Why China and Ugly Japan are oceans apart
YouTube上看似不应受追捧的热门视频,是一段有关一艘小渔船的40分钟短片。逾150万人(主要在日本和中国)观看了发生在海上的这一幕,仅略少于登录该网站观看另一段40秒视频的人数——后者观看的是一只名叫泰森(Tyson)的小狗踩着日本人玩滑板的视频。
The unlikely YouTube hit of the moment is a 40-minute video about a little fishing boat. More than 1.5m people, mainly in Japan and China, have watched this ocean drama, only a tad fewer than those who logged on to a 40-second clip about Tyson the skateboarding dog-Japanese.
短片中的这艘中国拖网渔船,是9月一起事件的焦点——该事件使得中日关系降至2005年以来的冰点。上周泄露的这段短片,意在展现一艘中国渔船在钓鱼岛周边水域撞击日本海上保安厅舰艇的画面。钓鱼岛在日本被称为尖阁列岛(Senkaku ),这些岛屿无人居住,但中日两国争夺激烈。这一段视频的泄露,再度点燃了围绕日本拘捕中方船长时间的争议——此次事件引发了中日外交角力。由于中国政府施加了强大的政治压力,日本检察机关以担心中日关系为由释放了中国船长,没有对其提出起诉。
The featured Chinese trawler is at the centre of a September incident that brought Sino-Japanese relations to their lowest point since 2005. The footage, leaked last week, purports to show a Chinese boat ramming a Japanese coastguard ship in waters close to uninhabited, but fiercely contested, islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. Its release has reignited controversy over Japan’s arrest of the captain, which set off a diplomatic shoving-match between Beijing and Tokyo. So intense was the political pressure from Beijing that Japanese prosecutors released the captain without pressing charges, citing concerns about Sino-Japanese ties.
该视频的泄露,似乎是为了支持日本的说法:即该国别无选择,只能在本国控制的岛屿附近,拘捕故意冲撞日本舰艇的中国渔船船长。中国政府始终否认这艘渔船主动挑衅,尽管许多中国网民正是因此而把船长奉为英雄。
Tokyo’s apparent climbdown in releasing the captain provoked a backlash at home. Even Yoichi Funabashi, editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s most liberal mainstream newspaper, published an anguished letter in which he decried Beijing’s actions. “If China continues to act as it has, we Japanese will be prepared to engage in a long, long struggle with China.”