A popular trope among people writing about Japan is that Japan will never assume a leadership role in Asia unless it deals with its "history issues". I've never been able to understand it. Literally. I don't understand what they mean by Asia, and I don't understand what they mean by "leadership". I think I know what set of issues they mean by "history issues", but I have a very different understanding of "history issues" when it comes to the effect on our international standing. Let me explain.
When a pundit first stakes his claim, he begins by assuming that Asia begins and ends with China and the Koreas, and possibly though never explicitly Taiwan. As he develops his argument, he usually feels compelled to implicate ASEAN, and rely on Singapore and the Philippines for provenance thereof. The Indian subcontinent is rarely touched upon; West Asia, including the Anatolian and Arabian Peninsulas, are to be strictly avoided.
Now the Philippines are a mainly Christian, former US colony; Singapore is heavily Chinese. It is clear that the pundit is, for the most part, talking about the Northeast Asia, with arguments bleeding out to the broader Sinic civilization plus a Southeast Asian outlier. There is probably greater awareness on the part of the pundit since the Six-Party talks began and the Shangahai Cooperation Organization took off that Russia is also part of Northeast Asia. It is, however, is usually ignored when the pundit expounds on this theme, since the term "history issues" would take on a very different and inconvenient coloring if Russia were to be included in the narrative.
More generally, consistency is usually sacrificed to convenience of the story, as he wantonly switches from one geographical dimension to another without so much as a warning.
And what does he mean by leadership? On what? If we confine the question to security issues in Northeast Asia, the most important arena is the Six-Party talks. But Japan is not the one who holds the most important cards there. China and South Korea continue to provide sustenance for North Korea.
It is at least conceivable that if Japan agreed to normalize relations with North Korea and cough up the billions of dollars of assistance as the means to "settle the past", the argument could be made that Japan and South Korea could make peace with North Korea and tell the US that there is no longer a security threat in Northeast Asia so thank you we no longer need your services. Leaving aside my suspicions that the current North Korean regime will not like that turn of events, the one thing that is standing in the way of Japan amending its ways has nothing to do with the "history issues".
I am talking, of course, about the abductees issue.
So much for the situation on the Korean Peninsula. As for Taiwan, the one other substantial, if much smaller, cloud on the horizon, our strategic ambiguity is only remotely related to "history issues", in the sense that many pro-Taiwan politicians in Japan harbor a very positive view of the pre-WW II Japanese role there, which independence-minded Taiwanese exploit to the fullest. But it is far more driven by the need to accommodate the national security relationship Japan has with the US, again only tangentially connected with "history issues". For lesser issues, such as the disagreement over the Senkaku Islands and the more pressing dispute over the conflicting claims over EEZ covering most significantly offshore gas fields, there is little reason to believe that China would be any more accommodating if Japan were to officially and unconditionally accept Beijing's line on "history issues". On both issues, each state will do what it can get away with; at most, "history issues" have a marginal effect on the rhetoric.
More important in this respect are the low-key but substantive coordination based on mutual interests that continue between the two states. Most recently, Japan and China reached agreement on the substance of a bilateral treaty for mutual assistance on criminal law enforcement. More broadly and to the point, our military vessels and defense ministers are now calling on each other and the two states are gearing up to set up hotlines and other means of cooperation. And all it has taken is Prime Minister Abe staying away from Yasukuni Shrine.
The one example often given by the pundit that is related to the leadership question is China's opposition to Japan's bid to become a member of the UN Security Council. Leaving aside for this occasion the existence of other constraints (including US opposition to the substantial expansion of the Security Council to accommodate the wishes of other nations and groups there of that believe that they too should be permanently represented), as well as my highly skeptical views on the value of the UN, it has mainly been the US that has used the Security Council for its purposes. The other permanent members are either fellow travelers or obstacles for the US. Will it be any different with Japan on board?
The pundit's arguments have little to do with the realities on the ground and very much to do with the sequence of events that Prime Minister Koizumi's Yasukuni visits touched off that nobody, not least of all Beijing, wanted, and everybody but the pundit has worked assiduously to roll back, with the singular, symbolic act of Yauskuni abstinence on the part of our current Prime Minister.
