Japan wants to play a more independent role in world affairs, and its increasingly assertive leadership is signaling President Clinton that it wants to forge a new partnership between the world’s two largest economies.
As the new administration takes shape, the foreign policy establishment here is anxious to avoid having nasty trade disputes become the focal point of Washington-Tokyo discussions.
“The transfer of power in the U.S. provides an opportunity to develop U.S.-Japan relations into a new and truly equal partnership,” Yukio Satoh, head of the foreign ministry’s North American department, wrote recently. “Japan is no longer in a position to see global issues solely through the prism of the alliance with America.”
But before the internationalists in Japan’s bureaucracy can transform their newfound verbal assertiveness into meaningful actions, they must overcome a host of major stumbling blocks:
– They have sidestepped the inconvenient fact that the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance continues unabated and will quickly reassert itself as a political minefield should the fragile U.S. economic recovery falter.
– Any new effort by Japan to assert itself on the world stage will face powerful domestic constraints, ranging from protectionist rice farmers to pacifist public opinion that still sees most global problems as fires raging on the other side of the river.
– And even if the homefront were prepared for greater external involvement, Japan still is viewed by its neighbors with extreme wariness.
Memories of Japan’s brutal imperial past smolder throughout Asia, and continue to be stoked by Japan’s seeming inability to atone meaningfully for its sins. One example is Tokyo’s refusal last year to pay compensation to thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by the army during World War II.
As a result, Japan remains extraordinarily introverted for an economic giant whose commercial tentacles spread across the globe. In nearly every global hotspot, the government’s minimalist actions belie its activist words.
“Japan is like Russia used to be, an incomplete superpower,” said Charles Morrison, an analyst at the East-West Center in Hawaii. “Russia was strong militarily, but had a weak economy. Japan is strong in economics, but it can’t be considered a complete player in the international arena.”
Clinton and his appointees have kept a low profile regarding their security and trade strategies for the world’s second-largest economy. In one of the rare Japan-related comments made during confirmation hearings of Clinton’s appointees, new U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor promised trade retaliation if countries like Japan refused to open their markets.
But for the most part, the new administration has remained silent.
Like his Republican predecessors, who consistently pressed Japan to step up its international contributions, Democrat Clinton presumably would welcome a beefed-up Japanese global role-especially if it meant reducing the budgetary burden of keeping 82,000 U.S. troops to maintain the peace in this part of the world.
Movement in Japan on such issues can be glacial. For instance, in recent weeks, leading members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, including Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, have called for a revision of the pacifist clause in the nation’s postwar constitution. The changes are necessary to allow Japan’s troops to participate more fully in United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian endeavors.
The 700 Japanese troops sent to Cambodia last September face severe constraints on their activities, a necessary compromise to get the historic Peace Keeping Operations bill passed. Many Japanese still consider the mission a violation of the constitution, which “forever renounce(s) war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”
Discussions to change the constitution have gone on in the Diet for years and never even reached the stage of serious consideration, much less passage.
The result is a series of halting half-steps in recent crises ranging from the Persian Gulf war to Somalia, where Japan donated $100 million but did not participate in the multilateral humanitarian effort. This tentativeness reflects the still-powerful domestic sentiment that Japan should avoid overseas entanglements at all costs.
Japan’s leaders also would like to play a leadership role in their own back yard, and become Asia’s spokesman in world forums such as the July summit in Tokyo of the G-7, or leading industrialized nations.
Yet the centerpiece of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s just-concluded swing through Southeast Asia, delivered in a speech last weekend in Bangkok that had been billed as a major initiative, was a tepid call for a new forum to discuss regional security issues. The pronouncement generated little enthusiasm from his hosts.
Miyazawa’s other major comments served as a reminder that Japan still faces deep suspicion-and in some cases outright hostility-to a greater regional role because of its march through Asia a half-century ago.
Miyazawa pledged that “Japan shall never again become a military power” and promised to seek revision of textbooks that gloss over Japanese wartime atrocities.
He then assured his Asian neighbors that Japan would continue to rely on the U.S. military to be the “stabilizing factor for the region.”
While that’s an easy-to-adopt stance for the trading states of East Asia, it’s a role the budget-conscious Clinton administration is bound to review.
On trade issues, Japan’s increasingly assertive leadership sees the past pattern of buckling under to U.S. pressure as passe. Certain of the ability of its own companies to compete in world markets, Japan has emerged as the world’s strongest ideological supporter of free trade.
A study released last month with the Foreign Ministry’s blessing blamed the U.S. for most of the two countries’ endless trade disputes and threatened to retaliate in kind if the Clinton administration strikes out in a protectionist direction.
But in the key area of world trade talks, where Japan could have played a major leadership role, it has refused to take action. Rather than help bring the current round of talks on international tariffs to a successful conclusion, Japan steadfastly sticks by its ban on imported rice, catering to a small but powerful domestic constituency that has little real impact on its economy.
Japan also continues to put its domestic political agenda ahead of international concerns regarding aid to Russia, a big concern in the West and certain to be a major topic of discussion at the G-7 meeting in July.
Japan has withheld aid and investment pending the return of four Kurile islands seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, torn between a chaotic economy that could use Japanese help and a growing nationalist movement that opposes land giveaways, canceled his Tokyo visit last year rather than confront the single-minded Japanese.
Indeed, Japan’s hopes to play a greater global role could become completely unglued this spring in Cambodia when the UN peacekeeping operation and its Japanese participants will be put to a severe test.
According to the compromises in the peacekeeping operations bill authorizing their participation, Japanese troops can only take part if all parties to a conflict supported their presence.
They also are restricted from taking part in any type of police action, such as monitoring ceasefires, demobilizing troops or collecting weapons.
What will happen if the Khmer Rouge refuses to demobilize and pulls out of the UN-supervised election process, an increasingly likely prospect as the May election draws nearer?
Japan could be forced to withdraw its troops. That would further damage its credibility as a world player.
