Tokyo Drift?

Critics suggest this will lead to “remilitarization.” But Japan already has a military, known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), which has been deployed overseas for peacekeeping missions several times since the early 1990s. After 9/11, Japan sent SDF naval ships to the war in Afghanistan and SDF ground troops to the war in Iraq, both in noncombat roles. Long criticized for not making its fair share of global contributions, Japan demonstrated a willingness to do more. As former Economist editor and Japan expert Bill Emmott wrote in April 2004, the Iraq mission seemed to indicate that Japan would “play a fuller role internationally” and “truly be part of an international community.”

Abe’s proposed constitutional tinkering is relatively modest and incremental: He would keep the “No War” pledge, but would also make it easier for Japan to pursue collective self-defense and integrate the SDF into multilateral frameworks. Overall Japanese defense spending is still capped at an artificially low level. “The claims of Japanese ‘remilitarization’ are both inaccurate and overblown,” says Michael Auslin, director of the Project on Japan-U.S. Relations at Yale. “It’s a very prudent and responsible buildup that is still defensively oriented.”

In short, Abe’s basic agenda, building on the legacy of former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, is healthy for Asia and healthy for global security. It is certainly healthy for the U.S.-Japan alliance. But Abe also gives credence to Japan’s World War II revisionists. He regards the postwar Tokyo Trials with suspicion, and has unapologetically visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a private Shinto religious memorial that honors roughly 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including several war criminals from the Pacific theater such as Hideki Tojo. Many have observed that Abe, 52, is the first Japanese premier born after Hiroshima. We should also remember that his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, served as minister of commerce and industry during the war, and later became prime minister from 1957 to 1960.

So when, a few weeks ago, Abe whitewashed a terrible blight on Japan’s war record, he needlessly raised red flags about his intentions and gave detractors fresh ammunition to cast him as a dangerous nationalist. Inside the Bush administration, the ensuing diplomatic row has placed pro-Japan officials on the defensive.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo on March 1st, Abe appeared to deny that Japanese soldiers had directly “coerced” tens of thousands of Asian women into sexual slavery during World War II. Though Abe pledged to honor the Kono Statement, Japan’s 1993 apology for the wartime brothels, and later personally apologized for the suffering of the “comfort women” (as they are euphemistically known in Japan), the damage was done. His groundbreaking trips to Beijing and Seoul last October suddenly lost their potency. Abe had given Japan a black eye. He earned scathing editorial rebukes from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

“It’s extremely bad politics internationally,” says a former Bush administration official. “They’re aiding and abetting their own enemies.” According to this official, who is very pro-Japan, some senior Asia hands at the State Department now believe that Japan is “isolated” and “radioactive,” and that Tokyo’s role in the freedom agenda has been tarnished.

SO WHY WOULD Abe commit such a blunder? There are many possible explanations. His poll numbers are sagging and he wanted to fortify his conservative base prior to Upper House elections this July. He is tired of being bullied over Japan’s history by China and South Korea. He takes a somewhat revisionist view of World War II. He was responding to a caucus of over 100 members of parliament who have urged him to reconsider the apology delivered by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono. He was mindful of a resolution introduced in the U.S. Congress by California Democrat Mike Honda, which calls on Tokyo to apologize frankly for the abuse of wartime sex slaves. He hopes to imbue the Japanese people with a sense of patriotism. He wants to make Japan “a beautiful country” and is uncomfortable with its dark past. He recognizes that many Japanese suffer from apology fatigue. He is leery of any apology that might compel Tokyo to pay financial reparations.

Whatever Abe’s motivation, his comments were embarrassing and indefensible. They have also distracted attention from his foreign policy. Abe may be a nationalist, but he is hardly a revanchist militarist bent on repeating the 1930s. He has always been a staunchly pro-American nationalist–and the best guarantor against a genuine revival of Japanese militarism is a firm U.S. alliance. Abe has boosted bilateral security integration and, in particular, intensified cooperation on missile defense. “It is essential that Japan strengthen its alliance with the United States,” he said in a recent speech at Japan’s National Defense Academy. He has called the U.S.-Japan relationship “invaluable and irreplaceable,” and has endorsed the late Mike Mansfield’s argument that it represents “the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.”

“Abe is deeply conservative,” says Thomas Berger, a Japan expert at Boston University. But “his basic agenda is quite reasonable.” No question, Abe has accelerated Japan’s evolution into a more muscular, assertive nation, which has meant loosening its pacifist straitjacket. In January Tokyo upgraded the Japan Defense Agency to formal ministry status. Abe’s ultimate goal, long prized by Japanese conservatives, is to amend the pacifist Article 9. He hopes to drag Japan away from a guilt-driven foreign policy and toward “proactive diplomacy” based around democratic interests. Apologizing for World War II, which the Japanese have already done many times, is not his top priority, to put it mildly.

