A delicate balance that must be maintained

05/10/2008

It appears that every period in history has its share of people who resent seeing their country inundated with foreign influences and products.

In the Kamakura Period (1192-1333), for instance, the monk Yoshida Kenko bristled in "Tsurezuregusa" (Essays in Idleness), "Aside from medicines, we can do perfectly well without goods from China."

He went on, "How stupid it is to load up ships with unnecessary items and risk sailing the treacherous waters from China." Were Kenko to live in present-day Japan and see households overflowing with Chinese consumer goods, he would probably flip.

Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Japan earlier in the week for a summit with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. The talks focused on three issues--Tibet, gas fields in the East China Sea, and the recent tainted frozen gyoza Chinese dumpling scare.

Fukuda usually talks as if everything is someone else's problem, not his. But even he came across as uncharacteristically "hands on" when he insisted that the gyoza issue "must never remain unresolved."

Chinese imports satisfy Japanese consumers' desire for cheaper and more convenient products.

The summit, however, did nothing to guarantee the safety of Chinese food imports. But Hu was more than accommodating on the matter of loaning a couple of giant pandas to Tokyo's Ueno Zoo.

His kindness is to be appreciated, but it made me think of a delicious appetizer helping to tame the bitter taste of the main dish.

Hu described his visit as a "warm spring trip," while Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who came to Japan in April last year, called his a "trip to melt the ice." The season, it seems, has advanced from winter to spring.

But inherent in the relations between Japan and China is a certain instability that could bring the chill back the moment something goes wrong. We must not let the buds that look to the future shrink.

Back to Kenko the monk. His diatribe was also directed at people who tended to appreciate only foreign imports. In telling them off, however, he quoted a classic Chinese maxim that warns against coveting exotic goods from faraway places.

His apparently unconscious self-contradiction offers a glimpse of the history that has always bound Japan and China together.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 9(IHT/Asahi: May 10,2008)