East Asian antagonism and U.S. interests

Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社) has been a touchy subject between Japan, China, and South Korea the last few years. In case you didn’t know, it’s a shrine honoring Japanese who died during the Pacific conflict, among them a group of convicted Class-A war criminals and leaders of the war (and quite a few of lesser status). The point of the shrine is to honor Japanese wartime dead; I personally believe that denouncing the shrine’s existence is an affront to the decendants of two million other people spiritually laid to peace there. Nevertheless, the temple is surrounded by a maelstrom of controversy. (By the way, when I say Korea for the rest of this entry, I mean South. I hope I do, anyway.)

Over the years of standing as Prime Minister, Koizumi managed to unapologetically visit the shrine every year, including the one in which he (was) retired. And not just Koizumi; since the shrine’s revisionist outlook on the wartime dead was created, every official’s visit to the shrine is marked by fiery response both domestically and abroad, whether they visited as individuals or as officials. Emperor Hirohito and his son have made it a habit not to as Emperor, but I assure you, if anyone who sits on Chrysanthemum Throne sets foot in that place some people in Korea and China will like, seriously explode or something.

That’s why attempts to mend relations between the countries always make the news these days, I guess (link). Despite their very nice economic relationships and cultural exchange, there’s a good amount of historical enmity built up between the countries dating back to World War II and Japanese atrocities committed then. Yasukuni’s views, criticized as revisionist, really just mess this up further. Abe, the new prime minister, may be trying to push policy-making a more positive direction, but it really seems that Japan’s political leaders have little invested in relationships with their neighbors. I’m of the opinion that making the general populace of your closest neighbors hate your country isn’t a good idea. Japan’s attitude toward Korea isn’t good foreign policy, but China of all countries? It’s like throwing large rocks at the neighbor’s oversized doberman when it’s chained up and hoping you’re never outside when it isn’t nailed to the grass by sturdy metal links.

Why do Japan’s leaders want to antagonize an emerging military and economic superpower that could feasibly pose a serious challenge to the U.S.’s dominance in the Pacific in the next century? (Admittedly there’s as much going against a China superpower as there against it, but that’s a really big risk to take when your borders are only separated by a couple hundred miles of blue water.)

In my opinion, Japan’s leaders are relying on two things when the do things like this, One would obviously be their economic weight in the region, as said earlier. China’s largest trading partner is Japan. East Asia lags behind Japan economically, and I would venture that for any of the developing Pacific Rim countries to negotiate with established world powers on equal grounds, economic cooperation from Japan is an unwritten prerequisite. China is already a United Nations voting member, but the same applies on a technological and economic level. Japan’s brute economic power, second only to the U.S.’s, gives them leverage that China cannot afford to lose, especially in a period where they are so reliant on their investors.

The second is military. But not Japan’s military! The U.S. has a lot of interest in its power projection in the Pacific Rim, and its fleets float around in the international waters regularly. This strange relationship between Japan and the U.S. – one gets military leverage (or rather, immunity against it) without a true military and the massive budget it implies, and the other gets its power projection – is infinitely self-sustaining and provides both with highly desirable benefits. As a result, Japan has, for the last half-century, been an impossibly hard target that not even, for the sake of example, China’s enormous PLA can target because of the implications of such an attack would be synonymous with attacking American military bases.

With both military and economic invulnerability, it’s “okay” that Koizumi (or any other of Japan’s leaders) assume unrepentant stances against neighbors. At this point, they can afford to not care, even if it drives anti-Japanese sentiment through the roof abroad. This, I think, will come back to bite them in the ass later. Painfully.

Which brings me to the second idea (I’m sure you are wondering why “U.S. interests” was in the title by now; well, here we go.) In a way, the U.S.’s power projection into the Pacific Rim requires that this sort of antagonism exist between the countries it supports and the countries it doesn’t. Well, that’s a bit backwards, but imagine an Asian alliance between Korea, China, and Japan (AKA, the Pentagon’s worst nightmare); loss of this tension voids many of the natural reasons for American military forces to be stationed within their borders.

I wrote a paper during Kansai that attempting to say (to probably varying degrees of success) that the same deal goes with the power struggle over the Taiwanese Strait. The Taiwanese don’t want to accept inclusion into the mainland, but they’re also wary of moving from a de facto independence because of their economic dependence and the hulking military shadow of its neighbor. China “allowing” Taiwanese independence would really screw things up for U.S. presence there, because the conflict is the thing that necessitates it.

