The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.

Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

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But ordinary members of the public need not be so diplomatic: whether through design, weakness or sheer incompetence, Malcolm Turnbull has chosen a particularly cruel response to the gift that Ardern brought across the Tasman. He could graciously have accepted it, and opened the way to a rapid and safe resettlement of a quarter of the refugees from Manus Island to New Zealand. Or, had he been adhering to the line that his own government has insistently repeated in recent months, he could have said that the refugees on Manus Island are no longer Australia’s responsibility but Papua New Guinea’s, and that New Zealand should address its offer to the PNG government, which would probably have accepted it with alacrity.

Instead, he chose to reassert Australia’s responsibility for the fate of the refugees, at the same time ensuring that the opportunity for 150 desperate people to escape from limbo and find a new life is postponed indefinitely, until after the completion of the “US deal.”

But that “dumb deal,” as Donald Trump called it in one of his more insightful moments, is going nowhere. Having accepted a very small proportion of the refugees, the US officials concerned have departed with no assurances that they are going to complete the processing of the remaining asylum seekers, let alone allow any more into the United States.

Meanwhile, the Australian government, which has enough control over the refugees to ensure that none goes to New Zealand for the foreseeable future, simultaneously denies all responsibility or control when it comes to providing them with the basic necessities for survival. A large proportion are so unwell that they need to be on regular medication, but their medical supplies will cease this month because the Australian government no longer takes responsibility for them, and PNG is not picking up the slack. This has left underfunded and understaffed refugee support groups with the almost impossible task of trying to navigate the medical chaos on Manus Island and raise the substantial donations needed to prevent suffering and quite possibly deaths.

If we are to believe Peter Dutton and other cabinet ministers, of course, it is the refugee supporters themselves who are somehow responsible for this whole debacle. The Turnbull government’s approach to offshore detention, we are told, is a compassionate way of stopping the people smugglers, and thus preventing deaths at sea. But that rhetoric wears thinner with every passing day.

It is the government’s policy of turning back boats, and not the miseries on Manus Island and Nauru, that has prevented arrivals of people-smuggling boats on Australian shores. Boat arrivals dropped drastically, not when Julia Gillard reintroduced offshore processing, but following the start of the Abbott government’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” or OSB, in September 2013. But then again, just how many lives are actually saved by boat turnbacks, and by the Coalition’s entire policy of “being cruel to be kind”?

No one knows the answer, of course, since the government has no interest at all in finding out what happens to refugees either before or after the moment their boat is turned back from Australian waters. Despite the veil of secrecy with which OSB is shrouded, though, there have been reports of turned-back boats running out of fuel or being left aground on the borders of Indonesian waters. The Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales notes that refugees returned to Sri Lanka and Vietnam under OSB have been interrogated and imprisoned, and torture has been alleged in at least one Sri Lankan case.

Nor do we have any idea how many turned-back refugees have simply gone on to board other dangerous people-smuggling boats in desperate attempts to reach other safe havens; and we have no idea how many of those deterred from attempting to reach Australia by boat have been imprisoned or killed in their own countries or en route. The government’s policy does not make refugees safe. It simply ensures that they do not die in Australian waters.

If there is one good thing that has come out of the meeting between Ardern and Turnbull, it is an end to the bipartisan support for the chaos and cruelty of the Coalition’s refugee policy. Labor is finally beginning to find an alternative voice on the issue. The urgent task now is for opposition parties to join forces with the growing number of government politicians showing queasiness at their own party’s policies, and to demand answers to a few basic questions.

What evidence can the government provide to show that its cruelty on Manus Island saves lives elsewhere? What assurances can the government give that any more refugees will be processed and resettled under the US deal, and when might that happen? Why can the government stymie refugees’ chances of going to New Zealand, but be incapable of working with PNG to provide the refugees with the basic necessities for safety and survival? And when will the misery, shame and chaos of Manus and Nauru end?

Meanwhile, it’s surely time for Jacinda Ardern to start talking directly to the government of PNG. ●

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An inner-suburban church might seem an unlikely target for a discrimination claim by Japanese residents, but the focus of the complaint is not so much the church itself as a small statue erected on church grounds. This statue commemorates “comfort women,” those tens of thousands of women who were recruited to serve in Japanese military brothels during the Asia-Pacific war. The AJCN argues that the statue provokes race hatred towards Japanese living in Australia, and insists that its complaint is in no way politically motivated. “We are not doing this for politics,” Yamaoka told the ABC’s 7.30. “We are doing this only responding to the concerns raised by local mothers and fathers – the parents.”

The AJCN may indeed include Sydney-based Japanese parents who believe that they have something to fear from the statue. But the claim that the group’s campaign is simply a grassroots appeal against ethnically motivated hostility is, to say the least, disingenuous. Australian groups including the Uniting Church, Strathfield Council (which had earlier become embroiled in this controversy) and the Human Rights Commission (to whom the AJCN has directed its complaint) have a right to know the backstory.

Controversy over the comfort women issue reignited following the election of Shinzo Abe’s second government in 2012. Right-wing members of Japan’s ruling coalition and sections of the Japanese media sought to deny that comfort women were recruited against their will. The abundant historical evidence of recruitment by deception, threats or in some cases outright violence suggests otherwise, as does an earlier admission by the Japanese government itself. In response, supporters of former comfort women in many countries stepped up their campaigns for justice. It was in this context that a group of Sydney residents, led by members of the Korean and Chinese community, planned to erect the comfort women statue that now stands in the grounds of Ashfield Uniting Church.

