Japan, China can share the same boat

Kanji - the characters derived from Chinese and adapted into written Japanese - are so visible in Japan that visitors from China may have an occasional illusion that they are still in their own country.

The use of kanji for place names is particularly helpful. Chinese people can make educated guesses about meaning and navigate successfully even though they don't know how to pronounce the words.

But be careful: while a lot of kanji words look like Chinese, they can differ in meaning.

"犠牲"means laying down one's life for a heroic purpose in China, while in Japan it can refer to the death of 56 people when Mount Ontake, the volcano in Otaki, Nagano prefecture, burst suddenly to life on Sept 27.

"娘"means "mother" in China and "daughter" in Japan. Couples in China like to introduce their spouses as"愛人", which denotes "lovers" in Japan.

The differences between kanji and Chinese, as these three examples show, are not necessarily fatal, but they can be misleading.

There are some meanings that are lethally different, however.

At a panel discussion at the Beijing-Tokyo Forum, which convened in Tokyo in late September, some Japanese delegates asked their Chinese counterparts to explain the rise of China. They believed that a now prosperous China is building a stronger army with which to expand.

Both countries use"富國強兵" to express an idea of strength.

But it's a mistake to understand the term the same way in the two countries. In China, it simply refers to prosperity with a strong military. In Japan, it suggests expansion.

Beginning with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which ushered in a new, centralized regime, Japan set out to gather wisdom from all over the world and embarked on an ambitious program of military, social, political and economic reforms that transformed it within a generation into a modern nation-state and a major world power.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan pushed for a national "rise through military means", and the continent of Asia was directly targeted for invasion.

Japan's overseas expansion was a monstrous disaster for other Asian countries both before and during World War II, and it moved Japan to the brink of national annihilation. Thus,"富國強兵"is loaded with historical context and has become a pejorative term in Japan.

Yet some people in Japan are now measuring China's corn by their own bushel, drawing a parallel between Imperial Japan's expansionism and the rise of China.

It's true that a pattern can be seen throughout world history: empire emerges, hand in glove, with aggressive expansion.

The British Empire was a product of the European age of discovery, starting with England's maritime explorations in the 15th century. The entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 heralded the beginning of its own expansionist path to power.

But China's story is different. While it is attracting attention around the world because of its rapid growth, China remains a developing country that harbors no desire for world hegemony.

The rise of China is fundamentally altering the power configuration of the world, and its leaders are determined to accomplish this peacefully.

Premier Li Keqiang's recent visit to Germany, Russia and Italy was closely watched in Japan. Japanese media described the China-Russia relationship as a kind of"吳越同舟", or being in the same boat.

A proverb alludes to an episode in ancient China in which combatants from the warring states of Wu and Yue found themselves in the same boat on a river in a storm. Despite their hatred for each other, they agreed to lay down their weapons for common passage.

Separated by a strip of water that is stormy now and then, China and Japan have often occupied the same boat. They are not only neighbors but also the world's second-and third-largest economies.

Though many characters in the Chinese and Japanese languages differ in meaning, the connotation of the term"吳越同舟" is crystal clear and the same.

The people of Wu and Yue states offer a lesson for us in modern times: When they bent their energies in a single direction, they weathered the storm.

This is the approach China and Japan should take today.

The author is China Daily's Tokyo bureau chief. caihong@chinadaily.com.cn