LAST October Sanae Takaichi became Japan’s first female leader of both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the government.
The “liberal” in the LDP actually means conservative. Takaichi herself belongs to the hardline rightwing Nippon Kaigi faction of the party.
Soon enough, she would come to brush against China. Responding to a question, she said Japan would take military action if China moved on Taiwan and affected Japan’s interests.
That soured China-japan relations, triggering bitter WWII memories of a rightwing militarist Japan invading, occupying and committing war crimes in China. Those wounds have yet to heal.
Modelling herself after Britain’s brazen first female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Takaichi was unapologetic. She further prodded Beijing by seeking to revise Japan’s postwar Constitution to favour militarism, and working with the US and its allies to contain China.
Other countries began to regard Takaichi’s Japan as potentially revisionist, bent on whitewashing its history of war atrocities and may even repeat them. So is Japan getting ready to remilitarise?
At issue is Article 9 of the Constitution on Japan’s military forces, officially the Self-defence Forces (SDF) after Japan’s surrender in 1945. Takaichi wants to remove the SDF’S constitutional constraints to enable an assertive military posture abroad.
That is challenging because it requires two-thirds majorities in both the Lower and Upper Houses of the Diet. While the LDP lacks support from the latter, it is working to boost military power, capacity and reach in other ways.
For the first time since 1945, Japan participated prominently in this year’s Us-led Balikatan military exercises with live-fire drills in the South China Sea. Japan will also be exporting lethal weapons, manufacturing to scale and expanding military links abroad.
Must this mean Japan is returning to its militarist past of a century ago? Much depends on the prevailing regional realities.
The US is encouraging other countries to play a bigger regional defence role. This is as true for Asia as it is for Europe, and applies for both Republican and Democratic administrations.
A 2012 Us-japan treaty would halve the 19,000 Marines in Okinawa by returning them to Guam, Hawaii and the US mainland. Deployments to the Philippines tend to be more limited and ad hoc.
In post-wwii East Asia, US military hegemony is seen to keep the peace by removing the need for Japan’s military build-up. The same applies with Germany in Europe.
However, US bipartisan policy is retrenching long-term regional military postings. Military forces will still be deployed for limited missions, such as in Iran or Venezuela, but major postings in far-flung regions are another matter.
Regardless of who is heading Japan’s government, Tokyo will want to look more to itself for its defence role and commitments.
Unlike Germany, Japan is not seen by other countries to have fully atoned for its imperial wars and the devastation they unleashed. An unrepentant rightwing leader now leading an apparent military revival only exacerbates Japan’s trust deficits.
Nonetheless, modern East Asia’s realities would inhibit if not prohibit any ultra-nationalist Japanese leader from returning to the country’s imperialist past.
Such an outcome will not be acceptable to Western powers because Japanese nationalism is anti-western. A rampant nationalist Japan will alienate all other significant powers in a more developed Asia and a more multipolar world.
Economically, Japan’s best days are over so it has insufficient resources to challenge the sovereignty of other global stakeholders including Asia’s middle powers. Its economy has slipped below Germany’s and India’s to fifth place, and continues sliding.
Socially and institutionally, Japanese hawks may be in a minority even in Japan. Groups and individuals stage protests against perceived drifts towards militarism, in a country where dissenting voices matter.
Even within the LDP and other mainstream institutions, evidence of an exclusive, monolithic bloc favouring militarism is sparse. The general public still tends to be averse to radical constitutional changes.
Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama criticised Takaichi’s petty populism, stressing that Taiwan’s status is China’s internal affair. Former Deputy Prime Minister Yohei Kono invested a lifetime in building bridges with China.
Another former Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda, accepts reinterpretation of Article 9 without descending into populist militarism. In 2017, then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared that Japan was ready to cooperate with China in the Belt and Road Initiative, despite Abe being another member of the LDP’S Nippon Kaigi faction.
Professor Mike Mochizuki says the way for Japan to work with a wayward Trump-led US is not to alienate China, but instead to improve relations with Beijing and deepen Tokyo’s stake in the region. Takaichi also happens to be reaching out to Asean countries like Malaysia in business deals, and this should be encouraged.
Kono passed away last Monday, while fine-tuning new plans for cooperating with China. Whether Takaichi’s realism will eventually outlive her populism remains to be seen.
Bunn Nagara is director and senior fellow of the Renaissance Strategic Research Institute, and honorary fellow at the Perak Academy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