The initial plan to place the statue in a Strathfield park evoked an instant reaction. Opposition was spearheaded by a group calling itself Japanese Women for Justice and Peace, which launched a petition against the statue on the website Change.org. Despite its name, this group, which was founded in 2011, is a far-right Japanese revisionist organisation. Its leader, Yumiko Yamamoto (also known as Yumiko Sakura) is a former deputy head of the notorious Zaitokukai, a group that has been successfully sued in Japan for its ongoing racial harassment of ethnic minorities.

The plans for the Strathfield statue were also roundly condemned in Liberty Web, an online journal published by the new Japanese religion Happy Science, whose multimillion-dollar neo-classical Sydney temple was opened in 2012. Liberty Web features frequent “interviews” conducted by the religion’s founder, Ryuho Okawa, with the “guardian spirits” of prominent political figures living or dead – a guardian spirit being an invisible entity that can only speak the truth, and to whom Okawa has exclusive access – as well as articles supporting causes such as Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons. The head of Happy Science’s Australian branch, Brian Rycroft, was (not coincidentally) one of four people who spoke against the comfort women statue at the crucial 2015 Strathfield Council meeting on the issue. After listening to Rycroft and others, the council voted against allowing the statue to be erected on public land.

Liberty Web’s articles condemning the Sydney comfort women statue include an interview with AJCN president Tetsuhide Yamaoka that sits very oddly with his insistence that his group’s actions are apolitical. In this interview, Yamaoka says, “The comfort women issue is not something to be resolved by apologies or compensation. I hope the Abe government properly recognises that the history issue is an information war, and that it will shift from ‘apology diplomacy’ to take a resolute stance in international negotiations.”

The need for an “information war” on history issues is a widely repeated theme of Japan’s far right. The AJCN’s Japanese-language website contributes to this “war” by reproducing key elements of the revisionist narrative about the comfort women issue, and about Japan’s imperial expansion more generally. Yamaoka echoes the denials of forced recruitment both on the website and in articles in conservative Japanese journals. In February this year, he addressed a far-right protest against a limited agreement on the comfort women issue recently reached between the Japanese and South Korean governments. The gathering’s all-star line-up also included “Japanese Women for Justice and Peace” president Yumiko Yamamoto and Kyoko Nakayama, head of the small right-wing “Party for the Japanese Heart.” Speaking as a representative of the AJCN, Yamaoka condemned the agreement and told the gathering that Japan’s goal in its relations with Korea should be security, not reconciliation.

The extension of this highly politicised “information war” from Japanese to Australian soil has profoundly troubling implications. The fight for justice for the comfort women has been conducted not only by Koreans and Chinese, but also by many human rights activists in Japan itself, as well as around the world. The issue is one of women’s rights and human rights, not one of race. When right-wing activists label the campaign for redress “anti-Japanese,” they arouse fears of racist attacks in the Japanese community. Thus, they harm the community itself, as well as Australian society more widely. They also demean the work of those in Japan and elsewhere who have fought so long and hard for historical truth and justice. •

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While Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe was making a historic address to the Australian parliament last week, in Perth a group of scholars and other experts was launching a network called Active Peacemaking in Australia and Japan. Concerned at the current direction of the Australia–Japan relationship, our plan is to develop a different vision for the Australia-Japan relationship and for peace in our region.

Peace is often defined in passive or neutral terms – as the absence of war, a welcome but temporary pause between inevitable conflicts. Yet some people see Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution, which formally renounces war and prohibits Japan’s military from taking action overseas, as an aberration, or simply as a punishment for Japan’s defeat in the second world war. Given the progress Japanese society has made in the almost seventy years since the end of the war (so the argument goes) it is time to put aside this outdated document – time for Japan to step up to its responsibilities in the Asia Pacific, a region where the balance of power is dramatically shifting.

Rather than being an aberration, we believe that Article 9 symbolises an active stance for peace that should become a regional and, indeed, a global objective.

Abe is not the first prime minister to challenge Article 9. But there are several reasons why his government’s recent “reinterpretation” of the constitution to allow for overseas Japanese military action is particularly concerning.

First, Japan’s internal political, economic and social landscape is at a crucial turning point. Already troubled by underemployment, ageing and general malaise, the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 further complicated the scene. Some Japanese citizens rally for a “stronger” Japan both at home and abroad, while others increasingly mistrust authorities (both politicians and corporations) and see a grim future in which the lessons of Japan’s past are foolishly cast aside. “Abenomics,” the supposed cure for Japan’s ills, is an uncertain and risky experiment, one of whose key unspoken elements is a substantial expansion of Japan’s military industries and arms exports.

A second concern is the process by which the Japanese government’s reinterpretation of the constitution occurred. It took the form of a cabinet decision formulated with no real public consultation, in defiance of majority public opposition, and disregarding the separation of powers and the norms of constitutional democracy.

The despair that current developments are generating in some sections of the Japanese community was tragically illustrated in late June, when, after making an impassioned defence of the constitution, a man set himself on fire in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Yet this event was not covered by NHK, the national public broadcasting company. Turning a blind eye to this despair is reminiscent of Japan’s troubled relationship with China and Korea before, during and after the second world war.

