Political Tensions in East Asia Mirrored Online

If comments on Internet bulletin boards were bullets and computer hacking attacks military sorties then East Asia would be a war zone now. In the last few months, a bitter controversy over Japanese history textbooks, which China and South Korea say gloss over Japan’s actions in World War II, has had Internet users in the region revisiting hostilities of 60 years ago. As well as mauling each other online, the two sides have been directing determined cyber attacks against each other’s Internets.

Not only have real-world diplomatic frictions been mirrored online, Web technology has been at the core of the escalating frictions. In China, protestors used mobile phones and the Internet to organize widespread and sometimes violent protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses. In South Korea, citizens arranged protests and debated the row through weblogs and bulletin boards. In Japan, irate bulletin board users have reacted with jingoistic attacks on their country’s neighbors.

A series of disputes between the Asian neighbors brought online tensions to a peak this past spring. In March, Japan’s Shimane Prefectural Assembly voted to devote a special day to a set of South Korea-controlled islands (Dokto in Korea and Takeshima in Japan) positioned between the two countries. The action reignited a long-standing dispute on the 0.09 square mile islands’ sovereignty.

South Korea was irritated again in early April when the Japanese government authorized eight controversial school textbooks that state a Japanese claim to the Dokto islands. China too was upset by the textbooks’ description of the Japan-controlled Senkaku islands (Diaoyu in China) as Japanese territory. China disputes the sovereignty of the East China Sea chain of islets, and the gas fields surrounding them.

Most significantly, China and South Korea accuse the textbooks’ authors of glossing over Japan’s actions during World War II. The junior high school texts refer to the Nanjing massacre, in which up to 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians died, as an “incident.” The schoolbooks also neglect to mention the use of “comfort women” — women from Asian countries forced to serve Japanese forces as sex slaves.

Although the textbooks have only been adopted by a tiny fraction of Japanese schools, the controversy riled those in East Asia who believe that Japan has not shown sufficient repentance for World War II. China in particular has been infuriated by Prime Minister Koizumu’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The Shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals. A museum there presents what critics say is a revisionist history that tries to justify Japan’s invasion of her neighbors.

Perhaps then it is no surprise that the shrine’s Web site was one of many in Japan to suffer a barrage of cyber attacks this spring. According to a notice posted on the shrine’s site, at times as many as 15,000 DOS (denial of service) attacks per second have been launched against the homepage. Shrine officials also claim that messages inciting hackers to target the Web site were posted on a Chinese bulletin board. The attacks are described as a “malice-filled provocation against the country of Japan” and “a base act … terrorism that is a fundamental negation of Internet law and order.”

By April, the offensive had spread to Japanese government Web sites, even provincial universities and local governments. According to Japanese newswires, the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet offices were attacked at the end of February. On March 17, the Foreign Office Web site was targeted, a Korean Web site claiming responsibility. In mid-April, a message in Chinese, “You can forget the past, but you can’t deny history,” was inserted on the front page of the Kumamoto University Web site. On April 19, the Mainichi Shimbun reported, the Fujieda municipal office Web site (a town of 131,000 people) unwillingly featured a message that said “Return the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku islands).” The Japanese Defense Agency and Police Agency Web sites were also attacked.

Until recently, Japan’s digital security had lagged behind other countries, said Naoki Miyagi of the National Information Security Center, a 26-person department set up this April to help protect government Web sites. Without a coordinated policy, individual ministries and agencies were left to sort out their own security themselves. “Government Web sites were vulnerable, not properly managed. [But] recently we’ve been taking aggressive measures,” said Miyagi. Yet, the department noted that even a planned July expansion to 37 employees will fall short of the 100-member governmental cyber-security staff in France, or the 800 employed in the United States.

Despite the widespread assumption that hackers in South Korea and China have been responsible for the cyber attacks, few believe they were government-sanctioned. And no one, it seemed, was more surprised about the role that the Internet has played in the recent frictions than the Chinese government. Authorities appear to have been caught off-guard by how easily demonstrations against Japanese businesses and diplomatic missions were organized. Protesters made use of a panoply of Internet and mobile communications technology. Information was exchanged through text messages, blogs, Web sites and online messaging systems. “If it wasn’t for the Internet then such large and widespread demonstrations wouldn’t have taken place,” said Qi Jing Ying, a researcher studying the Chinese Web at the University of Tokyo.

She doubts whether Chinese authorities could have prevented the demonstrations, even if they had wanted to. When they did finally clamp down, it was by detaining protestors and sending out threatening text messages. Beijing citizens were warned: “Express patriotism rationally. Don’t take part in illegal protests. Don’t make trouble.”

