After 9/18 had passed, seeing that the 7-Eleven downstairs was still open for business as usual, I finally let out a slight sigh of relief. The article I had meant to write yesterday but didn’t get around to writing, I’ve decided to make up today.
I don’t know why 9/18 is called “National Humiliation Day.” At first glance that doesn’t seem like a problem, but the more you think about it, the more something feels off.
What is “humiliation”? Shamelessness, brazen lack of shame, “to know shame is close to courage”… Dictionaries define it as “inner shame caused by damage to one’s reputation,” or as shame, disgrace, or embarrassment. If you do something wrong, then you ought to know shame; that is the main meaning of “humiliation.”
But what is being commemorated on National Humiliation Day? It commemorates Japan’s invasion of China. Who should feel ashamed of Japan’s invasion of China? Of course the Japanese who did the wrong thing should feel ashamed. So how did it end up becoming our National Humiliation Day instead?
Of course, the so-called national humiliation here must be a special usage, meaning that others made us suffer humiliation. But even if you explain it that way, the embarrassment is still, after all, ours. For example, if you want to mock me, then you are exposing my embarrassing side and using it as a point of attack, or setting a trap for me so I make a fool of myself. If I don’t have anything embarrassing at all, and I don’t make a fool of myself, then your mockery won’t succeed.
The question is: we were invaded, so why should we be the ones to feel embarrassed or ashamed? And why should we go all out to commemorate our own loss of face?
Some people say that the United States also has a National Humiliation Day, for Pearl Harbor and so on. But first, there is a translation issue here; second, they only talked like that at the time, and even then it was from a posture of self-reproach: “We should have anticipated this attack long ago, and yet we still let it happen—what a humiliation!” But what exactly is our so-called national humiliation?
Indeed, ever since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, our national humiliation has always been tied to Japan. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 truly was a national humiliation; its humiliation did not lie in Japan having defeated us, but in the fact that we were both Eastern countries, and our wealth and battleships were not exactly weak either, yet the result was a crushing defeat. Compared with open, reform-minded Japan, the Qing government shut itself off from the world, was consumed by internal strife, and stood still, so much so that Japan, once the schoolboy of Chinese civilization, had far overtaken it. That is what made Chinese people feel ashamed. In that sense, treating 9/18 as a national humiliation is nothing more than an extension of 1894–95.
A national humiliation in this sense is of course worth remembering—because we really did not escape that humiliation, that is to say, this vast ancient country of ours was left behind by its neighbors in the modern world. Of course, our GDP has caught up, and “Made in China” has flooded everywhere, but the Qing government’s manufacturing and GDP were also number one in the world at the time. As for being stuck in our ways, politically rigid, culturally closed off, and so on, there is still not much to be proud of.
After 9/18, we had even more and more humiliating things: the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns, grain yields of ten thousand jin per mu, the Cultural Revolution… We committed too many mistakes too painful to look back on, and made utter fools of ourselves before the world. These national humiliations certainly cannot be forgotten, because these shameful problems have not been reflected upon and corrected.
But it is obvious that those patriotic youngsters who smash and loot fellow-countrymen’s property in order to commemorate someone else’s invasion do not understand “national humiliation” this way. Their understanding of “National Humiliation Day” is simply a commemoration of the Japanese army’s invasion of China; that is, the Japanese bullied us, and we are supposed to bully them back.
In other words, National Humiliation Day is in essence National Enmity Day: the theme is not shame, but hatred. Those who shout “Never forget national humiliation” actually mean “Never forget national enmity.”
Humiliation and enmity are not the same. Humiliation stands in opposition to honor; a person’s honor can bring glory to the household, and of course humiliation can also harm descendants. If a person does something unspeakable, then both his ancestors and his descendants will be shamed by it. Honor is honor precisely because it will be talked about fondly by later generations; humiliation is humiliation precisely because it will be remembered by later generations. Of course, we should not become so mired in past humiliation that we cannot move forward, just as we cannot become too immersed in past glory. But basically speaking, being remembered for humiliation is only natural.
