Japanese Foreign Policy at the Crossroads: Challenges and Options for the Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Kawashima, Yutaka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815748698 ISBN 13: 9780815748694

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, 2005

Synopsis

The post–World War II paradigm that ensured security and prosperity for the Japanese people has lost much of its effectiveness. The current generation has become increasingly resentful of the prolonged economic stagnation and feels a sense of drift and uncertainty about the future of Japan's foreign policy. In J apanese Foreign Policy at the Crossroads, Yutaka Kawashima clarifies some of the defining parameters of Japan's past foreign policy and examines the challenges it currently faces, including the quagmire on the Korean Peninsula, the future of the U.S.-Japan alliance, the management of Japan-China relations, and Japan's relation with Southeast Asia. Kawashima—who, as vice minister of foreign affairs, was Japan's highest-ranking foreign service official—cautions Japan against attempts to ensure its own security and well-being outside of an international framework. He believes it is crucial that Japan work with as many like-minded countries as possible to construct a regional and international order based on shared interests and shared values. In an era of globalization, he cautions, such efforts will be crucial to maintaining global world order and ensuring civilized interaction among all states.

About this title

About the Author

Yutaka Kawashima served as Japanese vice minister of foreign affairs from 1999 to 2001. He served as ambassador to Israel from 1997 to 1999. After his retirement he did research as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies and he taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is widely respected in international policy circles and has served in Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Japanese Foreign Policy at the Crossroads

Challenges and Options for the Twenty-First CenturyBy Yutaka Kawashima

Brookings Institution Press

Copyright © 2005 Yutaka Kawashima
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780815748694

Chapter One

Historical Parameters ofJapanese Foreign Policy

The basic objective of the foreign policy of Japan, likethat of any other country, is to ensure the nation'ssecurity and prosperity. It can be concluded that Japan hassucceeded in the pursuit of that objective for more than halfa century. Since the end of World War II, Japan somehowhas managed to ensure that the wars, revolutions, andother crises witnessed in East Asia throughout the periodhave not fatally damaged its own security. And Japan hasbenefited immensely from the international economic orderimposed by the Bretton Woods system, without which itseconomic recovery and ensuing economic success wouldnot have been possible.

Today, however, a sense of drift or uncertainty about thefuture course of foreign policy seems to prevail in Japan. Inpart, it reflects uncertainty about the international situation.More than a decade has passed since the end of thecold war, during which international affairs were muchmore predictable. And yet a clear-cut concept for a newinternational order in the twenty-first century has yet toemerge. Many Japanese, although they may fully supportthe U.S. antiterrorism campaign, have begun to wonderhow President George W. Bush's preemptive strike doctrine will affect theU.S.-Japanese alliance in the future. The stunning admission by NorthKorea of its abduction of numbers of innocent Japanese in the 1970s and1980s and the announcement of its decision to restart its nuclear facilitieshave reminded the Japanese people of the urgent need to rethink howbest to deal with the dangerous quagmire in the Korean Peninsula.Furthermore, as the Japanese watch the dynamic economic growth ofChina-in such contrast to the economic stagnation in Japan-many naturallywonder what East Asia will look like, say, twenty years from now.

Since today change is occurring everywhere at a truly exponential rate,some sense of uncertainty may be inevitable. Still, the main reasons forthe sense of uncertainty evident in Japan today are indigenous. First, thereis generational turnover. All the decisions that have defined the course ofJapan's foreign policy were made long ago. With the passing of time, theheated debates and agonized decisionmaking of former political leadersare forgotten. Although today's younger generation is aware in anabstract sense of the importance of U.S.-Japanese relations, it seems tohave difficulty grasping in any real sense the enormous stakes that Japanhas in managing those relations. The domestic political tension that theleaders of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had to deal with in optingto maintain security ties with the United States has become a dim memoryof a bygone era. Today, the argument that the relationship betweenJapan and the United States is the cornerstone of Japan's foreign policymay sound like nothing but a clichi to many people. For that matter, inthe 1970s and 1980s maintaining a friendly relationship with China wasrecognized as extremely important, and it evoked a certain sense ofachievement among many Japanese who remembered the historical contextand the difficulties that the two countries had to overcome to developthat relationship. But today, to a younger generation that does not sharethe memory, arguments of the importance of the friendship betweenJapan and China are hardly convincing. Moreover, today important policystatements, domestic and foreign, tend to be presented as "soundbites," and the complexity of the issues involved can easily be overlooked.

