After Defence Minister Koizumi's Yasukuni visit on the 81st anniversary of Japan's surrender, the region's foreign ministries confirm the yearly row will now run on a scheduled send.
Following the defence minister's Yasukuni visit on the surrender anniversary, Japan, China and South Korea have reportedly automated their annual exchange of outrage, with condemnations set to send every 15 August whether anyone visits or not. A new Trilateral Office of Scheduled Indignation says the move frees diplomats to develop newer resentments.
There is a certain comfort, at my age, in a story one can review without reading. Japan's defence minister visited Yasukuni Shrine on the 81st anniversary of the surrender; Beijing and Seoul objected; Tokyo noted the visit was private; everyone retired until next August. This year, however, the franchise has finally acknowledged what its audience worked out decades ago, and the foreign ministries of Japan, China and South Korea have jointly announced that the entire exchange will henceforth be automated.
Under the new arrangement, condemnations will dispatch themselves at 09:00 local time every 15 August, regardless of whether any minister has actually attended the shrine. Officials described this as a sensible efficiency, given that the statements have not required updating since roughly 2005 and, in the words of one internal memo, "perform identically whether or not anyone is angry." Japan's expression of regret that the visit "was made in a private capacity" has been configured as an auto-reply.
The scheme is administered by a new body, the Trilateral Office of Scheduled Indignation, whose spokesperson, Ms Haruka Tanibe, unveiled a shared regional calendar containing a single recurring entry: Historical Grievance (annual, no end date).
"We were spending three working days a year on a dispute whose script has not changed within living memory. Now the machines handle August, and our diplomats are freed to generate entirely new resentments, which frankly is where the growth is."
Ms Tanibe confirmed that the system had been stress-tested by running the last forty years of statements through it in reverse order, an experiment nobody in any of the three capitals noticed.
The sequel nobody demanded, delivered annually
One reviews this production, as one must, as a sequel. The set is unchanged, a handsome shrine in late-summer light. The plot is unchanged, a visit, a protest, a shrug. Only the cast rotates, and even then within a narrow repertory: the latest instalment stars a Koizumi, a surname the franchise last deployed to considerable box office in the early 2000s. The producers, one suspects, are simply rebooting the original with the founder's son, the surest sign in any medium that fresh ideas were considered and declined.
Asked whether automation might cheapen the sincerity of the region's mutual displeasure, Ms Tanibe was reassuring. "The sincerity was automated some time ago," she said. "We are merely updating the delivery mechanism." A pilot programme will reportedly extend the model to territorial disputes over uninhabited rocks, which officials believe can be reduced to a single laminated card passed back and forth in perpetuity.
And so the calendar turns, the emails queue, and next August will arrive precisely as scheduled, indistinguishable from this one. History, as ever, declines to take notes.