But enmity stands in opposition to love; it is a more specific, more private emotion, and there is no inherent reason for it to be passed down through generations. For example, if Zhang San loves Li Si, it does not necessarily follow that Zhang San’s child should also love Li Si’s child.
I have always advocated “love, not hate.” That is not to say that if you harm my loved ones, I will still love you as before. Of course we all feel resentment, we all hate; toward certain people who have hurt us, we grind our teeth whenever we think of them—that is what is called an enemy. But the key point is that this hatred should not be rationalized, and it should not be deliberately cultivated and promoted.
Emotion is the source of reason, not the source of non-reason; rational deduction cannot derive a conclusion of love or hate. To analyze in theory that “you are a good person” does not actually produce love. Love requires two people to undergo actual, intimate encounters in life. To say that because Zhang San once loved Li Si, Zhang San’s child must definitely fall in love with Li Si’s child, is in fact unreasonable. Unless Zhang San, from childhood, instills in the child a twisted view of love, and by every possible means shapes an illusory idol to guide the child’s imagination, allowing his love to arise through a false encounter with that idol, and ultimately to be settled onto Li Si’s child’s head. This method does no great harm in many cases, but if what is cultivated is a highly destructive, all-consuming hatred, then the situation is different.
I do not oppose hatred, and of course I oppose irrationality even less; what I oppose is the rationalization of hatred. Emotions wrapped in reason are not thereby made calmer or steadier; on the contrary, this is what is called a “mental demon,” an illusory idol constructed in the mind that is guiding our emotions. And this rationalized emotion is more easily generalized, with its target no longer being those people we have actually encountered, but some abstract universal concepts, such as China and Japan.
This week’s anime version of *One Piece* happened to air the chapter “Void,” which tells of the racial hatred between fish-men and humans, entangled across generations on Fish-Man Island. Efforts to resolve hatred cannot erase the memories of those fish-men who were persecuted by humans, nor should those memories be erased; and yet what the advocates of peace yearn for is only this: do not let the spark of hatred spread to the next generation.
And at the Fish-Man Island stage, the Boss is precisely the embodiment of hatred. In this episode of the anime, their “essence” happened to be laid bare:
“…Monsters born and nurtured by the environment… The New Fish-Man Pirates are a collection of monsters produced by grudges. They fear that the ancestral enmities will be forgotten, they are perpetually in dread of the day when their anger toward humans cools, and in order to prove the correctness of their holy war, they long for human evil. These monsters have never even wished for peace and harmony for the fish-men tribe. In these monsters’ grudges there is not even any actual ‘experience,’ nor any demand of ‘will’; their enemy is nothing but an incorporeal, illusory existence.”
When Ōda conceived this storyline, he was probably thinking of the Middle East, but now projecting it onto the problem of anti-Japanese sentiment is also highly apt. What Princess Otohime feared most has happened.
They imagine themselves to be avengers chosen by heaven; what they pride themselves on is not the intensity of their feelings, but the legitimacy of their justice. Their resentment has no actual target; eliminating certain specific human beings cannot resolve their hatred, because their hatred was originally inherited and diffused from their forebears, and so from the very beginning it was directionless, with all “humans” encompassed by this empty hatred. They attack all humans indiscriminately because there was never any real discrimination in their hatred to begin with. Emotion, whether red or white, often blinds the eyes of reason; and empty emotion is transparent. It seems not to obscure reason, but in fact it is everywhere, filling the gaps of the soul, not only blinding reason but also blocking genuine feeling.
This kind of feeling carries no past experience and places no hope in the future. They not only do not long for peace, they fear it; they fear that the ancestral enmities will gradually be forgotten. They have a strong sense of justice and mission, and want to keep the flames of hatred burning. They never even consider, nor are they able to consider, what the future would look like if hatred were resolved—unless everyone is killed to the last person, their hatred will never have any reason to come to an end.
Let me reiterate: I am not saying that hatred should be forgotten. On the contrary, hatred cannot be forgotten, but neither was it ever meant to be inherited. We were never meant to transplant the love and hate between our forebears onto ourselves; we can only project outward the feelings cultivated upon the illusory idols in our own hearts. The fact is, we never really “remembered” the hatred of our ancestors in the first place, so how can there be any question of forgetting it?
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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