I had to teach to today due to next weeks school vacation. Chinese state employees, like me, have to deal with some vacation absurdity, though they may just scrap the whole vacation anyway. In my mind it is not a good idea to make students attend class on a Saturday, but that’s just me. My classes earlier today made that very clear to me. My students seemed extra disruptive, which is saying a lot considering there are around 60 fifteen year old students in each of my classes and they act out every time I teach them. I confiscated a whole bunch of magazines, comic books, novels, math homework, and MP3 players, I even had to kick one student out of my class.
The most glaring issue today though was something else. I’ve been teaching my students about travel this week, having them in groups think of a dream vacation anywhere in the world they want. Paris was the all-time winner in my classes, but there was also a huge percentage that wanted to go to Japan. They all presented their trips saying why they wanted to do and what they would do. All of the Japan groups did this without incident except for one of my classes today.
The Chinese generally loath the Japanese. This makes some sense when you think about the fact that the Japanese Imperial Army brutally occupied China back in World War II. However it has always surprised how intensely the Chinese still hate Japan today. I mean why should a Chinese high school freshman hate all the Japanese people today? I still don’t get it, but when a group in one of my classes presented a bunch of racist Japanese slurs instead of reasons for a trip to Japan I wasn’t surprised.
The group’s reasons for going to Japan were simple English sentences followed by racist slurs in Chinese. The sentence “I want to see Japanese dogs” was followed by 日本狗 (lit: Japanese dogs), which is a very negative word for all Japanese people. The sentence “I want to see the soldier….” (the student’s English was very bad so it was unclear what he said) was followed by 黄军 (lit: yellow soldier). According to Wikipedia 黄军:
Was used during World War II to represent Imperial Japanese soldiers due to the colour of the uniform. Today, it is used negatively against all Japanese. Since the stereotype of Japanese soldiers are commonly portrayed in war-related TV series in China as short men, with a toothbrush moustache (and sometimes round glasses, in the case of higher ranks), 黃軍 is also often used to pull jokes on Chinese people with these characteristics, and thus “appear like” Japanese soldiers.
These “jokes” made the students very excited and they laughed loudly, though some looked back at me with worried expressions. I took the group outside and told them they had not done the activity properly and even if they disliked the Japanese that was not what they were supposed to speak about. I then saw one of the student’s paper for the presentation. On the paper were several sentences under the heading of Japan. They included: “I hate them” and “I want them to die” among other angry phrases. I made them redo their assignment and hand it into me at the end of class. That’s all. I don’t think any more action would help at all, no one cares about teaching tolerance for the Japanese here. It was not a fun day to teach.
Your comment about your students’ “I hate Japan” comments aren’t surprising. I run across it occasionally here in Beijing too, and I faced it a lot when I used to teach here. Interestingly, it seems that the younger the audience, the more intense the anger seems to be (young up to a certain age). I’ve had people tell me that they hate all Japanese people except me, as well — when I ask them why, they say bc they think I’m pretty nice, so I mess up the pattern nasty Japanese people. Most of them also admit that they’d never met a Japanese person before me. strange.
I haven’t seen it at the college level, but then again I haven’t questioned them about Japan. Most of my students who have volunteered their travel plans want to go USA, Britain, Europe, or Australia.
You might challenge your students about what technologies they use daily that are Japanese. The CD, the DVD, and probably much more are also Japanese inventions. They watch Japanese anime, read manga, so there is a real disconnect here.
For what it’s worth, I lived in Kentucky for 25 years. There are still folks there who detest Yankees (like me) — they say the word with a sneering tone — because of the War of Northern Agression. And that was 140 years ago.
I am Chinese and I remember this hatred or simply discontent towards Japan has always been surrounding me since I was a kid. Its just there. I learned from people around me and watched TV dramas and movies about very evil Japanese soldiers killing innocent Chinese people. Well, I think its a very deep influence on my generation. However I have my own opinion towards it. Since I have spent a few years in a western country in Britain. I started to dislike our government very much. I do feel we lack a lot of human rights in China and the central government is just too powerful so that they can do anything in the name of protecting peoples interest and holding the country as a whole. I think the government like the people to remember the pain from the Japanese invasion coz that also make us remember that its the communist party saved us people and is leading us to the bright future.