Second, in spite of the new culture of transparency and accountabilityin politics, the public seldom has access to the candid, in-depth analysisconducted by national decisionmakers of other countries' intentions,motives, and domestic power structure. Although such analysis is a prerequisitefor successful decisionmaking, if countries began to disclosetheir assessments of each other publicly, the resolution of issues andproblems would become much more complicated, and mutually embarrassingoutcomes inevitable. Candid and even unkind assessments ofadversaries may be made public if officials do not care about further negativeimpact on relations that already are in bad shape. However, with theend of the cold war, such cases of openly adversarial relations betweencountries have become rare.

Much of the art of diplomacy lies in nations' ability to assess and analyzeone another continually and accurately. If the analysis or assessmentshatters the conventional wisdom, it may be welcome. The process, however,cannot be made transparent. That constraint may be very frustratingfor the general public. In the course of discussions among members ofthe so-called Committee to Change the Foreign Ministry, it was arguedthat the ministry should make public all analyses and conclusions regardingpolicy alternatives before making any foreign policy decisions. Thegrowing demand for such transparency is bound to make it an increasinglydaunting task for the government to obtain better understandingand broader support among the population for its foreign policy.

Finally, we are witnessing a crisis of legitimacy. The prolonged economicdifficulties in Japan have gradually taken a toll on Japan's nationalpsyche. The domestic mood has become more resentful. The public harborsanimosity toward various things-the bureaucracy, the banking sector,the traditional political process, foreign countries. In the face of protracteddifficulty, people tend to react in one of two ways: one is to reflecton what they themselves did wrong; the other is to find someone or somethingelse to blame. The latter reaction may be seen in the actions ofIslamic fundamentalist-terrorists, but it is common throughout the world.Another example is the anti-immigration fervor in various Europeancountries, where some nationals blame foreign workers for all sorts ofproblems. In Japan, one gets the impression that the public has becomemuch more supportive of a tough, hawkish, assertive, and occasionallyconfrontational posture in the conduct of foreign policy. Since the mid-1990s, domestic criticism of the Foreign Ministry for being subservient tothe United States, subservient to China, and soft on South Korea, NorthKorea, and many other countries has tended to be far more frequent.

Furthermore, a series of scandals involving fraud that have erupted inthe Foreign Ministry since 2001 have badly damaged its credibility andlegitimacy-so much so that there is a genuine risk that much of Japan'sbasic foreign policy may also lose its credibility and come to be viewedwith skepticism or disdain.

Japanese Foreign Policy since World War II

This chapter revisits past decisions that have constituted the basis ofJapanese foreign policy since the end of World War II. Some key decisionmakingprocesses of the postwar era are reviewed first, and thensome reflections about future options on key issues are presented.However, before embarking on a review, it is important to have a cleareridea about the key domestic parameters-constraints, identity issues,obsessions, and other factors-related to foreign policy decisionmaking.For easier understanding, these parameters are discussed to the extentpossible in a dialectical manner.

Catching Up with the West versus Maintaining an Asian Identity

Ever since Japan embarked upon modernization, many Japanese leadershave been acutely aware of a dichotomy in the national identity. Afamous essay by Chomin Nakae vividly describes a hypothetical discussionbetween two characters in which one fervently argues that Japanshould "get out of Asia" and join the club of Western powers while theother insists that Japan should remain an Asian nation. After all, themodernization effort since the Meiji Restoration can be simply defined asa nationwide attempt to catch up with the West. There were two phasesof this catch-up process. The first was from the Meiji Restoration in 1868to World War II, in which the fruit of the first phase was utterlydestroyed. The second phase was from 1945 to sometime in the 1970s,when Japan became a major industrial power. When Japan was invited tothe first summit of major industrial democracies (the gathering of the"G-6," as Canada was not invited to the first meeting), there was a genuinesense of achievement in Japan, where many naturally thought thatmembership in that kind of forum signified the successful conclusion ofthe catch-up process. Since then, Japan's identity as a responsible memberof the major industrial democracies has become highly important, and itshould be borne in mind in grappling with various foreign policy issues.

During the period from 1868 to 1945, there was not much conflictbetween the two approaches in terms of policy implications. To catch upwith the West and perhaps to preempt any risk of colonization byWestern powers, Japan vigorously participated in the game of imperialismin Asia. To "get out of Asia" was never an actual course of action.Instead, Japan's Asian identity was stressed in terms of resentment towardthe hegemony of the Western powers, notably the United Kingdom untilthe early 1930s and the United States afterward. Fumimaro Konoe, whobecame prime minister in the late 1930s, published an essay in 1918decrying the supremacy of the United Kingdom and the United States ininternational politics that had considerable resonance at the time amongthe elite class in Japan.