But Abe also speaks frequently of Japan’s “new values”–“freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law”–and the importance of what Foreign Minister Taro Aso calls “value-oriented diplomacy.” Citing their “common values,” Abe has pushed for a quadrilateral strategic dialogue among the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia. On March 13th he signed a defense pact with Australian prime minister John Howard, the first formal Japanese security agreement with a country other than the U.S. “Australia has no better friend or more reliable partner within the Asia-Pacific region than Japan,” said Howard. Abe is also keen on embracing India, the world’s largest democracy. Later this month, the U.S., Japan, and India will reportedly stage their first joint military exercise.

The hope is that greater cooperation among these four nations–America, Japan, Australia, and India–will check the rise of Chinese power and preserve a regional order favorable to democracy. It is a bold and provocative strategy, especially to Beijing, which is why, according to the former Bush official, Foggy Bottom has been reluctant to pursue the quadrilateral dialogue championed by Abe.

This highlights the same intra-administration split that has muddled U.S. policy on North Korea. “For the most part, the hawks are close to Japan,” says the former Bush official, including J.D. Crouch, the number-two man at the National Security Council, and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Scooter Libby, incidentally, was very pro-Japan.) The doves, chiefly those at State, are said to be more wary of angering China and less thrilled with Japan’s hard line on North Korea.

The pro-Japan Cheney wing has reportedly lost influence in recent months. Hence the North Korea nuclear agreement, which left many Japanese feeling cold. In a March 16th editorial, the centrist, pro-American Nikkei Shimbun, a Japanese financial newspaper, criticized the deal as a “risky departure” from Bush’s “original strategy,” which symbolized “the erosion of Washington’s basic principles.” The paper was specifically vexed about the easing of financial sanctions against Pyongyang. “The Bush administration’s soft approach could derail international efforts to denuclearize the dangerous regime,” it said, worrying that the United States might “settle for easy cosmetic solutions to extricate itself from problems concerning North Korea.”

Tokyo also fears that U.S. diplomats may have marginalized the issue of those Japanese citizens who were kidnapped by North Korean agents during the 1970s and 1980s. “The overall impression is that we went wobbly,” says the former Bush official (who recently traveled to Japan). The Japanese are “not happy,” affirms a second former administration official. “They’re worried about what [the deal] means.” In an earlier editorial, on March 8th, the Nikkei warned that bilateral ties could “fall into a real crisis” unless U.S. diplomats assuaged Japanese anxiety. Should Japan feel entrapped or undermined, it might begin hedging on the alliance.

Still, strengthening the U.S.-Japan relationship remains a linchpin of mainstream Japanese foreign policy thought. “This is a very deep alliance,” says David Kang, a Japan expert at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “The U.S. and Japan clearly have so many interests in common.” Kang is hopeful that the recent surge in business links may limit the amount of Sino-Japanese political tension that can emerge. (China, including Hong Kong, is now Japan’s biggest trading partner.) But to resolve lingering East Asian historical spats, “The Chinese Communist Party has to change.”

WHAT ABOUT TOKYO? It’s true that demonizing Japan works well for Chinese and Korean populists. The Communist rulers in Beijing, who excel at whitewashing their own history, object to the security posture promoted by Koizumi and Abe, and therefore use the World War II card to poison Japan’s image and raise the specter of resurgent militarism, all the while reaping large dollops of Japanese development aid. In Seoul, the left-wing government of President Roh Moo Hyun is also suspicious of Japanese defense policies, particularly on North Korea. After a brief thaw in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japan-bashing is once again a widespread element of South Korean domestic politics, stoked by lingering animosity, the rise of pan-Korean nationalism, and the investigation of those Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonial regime between 1910 and 1945 (the years of the occupation).

Yet blaming China and South Korea for turning the “history issue” into a diplomatic bludgeon doesn’t excuse Tokyo from its own failure to grapple honestly with the past. Japanese conservatives have a troubling tendency to downplay or sugarcoat various atrocities, such as the sex slaves and the Nanking massacre. This just hardens the impression that Japan has been less than forthright about historical culpability.

