Posted on 11/27/2005 4:52:25 PM PST by Dundee
Japan's increasing reliance on US wins few friends in jittery region
Koizumi's deteriorating relationship with China might confront Canberra with unpleasant choices, writes Tokyo correspondent Peter Alford
JAPAN is becoming more isolated in Asia as its strategic engagement with the US tightens and its difficulties with China worsen. Its few friends are growing worried.
As a result of Junichiro Koizumi's refusal last week to foreswear further visits to the Yasukuni shrine war memorial, South Korea's Roh Moo-hyun seems to have joined China's top leaders in refusing formal meetings with him.
Chinese President Hu Jintao now declines to meet his Japanese counterpart even on the sidelines of multilateral meetings. That might be theatrical, but there hasn't been a China-Japan leaders summit in four years and in a locale as prone to misunderstandings as northeast Asia, it is also unhealthy.
China has up-ended Japan's chances of securing a permanent place at the UN Security Council. Tokyo may be the region's great exponent of "soft power" but no prominent Asian voice was raised on Japan's behalf except India's, its partner with Brazil and Germany in a joint push for seats.
Japan's trade diplomacy isn't inspiring, either. The country with the greatest continuing stake in trade liberalisation, as well as the heaviest reliance on imported food, has offered nothing useful to help save the World Trade Organisation's Doha round.
Japan can't shake off its acute agricultural protectionism, an affliction it shares with South Korea. That does little to reconcile them, except in the arguably counter-productive mission of frustrating a multilateral agreement on farm trade, Japan's one recent successful diplomatic engagement with anybody but the Americans came last week when a Russian mission led by Vladimir Putin signed a dozen commercial agreements.
But there was no movement on recovering the southern Kurils island group the Russians seized from Japan at the end of the Pacific war. Tokyo insists that is a prerequisite for normalising Russo-Japanese relations.
Like Koizumi, Putin didn't want the islands dispute blocking trade and investment. On the other hand, those same mercantile instincts motivate Russia's large sales of advanced military technology to China, which may end up pointed at Japan.
Though their security alliance is now undergoing a transformation long sought by the Americans, Washington, too, is worried about Japan. The alliance is critical to US arrangements in the Asia-Pacific but so is managing the consequences of China's "peaceful rise" in a jittery region.
Japan's rows with its neighbours are complicating US diplomacy, as Undersecretary of State for East Asia Christopher Hill made clear during President George W. Bush's tour this month.
"It doesn't help us that when we have relations with Japan, people think, 'ah ha, it's an anti-Chinese move'," Hill said in Seoul. "It's not in our interest. So we would like to see that situation between Japan and China, and Japan and Korea to calm down."
Hill was referring principally to the "historical issues" symbolised by Koizumi's October 17 visit to Yasukuni, which enshrines 14 class-A war criminals. But there's an underlying worry, voiced by Singapore's Defence Minister, Teo Chee Hean.
"It is a great pity that the history question continues to bedevil Japan's relationship with China and Korea. This has really affected Japan's moral standing in the eyes of other Asians -- Japan rightly should play a greater leadership role."
One form of leadership the Southeast Asians want from Tokyo is to provide a balance to China's economic and diplomatic might.
The senior ASEAN countries' fear that Japan's influence had been permanently diminished gave rise to their recent enthusiasm for outsiders such as Australia and India to become continuously involved in whatever flows from next month's East Asian Summit. China dislikes that concept.
Though the process really began with the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, China's East Asian penetration gathered momentum five years ago with its huge economic surge. That coincided with the arrival of a Japanese leader determined to confront, rather than accommodate, the Chinese challenge.
Japan's diplomacy was already struggling, not least because the US, under former president Bill Clinton, had humiliatingly scuttled its attempt to provide leadership during the financial crisis, while China was seen to have saved the situation by not devaluing its currency.
But Koizumi made a terrible tactical error by undertaking to visit Yasukuni every year in his official capacity. He institutionalised a gesture that uniquely affronts almost every country east of India -- China and South Korea most of all.
Worse yet, Koizumi shunned the opportunity created by his overwhelming election victory on September 11 to repudiate his promise. With no more elections to face before his planned retirement next September, he could have said the national interest overrode his sense of personal honour. Koizumi even had an alibi in the form of a message from the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association asking him to "give consideration to neighbouring countries and obtain their understanding".
By accepting the opportunity to change course, Koizumi could also have made it difficult for Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso, the most enthusiastic shrine-worshippers among those competing to succeed him, to promise to continue attending as prime minister.
But since October 17, even if they were so inclined, Aso and Abe would find it correspondingly difficult not to continue visiting in his footsteps, should one of them become the next leader, as is likely.
"Japan doesn't seem to grasp the concept of enlightened self-interest," says Robyn Lim, professor of international relations at Nanzan University, Nagoya, and formerly of Australia's Office of National Assessments.
