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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US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

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As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

The post Dictating democratisation appeared first on Inside Story.

At their annual summit in July, island leaders appointed an independent five-member expert scientific panel to probe the project’s safety. Forum secretary-general Henry Puna, concerned about harm to the fishing industry in Japan and the wider Pacific region, has reinforced regional concern that the scientific data doesn’t justify the plan.

“Experts have advised a deferment to the impending discharge into the Pacific Ocean by Japan is necessary,” Puna said last month. “Based on that advice, our members encourage consideration for options other than discharge, while the independent panel of experts continue to further assess the safety of the discharge in light of the current data gaps.”

In a confidential report to the Pacific Islands Forum, the expert panel outlined detailed concerns about the project, arguing that any decision to proceed should be postponed. Even though Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has given the go-ahead for construction, a growing number of scientists are warning about the long-term implications of dumping more than a million tonnes of water containing radioactive isotopes into the Pacific.

The waste problem goes back to March 2011, when three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were flooded after an offshore earthquake. A fourteen-metre tsunami hit the coast, causing massive damage to the reactors’ power supply and cooling systems. The partial meltdown of the reactor cores caused extensive damage as fuel rod assemblies burned through steel containment vessels and into the concrete base of the reactor buildings.

For more than a decade, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, has been using water to cool the excess heat still emanating from the melted fuel rods. The highly contaminated cooling water is then stored in more than a thousand tanks at the site. With more than a hundred tonnes of water collected every day, storage space is running out.

Japan proposes to dump this wastewater into the Pacific Ocean after passing it through an Advanced Liquid Processing System designed to remove most radioactive materials.

The cost of decommissioning the stricken Fukushima reactors has put TEPCO — and Japanese taxpayers — under massive pressure. Since 2011, more than ¥12 trillion (A$120 billion) has been spent on cleaning up the plant, decontaminating the site and compensating people affected by the accident. This accounts for half of the amount budgeted for work that must continue for many decades.

The Japanese government has already provided ¥10.2 trillion in no-interest loans to TEPCO. Last month Japan’s Board of Audit revealed that repayment of these loans will be delayed, highlighting TEPCO’s ongoing financial crisis.

Many analysts are concerned TEPCO is looking at ocean waste dumping as the cheapest option to resolve storage costs for the vast amounts of water contaminated with tritium and other radionuclides. As Benshuo Yang and Haojun Xu from the Ocean University of China report, alternatives include underground burial, controlled vapour release, and injection into the geosphere. Japan, they add, “has chosen the most cost-efficient, but most harmful one.”

Work on the ocean dumping plan is rushing ahead, ignoring international concern. In August, TEPCO began building the infrastructure needed to release the treated radioactive water into the sea, including a kilometre-long undersea tunnel and a complex of pipes to transfer the treated water from storage tanks.

Because Japan is a major donor to Pacific Island nations, some island governments are wary of directly condemning the plan. But anti-nuclear sentiment is strong in a region that still suffers from the radioactive legacies of fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing, and many remember previous Japanese pledges to consult about plans to dump nuclear waste.

The expert panel was appointed to help bolster the islands’ dealings with Japan. Its five members have extensive expertise in the marine environment, nuclear radiation, reactor engineering and oceanography: Ken Buesseler works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Antony Hooker is director of the Centre for Radiation Research, Education and Innovation at the University of Adelaide, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, Robert Richmond is director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, or IEER.

TEPCO’s radiological impact assessment, released in November 2021, sidestepped many of the initial concerns raised by critics of the project. Throughout 2022, the expert panel held meetings with TEPCO and Japanese officials, receiving some data on the type of radionuclides held in storage by the company. The International Atomic Energy Agency has also contributed to the debate, with director-general Rafael Grossi visiting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in May 2022 and briefing a Forum meeting in July.

For panel member Arjun Makhijani, a former nuclear engineer and IEER expert on nuclear safety, the lack of significant data is a crucial problem.

“From a scientific point of view, we as an expert panel felt there was really insufficient information to plan this huge operation,” he tells me. “We perceived early on that because most of the storage tanks had not been sampled, most of the radionuclides are not being sampled, and so there just wasn’t enough information to proceed.”

As time went on, says Dr Makhijani, the panel’s worries about the Japanese plans became stronger. “Do they know what they are doing? Do they have enough information? Have they done the measurements properly? Do they know if the capacity of the filtration system will be enough for the volume of liquids, so the concentration of radionuclides would be low enough? How long will it take if they have to repeatedly filter the liquids? There weren’t any clear answers to these questions.”

As they met with TEPCO and Japanese authorities, the expert panel began to raise a series of concerns: the failure to accurately sample different isotopes in the storage tanks, the level of radioactive contamination in sludge at the bottom of the tanks, and the models used to determine how elements like tritium will disperse and dilute in the vast Pacific Ocean.

For Dr Makhijani, the Japanese authorities have not provided enough information to ascertain what range and amounts of radionuclides will be found in each tank. Only nine of sixty-four radionuclides have been included in the data shared with the Forum.

“The vast majority of radionuclides are not being measured, according to the Japanese authorities themselves,” Dr Makhijani says. “In summary, most of the tanks have never been sampled. The sampling they do is non-representative of the water in the tanks and when they were stored. Are the measurements of what’s in the tanks accurate? The answer to this is no.”

The bulk of the radioactivity measured in the wastewater is from two isotopes: tritium and carbon-14. But current data also show a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, caesium-134, caesium-137, cobalt-60 and even tellurium-127, a fission product with a short half-life of nine hours that shouldn’t be present after years of storage.

The expert panel has noted that some tanks low in tritium are high in strontium-90, and vice versa, concluding that “the assumption that concentrations of the other radionuclides are constant is not correct and a full assessment of all radioisotopes is needed to evaluate the true risk factors.”

