Daily Times

One reason alone makes any politician go against immovable public opinion. It is when he or she has a sense of foreboding that some mistake from the past will crawl back through time to haunt them and their country. The Japanese Prime Minister (PM), Shinzo Abe, is one such politician. Despite rabid opposition at home, Abe wants to rewrite Japan’s 70-year old pacifist Constitution with a series of security bills that have already passed the lower house of parliament. Once they are law, Japan’s Self Defence Forces (SDF) will be able to fight abroad for the first time since 1945, even if there is no direct threat to the country. To young Japanese especially, Abe’s actions reek of the kind of jingoism that devastated Japan in World War II (WWII) and resulted in the nuclear catastrophes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A July Asahi Shimbun newspaper poll revealed that 56 percent Japanese are against Abe’s bills and the streets of Tokyo regularly host thousands of anti-war protesters demanding the PM back down from hawkish posturing. Shouting “We are against war, kill the bill,” these protesters see danger in a “normalisation” of the SDF and Abe’s wish to engage in NATO-style “collective defence” of East Asia.
What compels Abe to stay the course, however, is a feeling of déja vu. Across the China Sea, Abe sees a regime in Beijing with the kind of global ambition that defined imperial Japan between 1868 and 1947. He knows well how a heady mix of money, hubris and military can justify every manner of oppression and brutality possible. In Japan’s case, it was the army’s slaughter of six million ethnic Chinese and Koreans during WWII. Consequently, Abe fears that modern China, where nationalism is making a comeback, could seek revenge on Japan for its long history of aggression going back to the warlord Hideyoshi five centuries ago. Therefore, he wants to rhetorically and militarily assert himself over Beijing in advance, and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute is the perfect opportunity. If Japan’s warning is loud and backed by firepower, Abe hopes China will rethink any attempts to ‘change the status quo’ in East Asia.
Abe’s paranoia also stems from China’s desire to imitate the US. The famous political scientist John Mearsheimer believes China wants to “dominate Asia the way the US dominates the western hemisphere”. Here too, it is not hard for the Japanese PM to draw worrying parallels with early Showa-era Japan.
After Commodore Matthew Perry and his US ‘black ships’ forced Japan out of isolation in 1853, Japanese loyalists like Sakamoto Ryôma quickly grasped that they were militarily obsolete, and needed to learn and acquire technology from the enemy before the country could fight back. With unrelenting purpose, Japan managed to compress 150 years of western industrial progress into a 40-year sprint towards parity. Then, in 1905, the Japanese army astounded the world by drubbing European powerhouse Russia in a war for Manchuria and Korea. The era of omperial Japan was truly underway.
For Washington, Abe’s desire to suspend Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, one that prohibits offensive military action, is welcome news. With the SDF in play, the US hopes that it will not have to deploy additional military resources in the Pacific to scare China. South Korea, though, despite being a US ally, is not happy about a Japan that is willing to fight abroad because of its own wartime scars. The memory of the thousands of Korean ‘comfort women’ enslaved by the Japanese army during its occupation colours bilateral relations even today.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, continues to send out mixed signals. On the one hand, he promises to cut the country’s active troop levels by 300,000 men in an attempt to soften international criticism. On the other, China’s WWII remembrance parade on September 3 had obvious “victory of the Chinese people against Japanese aggression” overtones that the state-controlled media fanned leading up to the occasion.
In a sly dig at Abe then, who stayed away from the event along with many western leaders, Jinping pledged China would “never inflict its past suffering on any other nation”. Also, by having Russian President Vladimir Putin as the guest of honour, Jinping made clear that any US attempts to ‘rebalance’ East Asia using Japan would face a united Sino-Russian bloc. Furthermore, by creating the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that will connect Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea, Jinping aims to nullify any future allied naval blockade of China through the Straits of Malacca.
China’s ability to rebound from its recent stock market routs will determine how this Sino-Japanese impasse plays out. If the Jinping government can correct fiscal course soon, China will see no reason to escalate regional tensions. Conversely, if this downward trend continues, increased domestic scrutiny could force Jinping to heat things up with Japan to divert attention. In short, it all comes down to basic psychology. For a setup like Communist China, anything that suggests a loss of control is completely unacceptable.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad