Lee Doo Dam is a third-grader in Seoul who, like many eight-year-olds around the world, is nuts about PokEmon. But unlike most kids, he's conflicted. He knows the popular animated characters come from Japan. He has also learned in school how Japanese soldiers brutally invaded and colonized his homeland back in 1910. After his mother reminded him that every Pocket Monster sold helped Japan get richer, Doo Dam successfully resisted buying any PokEmon cards. "Japan is bad," he says. "No one nation should be above another nation."

The little boy's predicament aptly illustrates Asia's mixed feelings toward Japan. To the gray-haired generation, memories of military invasions are still vivid. "It's really sad," laments Park Sung Pyo, a 63-year-old retired Seoul businessman. "I try to tell my children about the atrocities. They listen with one ear and it goes out the other ear, and then they buy my grandchildren things from Japan. They didn't live through the colonial experience, so it doesn't seem real to them."

It is certainly nothing more than history to 23-year-old Lee Sun Jung, as she shops for a Hello Kitty hair curler. "Appealing to nationalism to buy Korean goods is over now," she says. "We get upset because of the history, but when we look at creative designs from Hello Kitty we buy them."

Hair curlers and Pocket Monsters, comfort women and labor camps. Like young Lee Doo Dam and retiree Park Sung Pyo, much of Asia sees Japan as a country with a split personality, a hard-to-understand culture that inspires contradictory sentiments. It represents evil. And fun! Fear. And awe. No matter what the impression, the stereotypes fail to capture the nuances of the culture—or the postwar relationships that have evolved between Japan and its Asian neighbors. Instead, the images of Japan—the warmonger, the economic powerhouse, the rich sugar daddy and the epitome of teen cool—are like its comic book exports: one-dimensional, exaggerated and extreme.

The Warmonger
The worst of the stereotypes, war-monger Japan—the country that invaded its neighbors, massacred local populations, forced men to toil in munitions factories and women to work as sex slaves for its soldiers—is still palpably alive in no small part because Japan has done such a poor job exorcising the old demons. The apologies came too late and are too feeble. Japan didn't acknowledge it forced Korean, Taiwanese and Filipino women into sex slavery until 1993. Its courts are only now hearing cases of indentured workers from Korea and China, who stand little chance of winning any settlement; in April the Supreme Court rejected Korean forced laborers' pension claims. Mainstream politicians insist that Nanjing Massacre atrocities have been exaggerated. They still justify Japan's World War II aggression as an effort to liberate Asia from European colonization or, in the case of Korea, to aid the country's modernization. "None of this was for Korea," scoffs Lee Jung Hoon, an expert on modern Japan-Korea relations at Seoul's Yonsei University. "Korea was simply a stepping stone for future advancement into Manchuria and China."

So the animosity continues, sparked at times by recalcitrance on the part of the Japanese government and at other times by the insensitivity—or nationalism—of individual Japanese. In February, politicians in Taiwan marched through the streets of Taipei to burn a comic book by Japanese artist Yoshinori Kobayashi, whose inflammatory take on Taiwan's history portrays so-called comfort women as grateful for the opportunity to work as prostitutes. Indonesians were upset earlier this year by a Japanese film Merdeka, which depicts Japan's imperial army as helping Indonesia's fight for independence. The filmmakers have agreed to delete one particularly galling scene that shows an Indonesian woman kissing the feet of an invading Japanese officer.

The planned publication of junior-high school textbooks that still present a watered-down version of Japan's military aggression has provoked official protests from China, the temporary withdrawal of South Korea's ambassador and a South Korean cyberattack that crashed the Japanese Education Ministry website in March. The message that the rest of Asia takes from these episodes is clear: Japan still doesn't get it.

The Powerhouse
Few dispute that there's one thing Japan does get, and that's the art of doing business. Asians admire powerhouse Japan, the economic marvel that pulled itself out of its postwar depths, made and exported the world's best cars, TVs and semiconductor chips, and served notice that the region was a global player. Asians acknowledge sharing in its success: in April, electronics giant Matsushita announced it will spend $16.1 billion to expand factories making mobile phones and other devices in Tianjin, China. In the postwar period through September 2000, Japan has funneled $172 billion in direct investment to its Asian neighbors.

But even this is a double-edged sword: Japan's perceived economic colonialism has spurred a recent backlash. In the Philippines, workers have demonstrated over mistreatment by Japanese bosses. Anti-Japanese fervor in China has shifted from complaints about war atrocities to gripes about selling shoddy merchandise. In one case, Mitsubishi Motors Corp. recalled four-wheel-drive Pajeros in Europe and North America because of a faulty rear brake. Customers there got free repairs. Chinese owners did not. Only after a Chinese government-affiliated consumers' group filed suit did Mitsubishi agree to pay compensation. Similarly, Toshiba offered free repairs and compensation for faulty laptop computers sold in the U.S. while Chinese buyers were left in the lurch. "Such behavior by the Japanese has harmed the reputation of Japanese business and lowered their products' prestige," says Yang Jiankun, secretary-general of the Chinese Consumers Association. A recent poll on one Chinese website found that 83% of the 7,584 respondents no longer prefer Japanese products because they think they aren't reliable. "We should boycott Toshiba to show that China is stronger than Japan," said a vendor named Zhou in Beijing's Haidian technology district. "We should not support a product that is made by people who try to cheat Chinese."

The Moneybags
Far from cheating the Chinese, the Japanese government gave China some $1.22 billion in development aid in 1999 alone. It seems that even Japan the Sugar Daddy—the rich country that buys Van Goghs and golf courses, gives billions for roads and bridges and gets ripped off when it goes traveling—can't get a break. Since 1969, Japan's government has spent $80 billion in assistance on its Asian neighbors. It is Indonesia's third-largest donor, behind the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. It is India's largest bilateral benefactor. The roads, sewers and airport runways clearly benefit the countries—from China to Cambodia—where they are built, though the money too often has been tied to projects that go to big Japanese construction companies—the right hand paying the left. Still, says Lu Guangye, a senior research fellow with the China Institute for International Strategic Studies: "Japan cannot think that by offering us economic incentives it will make us accept its historical distortions of what it did during World War II. We will never forget."

Japan complains bitterly that it doesn't get enough credit for the money it lavishes on its neighbors. That may be an understatement. Consider a recent survey of politicians, academics, professionals, artists and industrialists in India: half did not think Japan played any significant role in Asian economic development at all.

The Trendsetter
But for a younger generation of Asians, there is no confusion about Japan's role as the epicenter of cool. Weaned on pop music, platform boots and tea hair (and gray hair, pink hair, blond hair and no hair), these kids may eventually offer the best hope for a less hostile and more nuanced view of Japan.

Little Lee Doo Dam is just one example. He may have managed to hold out against PokEmon, but then the newest Japanese fad hit—the Digimon cartoon series. Doo Dam caved—like most of his buddies who have helped make the comics the top-selling children's books at Seoul's giant Kyobo bookstore. "It's fun and there is no Korean comic to match it," he says. "So I think it is O.K. to read Digimon. Even if it comes from Japan."

Ultimately no matter how many bridges Japan builds in Bangladesh, how many rice cooker factories it opens in Bangkok or how many of its comic books are devoured in Seoul, only the Japanese can determine which of its many images will prevail.

With reporting by Hannah Beech/Beijing, Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Stella Kim and Donald Macintyre/Seoul and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

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