Also of concern is the fact that particles in the water may settle to the bottom of the storage tanks over time, creating contaminated sludge. Japanese authorities have confirmed that tanks filled with cooling water in the years immediately after the 2011 accident contain contaminated sediment of this kind.

“The sludges were not sampled then and have not been sampled since that time,” says Dr Makhijani. “How much of these sludges will be stirred up and complicate the filtration system as you pump out the water from the tanks? This issue has not been addressed.”

TEPCO plans to filter out most isotopes but dump vast amounts of tritium into the Pacific, relying on rapid dispersion and dilution. But many scientists are critical of the model used to measure the dilution of tritium in seawater, which is based on models using international standards for how much naturally occurring tritium can be safely ingested in drinking water. Environmental critics of the dumping plan are concerned tritium and other radioactive isotopes will accumulate in ocean sediments, fish and other marine biota.

According to Dr Makhijani, the expert panel was concerned that the proposed drinking water standard for tritium does not apply to ocean ecosystems. “The discharged concentration of tritium will be thousands of times the background level you find naturally or through historical nuclear testing,” he explains, “and then you’re going to discharge it for many decades.”

He believes a full modelling of the impact would include “an ecosystem assessment, both for sediments and for vegetal and animal biota that travel,” which hasn’t been done. “In TEPCO’s environmental impact assessment, they didn’t take account of any bioaccumulation of tritium, which does occur in all organisms. The question of bioconcentration in an ocean environment was totally ignored in the statement.”

In its report to Forum member governments in August, the expert panel concluded that Japan’s assessments of ecological effects and bioconcentration are seriously deficient and don’t provide a sound basis for estimating impact. Writing in the Japan Times, the five scientists noted:

The release of contaminated material from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant would take at least forty years, and decades longer if you include the anticipated accumulation of new water during the process. This would impact not only the interests and reputation of the Japanese fishing community, among others, but also the people and countries of the entire Pacific region. This needs to be considered as a transboundary and transgenerational issue.

Insufficient information is available to assess how environmental and human health would be affected, they argued, and issuing a permit at this time would be premature at best: “Having studied the scientific and ecological aspects of the matter, we have concluded that the decision to release the contaminated water should be indefinitely postponed and other options for the tank water revisited until we have more complete data to evaluate the economic, environmental and human health costs of ocean release.”

The potential for long-term damage to the ocean environment is echoed by expert panel member Robert Richmond from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

“This is truly a trans-boundary issue,” he says. “Fish don’t respect political lines, and neither do radionuclides or pollutants in the ocean. I really commend the members of the Pacific Islands Forum for recognising this is an issue they need additional information on.”

Soon after the 2011 Fukushima accident, scientists confirmed that Pacific bluefin tuna can transport radionuclides across the northern Pacific Ocean. A 2012 study from Stanford University reported tuna with traces of Fukushima-related contamination had been found on the shores of the United States.

“Pacific bluefin tuna can rapidly transport radionuclides from a point source in Japan to distant ecoregions and demonstrate the importance of migratory animals as transport vectors of radionuclides,” the study reported. “Other large, highly migratory marine animals make extensive use of waters around Japan, and these animals may also be transport vectors of Fukushima-derived radionuclides to distant regions of the North and South Pacific Oceans.”

Will perceptions of radioactive hazards from Japan’s ocean dumping damage the global market for tuna? Many island nations derive vital revenue from the deepwater fishing nations that pay to operate in Pacific Island exclusive economic zones, or EEZs.

Regional organisations have also sought to process and market tuna from the Pacific as another key source of revenue. For nearly a decade, island states have supported Pacifical, a brand that promotes sustainable distribution and marketing of skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught in their EEZs.

Speaking after her recent appointment as executive director of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Rhea Moss-Christian highlighted the potential damage of Japan’s decades-long project: “This is a massive release and a big, big potential disaster if it’s not handled properly.”

Moss-Christian is the first Pacific woman to head the commission, which manages the largest tuna fishery in the world, representing nearly 60 per cent of global production.

“I wish that the Japanese government would take some more time before its release,” she told journalists at December’s commission meeting. “There are a number of outstanding questions that have yet to be fully answered. They have focused a lot on one particular radionuclide, and not very much on others that are also present in the wastewater.”

Moss-Christian is a citizen of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation living with the consequences of radioactive fallout from sixty-seven US atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. A former chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, she is deeply aware of this radioactive legacy. Her nation struggles to control radionuclides leaching into the marine environment from the Runit Dome, a nuclear waste site on Enewetak Atoll created by the United States in the 1970s.

“We have a lot of experience in the Marshall Islands with lingering radioactive waste,” Moss-Christian said. “We don’t want to find ourselves in another situation, not just in the Marshall Islands, but in general in the region, where we agree to something without knowing what could potentially happen in the future. What are the contingency plans? What are the compensation mechanisms?”

At a time of growing US–China tension, the Japanese government is seeking to boost its role in the islands region. Tokyo is building closer ties with Australia and the United States through increased military operations and joint investments in the islands. In November, for example, Tokyo and Washington agreed to contribute US$100 million to support Australian underwriting of Telstra’s purchase of Digicel, blocking Chinese investment in the Pacific’s key mobile phone network.

Even as the Japanese government seeks to win hearts and minds in the region, community anger about the nuclear threat is growing. Church and civil society groups, including the Pacific Conference of Churches, Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and Pacific Network on Globalisation, have criticised the proposed wastewater dumping plan.

When Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi visited Fiji last May, these community groups argued the proposed ocean dumping breached international agreements like the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. A joint civil society statement concluded, “We believe there is no scenario in which discharging nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is justified for the health, wellbeing, and future safety of Pacific peoples and the environment.”

As Japan forges ahead with its plan and Australia works towards acquiring nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement, the gulf is growing between the two countries’ geopolitical agenda and the growing antinuclear sentiment across the Blue Pacific. •

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Let’s leave aside the doubts about US staying power after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or Narendra Modi’s latest subversion of democratic freedoms revealed by the discovery of Israeli spyware in the phones of 300 critics. Or even Scott Morrison’s spell in Washington’s doghouse because of foot-dragging on climate change.

