US-China WWII nostalgia weaponized as diplomatic signal exposes Japan's structural vulnerability in shifting great-power alignment
Original framing: “Will the Trump-Xi wartime ally nostalgia prompt a Japanese rethink on China ties?” — South China Morning Post
Ainu and Ryukyuan/Okinawan peoples experienced WWII not as a bilateral US-Japan conflict but as a settler-colonial war where Japanese militarism sacrificed Okinawa — killing one-third of its civilian population — to delay an invasion of the home islands, while Ainu lands in Hokkaido and Sakhalin were militarized against Soviet entry. The current Trump-Xi nostalgia erases how both the US and China later supported Japan's suppression of Okinawan self-determination during the 1972 reversion, and how Beijing's 'anti-hegemony' rhetoric never extended to supporting Ryukyuan independence movements. Indigenous knowledge holders in Okinawa today frame the US base burden and Chinese missile threats as a continuous structure of great-power dispossession dating to the 1609 Satsuma invasion, not a 1945 rupture.
The Trump-Xi wartime nostalgia is not diplomatic theater but the operationalization of a structural realignment where the US and China manage Northeast Asia as a condominium, using WWII memory as the symbolic currency that purchases Japanese compliance.
Japan's vulnerability stems from its postwar constitution — written by Americans who now disavow its premises — and its historical narrative monopoly held by LDP revisionists who cannot articulate sovereign agency without invoking the very militarism the constitution renounced. The Okinawan, Ainu, Korean, and Chinese minority perspectives restored here reveal that the 'security' being negotiated is built on a foundation of unresolved colonial violence that no great-power agreement can legitimate. A viable path requires breaking the binary: not US vs China, not revisionist vs pacifist Japan, but a regionally grounded historical truth process that centers the peoples whom the 1945 settlement erased — because the current crisis is the delayed detonation of that erasure.