But Japan is not the only place where silence and growing government secrecy conceal despair. Events there are strangely echoed in Australia, where the new federal government violates democratic norms and humanitarian values by imposing a blanket of silence and secrecy over its treatment of asylum seekers. Mutual disregard for constitutional principles and open governance is a poor basis for a deeper Australia–Japan relationship.

The third problem with Japan’s constitutional reinterpretation is that it comes at a time of greatly heightened tensions between Japan and its Asian neighbours, particularly China. Though Chinese actions are among the prime reasons for these tensions, they have also been heightened by provocative actions and statements from Japan. There are real fears that East Asia is heading for a second cold war, and that Australia and other countries of the region are being pushed into an unenviable and dangerous choice between being “pro-Japan” or “pro-China.”

In his speech to the Australian parliament, prime minister Abe promised that Australia and Japan would now join in a “rugby scrum to protect peace.” The following day, Tony Abbott praised the “sense of honour” shown by Japanese troops during the Asia–Pacific war. The proposed scrum (in which the other dominant partner is the United States) involves the construction of a massive and environmentally disastrous US heliport at Henoko in Japan’s southern prefecture of Okinawa (bitterly opposed by local residents) and is likely to include further expansion of American military bases in Australia. It also opens the way to a possible presence of Japanese military forces on Australian soil. In a strikingly Orwellian turn, Abe calls his plans for military expansion “positive pacifism.”

An alternative approach to peace in our region is possible. We call this “active peacemaking,” and we believe that – as two major democracies in our region – Japan and Australia should play a key role in this process.

Active peacemaking means addressing the real issues that threaten the security of the people of our region – issues like the continuing disaster in Fukushima, where tens of thousands of people are still living, largely forgotten, as disaster refugees. It means cooperating to build better responses to climate change and energy security. It means talking about a sustainable solution to regional and global refugee crises, not joining a race to the bottom of the humanitarian league table. It means seeking ways to promote dialogue between Japan, China and Korea, rather than aggravating their conflicts through historical amnesia.

It is the hope of this group that concerned individuals, groups and communities will join in creating an alternative approach to these crucial issues. •

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Japan goes to the polls on 16 December in a general election that could transform the political landscape. Three years ago the formation of a Democratic Party government, ending years of dominance by the right-of-centre Liberal Democratic Party, raised hopes that Japan had entered an era of real two-party politics in which voters would be offered a genuine alternative at elections. But the Democratic Party had the misfortune to be in power when the massive earthquake and tsunami, followed by the explosions at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, struck Japan in March 2011. The party therefore became the focus of much of the anger which Japanese citizens felt at the inadequate official response to the catastrophe.

This anger has been expressed in huge anti–nuclear power demonstrations in central Tokyo — the largest demonstrations to be seen in the city since the 1960s. But a strange and paradoxical feature of the Japanese political system has made itself felt. Japan’s left-of-centre political movements have always had extreme difficulty in converting themselves into organised political parties: partly because of the closed and cliquish nature of machine politics in Japan, and partly because of extreme scepticism about party politics amongst members of grassroots social movements. A newly created political grouping, the Japan Future Party (led by progressive governor of Shiga prefecture Yukiko Kada) hopes to link the energies of the anti-nuclear movement to mainstream Japanese politics, but its prospects for success remain very uncertain.

Meanwhile, the profound disillusionment of Japanese voters with existing party politics has created a vacuum that has rapidly filled with increasingly alarming forms of nationalism. The pattern began to emerge in April of this year, when Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara (a former Liberal Democratic parliamentarian) put forward a bizarre and highly publicised proposal that his city’s government should purchase three of the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, a group of barren rocks in the East China Sea whose ownership is disputed between Japan, China and Taiwan. Despite the fact that the islands are over 1500 kilometres from Tokyo and are of no imaginable practical use to the city’s inhabitants, Ishihara’s proposal was taken seriously and, as he had clearly calculated, served to spark a fierce territorial dispute with China. One result was a sudden drop in Japan’s exports to China, leading to a sharp rise in Japan’s trade deficit in the latter part of the year.

The timing of the Ishihara proposal was not coincidental. It came as anti-nuclear protests were gathering momentum across Japan, and helped to divert media attention away from them. Ishihara is an outspoken proponent of nuclear power, as well as being an advocate of a nuclear-armed Japan. He is also notorious for his overtly racist, sexist and homophobic comments, including references to the “criminal DNA” of Japan’s Chinese residents. His intervention in the Senkaku–Diaoyu issue proved to be a prelude to his return to national politics. On 13 November Ishihara, who had just announced his retirement from municipal politics, formed the new Sunrise Party, which (even by the standards of contemporary Japanese politics) established something of a record by surviving for just four days.

The aftermath of the 2011 tsunami has left many people in Japan feeling vulnerable and abandoned by a government that seems unable to come to grips with the multiple crises assailing the country. This mood gives rise to a deep desire for strong leadership; and, in a world of twitter, sound bites and instant celebrity, strong leadership is all too easily confused with the ability produce the aggressive one-liners that grab the headlines and go viral in cyberspace.