Principally, the timing is bad because the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will be in his last days in office when the meeting takes place in Washington on 24 September. He will step down less than a week later to hand over to a successor to be chosen by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on 29 September.

When Shinzo Abe stepped down as prime minister in August 2020, citing a recurrence of stomach ulcers, Suga, now seventy-two, looked like a safe choice as successor. As Abe’s chief cabinet secretary he appeared to have been the brains and safe hands of the government, steadily implementing Abe’s retro-nationalist agenda while protecting him from successive scandals over political favours.

That reputation, which drew a 70 per cent approval rating in opinion polls when he stepped up, has now dissipated, largely thanks to Suga’s handing of the Covid pandemic.

In a not-unfamiliar picture for Australians, his government was slow to grasp the urgency of the vaccine rollout. Its health ministry insisted that Pfizer retest its vaccine in Japan, losing several weeks, even though the US trials had included people of Japanese origin. (The ministry said this didn’t count, as they wouldn’t have been eating Japanese food.) The Japan Medical Association, a powerful political donor, convinced Suga that local doctors were the best placed to give jabs. Many older people couldn’t make appointments because the smartphone app was too complicated.

Then Suga took a gamble on holding the summer Olympics despite the Delta variant’s resurgence and, with Japan’s vaccination level then just 23 per cent, amid fears the athletes could set off new outbreaks. Watching on TV, the Japanese were told hospitals were reserved for Olympians while they would have to endure Covid at home, except in the most severe cases.

A belated vaccination effort, in which the doctors’ lobby was pushed aside and the Jieitai (military) brought in to set up mass vaccination centres, has pushed the double-dose level among adults above 50 per cent, but the political damage was done.

In August, backed by three centrist and left-wing opposition parties, a university professor with expertise in pandemic analysis beat the Liberal Democrat candidate in elections for mayor of Yokohama. The port city near Tokyo is capital of Kanazawa prefecture, Suga’s political home ground.

With his approval rating below 30 per cent, and with younger and less-established Liberal Democrat members of the Diet worried about the House of Representatives election due by 28 November, no one was taking up Suga’s idea of a snap election or a cabinet reshuffle. Suga announced he wouldn’t be running in the party leadership ballot due at the end of this month.

The contest — a mix of public campaigning and the kind of backroom brokerage among the party’s seven factions that Yukio Mishima portrayed in his novel After the Banquet — has a half-dozen declared and potential candidates.

Among them, and the most popular with the public, if not his colleagues, is former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono, who at fifty-eight rates as a youngster among Liberal Democrats. Most recently, as Suga’s minister for administrative reform, he famously suggested Japan’s civil service might move on from letters and fax machines to fully digital communications. Although he was also in charge of the vaccine rollout, he seems to have gained credit for the recent progress rather than the earlier delays, which have been sheeted home to Suga.

With 2.5 million in his Japanese-language Twitter circle, Kono is more skilled than most of his colleagues in reaching the public. He has vowed to press on with reforms, and has moderated his anti-nuclear position by conceding that power stations shut down after the Fukushima disaster might be used again while Japan phases out coal, oil and natural gas to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Asked about his volatile temperament, he said he would be a leader who “laughs and cries together” with the Japanese people.

He would also be a very presentable face for Japan in the Quad and in the wider world. He opted to study at Washington’s Georgetown University rather than one of the elite Japanese universities that prepare the young for top political, bureaucratic and business circles. He is versed in the big diplomatic and strategic issues from his previous portfolios, and as far as the Quad goes, supports closer military ties with the United States and its allies, even angling for Japanese membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact.

As importantly, he brings greater nuance and empathy to Japan’s troubled history with its East Asian neighbours. A third-generation Liberal Democrat, he is the son of Yohei Kono, who in 1993, as chief cabinet secretary, issued a statement officially recognising that so-called comfort women were put into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army in wartime.

The “Kono statement” was a step towards dealing with this historical abuse, but the contrition was wound back when Liberal Democrat politicians on Shinzo Abe’s side of the party claimed that army brothels were simply commercial businesses and their workers all volunteers. The controversy has given a bitter edge to relations between Japan and South Korea, the two most powerful US allies in the region.

As Daisuke Akimoto of Temple University, Japan writes in the Diplomat, “It is possible to theorise that Kono has long waited to become prime minister in order to follow his father’s diplomatic footsteps, with a view to promoting Japan’s reconciliation diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region.” But Kono, perhaps with an eye on his party colleagues, hasn’t played up this aspect of his legacy yet.

What he has said is that, as prime minister, he wouldn’t be visiting the Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead. Because it pays homage to Pacific war leaders executed by the Allies for war crimes, as well as ordinary soldiery, and because its museum portrays Japan’s pre-1945 campaigns as well-intentioned, political visits to Yasukuni are seen elsewhere in Asia as excusing aggression.

All of which makes Kono somewhat suspect in the eyes of the party’s retro-nationalists, with terms like “maverick” expressing this sentiment.

Kono’s closest rivals look like being former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, sixty-two, a figure who has long hovered near the top of the party and who declared his candidacy early, and Shigeru Ishiba, sixty-four, a former defence minister who is yet to decide whether to run. Either would be a business-as-usual prime minister but hardly likely to jolt Japan out of its longstanding economic and social ennui.

The wildcard candidate is Sanae Takaichi, sixty, who would be Japan’s first female prime minister but hardly a standard-bearer for feminism. She has opposed steps to break down the nation’s patriarchies, including allowing married women to keep their own family name and introducing female succession to the imperial throne. “She belongs to a kind of Japanese woman who gets ahead by being more macho than her male colleagues,” says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian academic long resident in Tokyo.

