Japan

by Edwin Reischauer

  Japan at last was beginning to be accepted by the Europeans as a full-fledged member of the group. At first, the phrase “the West and Japan” was used to indicate its inclusion, but soon people came to speak merely of “the West,” meaning to include Japan as a matter of course. Everyone, with the possible exception of some Japanese themselves, came to think of Japan as being one of the leading members of the coalition of Western democracies. Bureaucrats, statesmen, businessmen, scientists, and leaders of all kinds, including prime ministers and presidents, went back and forth between it and the other members of the group. In November 1974 Gerald Ford became the first American president in office to visit Japan, blotting out the unhappy memory of Eisenhower’s aborted trip in 1960. President Jimmy Carter visited Japan for a few days before the fifth “summit” conference held there in June 1979 and returned in July 1980 for the memorial service for Ohira in an unprecedented show of personal respect and international solidarity. President Ronald Reagan in November 1983 was the first American president to address the Japanese Diet.

  By the late eighties, no one any longer had any doubt about Japan being a full member of the community of “Western” democracies. At the same time, there was considerable resentment of Japan’s flooding the world with its exports and some strong suspicions that it was doing this through unfair means. There was also a general perception that Japan was failing to carry its share of the load in maintaining world security and peace. Other causes for irritation were often not as substantial but could reach a high pitch of feeling. For example, during the seventies many conservationists in the West became incensed that the Japanese continued to hunt down great numbers of whales, which Westerners considered to be a particularly precious endangered species. The Japanese, together with the Soviets and Norwegians, which were the only other whaling nations, held out against this criticism for several years, and the Japanese were much annoyed that people who looked on whales basically as a curiosity of nature should feel entitled to criticize those to whom whale meat was an important source of protein. Gradually whaling was reduced, however, until all that remained was only a little activity, ostensibly for research purposes. Meanwhile similar attitudes developed over dolphins, which Westerners considered with considerable affection. Japanese permitted the slaughter of dolphins because they ruined the nets of fishermen, whose work was essential for Japan’s protein supply.

  In a very different field, the United States was outraged in 1987 when a Toshiba subsidiary together with a Norwegian firm sold to the Soviet Union machinery designed to improve the making of submarine propellers, even though this machinery was on a list of items banned from trade with the Soviets by the group of industrialized democracies. The responsible company executives were forced to resign, and Nakasone personally apologized. Anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States were particularly strong over blatant Japanese racism. Racism, of course, is an attitude found almost everywhere in the world, but it has seemed especially virulent among Japanese, whose history has led them to look upon themselves as so unique as to constitute virtually a different species from the rest of mankind. With the exception of Chinese and Koreans, Japanese often made little distinction between the other nationalities, since the strongly felt distinction between Japanese and gaijin, or “outsiders,” was so great to Japanese that it expressed their virtually “tribal” sense of uniqueness.

  In earlier times, such attitudes had been acceptable, but they no longer were in a now closely interdependent world and especially on the part of a superpower like Japan. Only a few years earlier remarks made or published in the Japanese language went virtually unnoticed by others, but by the eighties Japanese were under close world scrutiny and therefore had to be circumspect in what they said. For example, in September 1986 Nakasone casually commented that the reason for the reputedly low intelligence levels of Americans was the large number of blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans in their population. He hastily tried to make amends by apologizing to the American people. Takeshita similarly had to apologize in August 1988 because of the statement by a member of the Diet that blacks in America did not mind going into bankruptcy because this freed them of their debts.

  While Japan, despite much friction and many misunderstandings, did become during the eighties a full member of the coalition of industrialized democracies, its relations with the communist countries and its Asian neighbors grew mostly in size rather than warmth. Back in 1972, when it set up the Japan Foundation to further international cultural relations, it made Southeast Asia its second priority area, next to the United States. It continued to be the major trading partner of most of the nations of East and Southeast Asia and became the leading provider of aid to them. In fact, flushed by its huge trade surpluses, it assigned $10 billion to aid, becoming the world leader, a little ahead of the United States. It also spread its aid much more widely than before to most parts of the less developed world. It should be pointed out, however, that in terms of the percentage of GNP devoted to aid and the amount provided in per capita terms, both Japan and the United States lagged far behind some of the smaller Western countries.

  Japan’s relations with the Soviet Union during the eighties became on the whole a little less harsh but made no great progress. The Japanese Communist party did restore its contacts with Moscow in 1979, but the two governments failed to achieve a peace settlement to bring an official end to the war between them. During the seventies there had been high hopes for developing Siberia as a major source of oil and gas for Japan to replace Middle Eastern oil, but nothing came of this. Other joint development plans were equally unsuccessful. They would have taken enormous investments by Japan, which the Japanese were not prepared to place at the mercy of the Soviet Union. The Soviets on their side adamantly refused to discuss the four islands north of Hokkaido, which Japan claimed under the name of the “Northern Territories.” Soviet suggestions that the two smaller southern islands might be treated separately drew indignant refusals from Japan. This left the size of the Japanese catch of fish in waters the Soviets claimed the only important economic relationship between them that called for annual negotiations. Meanwhile a large naval buildup by the Soviet Union in the Japan Sea made both Japan and the United States nervous, and Japan’s growing capacity to blockade the three straits, enclosing the Japan Sea and the Soviet Pacific fleet, worried the Soviets.