It’s not really a conspiracy theory; it’s just a practical view of the situation, which I bet was repeated thousands of times over during the Cold War by many other countries. Now, in the present day, East Asia is a politically fractured region, littered with countries that really don’t perfectly get along with its neighbors. Really important countries, next to other really important countries. Thus, when U.S. is given permission to station its fleets and troops near its Asian allies there, providing a military deterrant for any unwelcome overt action, the Pentagon happily obliges, sending carrier battle groups to allow the U.S. to project its military strength all over the basin. However, without this antagonism, and with the unification of the region through some ideological/political/military means, East Asia would have grown into the modern age with almost complete immunity to the intrusion of not just U.S., but Western power as a whole. An solidified East Asia says with one voice that they have no need for our warships in their oceans.

And now we’ve come full circle – the concept of Western immunity was a fundamental reason for the creation of a Japanese Empire, in turn creating the context for the bitter memories of Japanese invasion, oppression, and occupation.

The unraveling of a “pacifist state”

The Japanese Defense Agency is now a Japanese Defense Ministry (link). Words, words? Yeah, right. It’s not set in stone… yet. But for a country with a so-called peace constitution, the military’s importance is quite clearly exceeding expectations already, and continuing to rise. There won’t be a true Japanese Army/Navy/Air Force/Spacy (hur-hur) anytime soon, but the falling of each barrier blocking Japan’s military reestablishment is probably just as important as whatever its inevitable presence in the Pacific Rim will mean.

I don’t think anyone that will ever read this blog ever experienced what the Japanese Empire meant for East Asia in the 20th century, and probably not that many have even heard of its meaning second or even third-hand. (This is, among other things, a tongue in cheek joke about the age of the internet viewing audience. Or, lack of audience in my case.) Speaking of which, there remain only a few more World War I veterans; in a few more generations, we’re going to see the greatest and costliest war of human history disappear from our collective memory as well. Anyone else find that really weird?

However, I doubt that Japan’s status as a pacifist state (even with that oh-so-special constitution to back up that claim, snort) will remain as long as the memories of the blood spilled against – and for – its quest for Pacific empire. Elements of the Self Defense Force are already serving, uh, certain “interests,” in Iraq, under its vague ability to “peacekeep.” Despite that, no one, besides Mr. Article 9, is fooled; there’s little mistake that those serving in Iraq know that peacekeeping is hardly the phrase most people would use for their task there. It starts with sen, and ends with sou.

So, the SDF can go to war. Not for itself though. Yet! Just gotta fudge that corner a little too… there, all better.

Jokes about bueracratic processes aside, there’s a definite move, both domestically and internationally, to allow Japan to move from a “open hand” to a “closed fist” power with its military – I really, really like this metaphor, by the way. Despite taking up a relatively small percentage of its annual budget, it’s by a good margin the second highest military spender because of how much they have available in total. (The only reason we don’t hear about it is because America’s annual military spending is like, eight-fold larger.) I can’t say I know of the intricacies of the matter, but I seriously doubt Japan being incapable of rapidly acquiring long-range nuclear capability. And it’s quite ideally placed for, carefully now, “Western interests.”

The US is stuck in its Iraqi quagmire at the moment, but when it clears that – as if it something intrusive won’t happen sooner, and as if it hasn’t already, AKA interesting “seismic activity” near Korea – the Pacific region will fly back in the focus of US foreign policy. The US does a lot of things, but deploy CVBGs haphazardly isn’t one of them. Whoever Japan decides up with will strongly influence who will be able to project the most power over the area, whether in a political, economic, or military sense, and against whom that power will be projected.

Historically, Japan has seen itself as a Western state, and it definitely seems to fall in that category, well, except for the minor detail of geography. It certainly seems to carry little political compassion for its neighbors; I like to think of the Koizumi years as Japan giving a giant political middle finger to its neighbors (while eagerly shaking economic hands, but I disgress). But I think what happens from here on out is anyone’s guess; there’s plenty that can feasibly happen in both East and West that can challenge said historic patterns. That’s the way people keep it interesting on the Pacific Rim, you know?

Japan’s only allowed an open hand right now, and that’s going to be the status quo for a while to come. But it’s one big hand, thoroughly clad in modern technology, top hardware, and the cutting edge of military knowledge. No one wants or would support Japan outright closing that hand right now, including and especially the Japanese people themselves, but those fingers look a lot more curved than they did 50 years ago. And reeeeaal twitchy sometimes, too.