Early in her career, Takaichi worked as an intern for a Democratic congressman in Washington and played drums in a rock band. Since then she’s marched to a different drum. Nurtured in her home city of Nara by a notorious war-guilt denialist, one-time justice minister Seisuke Okuno, Takaichi belongs to Nippon Kaigi and Jinja Honjo, organisations intent on returning Japan’s politics and society to their pre-1945 state and restoring the emperor’s semi-divine status. As a minister she has visited the Yasukuni shrine many times.

An ally of Shinzo Abe and his brother, defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Takaichi is among those in the Liberal Democrat camp who promote closer relations with Taiwan. Taken over by Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of a war with imperial China, the island has long been seen in Japan as the success story of Japanese colonialism, in contrast to the later annexation of Korea. Supporting Taiwan is part of standing up to China, with US bases in Japan key to its defence. For the first time, Tokyo’s latest defence white paper declared “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait” as a priority, a warning to Beijing that also crept into the communiqué from this year’s Australia–Japan meeting of foreign affairs and defence ministers.

As she began her run for the leadership, Takaichi called for amendment of Japan’s post-1945 constitution to transform the Jieitai from its circumscribed role in defence of Japan to a “national defence force” able to strike out, including by launching pre-emptive attacks on missile bases in places like North Korea.

The puzzle about her candidacy is that it has been openly backed by Shinzo Abe himself. With only 4 per cent approval in the polls, Takaichi is a very long shot. If Abe is seeking cover against prosecution for his latest scandal — some ¥23 million (A$285,000) spent from covert funds during 2015–20 to bring constituents to the prime minister’s annual cherry-blossom viewing party — this surely could be obtained from a more popular candidate. Or possibly Takaichi is a stalking horse for an attempted return by Abe himself, who at sixty-six is aged midway between Suga and the present line-up.

A later date for the Quad meeting might have been advisable. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

The post Winging it to Japan appeared first on Inside Story.

Just two weeks earlier, though, a proposal by Japan to take the strategic partnership to even greater heights, ranking that country with Australia’s longstanding anglophone allies, had met with a resounding silence in Canberra.

In an interview with Nihon Keizai Shimbun on 14 August, defence minister Taro Kono said that Japan was keen to expand its cooperation with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact that links the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “These countries share the same values,” he told the newspaper. “Japan can get closer [to the alliance], even to the extent of it being called the ‘Six Eyes.’”

Japan has been approached about sharing its information “on various occasions,” said Kono. “If approaches are made on a constant basis, then it may be called the ‘Six Eyes.’” The country need not go through formal procedures to join officially, he added. “We will just bring our chair to their table and tell them to count us in.”

The Five Eyes pact, created in 1946 with just two full members, Britain and the United States, grew out of collaborative efforts to collect and break the coded signals of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Australia had been involved in code-breaking against Japan since the 1930s, first with the British in Hong Kong and then with the Americans and other allies in Melbourne and Brisbane. Along with Canada and New Zealand, it was elevated from associated status around 1955 after upgrading domestic security.

The achievement of the wartime Allies in breaking enemy codes was kept secret for nearly three decades after the war, partly because the same capabilities were being deployed against the Soviet Union and other powers. It was blown open by the publication in 1974 of a book called The Ultra Secret by a former staffer at Britain’s now-famous Bletchley Park. Thanks to their “Cambridge” spy ring, though, the Soviets had long known about the code-breaking.

Japan has a highly developed signals intelligence capability and for decades has been a valued contributor in exchanges with the Five Eyes group. It listened to Chinese tank commanders preparing to enter Vietnam in 1979 during Deng Xiaoping’s “punishment” for its invasion of Cambodia. It heard the chatter of Soviet fighter pilots in the shooting down of the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 in 1983. In 2018, its agencies joined those from the Five Eyes in a US war game simulating a hostile attack on the allies’ satellite systems. It closely tracks Chinese and North Korean manoeuvres.

But Kono has not so far been rushed with invitations to the alliance top table. Although Japan clearly wants to move ahead of other powers sharing information with the Five Eyes — including France, Germany, South Korea, Norway and Denmark — even the most fervid Western supporters of bringing Japan out of its post-1945 diffidence about defence and security concede it will be some time before that particular set of eyes is a regular at the table.

No one is blackballing Japan’s membership of the club, it seems, but as yet no proposer or seconder has emerged.

Asked to comment on Taro Kono’s remarks, Australia’s defence department says that Australia values its “close and enduring partnership with Japan, including our strong defence cooperation” and points to the joint statement of a Five Eyes defence ministers’ meeting on 23 June, which “recognised the role of regional partners and institutions in shaping globally and across the Indo-Pacific a stable and secure, economically resilient community, where the sovereign rights of all states are respected.” Apart from that, “consistent with longstanding practice, government does not comment on intelligence matters.”

The chair of the Australian parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie, did not respond to a request for comment.

The warmest endorsement for closer Japanese involvement has come from the Conservative chairman of the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, after a visit from Kono in July. “We should look at partners we can trust to deepen our alliances,” he said. “Japan is an important strategic partner for many reasons and we should be looking at every opportunity to cooperate more closely.”

Washington is not pushing the pace. “The Japanese are definitely keen,” acknowledges Michael Green, a senior Asian affairs specialist in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who is now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “Full ‘Five Eyes’ is not on the cards,” he adds, “but there is support for an à la carte role for Japan.”

The most obvious inhibition is cited by another US specialist on Northeast Asian strategic affairs, Brad Glosserman, now at Tama University in Tokyo and previously at the CSIS offshoot in Hawaii, Pacific Forum. Japan’s partners recognised the value of its intelligence product, he writes, but worried about the security of information they gave Tokyo. Laws to protect official secrets passed by Abe’s government in 2013 have not completely allayed those concerns.