  A peace treaty with China was held up during most of the seventies by Peking’s insistence that it include a clause condemning “hegemony,” which had been a term of opprobrium ever since antiquity in China and was now applied to Soviet military ambitions. Finally in 1978 wording was devised to satisfy both sides, and a peace treaty was signed. But the troublesome problem of China’s claim to Taiwan remained. The island had been rapidly consolidating into a prosperous, stable country, which, like South Korea, was closely following the economic trail blazed by Japan. Both Taiwan and South Korea had the East Asian emphasis on education and hard work that had proved so important for Japan, and they also had the foundations of Japanese colonial rule to build on. China and Japan got around the Taiwan problem basically by ignoring it. Despite a large trade with Taiwan, Japan kept its relations with the island strictly informal and even took care to have Taiwanese and Chinese planes use different air fields in Japan. Since Peking felt the need for more technological knowledge and foreign contacts, it sent students to Japan in growing numbers, and Japan became by far its largest trading partner, developing by 1988 a trade with China that came to equal Japan’s sizable commerce with Taiwan.

  Korea remained a more difficult and less predictable problem for Japan. Sino-Soviet tensions relaxed notably in the eighties; wars continued in Southeast Asia but in confused fashion and with little threat to other regions; Peking let Taiwan be shifted to a back burner; but Korea continued to be full of explosive possibilities. North and South Korea for long had been military dictatorships, eager to achieve national unity by military conquest if a chance presented itself
. North Korea, however, was entirely dependent on China and the Soviet Union, and the eagerness of both these countries in the late eighties for better political relations with each other and greatly expanded economic relations with the industrialized democracies made them strongly opposed to trouble in Korea, thus tying North Korea’s hands. During 1987 and 1988 South Korea advanced significantly toward democracy, becoming as a consequence less militarily inclined. For a while, there were fears that a dangerous incident might occur during the Olympic Games held in Seoul in September 1988, but this threat was safely surmounted.

  The Koreans on both sides, however, shared deep resentments against the Japanese because of the colonial past. The presence in Japan of more than 600,000 people of Korean descent, originally brought there virtually as slave labor during World War II, did not help the situation. Although these people had been in large part culturally absorbed into Japanese life, stiff Japanese regulations on naturalization and the tribal exclusiveness of the Japanese people kept most of them from merging fully into Japanese society. Instead they remained a dissatisfied minority, usually siding with the opposition parties in Japan and the North in Korea and helping to stir up animosity between South Korea and Japan. Trade and other contacts between Japan and South Korea, however, increased enormously during the eighties, and tensions eased slightly. Joint problems of defense were discussed as early as 1979 between the Japanese and South Korean military, and in September 1984 Chun Doo Hwan, a former general and at the time the dictator in Seoul, was the first South Korean president to officially visit Japan, where he was given by the emperor himself a formal statement of regret about Japan’s past relationship with Korea.

  One symbolic issue loomed large in Japan’s relations with its neighbors as well as in domestic politics during these years. This was the propriety of the prime minister visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which was dedicated to the fighting men who had died in battle for Japan in its various wars. As part of the slow swing back toward nationalism, Fukuda and members of his cabinet visited the shrine in 1978 on its memorial day on August 15. The question was made politically more sensitive in 1979 by the inclusion in the shrine’s roles of the names of the military men executed as major war criminals following World War II. During the next few years prime ministers continued to attend the ceremonies, despite the opposition of the parties out of power and Christians, who considered this an infraction of the constitutional separation of church and state. Nakasone actually made his visit an official act in 1985, but the Chinese joined the South Koreans the next spring in strong objections, and he gave up the practice that August, although some members of the cabinet continued to attend.

  A somewhat similar situation developed in September 1986 when the minister of education published in a popular magazine his opinion that the Koreans themselves were in part responsible for the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and that Nakasone should not have given up visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. The Koreans were infuriated, and Nakasone felt himself forced to dismiss the minister, the first time such a thing had happened in thirty-three years.

  Japanese political problems were not only with the outside world. In 1986 Recruit, a rapidly expanding, aggressive company centering around a job-finding magazine of that name, sold shares at low prices to a number of top politicians, officials, and leading businessmen before these shares were publicly listed and increased greatly in value. These insider trading deals grew into a public scandal after they were revealed in June 1988, leading in time to the resignation of Miyazawa and two other men from the cabinet, the retirement of some leading business figures, and the tarnishing of Nakasone’s reputation. The opposition parties, demanding a further inquiry, boycotted the Diet, delaying the adoption of the new budget for fiscal 1989 beyond its deadline of April 1.