"It just isn't very good at the great power-balancing game -- the product of an insular history, I guess.
"And then there's the fact they didn't have to make any difficult choices during the Cold War, because the Americans made them all. That tends to produce opportunistic politicians because they don't have to take responsibility for their actions."
In foreign relations, Koizumi and his colleagues place overwhelming faith in the US partnership, which is reasonable because they don't have anything else. But sometimes they ascribe benefits to the relationship not even the Americans would claim.
During Bush's visit, the Prime Minister asserted: "The US-Japan relationship, the closer, more intimate it is, the easier it is for us to behave and establish better relations with China, South Korea and other nations in Asia."
Again, Asian eyes rolled skywards. Most East Asian countries want a robust US-Japan alliance. Even Hu's Tokyo ambassador, Wang Yi, said last week that China's only objection would be if the alliance was "aimed at a third country".
But it often appears to Japan's neighbours that the Koizumi Government regards the US alliance as a substitute for working creatively at strengthening ties with the rest of Asia.
Australians ought to be worried, too, says the Lowy Institute's international security expert, Alan Dupont, because transformation of the US-Japan defence alliance is inevitably drawing the Americans' southern alliance partner closer to Japan, politically and militarily.
This is healthy, Dupont says. While Japan has long been Australia's most important trade partner, the political relationship has been stunted until recently and bilateral security linkages almost non-existent.
"But it's ironic that after 60 years of an Australia-Japan relationship which has been incomplete, to say the least, we're starting to build a normal relationship just at the time Japan's relative influence is declining and it is becoming more isolated in the region," he says.
In future, Dupont warns, the combination of Australia's closer strategic association with Japan and that country's deteriorating relationship with China might confront Canberra with unpleasant choices.
There's an abundance of concern about the nightmare scenario of US-China conflict over Taiwan, Dupont says, "but something similar could happen with Japan.
"What would happen if Japan and China got into serious conflict over those offshore islands in the East China Sea, over resource issues, and Japan sought our support?"
It seems a version of that question was, in fact, posed just before the Bush visit when the Japanese briefed State Department officials on their case against China's development of natural gas fields in a disputed area of the East China Sea.
With China having already sent a warship to its side of the disputed line and Japan threatening to do the same when its drill-ships start working nearby, there is a high level of concern about the danger of an accidental entanglement.
The Americans told the Japanese they intended to remain neutral on the question and expected the disputing parties to find a peaceful resolution.
It was not a comforting response and probably wasn't meant to be. Japan's judgment in these delicate matters is not widely trusted.
The panda huggers don't like the idea of a Japan/US/Australia alliance.
If the US were to withdraw from the Western Pacific, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines and Australia would have a problem.
China never gives an inch on anything, so this is not really surprising. They are all take and no give.
South Korea has been an increasing disappointment. I don't know what we can do about that, but we certainly need to do something.
One thing is for sure. If we start giving the Chinese everything they ask for, they will soon swallow up half the world. I don't think that's in the rest of Asia's interest.
You have missed it.
This article had a very mistaken headline. It ascribed Japan's problems in the region to the US alliance. Bad editing.
But the body of the article was correct. Japan's problem is that it still believes its wartime propaganda. It would be as if Germans still believed that Germany fought to "create order" in OberOst and annually celebrated the founding of the Teutonic Knights. Japan sees the suffering it endured in the war. It is oblivious to the suffering it inflicted. It is in profound denial about "comfort girls", the Rape of Nanking, chemical warfare experiments, etc.
Then, there is the issue of racism. It is not possible for a foreigner, even a Brazilian Japanese, to amount to much of anything in Japan. Japan does not respect other Asians and other Asians know this.
The best analogy I ever heard for the Japanese was that they are like late Victorians. Sober, hard working, thrifty, law abiding, literate, conformist. But also racist, chauvinistic, smug, condescending, and arrogant.
Sounds like how the Dems would describe Republicans.
Claptrap.
Having worked and travelled in Asia a lot, the same thing can be said of the Chinese, the Koreans, the Malaysians...
None of them wants to admit the dark things in their past (or the dark things they are doing now, for that matter). The whole saving face thing isn't just a Japanese problem (and they aren't the worst offenders either).
Having done business in the area, I can testify that the Indonesians take the prize for best kickbacks.
Taiwan, Japan and ultimately would become subjects of the chi-coms if we left.
Why do you think Japan has cozied up to us in the last few years?
I was around in the 30s/40s when FDR was trying to pry Japan out of China. Now Japan loves us like a long lost brother, and China is the mean gorilla of Asia.
as China becomes stronger Japan is going to become ever more nervous.
If you think the chi-coms only had designs on hong kong and taiwan you'd be nuts.
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