“The Japanese leak like a sieve and the idea of the secrecy laws is all about trying to plug those leaks or make it more difficult to leak,” adds a former senior Australian official closely involved with Japan. “If they were ever going to have access to high-level information they needed to assure the US and other Five Eyes partners they weren’t going to read it on the front page of the Nikkei the next day.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, agrees that more work is needed. “It is widely believed that Japan does not yet have the system of security clearances and standards of information protection that would be required,” he says. “Having said that, there is much that the Five Eyes could do to collaborate with Japan — and with France, the logical seventh eye and the way in to Europe.”

In seeking deeper protection for secrets, not only in military and intelligence affairs but also now in technology, Glosserman says the Five Eyes were up against “cultural obstacles” in the form of the Japanese public’s resistance to government secrecy and “thought control.”

This is certainly true, but it might be added that Abe only added to the fears with his push for great patriotism in school education, his erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster NHK, his attacks on the Asahi Shimbun and other liberal media, and his nostalgic nationalism, all of which stirred collective memories of pre-1945 conditions.

Then there’s the view from inside the clubhouse. “The second obstacle to Japan’s membership is also cultural — but this one exists among the Five Eyes members,” says Glosserman. “The group shares deep historical and cultural ties that stem from a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; they’re all native English speaking too. Seventy years of cooperation has given them a fluency, comfort and confidence that compounds their sense of identity and separation from non-members. All this is subtle and immeasurable, but it is palpable and it matters.”

Not that the Five Eyes partners share everything. During Sukarno’s Konfrontasi of Malaysia in the early 1960s, the late Hunter Wade’s position as New Zealand’s envoy in Singapore gave him a seat in its joint intelligence committee. At a certain point, Wade once told me, the British chairman would cough, and the American representative would leave. At a second cough, the Australian and New Zealand officials would exit.

During the 1999 crisis in East Timor, Canberra’s efforts to keep certain “Australian Eyes Only,” or “Austeo,” material from Washington led to the suicide of defence intelligence liaison officer Mervyn Jenkins, who had been blamed for passing it to the Americans.

But in its original core business of signals intelligence, Five Eyes has the firm rule that each partner must share, without being asked, its entire stream of “raw” material and “end product,” or the assessments made from it. The partners are not to spy on each other’s communications (unless asked), and their human intelligence agencies — the CIA, MI6, ASIS and so on — are not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission. Those are the rules, anyway.

Australia’s intelligence and military links with Japan have tightened greatly over the past two decades. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, the then secretary of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Ashton Calvert, and the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, started a regular trilateral security dialogue with Japan’s foreign ministry at vice-minister level.

Then, in 2006–07, the Australian army provided protection for Japanese military engineers in Southern Iraq. Prime minister John Howard signed a joint declaration on security cooperation with Abe during the latter’s first short spell as prime minister. As well as increasing intelligence exchange and joint operations to enforce North Korea embargoes, ASIS is reported to have joined MI6 in helping Tokyo set up its own external spy agency on the British model.

“There’s hardly anything we hold back, and they deeply appreciate that,” says Warren Reed, a self-disclosed former ASIS officer and Japanese-speaker once posted in Tokyo, whose latest spy novel, An Elephant on Your Nose, has Japanese and British agents working together against a terrorist plot. “I don’t know whether it is necessary to actually put the cherry on the cake.”

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still deciding on a successor to Abe, but it seems unlikely Taro Kono will get the job and be in a position to push his Five Eyes membership application at a higher level. As a Georgetown University graduate fluent in English, though, the relatively liberal defence minister is well placed to allay cultural reservations on both sides. And, at fifty-seven, he has more years on his side than the two front-runners for PM, Yoshihide Suga and Shigeru Ishiba, both members of the hawkish and retro-nationalist group Nippon Kaigi. His turn may yet come.

Still, if Canberra really wants to show its faith in Japan, it could openly agree to the cherry being put on the cake. •

The post No cherry on Japan’s cake appeared first on Inside Story.

Abe first resigned as prime minister for these same reasons nearly thirteen years ago. He had become Japan’s youngest postwar prime minister in 2006 with stratospheric approval ratings (in the 70 per cent range) but departed not only in poor health but with his approval ratings around or below 30 per cent. Assessing his legacy in 2007 was comparatively straightforward: he had squandered his chance of transforming Japan and fulfilling the thwarted ambitions of his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, prime minister from 1957 until 1960. He had failed, especially, on constitutional reform, the major goal of the political right in Japan.

The explanation for Abe’s first fall seemed equally obvious. He was a victim of high public expectations and the inevitable disillusionment that follows. Unlike his charismatic predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, Abe was a leaden media performer. His political judgement also proved poor. Rather than focus on economic growth and political reform, he pursued an esoteric nationalist agenda of constitutional reform, patriotic education and history denial. Instead of trying to revitalise Japanese politics, he allowed anti-reform politicians back into the government and failed to address a series of misconduct and corruption scandals. By September 2007, he was gone.

But then came the resurrection. In 2012, with his conservative Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, in opposition, and just months before a general election, Abe drew on the support of his fellow politicians to regain the party’s leadership against the wishes of rank-and-file members. The deeply unpopular coalition government led by the Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ, was swept away in the subsequent election, and Abe suddenly had a second, very unexpected, chance at power.

How well did he seize this second chance? And what will be his legacy?

Abe’s prime ministership will be known foremost for its longevity. In November last year he became Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office for 2887 days and overtaking Taro Katsura, a prime minister from the early 1900s. While at the Keio University Hospital last week, he became the longest continuously serving prime minister, overtaking his great-uncle (and Kishi’s brother) Eisaku Sato, a prime minister in the 1960s and 1970s. In short, Abe ended the revolving-door prime ministership that characterised Japanese politics from 2006 to 2012.

This longevity reflects Abe’s dominance of Japanese politics over this time. He has proven to be the most powerful Japanese political figure at least since his great-uncle’s tenure and probably since Shigeru Yoshida, who was prime minister in the 1940s and 1950s. Yoshida was helped greatly when his conservative rivals were purged by US occupation authorities. Abe has similarly benefited since 2012 from a lack of rivals within the LDP as well as the chaos and disunity among opposition parties. The DPJ disappeared in 2016 as part of a merger and its former members have subsequently burned through multiple reinventions.