A final point. By now, you may have guessed what my personal subset of "history issues" is. It is the legacy from the more than 90 years since the arrival of the Black Ships and more specifically since 1937 (1931? 1941?) up to the end of WW II. It is the resultant fear of overseas military engagement and, to a much lesser degree, the vague sense of guilt towards our Northeast Asian Sinic neighbors that is holding us back. Politicians, given their professional interests, tend to feel strongly about this, if the left and the right are diametrically opposed to each other in drawing their policy implications from this. For the public in general, this is a matter of decidedly low-priority. Having seen the awful outcome of international intervention in the Middle East, I tend more and more to side with the - relatively speaking - non-committal masses here.
Showing posts with label war and responsibility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war and responsibility. Show all posts
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Has Norimitsu Ohnishi Done It Again with His Take on Shinzo Abe's Visit to India?
Here is Norimitsu Ohnishi's latest take on Shinzo Abe's history issues.
Mr. Ohnishi points to the continued popularity in Japan of Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist and lone dissenting judge at the Tokyo Tribunals (he called for complete acquittal of all the defendants). The hook for his article is, of course, Mr. Abe's tribute to Judge Pal before the Indian Parliament and his meeting with the judge's 81 year-old son on his what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation trip to India.
Mr. Ohnishi's point is that "many of postwar Japan’s nationalist leaders and thinkers have long upheld Judge Pal as a hero, seizing on — and often distorting — his dissenting opinion at the Tokyo trials to argue that Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but one of self-defense and liberation. As nationalist politicians like Mr. Abe have gained power in recent years, and as like-minded academics and journalists have pushed forward a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime history, Judge Pal has stepped back into the spotlight, where he remains a touchstone of the culture wars surrounding the Tokyo trials." Although he does not say so explicitly, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that Mr. Ohnishi, by blurring the conceptual boundaries between the war and war crimes, is alleging that Mr. Abe is one of those people trying to argue that "Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but one of self-defense and liberation."
But then, what to make of Mr. Abe's August 15 words of contrition on the occasion of the commemoration of the end of the war:
In WW II, Japan caused much loss and pain to the many countries, the people of the Asian nations in particular. As the representative of the people [of Japan], with a deep sense of regret, I sincerely express my feelings of sorrow to the people who became the victims.
This does not sound like the words of a man claiming "self-defense and liberation". In fact, it sounds very much like the words of a man who would knowingly pay tribute to a jurist who was convinced that "the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war".
The war, most thinking Asians will tell you, had many faces, and all but the hard-core right-wing nationalists here will admit that, at a minimum, we – if not we alone - wronged the Chinese and Koreans. Mr. Ohnishi by insinuation conflates every dissenting Japanese voice – including, yes, Mr. Abe's - with the diehard denialists.
Unlike this case (of which NYT made what could be charitably called an invisible retraction), there is no obvious error on the facts. Perhaps he has wised up and decided to let the critique coalesce in the reader's mind. But I will elect to take a more accommodating view; that Mr. Ohnishi thought that Western readers, American ones in particular, would find Justice Pal's views on the war as a whole so unfamiliar and displeasing that they could be safely introduced only as background to that familiar and greatly exaggerated right-wing resurgence trope.
Mr. Ohnishi points to the continued popularity in Japan of Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist and lone dissenting judge at the Tokyo Tribunals (he called for complete acquittal of all the defendants). The hook for his article is, of course, Mr. Abe's tribute to Judge Pal before the Indian Parliament and his meeting with the judge's 81 year-old son on his what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation trip to India.
Mr. Ohnishi's point is that "many of postwar Japan’s nationalist leaders and thinkers have long upheld Judge Pal as a hero, seizing on — and often distorting — his dissenting opinion at the Tokyo trials to argue that Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but one of self-defense and liberation. As nationalist politicians like Mr. Abe have gained power in recent years, and as like-minded academics and journalists have pushed forward a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime history, Judge Pal has stepped back into the spotlight, where he remains a touchstone of the culture wars surrounding the Tokyo trials." Although he does not say so explicitly, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that Mr. Ohnishi, by blurring the conceptual boundaries between the war and war crimes, is alleging that Mr. Abe is one of those people trying to argue that "Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but one of self-defense and liberation."
But then, what to make of Mr. Abe's August 15 words of contrition on the occasion of the commemoration of the end of the war:
In WW II, Japan caused much loss and pain to the many countries, the people of the Asian nations in particular. As the representative of the people [of Japan], with a deep sense of regret, I sincerely express my feelings of sorrow to the people who became the victims.
