WHEN Alexander Downer and Condoleezza Rice sit down with Taro
Aso at a Sydney naval base, a lot of sinister history will be
hovering around.
Aso is Japan's Foreign Minister, and this August he may well become
its prime minister, if the ruling Liberal Democratic Party stays
with a rotation of leadership despite the incumbent Junichiro
Koizumi's huge election win last year.
But whether Aso or his main rival, Shinzo Abe, represents new blood
is another thing.
Both men have lineage back to the darker side of the LDP and prewar
Japan.
Aso's family company ran coalmines in Kyushu where thousands of
Korean men worked in slave-like conditions during the war years.
Abe's father, Shintaro Abe, later a senior LDP figure, was training
as a kamikaze pilot when the war ended.
Aso is a grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, Abe of Nobusuke Kishi - two
of the early postwar LDP prime ministers who forged a new role for
Japan as the US's forward base off the Asian mainland, despite the
limits on military activity set by its postwar constitution's
article nine.
Acceptance of figures like Kishi - wartime Japan's munitions
minister and arrested by the Allies as a war crimes suspect - must
have been eased for many Americans by the expectation that
generational change would clean out the wartime taint in the
LDP.
Yet, partly thanks to hereditary succession in the party's Diet
seats, a perverse mindset lives on. Koizumi, Abe and Aso have been
out to stir Japanese nationalism by invoking wartime symbols and
stirring bitter memories in China and Korea through offensive
remarks.
The effect of Koizumi's theatrical visits to the Yasukuni shrine -
dedicated to Japan's war dead, including executed leaders, and
housing a museum justifying its sweeps across Asia - is well
known.
In less than a year as Foreign Minister, Aso has shown a particular
bent for stirring up the neighbours: Taiwanese are better educated
than Chinese mainlanders thanks to the Japanese occupation. Koreans
liked to adopt Japanese names and abandon their Hangul script. A
visit by Emperor Akihito to the Yasukuni shrine would be the
best.
How deep this runs is anyone's guess. Aso and Abe are intelligent
men. They went to American universities. They show no sign of
ultimately wanting to break free of the American embrace.
According to some reported private soul-baring by LDP leaders,
twisting the dragon's tail is consciously aimed at creating a
threat psychology about China in the Japanese population, to let
the LDP put through a revision of article nine.
Australian foreign policy has long been working in parallel with
the US's to bring Japan out as a "normal" nation.
In 2001 the Howard Government took things forward by getting the
new Bush Administration to agree to a new linkage between the
US-Japan and ANZUS military treaties, an annual security dialogue
between officials from the three countries. Last year it was agreed
to lift this to ministerial level, and today's talks are the first
occasion.
Of course Downer is insisting that this is not about countering
China, but Rice makes it clear this is what she is about.
If anyone is the father of the trilateral security dialogue, it is
Ashton Calvert, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
for most of the Howard years until illness forced him to retire
early last year.
A Japan specialist, Calvert went out of the way to seek Japan's
input on world problems, and insisted Tokyo's importance be
remembered in the rush to build up relations with Beijing.
In a Curtin memorial speech last June, Calvert expressed this
clearly. "While welcoming China's active participation in regional
and international forums, and while accepting that its influence is
likely to increase steadily, we should not soften our support for a
more active and responsible role for Japan in international
political and security affairs. As part of this, we should maintain
our firm support for Japan's bid to become a permanent member of
the UN Security Council."
Australia continues to nudge Japan further out of the article nine
box. Our main troop deployment to Iraq even has this collateral
objective, being assigned to protecting Japan's military
construction team, the first dispatch of Ground Self-Defence Force
(army) personnel into a foreign conflict outside a United Nations
mandate.
When they sit down with Aso, Downer and Rice might encourage more
Japanese assertiveness. But does it have to be achieved by stirring
up wartime animosities among three great East Asian nations, and
perhaps starting a new Japan-China strategic rivalry?
Will the American and Australian ministers urge Aso and his LDP
colleagues to cut the provocative Yasukuni patronage, the evasive
school textbook references, the needling remarks, the half-hearted
non-apologies? One suspects that this side of things won't be
raised much at all.
