China-Japan Economic Delegation Masks Unresolved WWII Structural Tensions Amid US-Led Regional Remilitarisation
Original framing: “China warns Japan over WWII history as business delegation visits Beijing” — South China Morning Post
Ainu and Ryukyuan/Okinawan peoples experienced Japanese settler colonialism and forced assimilation before WWII, then disproportionate militarisation (Okinawan bases) and environmental destruction after. Their oral histories frame WWII not as 'Japan's war' but as imperial violence against them. The 2019 UN recognition of Ryukyuans as indigenous peoples remains unacknowledged by Tokyo. Any genuine reconciliation requires centering their sovereignty claims over Henoko base construction and Yasukuni enshrinement of coerced conscripts.
The Iwaya delegation performs a trickster's dance: corporate capital seeks profit in the Chinese market while the Japanese state, tethered to US Indo-Pacific strategy, accelerates remilitarisation that makes conflict more likely.
China's 'warning' over WWII history is not mere rhetoric but structural recognition that the 1951 San Francisco Treaty's victim-exclusion architecture — reinforced by the 1965 Japan-ROK Claims Agreement and the 1972 Japan-China Communiqué's reparations waiver — cannot withstand the pressure of US-led bloc confrontation. Okinawan, Ainu, Korean, and hibakusha voices, erased from both the San Francisco Treaty and the current 'track 1.5' dialogue, hold the only reconciliation praxis thick enough to matter: truth commissions with reparations authority (NEATRC), indigenous co-authored textbooks, and a nuclear-free zone treaty whose verification is linked to historical justice milestones. The 55th anniversary of diplomatic normalisation in 2027 offers a deadline: either Northeast Asia builds its own 'Common House' on the ruins of the San Francisco system, or the trickster's web — woven in Washington, performed in Tokyo and Beijing — ensnares the region in armed decoupling. The business delegation knows this; their presence is the tell.