But longevity and power don’t necessarily translate into lasting impact. Although Abe changed Japan in some important ways, he has also struggled to halt the deeper historical forces, international and domestic, that are challenging and reshaping the country and its place in the world.

Abe’s most consequential reforms came in security policy. He oversaw substantial reforms in Japan’s security-related institutions, strategic doctrine and defence spending. But his most significant legacy will be constitutional change. Abe never did formally revise the constitution as he wished. But he did manage to “reinterpret” Article 9 — the famous “peace clause” — in a way that could have enormous implications for Japan’s future security role in the Indo-Pacific. Through a cabinet decision in July 2014, the Japanese government announced that Article 9 would henceforth allow Japan to engage in collective self-defence, albeit with certain caveats. Article 9 had previously been interpreted to prohibit Japan from using its military beyond strict self-defence. Now, if certain conditions were met, Japan could come to the defence of an ally.

This shift, legislated in 2015, was hugely unpopular in Japan but represents perhaps the single most important shift in the country’s security policy since the second world war. It effectively undoes a major plank of the security policy established by Yoshida in the early 1950s and could conceivably allow Japan to be dragged into a range of conflict scenarios, such as on the Korean peninsula, over Taiwan, or in the South China Sea.

Abe was also an active diplomat. He pursued a strongly regional foreign policy orientation that eventually coalesced into his vision for a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” Japan continued to build strategic partnerships with like-minded actors around the region, especially Australia and India, and he strongly pushed the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad,” of which Australia is a member. His regional focus also came through in economic policy. Abe kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership going after president Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the arrangement, finally effecting an agreement between all the remaining members in 2018.

Set against these successes, though, were significant failures. Japan’s foreign affairs in its immediate neighbourhood of northeast Asia remain troubled, in its relations not only with China but also with South and North Korea, as well as Russia. These relationships are beset by strategic rivalries, territorial disputes and history wars. Japan’s relationship with South Korea, with whom it shares the United States as a common ally among many strategic interests, are probably as bad as they have been since the two sides normalised diplomatic relations in 1965.

On Donald Trump, Abe has been praised for skilful diplomacy intended to massage the US president’s ego and avoid the criticism that Trump has levelled at other allies and partners. In giving Trump a gold-plated golf driver, Abe was consciously echoing Kishi’s “golf diplomacy” with president Dwight Eisenhower. But Abe’s approach has been a holding manoeuvre at best, designed to limit short-term damage in the hope that the president will be replaced by a more competent and reliable leader in this year’s presidential election. The 2019 US–Japan trade deal was one-sided, with Japan effectively agreeing under duress. Although a closer relationship with the United States had been a major goal for Abe, doubts in Tokyo regarding America’s capacity, as well as willingness, to commit to Japan’s security have flourished through the Trump presidency and will persist for the foreseeable future.

At home, Abe will leave behind an even more ambiguous legacy. When he returned to the prime ministership in 2012, he had clearly learnt lessons from his first stint, especially on the economy. Instead of neglecting this vital area, he issued what became his signature economic policy — “Abenomics.” This initiative was based on three “arrows” of reform: monetary easing, fiscal expansion and structural reform. The first two arrows would defeat deflation and boost growth, perennial problems for the Japanese economy, while structural reform would put Japan on the path towards longer-term economic growth through a range of productivity-boosting reforms.

Abenomics has achieved some limited results. But Japan’s economic growth has been precarious and intermittent over the past decade. Whenever growth faltered, the risk of deflation returned immediately, most recently with the economic damage wrought by Covid-19. Japanese companies sit on vast savings, unwilling to invest. Employment has been high, but wages stagnant. Public debt is enormous.

On the third arrow, structural reform, Abe has achieved even less. Although women’s labour force participation has risen, and Abe has partially liberalised Japanese agriculture, progress has been incredibly slow. Labour shortages have not been effectively tackled by a limited and tentative change in Japan’s highly restrictive immigration policies. Japan’s two-tier labour market has delivered a privileged, protected minority and an insecure majority. Procrastination and hesitancy have been the order of the day.

Avoiding scandal has also proved a challenge. Since 2017, Abe has been caught up, personally, in three major scandals: two involving allegations that Abe or those close to him intervened in government decision-making to benefit the interests of friends and associates — the Moritomo Gakuen and Kake Gakuen scandals — and one regarding the alleged use of public money to fund an annual cherry blossom viewing party for Abe and LDP supporters. Then, in June this year, two close political allies were arrested and charged for alleged vote buying in Hiroshima.

Tied to what has been a haphazard and sometimes ridiculed response to Covid-19 — Abe has been derided for his “Abenomasks” — these failures have begun to echo the mistakes of his failed 2006–07 tenure and led to a growing sense in Japan that his time was up. Constitutional revision was off the agenda, and then the Summer Olympics were cancelled, and political speculation began to centre on whether Abe was now a “lame duck” prime minister.

In truth, Abe’s longevity has exposed two key contradictions in his leadership. The first concerns ideology. Even as Abe has sought to reinvigorate Japan, he has been held back by his and his party’s conservatism. The goal of boosting the role of women in Japanese life has been undermined by the sexism of the LDP. This is the party, after all, with a long history of referring to women as “birth-giving machines” (umi kikai) and similar. The level of female participation in Japanese political life is woeful.

Similarly, the goal of tackling Japan’s ageing and declining population through immigration has been undermined by xenophobia within the LDP, as illustrated by deputy prime minister Taro Aso’s “single-race nation” comments early this year and Abe’s own problems with Japan’s history in Asia and his long association with far-right organisations such as Nippon Kaigi.

