Japan's balancing act

Fairly or not, Junichiro Koizumi is widely held to have dragged down Japan's relations with former wartime enemies China and South Korea to their lowest level since the 1950s. But the Diet's expected appointment today of Shinzo Abe as his successor as prime minister could stoke east Asian tensions and make matters worse.

Mr Koizumi's main offence, as seen from Beijing and Seoul, was his repeated visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine where convicted war criminals are honoured along with 2.5 million Japanese war dead.

The visits were interpreted, for largely political purposes, as proof that Japan had failed to acknowledge past misdeeds. As a result, there have been no full summit meetings between China and Japan since 2001. That is a bit like Britain and Germany refusing to shake hands 61 years after the shooting stopped.

If anything, Mr Abe, a third generation neo-nationalist who, at 52, will be Japan's youngest postwar leader, may take a tougher line than his flamboyant predecessor. He has said that any future prime minister should continue to visit Yasukuni. He also rejects the validity of the Tokyo war crimes trials that followed Japan's 1945 defeat and says, in effect, that Japan has done enough apologising.

Mr Koizumi emphasised close ties to the US, controversially deploying Japanese troops in non-combat missions in Iraq and buying into the Bush administration's global missile defence plans. Mr Abe may go much further. He wants to end, or circumvent, the self-imposed ban on "collective self-defence".

That would allow Japan to form "normal" alliances, undertake more overseas military missions, and pursue a more assertive foreign policy.

That approach appeals to Washington which, warily eyeing China's rise, is anxious for regional allies ready to stand up and be counted. But a more expansive Japan could exacerbate problems with Beijing and Seoul, and the US also wants reduced Sino-Japanese tensions. Mr Abe's stated belief that China is a destabilising factor in Asia that "doesn't share basic values like freedom and human rights" is unlikely to help the US achieve these conflicting aims.

Mr Abe's hard line on North Korea's nuclear bomb and missile programmes is another potential flashpoint. Mr Koizumi tried summit diplomacy but made little headway. Mr Abe, in contrast, made his name by fiercely championing the cause of Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang. After North Korea's July missile tests, he floated the idea of pre-emptive strikes. Now he is expected to create a special cabinet post for North Korean affairs.

Mr Abe is an ideological conservative whose popularity reflects a growing, revisionist nationalism right across Japanese society, said Christopher Hughes of the University of Warwick. "He feels the 1945 postwar settlement was unfair.

He feels Japanese society should stop its masochistic behaviour, that Japan was only acting like any other imperial power at that time and in fact the Japanese empire did some good." The responsibilities of office would modify his outlook, Dr Hughes predicted. "He's got to tread carefully on China.

He's under a lot of pressure from the US and the domestic opposition to come up with something." Speculation is growing about a bilateral summit in Hanoi in November.

For the US and China alike, reviving Japanese nationalism is a double-edged sword. "In foreign affairs we support the Japan-US alliance," said Yukio Okamoto, a former adviser to Mr Koizumi, in Japan Echo magazine. "But we find the US to be too rough. We want the Americans to be more aware of the pains of smaller countries.

We're disturbed by the selfish way they apply double standards - as by being hard on Iran but soft on India concerning nuclear proliferation, or hard on Burma but soft on China with regard to human rights." In short, growing self-confidence spells an end to subservience.

(The Guardian)