Shinzo Abe, who returned to power in 2012 pledging to strengthen defense and revive economy, has seen glaring protests against his conservative coalition Government. Indeed, these protests were reminiscent of those that forced down 55 years ago his grandfather’s Government which had tried to ink a revised US-Japan security pact.
With the formidable majority of Abe’s coalition in the legislature, it passed controversial new Security legislation despite having grinding political battles and overwhelming protests across the nation.
The main effect of this law is to allow the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (SDF) to help the US and its allies even if the country is not under attack directly. The Opposition’s obstructionist tactics could not stop Abe in bringing the new defense law. Apart from questioning the constitutionality of the new law, more than 90 per cent of the constitutional experts in a series of multiple surveys opined that this law violates Japan’s basic law laid (Article 9 of the Constitution) down by the US in the post-war occupation that absolutely renounces the use of force to resolve any kind of international disputes.
Abe is defending the new security law by saying it is essential to meet new challenges such as those from a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea. His legislation has received full support from Washington.
The US policy makers are welcoming a larger and a more active role for Japan signaling more responsibility to the latter for meeting emerging security threats. To him “The security situation around Japan is getting tougher….These bills are vital to protect the Japanese people’s lives and prevent war.”
But for majority of the Japanese the concern is “whether loosening restrictions on the military will put Japan on a more equal footing with the US, as Abe has argued, or, as critics contend, turn it into an American ‘deputy sheriff’ in Asia, its new military powers at Washington’s disposal” (Soble 2015).
The new law would help expanding the scope for Japan’s security cooperation with friendly countries, relax limits on peace-keeping operations and make it easier to respond to situations falling short of war with full force.
Japan rising is a serious concern for Asia, particularly for China. Japan’s position in Asia is very peculiar. It is constructed on the complex and contradictory process of differentiation, identification and subjugation of Asia. That is why Japan in Asia is less about physical geography than it is related to what Edward Said has termed as “imaginative geography”.
Japan was the only non-Western colonial power in Asia with an empire. Hence, “modern Japanese identity is continuously and constitutively constructed in the vacillating imaginative geographies between Asia and the West. It is an internalisation of a Eurocentric model of the world where the West is represented as modern, progressive, and therefore superior, whereas Asia is represented as premodern, stagnant, and therefore inferior” (Ching 2009). Therefore from, Hirohito’s Japan to Abe’s resurgence of Japanese nationalism is always trapped in the Eurocentric thinking of the elongated divide between the East and the West.
The Japan-led Asiatic identity which is purely based on non-modern or trans-modern qualities of Asian culturalism and spirituality largely challenges both materialism and militarism of the West in the continent. However, some Japanese scholars argue that without confronting the West, it is better to go along with them as the Asians could gain more by joining them. In 1889, Fukuza in his Datsu-a ron (On leaving Asia) argues that Japan necessitates a radical shift for joining the ranks of Western civilisation and it has to shed resemblances to China and Korea in this long journey.
He compares Japan’s place in Asia to “the case of a righteous man living in a neighbourhood of a town known for foolishness, lawlessness, atrocity, and heartlessness. His action is so rare that it is always buried under the ugliness of his neighbour’s activities.” Hence he suggested that the only reasonable path for Japan is to “leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilised nations of the West.” This is how Japan’s superiority over the rest of Asia was conceived and prepared the country to move beyond the stereotypes of Asian identity. But there are other scholars like Okakura who in The Ideals of the East (1903) begins, “Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and the Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.”
So Okakura does not recognise the inevitability of Japan joining the ranks of Western civilisation by abandoning the Asiatic values. As Ching (2009) advocates that the unity of Asia, despite periodic intertribal upheavals and numerous ethnic conquests, lies in the old energy of communication embodied by Chinese humanism and Indian spirituality so that the Asiatic races form a single mighty web.
Though Japan and China, the two Asian giants are closely fighting for their supremacy in the region, yet they are economically strongly intertwined. “China and Japan are locked into each other economically. The bilateral relationship is the third largest in the world, with a $340 billion trade relationship in 2014. China is Japan’s largest trading partner, accounting for one fifth of its trade, and Japan is China’s second largest. Japan is the largest investor in China, with a stock of direct investment at more than $100 billion in 2014 or $ 30 billion more than the next largest source, the United States” (Armstrong 2015).
China’s foreign policy exhibits “a variety of emphases — sometimes accommodating, sometimes engaging actively, and sometimes domineering…Beijing is ambivalent regarding its approach to the post-World War II international order” (Shambaugh 2015). China’s peaceful rise is truly evident in its worldwide external propaganda. The way China is countering the Western media dominance through its State Council Information Office (SCIO), it demonstrates its rising power and efforts to pose an alternative model of governance. Along with its economic and military might, its publicity blitz started in 2007 under Hu Jintao, but it received a global makeover with the coming of Xi Jinping who rightly declared in 2014, “We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s messages to the world’ for building the country into a ‘Socialist Cultural Superpower’.”
Unlike Koizumi, Abe is more entrenched into the resurgence of the national fervour which is largely influenced by an overarching Chinese moves for contesting the current global governance structure.
Indeed, today China has a considerable presence in the West Asia, Africa, latin America, Central and Eastern Europe and lastly in Asia. In contrast, Japan’s economy is doing no good with a huge domestic debt and with an ageing population growing. At a time when Japan is witnessing receding economic growth, China’s soft power expansion is supported by massive financial ventures, “$50 billion for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, $41 billion for the New Development Bank, $40 billion for the Silk Road Economic Belt, and $25 billion for the Maritime Silk Road. Beijing has also pledged to invest $1.25 trillion worldwide by 2025. This scale of investment is unprecedented even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not spend anywhere near as much as China is spending today. Together these recent pledges by Beijing add up to $1.41 trillion; in contrast, the Marshall Plan cost the equivalent of $ 103 billion in today’s dollars” (Shambaugh 2015).
This scale of spending for propaganda is alarming with its escalating military build-up in both sides of the South and East China Sea.
However China sees Japan’s new defense regime as a “dark stain for Japan” which marks the latter’s return to militarism. There has been a lot of hubris and arrogance that is complicating Abe’s reign and persona and it would surely hit his rating both within and outside the country.
The contemporaneousness of the changing dynamics of a de-territorialised global economy, Japan would find it increasingly difficult to resist the multiple peaceful expansions of Chinese moves in military and economic fields, despite bringing a new security law to rewrite its 70-year-old pacifist history. Now the debate on the future Japanese leadership remains on the deployment of the SDF, either in support of US or orchestrating a new resurgent identity for the country. Unlike the US and the UK, Japan has so far demonstrated its leadership by focusing overwhelmingly on economic development and regional integration in the region; and stressed on a much wider view of security rather than narrowly highlighting the military security.
In these tumultuous times, how Asian nations particularly China, and the peace loving Japanese people carry forward “Abe’s Stain” (as Xinhua calls it) would be worth watching and simultaneously, critical for Japan’s image in the coming days.
(The author is a political analyst based in Delhi)