"Japan's Asian identity" is almost a tautology. However, since WorldWar II various arguments in favor of specific courses of action have beenadvanced on the basis of that identity. And often those arguments havetended to reflect Japanese psychological reservations about-or in somecases even revulsion toward-what the West embodies. A typical case inpoint is the issue of values, notably human rights.

The Japanese people today are thoroughly committed to universal valuessuch as freedom and democracy. However, whenever it appears thatWesterners are eager to press their human rights agenda on Asian countries,the Japanese often claim that Asian values are different. Japan, asan Asian country, should point out those differences, the argumentgoes-for example, by refusing to join Western efforts to impose sanctionson certain Asian countries because of human rights violations.Moreover, the theory used to be expounded that enlightened dictatorialregimes in various East Asian countries were the key to their successfuleconomic development. And it has been frequently argued throughoutEast Asia that Asians attach more importance to and emphasis on group-orientedvalues, such as the importance of the family, and that those valueshave been the key to social cohesion and success in nation building.For example, in the early 1990s Singapore's leaders often expressed theview that there was little doubt that a society with communitarian values,where the interest of society takes precedence over that of the individual,suits them better than the individualism of America. The very success ofsome East Asian countries in achieving dynamic economic developmentgave a certain degree of legitimacy to these arguments in defense of Asianvalues. However, treating what can be argued to be a universal value asa parochial value of the West to be contrasted with Asian values is ofdebatable validity. Nevertheless, when issues are discussed in the contextof the differences between Western culture, values, or standards andthose of Asia, the argument that, because of its Asian identity, Japanshould act differently from the West can have considerable impact onpopular opinion.

Another interesting case in point was the East Asian Economic Caucus(EAEC) issue in the early 1990s. Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamadof Malaysia proposed forming the EAEC, whose membership was supposedto include all members of the Association of Southeast AsianNations (ASEAN), Japan, China, and the Republic of Korea (ROK). Ifthis group had been a formal economic entity, something like a tradebloc, perhaps arguments about its pros and cons would have been clearer,because its economic advantages and disadvantages would have been easilyidentifiable. However, since Mahathir's proposal was to establish aninformal forum with a very loosely defined agenda, the debate insideJapan centered solely on the identity question. The Asian identity schoolheld that there was nothing wrong with the idea of East Asians gettingtogether to talk about economic problems pertaining to East Asia andthat Japan, as an Asian nation, should wholeheartedly support thescheme. The industrial democracy identity school held that the notion ofexcluding countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and NewZealand could be counterproductive at a time when APEC (Asia PacificEconomic Cooperation forum) was starting to do well; besides, theUnited States was adamantly opposed to such a group, claiming that itwould undermine APEC. In any event, the EAEC became a nonissue inthe late 1990s, when a new forum for dialogue between Asia and Europewas created at the joint initiative of Singapore and France. The participantsfrom Asia were limited to ASEAN members, Japan, China, and theROK, and European participants were limited to European Union (EU)members. Thus a precedent was established for forming a group, themembership of which was de facto EAEC, without much agonizing aboutthe possible impact on Pacific unity.

Pacifists versus Realists on the Security Issue

The clash between pacifists and realists regarding the peace and securityof Japan has persisted since the end of World War II. In view of the catastrophiccasualties that Japan had suffered during the war, it is naturalthat the Japanese people came to have an extremely strong aversion towar and anything related to the military. And in the immediate aftermathof the war, the foremost concern of the United States was to eliminate anypossibility of the reemergence of the military in Japan. Therefore, at theinitiative of the United States, a new constitution was promulgated thatincluded a provision, Article 9, that if read literally seemed to precludeany possibility of Japan's regaining its defense capability. As described inchapter 2 of this volume, many Japanese government officials in thosedays assumed that in the event of an attack on Japan, the United Nationswould take care of Japan's defense with its own forces, as envisioned inChapter 7 of the UN Charter. However, the advent of the cold war at theend of the 1940s totally altered Japan's circumstances. Instead of ensuringthe security of the United States against Japan, ensuring the securityof Japan against the newly emerging threat from the communist blocbecame the more urgent priority for the United States. In response to U.S.



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Edition details

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815748698
• ISBN 13: 9780815748694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 175