Ishihara is not the only politician to turn this situation to his advantage. On 12 September, the equally outspoken mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, launched his Japan Restoration Party, whose platform combines vehement nationalism, neoliberal economics and a radical overhaul of the political system. Hashimoto’s vision for Japan includes, among other things, a single-chamber parliament and a quasi-presidential directly elected prime minister. Strong personal leadership is the key refrain of Hashimoto’s rhetoric: his most widely quoted comment is his remark that “what Japan needs now is a dictatorship.” Like Ishihara, Hashimoto has also succeeded in seizing the headlines with provocative statements that have inflamed tensions between Japan and its Asian neighbours. In August of this year, he provoked fury in China and Korea by denouncing the apology which Japan’s chief cabinet secretary issued almost twenty years ago to the former “comfort women” — women from Korea, China and elsewhere who were forced or tricked into working in wartime military brothels, where they were subject to extreme sexual abuse.

Hashimoto initially sought to tap the mood of discontent by including a promise to phase out nuclear power in his party’s platform. But the shallow foundations of his anti-nuclear stance became evident when, just four days after it was formed, Ishihara’s Sunrise Party merged with Hashimoto’s Restoration Party, and arch-advocate of nuclear power and nuclear weapons Shintaro Ishihara was named as the reconstituted Restoration Party’s new leader, with Hashimoto as his deputy. Ishihara then gave a news conference at which he called for Japan to “simulate” acquiring nuclear weapons as a precursor to deciding whether or not to become a fully nuclear-armed state. (How a nation simulates nuclear armament remains to be explained.)

While parties have been proliferating, in late September the old and long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party elected a new leader, Shinzo Abe, who had previously served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007. Abe has close links to Hashimoto, and had earlier reportedly been considering allying himself with Hashimoto’s new party. Despite public statements on the importance of ties with China, Abe’s previous tenure as prime minister was marked by frictions with neighbouring countries over his own provocative statements on the “comfort women” issue: statements which he then rather half-heartedly retracted.

The nationalist troika of Abe, Hashimoto and Ishihara share a core commitment to revising Japan’s postwar constitution by removing the “peace clause” that limits the scope of Japanese military expansion. Abe has promised that, if elected, he will first seek to alter Article 96 of the constitution, which defines the processes governing constitutional revision, so as to make fundamental revisions of other clauses (particularly the peace clause) easier. Though Abe’s comments on the nuclear weapons issue have been more circumspect than Ishihara’s and Hashimoto’s, he has expressed the view that the development of “small” nuclear weapons would be permissible even under Japan’s present constitution. As prime minister, Abe assured anxious neighbours that Japan’s arsenal would remain non-nuclear, but his year in power was marked by vocal debates within the ruling party about the possibility of Japan’s acquiring nuclear weapons: debates which Abe did nothing to discourage.

Current polling has Abe’s party well ahead of its rivals, while two out of three recent polls place the Ishihara–Hashimoto Japan Restoration Party in second spot. Abe’s party may not garner the two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament that it needs to initiate the constitutional revision process, but if the Restoration Party also polls well, a formidable coalition of far-right forces will be in the making. Such a coalition would open the way to a serious push to remove the peace clause from the constitution and could revive debate on nuclear weapons. This would unquestionably evoke strong reactions from surrounding countries, very probably triggering a cycle of escalating military tensions in Northeast Asia. Australians concerned about the future of the region should seriously be considering how to respond to this scenario.

The countries of the Asia-Pacific, including Australia, need an effectively led Japan with the strength and vision to play a key role in regional cooperation. But a Japan led by strident chauvinists whose populist pronouncements aggravate regional tensions would be bad news for Northeast Asia, bad news for Australia and above all bad news for the people of Japan itself. •

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THEY exist all over Japan, like tiny sparks of light, flickering and fragile, but somehow surviving against the odds: the peace museums, the reconciliation groups, the local history movements that work to address problems of historical responsibility neglected or denied by national politicians. According to a UN survey, Japan has the highest number of peace museums of any country in the world. But the heritage created at grassroots by ordinary Japanese people is constantly under threat from the hostility of nationalist politicians and sections of the media: and never more so than today.

Among the sparks of light is Osaka’s Human Rights Museum, also known as Liberty Osaka. Founded in 1985, Liberty Osaka is Japan’s only museum devoted to human rights. It features displays about the history of hisabetsu buraku communities (groups subject to social discrimination), the struggle for women’s rights, and minority groups such as the indigenous Ainu community and the Korean minority in Japan. An important aspect of the museum is its depiction of these groups not as helpless victims of discrimination, but rather as active subjects who have helped to create the diversity and richness of Japanese history. By 2005 more than a million people had visited Liberty Osaka.

Today, the museum faces the threat of closure. The Osaka city government, headed by mayor Hashimoto Toru, has decided to halt its funding from next year, on the grounds that the museum displays are “limited to discrimination and human rights” and fail to present children with an image of the future full of “hopes and dreams.”

Hashimoto’s own hopes and dreams for the future have recently been on prominent display. His Osaka Ishin no Kai (generally known in English as “One Osaka,” though literally meaning the Osaka Restoration Association) has high hopes of gaining a substantial share of the seats up for grabs in Japan’s impending national election, and Hashimoto is being hailed by many as a future national leader – even as a national saviour. A relatively young politician with a successful career in law and the media behind him, he has succeeded in winning popular support by projecting the image of an action man unafraid of making the tough decisions.

LIKE Prime Minister Koizumi in the early 2000s, Hashimoto combines personal charisma, budget-slashing economic neoliberalism and hardline political nationalism. But Hashimoto is Koizumi on steroids. His radical plans for reform would see Japan converted into a quasi-federal system with the prime minister directly elected in presidential style, along with massive reductions in welfare spending and a voucher-based education system. He is famous for remarking that Japan would benefit from becoming a dictatorship – a remark that most commentators have not taken as seriously as they should. His penchant for attracting attention by deliberately outrageous statements gives his role on the political stage an unstable and ugly edge that was entirely lacking from Koizumi’s more cool and suave performances.

