Kazuhiro Hayashida on Japan’s postwar misreading of China.--------  

Kazuhiro Hayashida-------   

Japan’s postwar error began with its treatment of China as merely an external state and of Japan itself as a completely severed modern sovereign nation-state. Yet the relationship between the Qing Empire and the Japanese archipelago was never one of such total separation. At the very least, within the Qing central administration, matters concerning Japan were preserved in large quantities not as miscellaneous issues of local commerce, but within the highest shelves of state judgment: the Palace Memorials with Vermilion Rescripts and the Grand Council archival copies. This fact alone makes it clear that issues concerning the Japanese archipelago were understood as matters requiring imperial judgment and central policy coordination concerning the arrangement of political subjects. Furthermore, the inclusion of Ryukyu-related matters within the memorial drafts and submissions of the Imperial Household Department, processed through the vocabulary of the inner court order — “submitted for imperial inspection,” “received,” “stored,” “granted for use,” “expressions of gratitude” — demonstrates that the East China Sea sphere was treated as a semi-internal space lying outside the framework of equal diplomacy administered by the Ministry of Rites. Only one conclusion can be drawn from this: Japan and the Qing were never completely separate political subjects...

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