In his 2004 book, Japan’s Quiet Transformation, historian Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University Japan, discusses why different generations might be sensitive about acknowledging the horrors of World War II. “For younger Japanese people, the burdens of history seem unfair and irrelevant: grandfather did those things and that is his problem,” writes Kingston. “For many older Japanese, the exoneration of Emperor Showa provides a convenient cover: if the man in whose name a sacred war was waged was able to avoid responsibility, why should anyone else be held accountable? For pragmatic government officials, there is no pressing need to take official responsibility and the tab for compensation could prove very expensive.”

In his new book, Japan Rising, National Bureau of Asian Research president Kenneth Pyle notes that younger Japanese of the postwar “Heisei” generation “have no living memory of the war,” and thus “do not feel guilt or remorse for Japan’s imperial past.” Nor do they appreciate the swell of anti-Japanese nationalism in China and South Korea. There is also the matter of Japanese honor. A “recurrent characteristic of the Japanese response to the international system is a persistent obsession with status and prestige,” writes Pyle. “Honor, as such, may be attributed to an individual, but it can also be attributed to groups and to nations.” Probing Japan’s imperial atrocities may conjure up acute feelings of dishonor.

At the same time, Japan’s “historical amnesia” has been overstated, as have fears of rising Japanese nationalism. According to a poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last December, 85 percent of Japanese feel they should “reflect,” at least to some degree, on their country’s past aggression. When conservative media tycoon Tsuneo Watanabe used his Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper to run a series of articles examining Japan’s war record, including the atrocities, he found that the public response was mostly positive. As Berger testified before a House panel in April 2005, “The large majority of Japanese high school–and even middle school–textbooks carry references to the history of Japanese atrocities and aggression in Asia.”

Japan does seem to be wrestling with an identity crisis, prompted by such factors as its “Lost Decade” of economic misery, the ascendance of China, the North Korean threat, political scandals, a shrinking population, social alienation, a looming welfare crisis, rising inequality, and disputes over national purpose. Though Berger says Japan has become less parochial in recent years, and more amenable to outside cultural influences, the Japanese remain largely hostile to immigration. Kingston calls the new public mood “nationalism lite.”

But he places it in context: “Japanese assertion of nationalism is a normal, and some might say healthy, reaction against Japan’s prolonged subordination.” There are nationalists “of different stripes and hues,” including left-wing nationalists. (Domestic reaction to Abe’s “comfort women” comments generally broke down along ideological lines, with Japanese progressives and liberals most upset.) “It would . . . be a mistake,” writes Kingston, “to assume that the mass of Japanese, or even their conservative leaders, actually identify with, much less support, extreme nationalism.” Indeed, “Japanese scholars, educators, politicians, and journalists have robustly challenged . . . efforts to whitewash the past.”

To his credit, Abe has shown some flexibility on the history issue. On March 26th he once again expressed remorse for the wartime brothels and confirmed his support for the Kono Statement. This past October, during his visit to Beijing, Abe agreed to launch a joint Sino-Japanese history project in hopes of reaching a shared understanding of the past. Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Japan this week, the first such trip by a Chinese premier since 2000.

HOWEVER AWKWARD the history debate, those who consider Tokyo “radioactive” should note the results of a new BBC World Service poll, which found that Japan is one of the most popular countries on Earth. In a survey of some 28,000 people in 27 countries, 54 percent of respondents said Japan was a “mainly positive” influence in the world, tying it with Canada for first place in that category. “Out of 27 countries polled,” said the survey authors, “24 gave Japan a positive rating, with just two giving it a negative and one divided.” (The two negatives came, not surprisingly, from China and South Korea.) A stunning 84 percent of Indonesians and 70 percent of Filipinos consider Japanese influence “mainly positive,” in addition to 74 percent of Canadians, 66 percent of Americans, and 55 percent of Australians.

India, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand: All these countries (and others) are seeking to upgrade strategic cooperation with the Japanese. Tokyo is now working with the Southeast Asian nations of ASEAN on anti-terrorism operations. Without much fanfare, government officials have also embraced democracy promotion. “This is really a new idea,” says a Japanese diplomat. “While not so openly assertive and high profile in [their] defense of human rights as the Americans or Europeans,” writes Pyle, “the Japanese nevertheless have quietly made these values an important principle in their recent diplomacy with other Asian nations.”

Looking back, it’s striking how fast Japanese security policy has changed since the first Gulf War. “Japan has come a long, long way in a relatively short period of time,” says a former Bush administration official. “It’s really an extraordinary transformation.” In Iraq and elsewhere, Japan has proved its mettle as a responsible international actor. “I think people should applaud Japan,” says Auslin. True enough. But it would be easier if Abe and other leading conservatives came to proper terms with Japanese history. As Jeannie Suk and Noah Feldman wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The denial of responsibility is an ongoing harm.”

Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.