At a time when Japan’s political system is mired in factionalism and indecisiveness, bold words have popular appeal. Until recently, Hashimoto has shown considerable skill in mixing policies drawn from various parts of the ideological spectrum, so avoiding being easily pigeonholed in conventional political terms. Ever quick to spot an opportunity to boost his political appeal, he responded to mass demonstrations against nuclear power following the Fukushima no. 1 accident by hastily adding an anti-nuclear element to his agenda for a new Japan.

But as the election draws nearer, Hashimoto’s true colours become increasingly visible. He is now wooing the support of leading old-style nationalist Abe Shinzo, a scion of Japan’s conservative elite and one of the rather crowded field of very briefly serving former Japanese prime ministers. (Abe’s tenure lasted precisely one year, from 26 September 2006 to 26 September 2007.) Abe, for his part, has expressed interest in working with Hashimoto to change Japan’s postwar peace constitution.

Amid political change and heightened frictions in Northeast Asia, Hashimoto Toru has found it impossible to resist stirring the pot of nationalist divisiveness. On 10 August, outgoing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak paid a provocative and self-serving visit to the island of Dokdo/Takeshima, whose sovereignty is disputed between Japan and Korea. Two weeks later, Hashimoto responded in kind, playing the shop-soiled card of historical revisionism: a favoured weapon of right-wing politicians in need of free publicity.

Using Twitter as his means of communication, Hashimoto chose this sensitive moment in Japan–Korea relations to denounce the Kono Statement, a key element in Japan’s search for reconciliation with its Asian neighbours. In 1993, after the government had collected and studied extensive documentary evidence over a two-year period, chief cabinet secretary Kono Yohei acknowledged that the Japanese military had been responsible for forcibly recruiting Korean, Chinese and other “comfort women” to work in wartime military brothels where they were subjected to extreme sexual abuse. Kono’s carefully worded statement of apology noted that brokers had often been used to recruit the women, but that in some cases Japanese soldiers or officials had carried out the recruitment themselves.

Fourteen years later, the Abe cabinet issued a partial retraction, denying that Japanese military or government officials had been personally involved in forcible recruitment of “comfort women.” This resolution not only ignored crucial parts of the available evidence, but also failed to answer the obvious question: how does the use of brokers (which no one denies) diminish the moral responsibility of the Japanese state and army? Or, to put it more bluntly, does employing others to do your dirty work make it okay?

Hashimoto Toru’s analysis of this profoundly sensitive, painful and controversial issue is a long, rambling and totally uninformed series of tweets which runs in part as follows: “In 2007 the Abe cabinet made a cabinet resolution that there was no evidence that comfort women were forcible recruited by the military or officials. That is the view of the Japanese government. I am a Japanese, so I stand by the view of the Japanese government. Besides, I am not a historian, so I’m not going to do the work of collecting historical documents to deliberately overturn the Japanese government’s cabinet resolution.”

Hashimoto’s bright new Japan, it seems, will be a place where not only the country’s future but also the events of the past are decided by government resolution. George Orwell would have loved it.

Even without being a historian, though, Hashimoto might have recalled that the “comfort women” fiasco was one of the less glorious moments of his would-be ally Abe Shinzo’s brief tenure as prime minister. Having pushed through the cabinet resolution, which caused considerable damage to Japan’s relations not only with South Korea and China but even with the United States, Abe then publicly backed down, and repeatedly stated that his government intended to stand by the Kono Statement after all. He went on (bizarrely) to make a rather half-hearted apology, not to the victims themselves but to President George W. Bush, for any hurt caused to the “comfort women.” Equally bizarrely, Bush solemnly accepted the apology.

HASHIMOTO’s politics poses a dilemma for his critics. This is not politics by persuasion but politics by performance. The object of the current performance is obvious. It is to provoke impassioned counter-attacks, preferably from those who can be labelled left-wing and foreign – best of all from those who can be labelled Korean or Chinese nationalists. This will then allow Hashimoto to assume the moral high ground as a martyred nationalist hero assailed by “anti-Japanese” forces. In responding to Hashimoto-style politweets, it is important not to act out his predetermined scenario. But it is equally important that the considerable number of relatively sensible people who have seen Hashimoto as a possible beacon of hope for Japan should recognise what sort of a person they are dealing with.

More broadly, the Hashimoto phenomenon can be placed in the context of the current political instability in Northeast Asia as a whole. A presidential election is imminent in South Korea; a change of leadership is under way in China; and an untested new leader is in power in North Korea. All of this magnifies the uncertainties created by the massive disaffection with the mainstream parties in post-disaster Japan. It is in this context of change and anxiety that we see the resurgence of territorial disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and Takeshima/Dokdo, as well as of nationalist rhetoric such as Hashimoto’s.

This makes a careful and considered response to Hashimoto particularly important. Above all, the phenomenon should not be “nationalised.” Hashimoto does not speak for Japan, and to condemn Japan because of his comments would only boost his demagogic appeal. The best reply from those who hope he never will speak for Japan is to allow his words to speak for themselves. Those outside Japan who are alarmed or offended by these words should seek out and lend support to the embattled peace, human rights and reconciliation groups in Japan that also seek a different future, so that their voices too may be heard at the national level.

