Barely half a year into his premiership, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia and mixed feelings in his country's key ally, the US. But will the administration of US President George W. Bush use its influence to nudge Abe away from his inflammatory behavior?
Before Abe, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi was a mold-breaking leader, reviving Japan's economy, reforming the postal savings system and smashing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party's faction system. But Koizumi also legitimized a new Japanese nationalism, antagonizing China and South Korea by his annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine. If anything, Abe is even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan.
Anyone who believes that the Yasukuni controversy is an obscure historical matter that Chinese and Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the 12 Class-A war criminals interred at the shrine; the real problem is the Yushukan Military Museum next door.
Walking past the Mitsubishi Zero, tanks, and machine guns on display in the museum, one finds a history of the Pacific War that restores "the Truth of Modern Japanese History."
It follows the nationalist narrative: Japan, a victim of the European colonial powers, sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. Japan's colonial occupation of Korea, for example, is described as a "partnership." One looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.
One might be able to defend the museum as one viewpoint among many in a pluralist democracy. But there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of Japan's twentieth-century history. Successive Japanese governments have hidden behind the Yushukan museum's operation by a private religious organization to deny responsibility for the views expressed there.
That is an unconvincing stance. In fact, unlike Germany, Japan has never come to terms with its own responsibility for the Pacific War. Although socialist prime minister Tomiichi Murayama officially apologized to China in 1995 for the war, Japan has never had a genuine internal debate over its degree of responsibility, and has never made a determined effort to propagate an alternative account to that of Yushukan.
My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher -- unbeknownst to me -- to translate my book The End of History and the Last Man into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote The Japan that Can Say No and is now the governor of Tokyo.
In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of large public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is thus the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. But unlike his German counterparts, he easily draws large and sympathetic audiences. I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers "explaining" that the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.
Moreover, there have been several disturbing recent incidents in which physical intimidation has been used by nationalists against critics of Koizumi's Yasukuni visits, such as the firebombing of former prime ministerial candidate Kato Koichi's home. On the other hand, the publisher of the normally conservative Yomiuri Shimbun attacked Koizumi's Yasukuni visits and published a fascinating series of articles on responsibility for the war.
This leaves the US in a difficult position. A number of US strategists are eager to ring China with a NATO-like defensive barrier, building outward from the US-Japan Security Treaty. Since the final days of the Cold War, the US has been pushing Japan to rearm, and has officially supported a proposed revision of Article 9 of the postwar Constitution, which bans Japan from having a military or waging war.
But the US should be careful about what it wishes for. The legitimacy of the entire US military position in the Far East is built around the US exercising Japan's sovereign function of self-defense. Japan's unilateral revision of Article 9, viewed against the backdrop of its new nationalism, would isolate Japan from virtually the whole of Asia.
Revising Article 9 has long been part of Abe's agenda, but whether he pushes ahead with it will depend in large part on the kind of advice he gets from close friends in the US. Bush was unwilling to say anything about Japan's new nationalism to his "good friend Junichiro" out of gratitude for Japanese support in Iraq. Now that Japan has withdrawn its small contingent of troops, perhaps Bush will speak plainly to Abe.
Francis Fukuyama is dean of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and chairman of The American Interest quarterly review.
Copyright: Project Syndicate/The American Interest
Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on April 9 said that the first group of Indian workers could arrive as early as this year as part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India and the India Taipei Association. Signed in February 2024, the MOU stipulates that Taipei would decide the number of migrant workers and which industries would employ them, while New Delhi would manage recruitment and training. Employment would be governed by the laws of both countries. Months after its signing, the two sides agreed that 1,000 migrant workers from India would
On March 31, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released declassified diplomatic records from 1995 that drew wide domestic media attention. One revelation stood out: North Korea had once raised the possibility of diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In a meeting with visiting Chinese officials in May 1995, as then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) prepared for a visit to South Korea, North Korean officials objected to Beijing’s growing ties with Seoul and raised Taiwan directly. According to the newly released records, North Korean officials asked why Pyongyang should refrain from developing relations with Taiwan while China and South Korea were expanding high-level
Japan’s imminent easing of arms export rules has sparked strong interest from Warsaw to Manila, Reuters reporting found, as US President Donald Trump wavers on security commitments to allies, and the wars in Iran and Ukraine strain US weapons supplies. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ruling party approved the changes this week as she tries to invigorate the pacifist country’s military industrial base. Her government would formally adopt the new rules as soon as this month, three Japanese government officials told Reuters. Despite largely isolating itself from global arms markets since World War II, Japan spends enough on its own
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
RSS