The second contradiction concerns power. Even as Abe has dominated Japanese politics and concentrated authority within his office, his capacity to shape events seems to have shrunk. This is partly due to Abe’s own ideological constraints and corruption scandals, but it also points to the strength of the historical winds buffeting Japan. Internationally, the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States have upended seventy years of generally stable strategic security. This is compounded by the rise of populism, protectionism and authoritarianism around the world since 2008, not to mention the global coronavirus pandemic this year. Domestically, Japan’s ageing population and the country’s various economic maladies appear beyond the ability of Japan’s political establishment to solve. A key part of the problem is a gerrymandered electoral system that systemically benefits older rural voters over younger urban ones and thus, unsurprisingly, prioritises the status quo over change.

Abe’s ultimate legacy, therefore, will be complex and contradictory rather than simple or self-evident. But what does this mixed record say about Japan’s future? The immediate problem concerns Abe’s likely successor. Numerous candidates are jockeying for position inside the LDP. Three names stand out, but each has drawbacks. Shigeru Ishiba, a defence hawk, is relatively popular among the public but not within the LDP. Fumio Kishida has policy credentials and a sense of Japan’s international challenges, having served as foreign minister, but also lacks factional support within the LDP. Yoshihide Suga, an Abe loyalist, is the continuity candidate. He is widely credited with strong bureaucratic skills and seems to have the support of the LDP’s dominant faction. At seventy-one, however, he may only be a transitional leader.

The next lower house election is due by October next year. With this in mind, the Democratic Party for the People, or DPP, and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (two successors to the Democratic Party, itself a successor to the DPJ) recently agreed to merge, with the new party to become the country’s largest opposition force. But Japan’s opposition remains deeply divided, with some DPP figures declining to join the new party because of personnel and policy differences. Accordingly, the next prime minister may seek to call an early election to exploit these ongoing divisions and extend the LDP’s grip on power. Much will depend on whether the pandemic is kept in check and how its economic effects play out.

For all his longevity as prime minister and his substantial achievements, Abe leaves behind much unfinished business, internationally and at home. More significantly, perhaps, he departs politics suddenly and at a time of crisis. His immediate legacy therefore may simply be to add leadership instability to Japan’s many other challenges. •

The post Has Shinzo Abe left a lasting legacy? appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet, in the midst of a global pandemic that originated in the region, and at a time when China’s rise is shaking geopolitical certainties throughout the world, one of our major national institutions has decided to turn away from Asia. Ironically, the same institution was a pioneer of Asian engagement.

For almost seven decades, the National Library of Australia has been building one of the world’s most extensive collections of Southeast and Northeast Asian material. The legacy of accumulated investment and collecting by specialist curators, its store of Asian newspapers and periodicals, books, government documents and other rare materials is among the great treasure troves of Asian studies, and the most extensive Asia collection in the southern hemisphere. Researchers visit from around the world, and the collection is a foundation stone of decades of effort to build sustained and deep knowledge of Asia at Australian universities.

Now, much of this is to be abandoned. In a new “collection development policy” — the document that lays out what and how the library will collect — the library has dramatically downgraded its emphasis on overseas collecting. It has removed key Asian countries from its list of priorities; it has closed its Asian Collections Room; it has cancelled subscriptions to hundreds of Asian periodicals.

Several specialist librarians with Asian language skills — crucial for managing existing holdings to say nothing of extending them — have recently retired and not been replaced, or have been replaced at a lower level. The future of current specialist staff working on Asian language collections is in doubt. Though the library maintains it will still prioritise three Asian countries — China, Indonesia and Timor-Leste — signs suggest that this collecting will be severely downgraded.

As its own website explains, the National Library has been developing its Asia collections since the 1950s. They are a legacy of the Menzies era when, learning from the deadly experience of the second world war, Australia’s federal government decided it needed to build deeper knowledge of the region in which Australia is located. Even as the White Australia policy continued to restrict Asian immigration, the library began to collect materials from Asian countries and in Asian languages. It was thus the forerunner of a broader Asian turn that followed in other Australian institutions, including universities, schools and, eventually, the private sector.

Even as the vision of Australian engagement with Asia has waxed and waned at the federal level down the years, the library has kept its eyes firmly fixed on the region. It has built up a rich collection, including — in the case of many of the Southeast Asian collections, as well as the remarkable North Korean collection — newspapers, political documents and other materials that are now difficult if not impossible to obtain in those countries.

The new collection development policy makes it clear that the library is turning inward, sharpening the focus on Australian materials. Thankfully, the Asia-Pacific will remain the priority in overseas collecting, but the scope of the reduction leaves only part of the previous Asia strategy intact. Countries that have been a major focus for decades — notably Japan and Korea, and also all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia — have been dropped altogether from the list of priority countries for collecting. Collections that have been developed over decades will now wither on the vine of neglect.

From a national interest perspective, this makes little sense. Of course, Australian collections must be the centrepiece of Australia’s national library. But if we accept that Australia’s fate is inextricably linked to our region — as all Australian governments since Menzies have believed — then we must recognise that knowledge of the region is important too. Understanding Australia requires that we understand our Asian context. This is the approach that has guided the library in the past.

Nothing in the external environment has changed. Asia has become more not less important to Australia: note, for example, that two of the countries just dropped as priorities (Korea and Japan) were among the top four trading partners of Australia last year. One of the digital subscriptions cancelled by the library covered local newspapers throughout China, including in Hubei province, the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Given this context, and with so many sunk costs in an Asia collection that rivals the best in the world, why walk away now? The main reason is depressingly familiar: funding cuts. Many years of “efficiency dividends,” as well as major cuts under prime minister Tony Abbott, have severely curtailed the library’s budget. It now barely has enough money to manage basic functions such as providing shelf storage for its constantly growing collection or maintaining its ageing ventilation systems. The shift to digitisation has placed new pressures on the library’s budget, which it has been able to cover only partly with special purpose grants (which don’t fix the underlying problem).