Japan urgently needs political renewal and hope. But this is not going to be achieved by replacing the dull faces of traditional party politics with an egocentric would-be megastar who plans to conduct foreign policy by Twitter. Rather, it is at the grassroots level, in places like Liberty Osaka, that the real hopes and dreams for the future are still being quietly nurtured. The worst tragedy of all for Japan would be to allow the search for “restoration” to extinguish the sparks that still burn bright in many parts of the country. •

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But there is one morsel of information that, oddly, has been little reported. This is the fact that Kim Jong-un’s mother, Ko Young-hee, was born in Japan, and that North Korea’s new leader has several relatives living in Osaka. Ko’s parents came from the southernmost Korean island of Jeju and she lived in Osaka until the age of eleven, when she and her family were among around 90,000 ethnic Koreans who look part in a mass relocation from Japan to North Korea that began in 1959 and continued until the early 1980s. While most of these migrants struggled to adapt to life in their new homeland, Ko became a successful dancer with the leading North Korean theatre company and caught the eye of Kim Jong-il, becoming his third consort in the late 1970s. She died in 2004, reportedly of cancer.

It is unlikely that these South Korean and Japanese connections will have any direct bearing on the Great Successor’s policies, but they are a reminder that, despite its “hermit state” image, North Korea is truly part of Northeast Asia. Indeed, rather than attempting to guess the un-guessable, it might be more useful to think about the North Korean succession in a regional context.

North Korea’s future holds the key to the stability of the region as a whole, but it is not the only country in the region facing a change of political command. A new Chinese leadership will be anointed at the Eighteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the second half of 2012 and at the Twelfth National People’s Congress in March 2013. South Korea will also elect a new president in 2012. Recently, meanwhile, subtle shifts in regional approaches towards North Korea have started to become visible. The hardline policies towards the North pursued by the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, since his accession in 2008 have visibly failed to produce positive results, and have been coming under increasing domestic criticism. In recent months, the South Korean government has shown signs of willingness to soften its position and resume some humanitarian aid programs, which were suspended after the sinking of the warship Cheonan in March 2010.

Ever since 2002, when Kim Jong-Il admitted that North Korea had been responsible for kidnappings of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan has pursued an even harder line towards North Korea, with just as little impact. But during a brief visit to Beijing immediately after Kim Jong-il’s death the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, discussed the need to revive the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear policy, suggesting the possibility of Japan softening its approach to dialogue with North Korea. In recent weeks, the United States has also indicated its willingness to provide food aid to North Korea for the first time in three years. Indeed, a senior US official was in Beijing negotiating the aid issue at the time of Kim Jong-il’s sudden death.

Meanwhile, Burma, one of North Korea’s very few remaining foreign friends, is in a process of political transformation. Over recent years, as its contacts with the outside world shrivelled, the relationship had become increasingly important to North Korea, but the recent thawing of relations between the United States and Burma has been accompanied by indications that the Burmese government is willing to relinquish ties to North Korea, and may even provide Washington with intelligence on its erstwhile ally.

The actions of North Korea’s neighbours, and of the United States, are likely to have a crucial bearing on North Korea’s future. The country’s political elite is doubtless even more nervous than outside observers about the sudden transition to a new leadership and an uncertain future. Because they feel the need to conceal their insecurity behind public displays of strength, nervous and insecure regimes are often the most dangerous. In North Korea’s case, the anxieties are enormously increased by the fact that the economy is in a state of collapse and the population on the brink of famine, reviving terrible memories of the great famine that swept the country soon after the death of the country’s first leader, Kim Il-sung, and claimed around a million lives.

Insecurity and inexperience make it unlikely that the new North Korean leadership will take quick steps towards reform or opening to the outside world. In the longer term, though, North Korea’s neighbours can certainly help to avoid dangerous confrontations and ease the way to future dialogue. The most urgent move is to signal a willingness to maintain and expand food and medical aid programs. This will help to reassure the jittery new leadership, and the population more generally, that the outside world is not hell bent on North Korea’s destruction. Dialogue on aid will also give outsiders better insight into the nature and workings of the new regime. Above all, aid is vital for humanitarian reasons. In return for signs of North Korea’s willingness to return to dialogue on nuclear and other issues, Australia could support this process by proffering a lifting of the blanket ban on visas for North Koreans and restarting long-stalled training programs for North Korean technical experts.

The region’s political changes, if handled with caution, could make 2012 a year for new forms of regional engagement, including renewed multilateral dialogue between North Korea and its neighbours. The alternative – rash actions seen by a brittle and inexperienced North Korean regime as threats to the country’s security – could provoke a fresh spiral of conflict, with dire consequences particularly for the unhappy citizens of North Korea. The future of North Korean politics will be determined not only within the secretive and palatial compounds of the Kim dynasty, but also by decisions taken in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Washington and even Canberra. •

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“Crisis” is one of the most overused words in the media lexicon. Just over a week ago, the government of Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan was said to be facing its “greatest crisis” to date. The cause of this political furore was a string of resignations by ruling party politicians, most notably the foreign minister, who had been forced to step down after admitting to a minor breach of Japan’s campaign funding laws.

