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Most people looking at the rise of Asian power focus
on China and India. They often forget that Japan’s $5-trillion
economy is the second largest in the world—more than China and
India combined—with a per-capita income that is 10 times that of
China. In addition, Japan spends $40 billion annually on defense,
and has one of the top five military forces in the world. China’s
economy is growing more rapidly, and its total size will probably
overtake Japan’s in a decade or two, but any serious analysis of
power in East Asia must include Japan as a major factor.
Japan has played a unique role in
world history. It was the first Asian country to encounter the
forces of globalization, master them, and then make them serve its
own interests.
Moreover, Japan has reinvented
itself twice. During the Meiji restoration of the 19th century,
Japan scoured the world for ideas and technologies that allowed it
to defeat a European great power in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.
Unfortunately, Japan moved onto militaristic imperialism in the
1930s, which eventually led to its surrender and occupation in 1945.
But in the post-World War II
period, Japan again used the forces of globalization to reinvent
itself as an economic superpower that became the envy of the world.
As Kenneth Pyle argues in his interesting new book Japan Rising,
these reinventions were responses to external shifts in world
politics. Now, with the growth of Chinese power, one of the great
questions for this century will be how Japan responds.
The Japanese are currently
debating their role in global politics. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
has taken a more nationalistic stance than most of his predecessors,
and his Liberal Democratic Party is committed to revising Article 9
of the Constitution, which limits Japan’s forces to self-defense.
Public opinion is divided on the issue, and polls vary according to
how the questions are asked. Nonetheless, many astute analysts
believe that the Constitution will be amended within the coming
decade.
While Abe wisely visited China
and smoothed over relations ruffled by his predecessor, Junichiro
Koizumi, who repeatedly visited the Yasukuni Shrine (where 14 class
A war criminals from WWII are interred), many people are uncertain
about his long-term vision. As one well-known Japanese intellectual
told me during a recent visit to Tokyo, “I can accept
constitutional revision in the long run, but not while Abe is prime
minister.”
In May, Asahi Shimbun, a major
newspaper known for its left/liberal inclination, proposed an
alternative vision for 21st century Japan in a series of 21
editorials. Asahi rejected the idea of revising Article 9, and
proposed instead that the Japanese Diet legalize the role of the
Self-Defense Forces. The editorials accepted the treaty with the
United States that serves as a basis for Japanese security, but
rejected the idea that Japan has a right to collective self-defense.
Interestingly, one of the reasons
given for retaining Article 9 was that it would better enable Japan
to resist American pressures to engage in military “coalitions of
the willing” far from Japan’s shores. Asahi worried about the
precedent set when Koizumi sent Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to
Iraq, albeit in a noncombatant role, to please US President George
W. Bush. Conservative voices argue just the opposite—that
abolishing Article 9 is important for exactly such reasons.
The alternative vision that Asahi
offered was for Japan to become a world power as a provider and
coordinator of global public goods from which all peoples can
benefit and none can be excluded, such as freedom of the seas or a
stable international monetary system. This would be a way for Japan
to escape its reputation for insularity, avoid the mistakes of its
military history, improve its relations with Asian neighbors who
still remember the 1930s, and increase Japan’s “soft” or
attractive power.
More specifically, Asahi urged
that Japan take the lead on managing global climate change by
building on its record of successful innovation in energy
conservation following the oil shocks of the 1970s. In an
interesting conjunction of events, shortly after the Asahi editorial
was published, Abe committed Japan to halving greenhouse gas
emissions by 2050, and to helping developing countries to join in a
new post-Kyoto protocol climate regime.
(Continued tomorrow)
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