Japans turn to the right
By Selig S. Harrison, Asia Director, Center for International
Policy
Is Japan moving toward right-wing nationalism and an inevitable
growth of tensions with China and the Korean peninsula?
Until the withdrawal of Yasuo Fukuda from the race to succeed
Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister, front-runner Shinzo Abe faced
in Fukuda a serious challenger who offered Japanese voters a clear
alternative to Abe's right-wing nationalism. Abe still faces
opposition from Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, but his victory
appears likely.
One imponderable will be the impact of the recent revelation by all
leading Japanese media two weeks ago that Abe had secretly visited
the Yasukuni shrine on April 15, followed by his refusal to comment
on reports of the visit and Tanigaki's pledge that he will not
visit the shrine if he wins the September 20, 2006, Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) election.
Fears that Abe will take Japan to the right are based not only on
his continual hawkish statements regarding North Korea and China
but also on his political DNA. Like Koizumi, Abe belongs to the
dominant Mori faction of the LDP, but he also happens to be the
grandson of the late Nobusuke Kishi, a member of Prime Minister
Hideki Tojo's World War II Cabinet. Until his death in 1987, Kishi
worked to keep alive the wartime dream of a "Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere."
In Taiwan, Kishi channeled Japanese support to the Taiwan
independence movement. In South Korea, he tried to get Park Chung
Hee to set up a "Japan-Korea Industrial Zone" in which labor and
capital would move back and forth freely without national tax and
investment restrictions between coastal areas of Korea and Japan's
Kansai. As Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo at the time, I was
one of those who exposed the plan, which soon died after a bitter
attack on it by Dong-a-Ilbo as "a resurrection of their old dream
of a Co-Prosperity Sphere that would make us a permanent processor
and subcontractor for Japan."
To se sure, Shinzo Abe cannot be blamed for the sins of his
grandfather, and it is possible that he will moderate his policies
once he faces the responsibilities of power, as many politicians in
many countries have done. In a speech on July 23 in Yokohama, Abe
made a surprising comment about Kim Jong Il, describing him as
having a "rational" way of thinking. A Kyodo report said that Abe
"hinted at the possibility of being able to resolve the abduction
issue."
A hopeful scenario would be that Abe turns out to be a politician
at heart, who acts opportunistically to advance his own interests,
not an ideologue with rigid convictions. In this view, as Kishi's
grandson, he knows how rightists think and what they want to hear,
but is not really one of them. That description fits Koizumi, who
broke from the rightist mold when he went to see Kim Jong Il
without telling the Bush administration and many of his close
advisers.
A plausible scenario, suggesting that an Abe victory might prove to
be short-lived, has come from Columbia University Japan expert
Gerald Curtis. The next prime minister "will be coming into
office," Curtis wrote in the Financial Times, "at a time when the
Liberal Democratic Party is not as strong as it looks and the
opposition Democratic Party of Japan is not as weak as it appears."
The Democratic Party has a "strong, popular leader" in Ichiro
Ozawa, Curtis points out, who will face an LDP with a leader "seen
to be weaker than Koizumi, which could turn politics around." The
test will come in the July 2007 upper house elections. By that time
the six-year term of members elected on Koizumi's coattails will
have expired. A Democratic Party victory in the upper house
elections, Curtis speculates, could spark a power struggle in the
LDP and produce demands for an early lower house election that
could lead to a new prime minister.
Even if Abe does not last long, the danger of rightward drift in
Japan will be great. Ichiro Ozawa is himself a right-wing
nationalist who has long argued that Japan should amend Article IX
of the Constitution so that it can become a "normal" nation. At
times, Ozawa has implied much more strongly than Abe that he favors
a nuclear-armed Japan. Indeed, Ozawa's election as leader of the
Democratic Party came soon after a speech proclaiming that "we have
plenty of plutonium in our power plants, so it's possible for us to
produce 3,000 to 4,000 nuclear warheads. If we get serious, we will
never get beaten in terms of military power."
Apart from how he will handle North Korea, the most important
immediate cause for concern if Abe becomes prime minister is that
he will expedite action by the Diet to implement the revision of
Article IX formally put forward by the Liberal Democratic Party on
the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary last November. Diet
approval requires a two-thirds vote by both the lower and upper
houses, and the revision would then have to receive majority
approval in a national referendum.
Whoever the next prime minister is and whatever he does, Japan is
already moving quietly to become a "normal" country without waiting
for the Constitution to be amended. As Cabinet Secretary, Abe has
worked with Koizumi to accelerate the creeping expansion of Japan's
military power projection capabilities under the legislative cover
of the "Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law" enacted following the
September 11, 2001 attacks. The Maritime Self-Defense Forces in
2006 had 16 submarines, 54 destroyers and frigates and 109 Lockheed
P-3C anti-submarine warfare planes. Most of the destroyers and
frigates have been stationed since November 2001 in the Indian
Ocean, where they have helped to refuel U.S. vessels and aircraft
operating in Afghanistan and Iraq and to intercept vessels regarded
as "suspicious" by U.S. forces.
Looking ahead, what makes a continuing shift to the right in Japan
likely is the growth of a nationalistic cultural climate and the
steady decline of moderate and pacifist forces that has been taking
place ever since the collapse of the Socialist-led opposition to
the LDP in the 1993 elections. The most dramatic example of this in
popular culture is the growing popularity of comic strips like
those of the manga artist, Yoshinori Kobayashi, some of which
depict the "comfort women" driven into Japanese brothels in Korea
and China as greedy prostitutes, and deny the Nanking Massacre of
1937 as a Chinese fabrication.
For the past 10 years, the Society for History Textbook Reform has
been working steadily to put a nationalistic slant on the version
of history presented to the emerging generation of Japanese
students. It is the change in Japanese "hearts and minds" resulting
from the entrenched strength of the right that seems certain to
create a growing psychological distance between Japan and its
neighbors in the years ahead, with unpredictable political and
military consequences.
Posted at : Aug.15,2006 13:21 KST Modified at : Aug.15,2006 13:23
KST
