[Marxism] sino-japanese ties

[Lajany Otum <lajany_otum@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

SINO-JAPANESE TIES

So much for Abe's reconciliation policy

By GREGORY CLARK

Remember all that talk just a few months back about how Prime Minister Shinzo 
Abe, unlike former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, was embarked on a policy 
of reconciliation with China?

Well, you can forget that now. Indeed, you should have forgotten it then. Even 
before visiting Beijing in October in his alleged bid for improved relations, 
Abe was embarked on policies that should have done far more to antagonize 
Beijing than Koizumi's heavily criticized visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine.

In his book published last year, "To be a Beautiful Country," Abe calls for a 
Japan-India-Australia alliance in Asia. Allegedly based on shared values 
(Indian castes, Japanese gangsters and Australian beer drinkers?). The target 
of that unlikely grouping is clearly China. And if this is not enough, he and 
the people around him talk openly about the Japan-U.S. alliance as another 
weapon to oppose China.

Defense and diplomatic officials from Japan and the United States will soon 
begin examining various scenarios for a confrontation with China over Taiwan. 
Tokyo still lobbies the Europeans to continue their ban on arms sales to China. 
A key aim of Abe's recent visit to Europe was to forge closer ties with the 
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which increasingly seeks to be a U.S. ally 
in Asia. Yet now that Abe is prime minister, Beijing says it plans to revive 
the top-level exchanges of visits that were denied during the Koizumi era 
because of those Yasukuni visits.

In Japanese it is called "fumi-e." It is the demand for a complete concession 
on one particular issue as a condition for any movement in other areas. In the 
past Beijing succeeded greatly with its demand for a complete break in 
relations with Taiwan as the prerequisite for any nation, including Japan, 
wanting to have normal relations with China. Toward Japan today, it seems to 
have wanted to use the Yasukuni issue for the same fumi-e role.

It was a curious choice. For many Japanese, and not just the ultraright, 
Beijing's view of Yasukuni visits as a proof of Japan's militaristic intent can 
be debated. Much depends on the question of Yasukuni's alleged enshrinement of 
convicted class-A war criminals. But this in turn depends on a number of other 
delicate questions -- whether the convictions handed down by postwar Tokyo 
war-crimes tribunals were correct, whether the tribunals were justified in the 
first place and even whether Japan's decisions to attack its various neighbors 
were, by the standards of the day, war crimes to begin with.

To many Japanese, Beijing's choice of Yasukuni visits as a kind of fumi-e 
smacks somewhat of unfair intervention in Japan's domestic affairs. True, the 
main reason for that choice was Beijing's rather strained efforts to absolve 
the Japanese people of blame for wartime atrocities, to pin the blame entirely 
on those class-A war criminals. In other words, it was trying to do Japan a 
favor, which, incidentally, Japan did not deserve. Even so, if Beijing had not 
been so single-minded in deciding where war guilt lay, Yasukuni would have been 
less of a problem.

But the main problem for Beijing lies elsewhere. For in having seemingly 
persuaded Abe to fumi-e over Yasukuni, it is now obliged to accept his other 
policies, most of which are far more inimical to China's interests than 
Yasukuni visits.

Whether it is on education, textbook revision, the emperor system, relations 
with Taiwan or any of the other touchstone ideological issues facing Japan, Abe 
belongs to the very far right on his ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

A key tenet of this far right is that Japan is destined to confront China in 
Asia. Abe has surrounded himself with defense and foreign-policy advisers who 
make no secret of their hostility to China. Among them is former diplomat and 
prominent rightwing ideologue Hisahiko Okazaki, who is quoted by Time Asia as 
saying: "The balance of power will be between the U.S.-Japan alliance and 
China. China has to deal with this reality. We have to be prepared for war." Is 
Beijing really doing itself a favor by seeming to want to accept the presence 
and attitudes of these people?

The other leg in the Abe foreign policy that should be worrying Beijing a lot 
more is Tokyo's determination to confront North Korea by all means. In the 
six-party talks aimed to halt North Korea's nuclear and missile development, 
Japan has consistently sided with the U.S. hawkish positions that in effect 
justify North Korea's nuclear and missile developments. This is then used to 
justify a significant upgrading in Japan's military spending and Japan-U.S. 
military cooperation.

The way the Abe camp has heavily exploited the abductee issue to gain public 
support for its anti-Pyongyang policies is part of the same picture.

Abe and his rightwing supporters moved quickly to deny Koizumi's September 2002 
triumph in having five former abductees freed from North Korea; it began to 
insist that Pyongyang had to liberate many more alleged abductees, including 
those Pyongyang insists do not exist or are dead. Koizumi had long realized 
that direct talks, not confrontation, were needed to resolve these questions. 
The Abe line is to refuse any such talks outright. Meanwhile, nonresolution of 
the issues is used as a key justification for Japan's anti-Pyongyang hardline 
military and other policies.

The extraordinary pomp and ceremony associated with the recent upgrading of the 
former Defense Agency to Defense Ministry, the growing influence of the 
military in policymaking, Abe's determination to gain permanent legal approval 
for use of the Japanese military in any part of the world, the emergence of a 
corrupt military-industrial complex, the crude attempts to manipulate public 
opinion over North Korea -- all these things say volumes about Japan's current 
leadership.

These are people who are in love with the military and its trappings, and are 
determined to find the enemies needed to keep the military employed. To me, 
that sounds a lot more worrying than whether a Japanese leader -- out of 
conviction, nostalgia or plain bloody-mindedness -- decides he wants to visit a 
Tokyo shrine.

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, is vice president of Akita 
International University. A Japanese translation of this article will appear 
at: www.gregoryclark.net.
The Japan Times: Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007
(C) All rights reserved


                
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