Tokyo
It is not yet obvious that the dominant political leader of the Age of Donald Trump will be Donald Trump. Others are vying for that distinction, including Theresa May of Britain and Shinzo Abe of Japan. Like Trump, Abe came to power on a claim that his country’s economy had been mismanaged. He felt the interests of his nation were poorly understood by politicians at home and sometimes disrespected abroad. He is close to world leaders who feel similarly—Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and especially Narendra Modi of India, with whom aides say he has electric sympathy. He is close to Vladimir Putin of Russia, too, whom he has met 17 times. In 2013, he visited Yasukuni shrine, where his country’s war dead are memorialized. The visit was controversial abroad.
He has managed relations with the new U.S. administration skillfully. Those who know him say he understood off the bat that Trump was to be taken “seriously, not literally.” At Mar-a-Lago, where they spent two days together in February, the two bonded over their respective ill-treatment in their country’s news media. Abe explained that Japan pays a higher share (75 percent) of U.S. military expenses on its territory than any other ally. Nor was Trump’s bolt from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement negotiated over years, a dead loss—negotiating the deal helped Abe break the hold of agricultural lobbies on his party machinery. This was a consensus view of politicians and political observers on a mid-May study trip arranged by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Unlike Trump, Abe has ushered in a return to political normalcy since he returned to power in 2012, following half a decade in which Japan’s leadership changed as frequently as that in a cacique-ridden banana republic. Abe himself began that period, resigning in 2007 after barely a year in power to treat his Crohn’s disease. Five PMs would follow, from both Abe’s conservative LDP (the usual party of government) and the progressive DPJ. One of the progressives, Yukio Hatoyama, was so irresolute in his promise to close a U.S. military base in Okinawa that Japanese pundits gave him the nickname “Save As .  .  . ,” after the word-processing command.
At the end of the Cold War, Japan accounted for 15 percent of world GDP, and American politicians feared it would dominate the world. But a quarter-century of stagnation followed. China rose. Americans demanded the movement of Japanese manufacturing facilities to the United States. While still the third-largest economy, Japan today commands 6 percent of world GDP at most. Japan was lectured, scolded, and threatened over its welfare state (the assets of its pension system alone run into the trillions of dollars) and its policy on immigration (which is, basically, not to have any).
And yet a lot of what looked to be liabilities for Japan in an information-age economy have turned out to be boons. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal Tokyo bureau chief Peter Landers summed up Japan’s enviable stability in two numbers. First, the foreign-born in Japanese society—nannies from the Philippines and Indonesia and property speculators from China—account for 1.3 percent of the population. That is a tenth of the level in the United States and Western Europe. Second, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda made $3.5 million in 2015 to run the largest and most successful car company in the world, turning a $20 billion profit. By contrast, General Motors CEO Mary Barra got a 70 percent raise to $28.6 million to run a company that since the Obama administration has been in part a government concession.
Japan is tied with Germany as the oldest country in the world. It has a median age of 46 and its population may fall below 100 million by mid-century. But the birthrate is rising again, to 1.46 per woman (the U.S. rate is now 1.87 and falling). For the time being, a tight labor supply means automation is an asset, not a threat, and jobs (washing windshields, keeping parks clean) are still plentiful for the unskilled. Japan has the world’s lowest crime rate. This vast country—with more people than the United States had when it won World War II—sees fewer than a thousand murders a year. Chicago saw 762 last year.
Abe must now spend some of the credibility won on domestic issues to manage the most complex foreign policy challenges Japan has faced in the postwar era. Chief among them is the imminent nuclearization of North Korea, which in May made a test-launch of a ballistic missile, its seventh, into Japanese waters. Ordinarily this would be a problem for South Korea as well, but it has been a scandal-ridden election season in Seoul. The new president, human rights activist Moon Jae-in, has been less interested in answering North Korean provocations than in unifying all Koreans around the idea of Japanese historic injustice. Starting in the 1990s, activists began demanding apologies and money for the conduct of the Japanese military in World War II, when it dragooned females, many of them Korean, into serving as “comfort women” for its troops.
It is through China—which provides almost all of North Korea’s imports and is the only major buyer for its coal—that North Korea must be brought to heel. It is unclear whether China has stopped coal imports as promised. But China is also busy probing Japan’s military defenses by air and sea. Each country is a chokepoint for the other. Japan’s shipping lanes to Persian Gulf oil and European consumer markets run through the South China Sea. But the long Japanese archipelago, which runs from Russia through Okinawa to Taiwan, pins China in shallow waters, as long as the U.S. 7th Fleet is allowed to operate all along the archipelago. That is why the Chinese have began launching extraordinary probes of the uninhabited rocks known as the Senkaku Islands, say Japanese officials, sending as many as 500 Chinese fishing boats along with 15 cutters—often “gray hull” Navy boats painted as Coast Guard craft.
China is also spreading its influence financially. Sri Lankan strongman and former president Percy “Mahinda” Rajapaksa borrowed billions from China to build an international airport in his podunk hometown. When he could not pay them back, China agreed to accept a 99-year lease on a port as a good-faith gesture. The vast infrastructure loans being made to Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries as part of China’s New Silk Road initiative risk putting them all on the hook. This process reminds Japanese people of the way China’s Ming dynasty operated 500 years ago. You could also compare it to the mountain of Latin American and other loans that the United States emitted in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s before lobbying the debtor countries to support a rewriting of the rules of the international economy.
Things are changing. Having ended its self-imposed ban on arms-dealing in 2014, Japan is now selling anti-submarine reconnaissance systems and patrol vessels to Malaysia and Vietnam, and boats to the Philippines. Abe has considered amending Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution—for the first time—to permit its “self-defense forces” to become a full-fledged military. Until some new defense arrangement can be devised, the waters and airspace in which four of the world’s half-dozen largest militaries operate (China, Russia, and North and South Korea) are going to be defended by the United States if they are defended at all.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
