War Memory: Evidence from Assistance during Great East Japan Earthquake

Abstract

On the basis of a natural experiment related to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the present work empirically analyzes the relationship between historical events and current attitude and determines whether regions that suffered severely during the Japanese invasion in World War II expressed small concern during the earthquake. After controlling for geographical distance, bilateral trade, and political characteristics, a negative relationship is found between the duration of invasion and number of related deaths in the invaded regions and their governments’ efforts in assisting Japan after the earthquake. Further analysis shows that political similarity to Japan helped in assisting them after the earthquake, but this effect was reduced for regions that sustained many deaths during the Japanese invasion. In addition, a mediation effect test shows that the help extended by Japan to several countries after the war through the Japanese official development assistance did not positively influence the amount of aid provided by such regions to Japan after the earthquake. These studies provide new evidence of the long-lasting influence of war. However, no robust evidence is found about the relationship between death rate and war memory. Therefore, even large countries cannot tolerate serious suffering during painful historical events.

Keywords:

• World War II
• war memory
• assistance
• historical events
• ODA

Subject classification codes:

• 030
• 120
• 190

Acknowledgment

We thank Baomin Dong, Pinghan Liang, Wenwei Peng, Chuanchuan Zhang, Xiahai Wei, Yuan Liu, Xiaobo He, Tianshi Dai, Xianbin Wang, participants in the CEC Workshop for English Working Papers (2017), XMU EAI Workshop (2017), BCCDS (2017), and the anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Fangjing Jiang, Shuo Kan, and Yuhang Zhao for their help in collecting data and related materials. We acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71103075) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Jinan University (Grant Nos.: 12JNYH002, 12JNKY001, 15JNQM001). The authors assume responsibility over any remaining error.

Notes

1. Gowa and Mansfield (1993), Glick and Taylor (2010), Berger et al. (2013) study the relationship between war and trade.

2. Fisman, Hamao, and Wang (2014) provide evidence that stock markets may react to adverse shocks of China–Japan relations. They show that stocks of Japanese companies with high Chinese exposure suffered a relative decline during the ‘Textbook Event’ in 2005 and the ‘Senkaku Event’ (Senkaku Islands is also known as Diaoyu Islands in China) in 2010, where the issues arose from the war. Similarly, Heilmann (2016) and Chen, Du, and Yang (2016) also find boycott effects in the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute.

3. French Indochina was a French colonial territory in Southeast Asia before 1949 that consists of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

4. Taiwan refers to Taiwan China.

5. The data are collected from the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

6. See http://www.japanww2.com/.

7. See http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/.

8. See http://www.populstat.info/.

9. For most countries, the 1937 population data is used. As no 1937 population data 1937 existed for Vietnam and Mongolia, the 1913 population data is used instead. For the other missing data, the 1935, 1936, or 1937 population data is used, which is available from the Populstat website (http://www.populstat.info/) by Jan Lahmeyer instead.

10. See http://comtrade.un.org/.

11. See http://stats.oecd.org/.

12. It includes West Africa.

13. Here, Taiwan refers to Taiwan China.

14. A large and growing number of studies has tested the mediation effect, namely, Baron and Kenny (1986), Mackinnon and Dwyer (1993), MacKinnon, Warsi, and Dwyer (1995), Morgeson, Delaney-Klinger, and Hemingway (2005), Kalyanaraman and Sundar (2006), Assad, Donnellan, and Conger (2007), Preacher and Hayes (2008), and Zhao, Lynch, and Chen (2010).