Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea and Japan, by Michael Booth
Three Tigers, One Mountain: a Journey through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea and Japan By Michael Booth Jonathan Cape £14.99
The author has chosen travelogue as his medium for probing political relations between the countries of the East China Sea – perhaps because his subject is rather remote for English readers.
The result is rather like one of those TV documentaries where the presenter is never off screen, guiding the viewer through landscapes, ruins and museums, into hushed meetings with bespectacled academics and informal chats with market traders.
Booth begins by asking why his three
‘tigers’ (actually four, since he includes Taiwan) should be so at odds when they have a common cultural ancestry in Confucianism. But next-door neighbours are notoriously quarrelsome. And the countries of Europe, despite a shared Graeco-roman and Christian heritage, were fighting each other up to the 20th century. The Confucian thesis gets quietly dropped as it becomes clear that the real problem is – or was – Japanese militarism.
Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and north-east China in 1932 visited horrors on people of a generation that is only now dying out. The book examines Japan’s use of poison gas in Manchuria, the enslavement of so-called ‘comfort women’ in both China and Korea, the massacre known as the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, and the unending dispute over the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where Japanese soldiers – among them war criminals – are honoured.
Formerly a food and travel writer, the author adopts a magazine journalist’s approach. Chunks of history and statistics are lightened with whimsical interjections and trendy cultural references, some of which Oldie readers may find baffling. He is nothing if not assiduous, however, even if his interviews with local experts sometimes beg for the blue pencil.
The danger of putting oneself at the centre of the narrative, like the TV presenter, is that readers may not find you simpatico. They may feel like tourists trapped on a tour bus by a loquacious guide with a loudspeaker when they would rather be enjoying the scenery. But, after some initial irritation, I found Booth an engaging travelling companion. Not only is he serious about his reportage, but he is also a fine descriptive writer when he chooses.
His book really takes off when he steps ashore in South Korea to find a noisier, pushier and more garish society than the Japan he has left. His ‘self-drive’ hire car is alarming; so too is the Koreans’ obsession with smartphones (not a single person in Seoul is to be seen with a book or newspaper) and their physical appearance. Koreans, per capita, undergo more plastic surgery than people anywhere else in the world.
Booth goes hunting for the burial place of thousands of Korean noses, cut off by invading Japanese in the late-16th century and sent back to Tokyo for bounty, only to be repatriated 400 years later. He leaves South Korea with a witty account of the 18-hour ferry ride to Qingdao in China, where he visits the birthplace of Confucius at Qufu. He visits Nanjing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and finally Taiwan, where popular opinion appears to be hardening against reunification with China. He leaves out North Korea, on the reasonable grounds that he would not find out very much there.
The mission ends inconclusively. Most of the countries seem to have it in for Japan, even if they have profited from its industrial legacy – but for different reasons. The Chinese government blames Japan in order to deflect domestic discontent; the Koreans seem almost to define themselves by their hatred for it.
In reply, the Japanese have issued a lot of apologies over the years since the Second World War; but the words never seem adequate – too formal, say the aggrieved, and therefore insincere. Yet young people of the region are apparently flocking to Japan. So perhaps it’s just a matter of time before the blaming and the shaming die out for lack of supporters.
If the journey leaves its big question unanswered, perhaps that is because it is unanswerable. What remains – a quirky and colourful account of East Asian customs and attitudes both ancient and modern – is well worth the ticket. And, for the same price, you get to visit museums more numerous, various and exotic than you could dream of.