FROM
curtailed Chinese tourism revenues to a suspended summit of Chinese,
Japanese and South Korean leaders, Tokyo continues to reap the fallout
from novice Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s combative style.
Just
17 days into taking office, she unnerved Chinese leaders by suggesting
that Japan may attack China if Beijing forcibly reclaimed Taiwan. This
was the most extreme declaration by any Japanese leader in decades.
Takaichi’s far-right foreign policy was not
unexpected given her political record, but its extent and in coming
so early in her term raised uncomfortable geopolitical
temperatures.
Japan’s liabilities in
foreign relations continue to grow, not only with China but also much
of Asia devastated by its wartime aggression. China reacted most
robustly because it suffered Imperial Japan’s worst depredations
within living memory, with tens of millions of civilians slaughtered
and many more brutalised.
Unlike Germany
that has fully atoned for its WWII atrocities, Japan has not.
Takaichi belongs to an ultranationalist faction of the Liberal
Democratic Party and is a leading member of the unrepentant Nippon
Kaigi (NK) organisation that routinely denies Japan’s war crimes and
praises its convicted war criminals as heroes.
Japan
and China may one day fully normalise relations, but not yet. The
wounds of war still run deep, their gravity further aggravated by a
government that denies its horrors at the highest levels.
Hitler’s Holocaust still haunts a postwar West that continues to
give
Israel a blank cheque to do anything. Revulsion at Imperial Japan’s
even worse massacres in China may take longer to subside.
What
upsets China further is Takaichi’s cavalier indifference to the
facts. Most countries including the US and Japan have long had a
one-china policy that does not recognise Taiwan as an independent
nation, yet Japan’s Common Defence doctrine she cited for Taiwan
applies only to assistance for sovereign nations.
This
implies that no basis exists for identifying Taiwan’s perceived
security interests with Japan’s. Even efforts to repudiate Article 9
of Japan’s postwar peace Constitution through re-interpretation
have been denounced by critics as unconstitutional.
Attempts
at re-interpretation to allow for greater assertiveness are not
widely accepted. It remains a highly controversial issue at home and
abroad.
Japan’s hope to become a ‘normal
country’ no longer beholden to postwar US tutelage is neither
unreasonable nor limited to ultra-conservatives, provided it can
acknowledge its own past, recognise current realities and engage
its neighbours fully with ‘normal’ trust and confidence. That
cannot happen with revisionist leaders who are politically
unreformed and historically delusional bent on rewriting history.
Takaichi’s
statement about possibly attacking a China that has not attacked it
is reason enough for widespread alarm. Japan did precisely that to
China and a slew of other countries by people who remain unapologetic
about Pearl Harbor and other tragedies.
That
loose and dodgy interpretation of Japan’s national security
interests prompted President Xi to call up his US counterpart and
recount how China and the US were once allies in the war against
fascism. President Trump then advised Takaichi to cool off.
Even
Asian countries inspired by Japan’s rapid industrialisation and
economic growth remain wary of its ultra-nationalists’ fascination
with remilitarisation. Japan’s postwar rise was made possible
only with conciliatory relations with its neighbours.
NK
members have included former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Shigeru
Ishiba, but they have been less extreme than Takaichi. Following her
outburst last month, Ishiba openly and repeatedly reprimanded her.
Although
the late Abe championed the Us-led Quadrilateral Security
Dialogue (Quad) in trying to isolate China, he later relented. In
2017 he declared Japan was ready to join the China-led Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), and the following year Japan was reportedly
engaged in several dozen BRI projects.
After
losing WWII, Japan’s Yoshida Doctrine relied on US protection to
build its economic strength, developed the Fukuda Doctrine to offer a
measure of war reparations, and issued the Murayama Statement as a
means to repair ties with neighbours. Now all those efforts may be
undermined, particularly when Trump is seeking peace with China and
downsizing alliance obligations all-round.
How
Takaichi’s administration now proceeds with China will decide its
own prospects. With economic stagnation already in its fourth
decade, the Japanese ‘miracle’ is over.
But
whether Japan then declines or can still thrive will depend on how, and
if, it can work with a rising Asia helmed by Chinese
entrepreneurship and productivity.
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