This does not sound like the words of a man claiming "self-defense and liberation". In fact, it sounds very much like the words of a man who would knowingly pay tribute to a jurist who was convinced that "the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war".
The war, most thinking Asians will tell you, had many faces, and all but the hard-core right-wing nationalists here will admit that, at a minimum, we – if not we alone - wronged the Chinese and Koreans. Mr. Ohnishi by insinuation conflates every dissenting Japanese voice – including, yes, Mr. Abe's - with the diehard denialists.
Unlike this case (of which NYT made what could be charitably called an invisible retraction), there is no obvious error on the facts. Perhaps he has wised up and decided to let the critique coalesce in the reader's mind. But I will elect to take a more accommodating view; that Mr. Ohnishi thought that Western readers, American ones in particular, would find Justice Pal's views on the war as a whole so unfamiliar and displeasing that they could be safely introduced only as background to that familiar and greatly exaggerated right-wing resurgence trope.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
The Prime Minister Plays Defense on Sunday Project
Today, the heads of the seven parties contesting the Upper House election made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows (Fuji TV, NHK, and TV Asahi). The TV Asahi Sunday Project took up the latest MAFF minister's public financing controversy, the public pension scandal, and Defense Minister Kyuma's gaffe over the atom bombs dropped on Japan during WW II. Forced to play defense, Mr. Abe acquitted himself well. He was noticeably better briefed and coached than his opponents, including Ichiro Ozawa, the enigmatic head of the DPJ, and was for the most part articulate without being too voluble.
Mr. Abe did a reasonably good job of explaining the MAFF minister's public financing accounting issues, drawing on the law, the attachment of inherited supporters to the family stronghold, and his own experience (though he himself had discontinued the practice) to conjecture that there had been nothing illegal or improper going on when Mr. Akagi decided to designate his parents' home as his main office and consolidate expenditures to that office in the annual reports to the authorities.
He fared less well on the public pension scandal, but no new hits were scored. The talk was mostly about who knew what and when. Mr. Abe gave a reasonably good account of the measures being taken by the administration and merely casually intimated at the LDP charge (instead of blaming head-on) opposition-friendly labor in the National Insurance Agency for the chronic, pervasive carelessness that led to the debacle. (A comment from Yasuo Tanaka, the ex-governor head of the Shinto Nihon that everybody was neglecting the real issue, which is that the pension system itself is in a meltdown, was quickly shelved by Soichiro Tawara, the emcee, with a quai-promise to revisit the issue on another date.)
On the atomic bombs, Soichiro Tawara pressed Mr. Abe to seek a US apology (as Mr. Ozawa had said should be done when Defense Minister Kyuma's words became public) and criticized the government for accepting US inconsistency in dealing with new nuclear states. Mr. Abe did not answer directly, and reiterated his position that such a thing should not have been done, and repeatedly emphasized Japan's successful efforts to pass UN resolutions for nuclear disarmament against US opposition.
But most voters have more important things to do than watch Sunday Project or the other Sunday talk shows. (Let's just say that they are less colorful that the weekday sex, love-triangle murder, astrology, Korean Drama, etc. fare.) Come Monday, the events will be incorporated in the news reports in the mainstream dailies, stripped of the emotional, impressionistic contents that the audiovisual experience leaves behind, and given the context of the ongoing narrative, which is that the adminstration has messed up royally. There, unpleasant things like the fact that Mr. Akagi has steadfastly avoided full disclosure, shielding himself with the law, just like his deceased predecessor (who, unlike Mr. Akagi, had made absurd and inflammatory claims on the costs incurred by his main office) had done may be juxtaposed against Mr. Abe's willingness to give full faith and credit to whatever explanation he got from Mr. Akagi.
To repeat, Mr. Abe played good defense. But when you're behind, you have to score goals. So barring further major surprises, the ruling coalition continues to look at a big loss. Just based on a hunch, I'd be happy to keep a book at 45 over-under for a 5% cut of all bets. But I won't, because it's illegal you know. So the real question here is, will the coalition loss be small enough to maintain a working majority in the Upper House?
And as a closely related but not identical question, will it be a sufficiently official coalition that it will enable it to maintain the Upper House president's seat and the lion's share of choice committee chairmanships? Those things will make a difference in the extent to which the coalition can push its legislative agenda till 2010, when its next general election changes the complexion of the Upper House.
