ,2009 Postwar History around ‘the Harp of Burma’, Hosei University Press , 2004, China Image for Japanese in Postwar period: from defeat till the Cultural Revolution and re-establishment of diplomatic relations. Shinyo sha, 2010.