Chinese Internet users have become increasing adept at breaching the so-called “Great Firewall of China” – elaborate systems set up by the government to try and control access to the Internet. “My friends and teachers in China can use proxy servers instead to access banned sites,” says Qi Jing Ying. Denied many other democratic freedoms, the Chinese have thrown themselves into political debate regarding the Internet, says Qi. Even some criticism of the authorities is allowed. Qi contrasts the tone of the Chinese Internet to its counterpart in Japan, where bulletin boards like the popular 2 Channel are often dismissed as trivial and shallow. “You can’t compare 2 Channel and Chinese political sites,” she argued. “Even Chinese foreign office officials and political leaders look at Chinese political Web sites. I doubt that Koizumi (Japan’s Prime Minister) is watching 2 Channel.”

Meanwhile, in South Korea the World Wide Web has similarly helped host public reaction to the territorial and textbook disputes. Bloggers, bulletin board users and hackers alike have been quick to protest against Japan. That’s no surprise considering the number of people online in Korea, said Isa Ducke, a political scientist at the German Institute of Japan Studies in Tokyo. South Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate in the world.

Sites like the popular Daum Web portal and its Daum Café bulletin boards are a venue for debate and protest. South Korea’s ubiquitous Internet culture is worlds away from the otaku underground culture of Japan’s bulletin boards. “There can’t be many Koreans who have never sent a message to a Daum Café,” said Ducke. Even the American Embassy has set up a page on Daum to provide information about visa applications.

In the past, South Korean Web surfers and hackers have been quick to make their feelings known. In 2002, they protested the disqualification of South Korean skater Kim Dong-Sung from that year’s Winter Olympics. Sixteen thousand e-mails sent to the United States Olympic Committee within five hours of the event crashed the organization’s Web server. During a previous Japanese textbook controversy in 2001, three South Korean high school students known on the Net as “anti-Japan” attacked the server of the right-wing revisionist tsukurukai textbook association, disabling it for several days. On another occasion the same trio crashed the Warner Brothers Web site in protest against a program on dog-meat eating in Korea.

Hacking attacks on Japan and other countries are well-publicized in Korea, unlike the efforts of hackers in Japan. “I guess it is partly because in Korea these people are heroes,” said Ducke. “They are just doing something weird, or blocking a Web site that no one is interested in anyway.”

In any case, the difference in tone between mainstream media commentary on the tensions with China and South Korea, and discussion on the Japanese Internet couldn’t be starker. In one article on rising nationalism in Japan, Aera magazine recently described the situation as “The Net world that can’t say ‘no’ to lip-service nationalism.” In contrast to the mainstream media, the Internet – or Internet discussion at least – is dominated in Japan by right-wing opinion. The recent disputes with South Korea and China have prompted a heap of aggressive, jingoistic commentary online.

Kenichi Asano, a professor of journalism and mass communications at Doshisha University in Kyoto, estimates that 80 to 90 percent of comments on 2 Channel are “rightist.” “Many people are disappointed by the discussions on 2 Channel,” Asano said. “They are irresponsible and arrogant, not based on facts.” He himself has found his political views attacked on the bulletin boards, and threats made on members of his family.

But do Japanese people really mean what they say on the Internet? “Not necessarily,” according to Kaoru Endo, a professor of political studies at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, and a researcher into the Japanese Internet. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they really dislike Korea or China.” Extreme comments about China and Korea could just be an outlet for general frustration. She pointed out that Japan’s conformist society leaves people few chances to express their frustrations or opinions in everyday life. “Things that they can’t say in normal life, they become directed against foreigners,” Endo said. The anonymity of the bulletin boards gives users an unaccustomed freedom. She noted that personal blogs in Japan tend to be more restrained.

More so than the Internet in China and Korea, the Japanese Web has often been characterized as the playground of otaku hobbyists – with little relation to real Japanese society. But that may be changing now, said Endo. The number of requests to interview her has increased tenfold in the last year. “The mainstream media’s treatment of the Internet has changed a little recently,” Endo said. Yet a year ago those same mainstream journalists were still telling her; “It’s nothing to do with us.”

This year also saw the publication in book form of a thread from the 2 Channel bulletin board. “Densha Otoko (train man)” began with a request for love advice from a self-confessed computer geek as he pursued a woman he met on a commuter train. What started as an apparently real-life discussion among the Internet community has permeated the mainstream media in comic form, as a book, and will soon be released as a film. The book alone has sold more than 615,000 copies.

The Japanese media is finally waking up to the Internet, it seems, but time will tell whether the Japanese Web develops as a space for real political discussion as it has in South Korea, or even in China. And that may depend as much on Japan’s domestic politics as on any Internet technology. Certainly, the influence of the Net on the economy media and politics of all three countries is expected to increase. The Chinese Internet alone is growing at an astonishing rate. The China Internet Network Information Center reports that there were 94 million Web users on the mainland in 2004, 18.2 percent more than the year before.

Many commentators also expect tensions to continue to grow in the region. The Japanese government’s slow drift to the political right has already antagonized its neighbors. Disputes over World War II are still festering, and Japan has unresolved disputes with China and South Korea about territory and energy resources. Future clashes on the Internet can be expected. East Asia will be watching the Web.