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Japan shines
its image
By Bennett Richardson
TOKYO - Since the anti-Japan protests in
China last month, senior Japanese lawmakers have
gone into overdrive around the globe in an effort
to improve the nation's image.
Since apologizing in April in
Jakarta for Japan's wartime actions in Asia, Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi has announced a
framework for strengthening economic, political
and security relations with India while in New
Delhi, pledged to restart yen loans to Pakistan
while in Islamabad, and met with European Union
leaders in Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
He has also held
talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the
sidelines of the 60th anniversary celebration of
the end of World War II in Moscow, and with the
leaders of Cambodia, Palestine and Finland on
returning to Tokyo. His newfound zeal for foreign
relations marks part of a drive by Tokyo to
convince the international community that it is
working to squarely face its wartime past, and
trying to build better relations with its Asian
neighbors as it steps up lobbying for a permanent
seat on the UN Security Council.
One of
the lessons of the recent deterioration in
regional relations is that "Japan has to do more
to rebuild its credibility," said Kazuhiko Ozawa,
an associate professor of political studies at
Obirin University in Tokyo.
Koizumi
has accordingly kept Foreign Minister
Nobutaka Machimura busy over the past few weeks. Since
the end of April, Machimura has met with UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York, US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington, announced
to Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development leaders in Paris that Japan
plans to double its overseas development
assistance to Africa, and made some headway in
mending fences with China and South Korea on the
sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) +3 foreign ministers' summit in
Kyoto last week.
At the meeting,
Machimura secured a promise from his Chinese counterpart,
Li Zhouxing, that Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi
would visit Japan (she arrived on Tuesday), while the two nations said
they planned working-level talks later this month to
discuss the development of disputed gas fields in
the South China Sea. Foreign Minister Li also
agreed to go ahead with a proposal made last month
by Machimura in Beijing to conduct a joint study
on interpretations of regional history. More
cooperation on energy issues, including a joint
study of alternative fuel source development,
apparently is also on the drawing board.
Machimura and South Korean
Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon, meanwhile, arranged
for their respective leaders to meet in Seoul in
June. Saying that Tokyo-Seoul relations were heading
in an amicable direction, they agreed to continue
a joint history research project that began in
2002. According to Ozawa, such joint research
projects hold the promise of a continued, active
regional dialog. They are important for enhancing
bilateral relations as such piecemeal cooperation
tends to expand and provide a basis for better
mutual understanding, Ozawa said.
Other
top Japanese officials on the move recently
include acting Liberal Democratic Party secretary
general Shinzo Abe, who was sent to New York to
add weight to Japan's UN Security Council seat
bid, and Koizumi allies Taku Yamasaki and Tsutomu
Takebe, who were on hand in Beijing, Shanghai and
Seoul to address complaints over school textbooks
that brush over Japan's cruelty in Asia in the
20th century and visits by politicians to the
Yasukuni Shrine war memorial.
To be sure,
the problems between Japan and its neighbors can't
be solved by a single bout of intensive diplomacy.
Li repeated in Kyoto that China is strongly
opposed to a Japan-US announcement made earlier
this year naming Taiwan as a security interest,
while Ban made it clear that South Korea views
disputed isles in the Japan Sea, or East Sea, as
Korean territory and said he expects Koizumi to
follow up his apology in Jakarta with concrete
actions. Beijing-Tokyo relations remain of
particular concern given their competing interest
in energy resources and security issues as both
countries jockey for a leading political role in
East Asia. "The skies are not suddenly going to
clear" for Japan-China relations, one former
Japanese diplomat told Beijing.
Japanese
diplomatic efforts have also not been helped by a
number of gaffes and politically insensitive
actions by lawmakers that suggest there is little
cohesion to Tokyo's recent burst of foreign policy
initiatives. When Machimura was chairing a meeting
of some 120 foreign ambassadors in Tokyo on Monday
to boost support for Japan's permanent Security
Council seat bid, he made the curious comment that
Japanese school textbooks are generally written by
left-leaning historians and thus tend not to
glorify militarism. While the statement is
factually correct, China and Korea are less
concerned about any glorification than the
increasing tendency to omit any reference to
Japan's militarist past at all. The effect of
Koizumi's recent apology over Japan's war actions
was similarly undermined when a group of 80
conservative lawmakers visited Yasukuni Shrine on
the same day.
In another ill-timed fumble
that may add weight to the Chinese view that Tokyo
isn't remorseful over the war, Koizumi said in
parliament on Monday that other countries ought
not to interfere in the way the Japanese revere
their war-dead. The government also passed a law
on Friday to re-name an existing public holiday as
Showa Day after the emperor who reigned from 1926
to 1989. Some historians have said that the Showa
Emperor ought to have borne more of the blame for
passively allowing the war to escalate.
Polls show most Japanese want to see more
government-level intra-regional dialog, but many
also hope for some give and take in working out
points of contention. Some older Japanese feel
that friction over the Yasukuni Shrine issue is
exacerbated by a lack of cultural understanding.
Koizumi has made repeated visits to the war
memorial, saying he does so to confirm his
conviction that Japan should never go down the
militarist path again.
Yasukuni Shrine
commemorates a number of convicted war criminals
along with Japan's war dead in the Shinto
tradition, which indiscriminately honors all those
who died in wars regardless of their moral conduct
- an ecclesiastical subtlety lost on the
descendents of those who endured the Japanese
Imperial Army's cruelty. It is also not well known
that the Yasukuni Shrine is a private, religious
institution the government is constitutionally
barred from interfering with. Still, that fact
hasn't stopped Koizumi from paying his respects
there.
The school textbook issue is
another area that many Japanese say has been
distorted for political gain by Beijing. The
Chinese education system tends to play up Japan's
wartime brutality to instill a sense of national
victimization that is increasingly replacing
Marxism as a rallying point for Chinese identity.
Studies have shown that anti-Japan feeling is
actually stronger among Chinese who didn't
experience World War II than among older
generations who lived through that period.
"This obviously must be the result of
education by the Chinese government," said Ryozo
Yoshino, a sociologist at Tokyo University.
Machimura has said Tokyo intends to examine
Chinese schoolbooks for anti-Japanese content and
possibly ask for them to be improved.
While top officials in the Japanese
government may aim to patch up bilateral ties,
those on the front lines in the Japan-China
relationship - ordinary Japanese business people -
say some companies are already looking to shift
capital to other countries.
"The age of
increasing investment from small and medium
Japanese firms in China is ending," said Rei
Yasuda, who has worked as a translator and
negotiator for a Japanese shipping firm in
Shanghai for the last three years. After the
anti-Japan riots, "people are starting to look
further abroad to markets like Russia for new
opportunities," she said.
A poll released
last week by the think-tank Teikoku Databank shows
that one in three Japanese firms that had planned
capital expenditure in China have now either
cancelled those plans or are considering the
possibility. Other nearby countries with a rapidly
improving infrastructure, such as Vietnam, are
cited by respondents in the survey as attractive
alternatives to direct investment in China.
Bennett Richardson is a
Tokyo-based freelance journalist with a special
interest in Japanese defense policy, politics and
modern history.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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