This week, months of bitter political feuding melted into utter irrelevance. “Crisis” suddenly took on a raw and shocking new meaning as the same government found itself struggling to deal with a cataclysm whose death toll is soaring into the tens of thousands and with the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Just as 11 September 2001, with its images of New York’s collapsing twin towers, has been seared into global memory, so 11 March 2011 will forever be associated with those seemingly impossible pictures of ships marooned on the roofs of houses, whole towns engulfed in a matter of minutes by the forces of nature, and explosions of smoke and steam billowing from nuclear power plants that were supposed to be disaster-proof.

Japan will, of course, survive this double catastrophe. Overwhelming though the task may seem, Japanese society will recover. But will it ever be the same again? How will the Japan of the future differ from the country pre-3/11?

The lessons of 1923 and 1995

No amount of experience or planning can prepare a society for a tragedy of this magnitude. But Japan has certainly had more experience than most, and history provides some indications of the likely impact of these events. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing raids on other Japanese cities in 1945 were the greatest calamities modern Japan has faced. But two massive natural disasters – the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake of 1995 – offer the closest parallels to current events.

Though the magnitude of the 11 March earthquake is the greatest recorded in Japan’s modern history, its terrible death toll is still well below that of the great earthquake of 1923, which left over 100,000 people dead and around half a million injured. The 1923 quake struck around the middle of the day almost immediately under densely populated areas of Yokohama and Tokyo, toppling wooden houses on top of open cooking stoves, and creating firestorms that killed vast numbers.

Media reports on the current disaster often comment on the calm and stoicism of the Japanese population, and attribute this to Japanese traditions of obedience and social order. But it is worth recalling that the 1923 earthquake triggered a horrifying reaction. Responding to rumours of sabotage by foreigners in their midst, some sections of the panicking population turned on Tokyo’s Korean and Chinese minority communities in the days following the earthquake, killing some 6000 people.

Once the immediate terror had passed, however, the recovery from this disaster was astonishingly swift. Local communities and the national government worked together to re-plan their city, and within two years Tokyo had risen like a phoenix from the ashes, with broad new boulevards and earthquake-resistant modern buildings replacing many of the wooden structures that had proved so fatally flammable. Society, economy and culture recovered too. The first half of the 1920s in Japan is remembered today as an era of relative liberalism, openness and vibrant cultural development, in contrast to the darker days of 1930s militarism.

Until this month, Japan’s worst earthquake since 1923 had been the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck Kobe and the surrounding areas in January 1995. In Kobe approximately 6400 people died – many of them again trapped in fires triggered by the collapse of buildings and power lines. As in 1923, so too in 1995 the tragedy evoked extreme reactions in some quarters. The followers of the rapidly expanding religious sect Aum Shinrikyo were persuaded to believe that the earthquake was an apocalypse that would bring down the Japanese state and transform Japan into a theocracy run by their leader, Shoko Asahara. Two months later, with the prophecy showing few signs of becoming reality, Asahara and his followers decided to take matters into their own hands, and launched poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in an unsuccessful attempt to complete the work that (according to their strange beliefs) the Kobe earthquake had begun.

But in Kobe 1995, as in Tokyo 1923, new life also sprouted from the wastelands of destruction. The mid-1990s is now recognised as having been a turning point in the development of Japanese civil society, not least because of the multitude of new social movements and humanitarian NGOs that flourished in Kobe and the surrounding areas following the quake. When local and national authorities failed to provide the necessary help to displaced communities, ordinary people – many of them young people with no previous experience of social activism – took up the challenge, creating grassroots groups which still flourish today.

A fragile system

In 2011, the scale of the disaster is much larger than in 1995. And, even though the death toll is lower than that of 1923, the effects of the material destruction are likely to be deeper and more long-lasting. The Japan of today, far more than the Japan of 1923, depends on a complex technological network for survival. Japanese cities (particularly Tokyo) have become immensely intricate machines whose operation relies on the smooth running of a maze of roads, rail links, power grids and communications networks. Throughout much of the past half century, these machines have operated with astonishing smoothness and efficiency, but even before the latest earthquake, the signs of ageing infrastructure were starting to show. The rail and subway links on which Tokyo depends for daily life, for example, were losing their clockwork precision, and beginning to experience more frequent breakdowns and delays.

Now the earthquake has thrown the entire system into chaos, mercilessly exposing the weaknesses in this highly centralised technological system. No amount of human ingenuity could possibly have prevented the tsunami from causing widespread death and destruction. But the failure of Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant is another matter. There was something horribly predictable – indeed, long predicted – about this event.

As historian Elise Tipton writes, “for decades, Japanese in the Tokyo area have been anticipating an earthquake of major proportions such as that of 1923,” and many have been expressing concerns about the possibly lethal combination of large concentrations of nuclear power plants in such an earthquake-prone country. Tipton’s study of modern Japanese history, published three years ago, pointed out that “Tokyo Electric Power Company’s reluctance to admit damage to the world’s largest nuclear power station at Kashiwazaki-Kariya after the severe Niigata earthquake of July 2007 added to the credibility problems of nuclear power providers.” The same company runs the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 power plants, and many of the problems that Japan has faced in recent days stem from the company’s history of “crying sheep” (repeatedly issuing reassurances that later prove to be false – the opposite of “crying wolf”): most people have learnt to mistrust good news about nuclear accidents.