Generally sympathetic to Mr. Abe (even producing a chart that listed all the policy initiatives that Mr. Abe had pushed through), Mr. Tawara pushed him hard on seeking US apology over the WW II atom bombs. As with Mr. Ozawa's reaction, this is yet another manifestation of a strong, underlying populist sentiment that mostly lies dormant but surfaces from time to time to see redress. This sentiment is not directed solely, or even mainly, against the US. Indeed, I suspect that we place the bulk of it squarely on the shoulders of our leaders who took us into the hellhole and (if the wishes of some of them were to be followed) would have forced us to perish there in a false glory of the damned. Nevertheless, any full-scale debate in Japan on responsibility for actions taken to bring about and conduct the wars will inevitably bring this issue to the fore. And what our ally shall hear then will not be to its liking.
Mr. Abe did a reasonably good job of explaining the MAFF minister's public financing accounting issues, drawing on the law, the attachment of inherited supporters to the family stronghold, and his own experience (though he himself had discontinued the practice) to conjecture that there had been nothing illegal or improper going on when Mr. Akagi decided to designate his parents' home as his main office and consolidate expenditures to that office in the annual reports to the authorities.
He fared less well on the public pension scandal, but no new hits were scored. The talk was mostly about who knew what and when. Mr. Abe gave a reasonably good account of the measures being taken by the administration and merely casually intimated at the LDP charge (instead of blaming head-on) opposition-friendly labor in the National Insurance Agency for the chronic, pervasive carelessness that led to the debacle. (A comment from Yasuo Tanaka, the ex-governor head of the Shinto Nihon that everybody was neglecting the real issue, which is that the pension system itself is in a meltdown, was quickly shelved by Soichiro Tawara, the emcee, with a quai-promise to revisit the issue on another date.)
On the atomic bombs, Soichiro Tawara pressed Mr. Abe to seek a US apology (as Mr. Ozawa had said should be done when Defense Minister Kyuma's words became public) and criticized the government for accepting US inconsistency in dealing with new nuclear states. Mr. Abe did not answer directly, and reiterated his position that such a thing should not have been done, and repeatedly emphasized Japan's successful efforts to pass UN resolutions for nuclear disarmament against US opposition.
But most voters have more important things to do than watch Sunday Project or the other Sunday talk shows. (Let's just say that they are less colorful that the weekday sex, love-triangle murder, astrology, Korean Drama, etc. fare.) Come Monday, the events will be incorporated in the news reports in the mainstream dailies, stripped of the emotional, impressionistic contents that the audiovisual experience leaves behind, and given the context of the ongoing narrative, which is that the adminstration has messed up royally. There, unpleasant things like the fact that Mr. Akagi has steadfastly avoided full disclosure, shielding himself with the law, just like his deceased predecessor (who, unlike Mr. Akagi, had made absurd and inflammatory claims on the costs incurred by his main office) had done may be juxtaposed against Mr. Abe's willingness to give full faith and credit to whatever explanation he got from Mr. Akagi.
To repeat, Mr. Abe played good defense. But when you're behind, you have to score goals. So barring further major surprises, the ruling coalition continues to look at a big loss. Just based on a hunch, I'd be happy to keep a book at 45 over-under for a 5% cut of all bets. But I won't, because it's illegal you know. So the real question here is, will the coalition loss be small enough to maintain a working majority in the Upper House?
And as a closely related but not identical question, will it be a sufficiently official coalition that it will enable it to maintain the Upper House president's seat and the lion's share of choice committee chairmanships? Those things will make a difference in the extent to which the coalition can push its legislative agenda till 2010, when its next general election changes the complexion of the Upper House.
Generally sympathetic to Mr. Abe (even producing a chart that listed all the policy initiatives that Mr. Abe had pushed through), Mr. Tawara pushed him hard on seeking US apology over the WW II atom bombs. As with Mr. Ozawa's reaction, this is yet another manifestation of a strong, underlying populist sentiment that mostly lies dormant but surfaces from time to time to see redress. This sentiment is not directed solely, or even mainly, against the US. Indeed, I suspect that we place the bulk of it squarely on the shoulders of our leaders who took us into the hellhole and (if the wishes of some of them were to be followed) would have forced us to perish there in a false glory of the damned. Nevertheless, any full-scale debate in Japan on responsibility for actions taken to bring about and conduct the wars will inevitably bring this issue to the fore. And what our ally shall hear then will not be to its liking.
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