  On April 25, 1989, Takeshita announced his intention to resign the prime ministership because of his theoretical responsibility for the scandal. Before leaving office, however, he pushed through the adoption of the new budget without the participation of the opposition parties and settled long-standing negotiations with the United States over the building of the FSX, a new type of fighter plane for the Air Self-Defense Force, on the basis of a $7 billion project jointly undertaken by the two countries. Tensions with America, however, heightened when on May 25 the United States officially cited Japan, together with some other countries, as “unfair traders” against whom special sanctions might be taken.

  On June 2, 1989, Uno Sosuke was elected by the Diet as Takeshita’s successor. A member of Nakasone’s faction lacking in any great distinction, Uno was selected largely because all the leading candidates had been temporarily eliminated on account of their involvement in the Recruit scandal. No one expected any major political changes, except possibly some more effective laws about the gray area of financial contributions to politicians and their parties and factions. Japan’s chief problem area remained its relations with the rest of the world.

  18

  FACING THE FUTURE

  Despite the continuing economic success of Japan in the eighties and the orderly, stable, and self-satisfied society it produced, the Japanese still seemed perplexed as to what the role of their country should be as an economic superpower. No Japanese now believed that the country could live alone or even through dominating some corner of the globe, like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japan had become so big a fish that it needed the economic waters of the whole world in which to maintain itself. Some enthusiasts took the extreme interpretation of the phrase “Japan As Number One” to mean that it would succeed England and the United States as the world leader, overseeing a Pax Japonica. They failed to realize that that sort of world hegemony had always been quite restricted and was now completely impossible.

  Great Britain had exercised extensive influence through superior naval power but had made no effort to control most of the great land masses of the world, even though it accidentally did fall heir to some of them because they were almost empty of people or else their inhabitants were politically disrupted or apathetic. The brief period of American domination had resulted from the destruction during World War II of the wealth and strength of all of the other major military powers. Its position of leadership naturally shrank in relative terms as these other countries recovered from the war. The United States also discovered that there were sharp limitations to its power. When the Soviet Union also came to possess nuclear weapons, the mutual destruction of all nations became probable if these weapons were ever used extensively. As a result, military conflict between any of the great powers was virtually ruled out. The worldwide rise of nationalism also tipped the scales against the ponderous military machines of the great powers and toward the less developed countries, which typically lacked important military objectives but were richly endowed with fanatical fighters. The United States learned this lesson in Vietnam.

  Japan National Tourist Organization

  A typical downtown, neon-lit street.

  The role as world leaders that England and the United States had once played was clearly not one to which Japan or any other country could aspire. This was particularly true for Japan. The country had become an economic giant, not by growing to fill a rich continent but by developing massive ties of economic interdependence with large parts of the world. Poor itself in natural resources, it was more dependent on its trading partners than they were on it. Japan someday might free itself from its dependence on imported fossil fuels for energy if the hazards of nuclear energy could be reduced and the dangers of its toxic wastes eliminated, or if Japan could become self-sufficient through the development of solar energy or other nontoxic technologies at reasonable costs. But these solutions to Japan’s energy problem seemed remote, and in any case would not solve Japan’s dependence on the importation of vast quantities of raw materials and food.

  Postwar Japan, as we have seen, had wisely turned its back on the blind alley of military might, and its peo
ple had chosen instead the broad road of world trade. They were completely committed to their “peace constitution.” Military might, they realized, could never bring them security, much less world dominance. Despite Japan’s great wealth, it was simply too small geographically to be a first-class military power, and even if it could, it would still lack military security. It was particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, since its small size and mountainous terrain squeezed more than half its population into a mere 2 percent of its area. It was also incapable of extensive nuclear deployment on land. This meant that in the event of a nuclear war, the Japanese would have only the cold comfort of knowing they could retaliate from the sea, but only after Japan itself had been destroyed.

  The Japanese relegated the now-empty concept of being a world military leader to the time in history to which it belonged. There was some reality, however, to the concept some Japanese held that the country could serve as the core of a Pacific Rim Community that could assume world leadership. Not only was Japan the fastest-growing large nation in the world, but some of the countries around it, like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, were also growing fast. Transpacific trade had come to surpass transatlantic intercourse. A free-trade community consisting of Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and some other Pacific countries might well outstrip an Atlantic community consisting of North America and Western Europe. It could be that the world stood on the verge of a “Pacific age,” as some people proclaimed.

  But such concepts had to be kept in perspective. The population and GNP of Japan were only about half that of the United States or the European Community. The European Community also expected to achieve in 1992 a degree of solidarity that would be far greater than that possible for the countries of the Pacific, with the exception of the United States and Canada free-trade zone, which started on January 1, 1989, and possibly a Japanese and American economic union. Both an Atlantic Community and a Pacific Rim Community, moreover, would center on the membership of the United States and Canada, making them not two competing zones but rather two linked areas. In a sense, the two zones together would be simply the concept of the old Trilateral Commission turned into reality. To say this is not to denigrate the vision of a Pacific Rim Community. In fact, taking the lead in building it would probably be the most concrete and significant way in which Japan could contribute at this point in history to the economic and political development of a peaceful, prosperous, and stable world, but it would not make Japan the economic leader of the world.