The events of the past week have left many Japanese people confused and angry at the conflicting reports they have received about their country’s latest and worst nuclear crisis. The nuclear disaster has diverted funds and energy from the desperately needed tusnami relief effort. Some 140,000 people living between twenty and thirty kilometres from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant have been ordered to remain in their homes to avoid the danger of radiation. But these homes have in many cases have been damaged by the earthquake and are without power. Food and water are rapidly running out, and the hapless citizens of this area feel that they have been abandoned to their fate by the authorities. Their concerns will hardly have been eased by news that the US military has ordered the withdrawal of all US forces to areas outside an eighty-kilometre radius of the stricken plant.

Damage to the now irreparable Fukushima Daiichi plant will affect Japan’s energy supply for months and possibly years to come. For now, all attention is focused on the desperate tasks of survival and rescue. But beneath the apparently calm surface, real anger is boiling towards explosion point. Once these immediate challenges of disaster relief have been overcome, there will have to be some serious apportioning of responsibilities.

Japan after 3/11

The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake struck when Japan’s industrial development and imperial expansion were in full swing. Although the economy had suffered a brief downturn in the early 1920s, the national mood was generally positive and forward-looking. The 1995 quake came as Japan was moving from the economic “bubble” years of the 1980s into a prolonged period of economic stagnation. At that time, however, it was still possible to believe that stagnation would be short-lived. The mid 1990s was also a time of political dynamism in Japan. The Liberal Democratic Party had just lost their grip on power after forty years of uninterrupted rule, and there were hopes for a fairly radical overhaul of the political system (though these hopes ultimately proved unfounded).

The present disaster struck Japan when the country was in a general mood of despondency. The economy has been in the doldrums for two decades. Many people in Japan feel deeply unsettled by the rise of China, which recently overtook Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. The Liberal Democratic Party, having regained its grip on the country’s political life in the 1990s, lost power to the opposition Democratic Party in 2009. But hopes that this would bring a new season of political reform proved shortlived. The Democratic Party government has been mired in scandals and shown no signs of being able to come to grips with the massive problems of the country’s ageing population and mounting debt. More fundamentally, neither side of politics has shown any ability to offer a persuasive new vision of Japan’s future.

This context will profoundly affect the way that the people of Japan respond to the current catastrophe. As I write, the nuclear crisis is still unfolding, and the death toll from the tsunami is still mounting. Decisive predictions about the future are impossible, but drawing on the experience of the past, some glimpses of Japan post-3/11 are possible.

The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis have had a massive effect on the psyches of the people who experienced them, whether directly or indirectly through their effects on friends and relatives. In this sense, Japan will never be the same again. As with previous disasters, the response is unlikely to be simple or one-directional. Some people may take refuge in religious beliefs. For others, the response to the disaster may be a defensive sense of nationalism – not in the form of the murderous xenophobia of 1923, but in the form of an intensified inward-turning attitude and heightened fear of the outside world (particularly of the arch-rival, China).

However, as in the case of Kobe, it is also very possible that good will emerge from the debris of destruction. Once again, many Japanese people have found that the powers-that-be are helpless to save them – indeed, many are increasingly suspecting that the central authorities have let them down in their hour of need. All over Japan, ordinary people are performing extraordinary deeds as they search for lost friends and relatives, take care of displaced neighbours or provide assistance to those in need.

For the past two decades, Japan has been plagued by a sense of aimlessness. The grand visions of economic growth had lost their hold on the imagination, and many young people in particular found refuge from the ongoing malaise in cynical individualism. Now suddenly, through sheer force of circumstances, there are tasks to be done. Society matters once again.

The political effects may be considerable. The anger of the affected regions (particularly Fukushima Prefecture) towards the national authorities is already palpable. Ironically, though, the current government contains several people (including Prime Minister Kan himself) who have been long-term critics of Japan’s nuclear power industry. It is the opposition Liberal Democratic Party who were largely responsible for creating the system that has failed so badly.

This opens the possibility that the crisis may push the Japanese people finally to demand fundamental changes to the bureaucratic and party political system that has, until now, seemed so deeply entrenched and so incapable of confronting the country’s problems.

Kiki – the Japanese word for crisis – is closely related to the word kikai – opportunity. Once the immediate humanitarian issues are addressed, this disaster may indeed prove to be the stimulus for the fundamental political rethinking that Japan has long needed.

The challenge for the region

But if good is to come out of this tragedy, the support of Japan’s regional neighbours is absolutely essential. So far, the response has been encouraging. South Korea was one of the first to offer Japan assistance following the tsunami. China, itself no stranger to catastrophic earthquakes, has been swift and generous in its aid. Australia too has been quick to help a long-time regional friend.

This support will need to be sincere and sensitive to Japanese public sentiment. Any sense that China was in some way profiting from Japan’s disaster could be particularly dangerous in fanning the flames of potentially nationalist responses.

Natural disasters of this magnitude affect the entire surrounding region – indeed the entire world. This is not just Japan’s disaster. It is East Asia’s and the world’s disaster. In a globalised world, Japan is not inhabited only by Japanese. Some two million foreign residents in Japan, including hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Korean nationals and over 10,000 Australians, are also affected by 3/11. The problems of nuclear power exposed by the crisis are problems for the entire region as it struggles to deal with the issue of global warming. Closer cooperation could provide a key to developing better response systems for future disasters, which may strike any of the region’s countries at any time. A committed, long-term regional response to the events of past days will be the key to ensuring that both Japan and its region as a whole emerge stronger and more vigorous from the ruins of 3/11. •

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