Opinion

Rereading First Opium War in the Year of Gengzi (II)

Of Chinese and Japanese nationality, Chin Shunshin was born in Motomachi, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan in 1924, and passed away in 2015. He authored more than a hundred books and received numerous awards, including almost all notable literary prizes in Japan – the Edogawa Nambu Prize, the Naoki Prize, and the Japan Academy of Arts Award, for example.

The entanglement brought by his dual national identity imbued his works with different connotations. Chin once explained the creative motivation of First Opium War : “I was born as a Taiwanese, but became a Japanese due to the First Sino-Japanese War; at the age of 20, the time came for me to become Chinese again. My fate is being tossed around with the current of the times, why? I really want to know the answer.”

It is this kind of “dual perspective” that crosses national, cultural and linguistic boundaries that makes Chin’s First Opium War different from the traditional narratives of China or Britain. For example, from the Chinese point of view, the First Opium War was generally studied without taking into account the “Japanese” point of view, but Chin noticed that the war broke out at the end of the Edo period in Japan, a time when Japanese society was also rife with internal conflicts and ills. Many Japanese were also struggling to make ends meet, and some even left Japan to find a new way out. The outbreak of the First Opium War and the defeat of the once powerful Qing dynasty prompted many Japanese to think about why Qing failed and question if a similar war would happen to Japan soon.

Hence Chin Shunshin added a fictional Japanese character in the novel, Ishida Tokunosuke.

Ishida was originally a guard on a Japanese merchant ship, and after being rescued from the sea, he met Wen Zhang (the only son of Wen Han, shopkeeper of the business “Jin Shun Ji” and one of the main characters in the book) and stayed at Jin Shun Ji. Later on, Ishida became an aide to Lin Zexu, a senior official of the imperial court. Through the character Ishida Tokunosuke, Chin observed the First Opium War from a perspective that was neither English nor Chinese.

Traditionally, the study of modern Japanese history begins with the Perry Expedition in 1853 (the sixth year of the Kaei era), when Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry of the U.S. Navy sailed to Japan. However, Chin Shunchin pushed the beginning of history forward to the First Opium War in 1840. He argued that the seeds of change in modern Japan were planted as early as the First Opium War.

As a matter of fact, studies in Korea point out that Koreans were also concerned about the First Opium War at that time, as it made them believe that the times were about to change, and the world order was about to be turned upside down. Unprecedented changes in Asia were on the horizon during the First Opium War.

Chin Shunshin’s First Opium War, published in the 1960s, elevated the significance of the war from the “beginning of modern Chinese history” to “beginning of modern Asian history”. He argued that the impact of the war was not limited to China and, from an Asian perspective, he presciently proposed a new view of history. First Opium War has been published in many editions in Japan and has been designated as a textbook of modern history by the University of Tokyo. It is worth reading seriously for contemporary Chinese readers as well.

 

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