The decline in base funding has been relentless. According to my calculations using data in the library’s annual reports, it experienced roughly a 15 per cent cut in government income (adjusted for inflation) in the years between 2009–10 and 2017–18 alone. (Take out a special grant for a Captain Cook exhibition held in 2018 and the decline is even steeper.) In the same period the population of Australia grew by 14 per cent, further increasing the library’s domestic collecting burden, but the number of library staff fell by 20 per cent, from about 500 to 400.

No institution can survive cuts like this without paring back basic programming. Something had to give. Given the library is statutorily obliged to build an Australian collection, it decided the deepest cuts would be in overseas collecting, of which the Asia-Pacific has always been a major component.

Government spending is an expression of political priorities, of course, and the library has obviously lacked effective champions in government. This becomes clear when we realise that not all of the national cultural institutions have suffered in the same way. In 2018, for example, the government announced a funding boost of $498 million to redevelop the Australian War Memorial. Where there is political will, funding can be found.

The irony in all of this is that the federal government remains rhetorically committed to building Asia knowledge. Government documents proclaim that Australia needs to promote its “soft power” in the region, in part by demonstrating seriousness about Asia. A National Library that is increasingly inward-looking points in exactly the opposite direction. •

The post Asia illiteracy appeared first on Inside Story.

In late February, I visited Japan for the first time. Covid-19 was on the move, but it still seemed feasible to make this short, long-planned trip. Planes were flying normal schedules; lockdowns hadn’t yet begun. But all that would change with frightening speed, and Japan would soon offer an unlikely link between two scenarios of Australia in momentous conditions, one of them an imagined nuclear war, the other the pandemic we are experiencing now.

No sooner had I arrived than Japan started to close its museums and galleries. Unexpectedly, and disappointingly, I couldn’t visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, one of the country’s most historically significant places. But I was free to walk around the nearby A-Bomb Dome, the ruins of a building 600 metres beneath where America detonated the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare.

Dropped from the Enola Gay on 6 August 1945, the bomb killed an estimated 200,000 people with its blast or from burns and radiation poisoning, and obliterated the city of Hiroshima. America dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later, bringing an end to the Pacific war that Japan had started four years earlier when it attacked Pearl Harbor with conventional bombs.

Hiroshima became a symbol for the anti-nuclear movement that emerged during the ensuing cold war. By the time Nevil Shute wrote his novel On the Beach in 1957, there was a sense that the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union could become a hot war at any minute.

Shute was a British-born aeronautical engineer and novelist who had worked for the British Admiralty during the second world war. He flew his own plane to Australia in 1948, returning two years later to settle at Langwarrin, near Melbourne. His novels about Australia, including A Town Like Alice, brought him great success, but none matched On the Beach. Capturing the fears hanging over the world of that era, it became an instant global bestseller.

On the Beach is set in 1963, in and around Melbourne, after radioactive fallout from a nuclear war between the two superpowers has obliterated life elsewhere on Earth. An estimated five months remain before the radiation will engulf Australia, too. Stanley Kramer, a Hollywood producer and director, snapped up the rights to Shute’s novel, and filmed it on location in Melbourne in 1959 with some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the day: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.

When we think of global threats to humanity, nuclear war and pandemics usually top the list. Their impacts, of course, would be different, though no one is sure exactly how different. I had happened to visit Hiroshima in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the atomic bombing. When I returned to Australia in early March, I was struck by a similar sense of the doom that pervades Shute’s novel and Kramer’s movie, the latter enhanced by the brilliant black-and-white imagery of the Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno.

Shute’s story is one of despair at how humans have managed the world, and especially their incapacity to heed warnings. “Newspapers,” one of his characters says, suggesting how serious warnings about nuclear war could have gone out. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault.”

Social media may well play an even worse role in today’s silliness. Serious warnings about a global pandemic were equally overlooked. “If anything kills ten million people over the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” the tech billionaire Bill Gates warned five years ago. “We’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents, but we have actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic… We need to do simulations. Germ games, not war games.”

Shute would not have imagined it in 1957, but his picture of a world closing down under a nuclear catastrophe uncannily mirrors many of the social curbs and human emotions evoked six decades later by a virus that seemingly has the power to destabilise populations and devastate economies.

Melbourne’s normally bustling landmarks, such as Flinders Street Station and the forecourt at the State Library of Victoria, are almost as devoid of people today as they were at the end of Shute’s story. Australians stranded around the world have been rushing to fly back to the security of their home soil, even if it has suddenly become very insecure. Americans in On the Beach wanted to do the same thing.

In Kramer’s film, one of the most chilling yet poignant scenes involves a reconnaissance trip from Melbourne by the nuclear-powered submarine the USS Scorpion, the last surviving vessel in the American navy, to investigate a strange radar signal from the American west coast. When it reaches San Francisco Bay one of its American crew, Ralph Swain (played with a masterly American accent by the Australian actor John Meillon), jumps ship and swims to the shore of his home city, where life has ceased to exist. Ignoring a loudhailer order to return from the sub’s commander, Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), he calls back, “I have a date on Market Street, Captain. I’m going home.”

Then, as now, the fear of a force that can change lives forever, or end them, prevails. “I’m afraid,” Moira Davidson, Ava Gardner’s character in Shute’s story, tells her old flame, the scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire). “I have nobody.” On 2 April Anthony Albanese, the Labor leader, told ABC radio in Melbourne that he had walked along a queue stretching about 200 metres from the Centrelink office in his Sydney electorate, talking to people who had lost livelihoods. “Everyone is polite,” he said. “That is the nature of our community. But many of them are distraught, they’re distressed.”

In his account of Australia’s political functioning in a cold war cataclysm, Shute also presaged what is happening now. “With no aircraft flying on the airlines,” he wrote, “federal government from Canberra was growing difficult, and parliamentary sessions there were growing shorter and less frequent.”

In fact, they have now stopped. Parliament has been suspended until August, although Scott Morrison suggests it might come back for a “trial week sometime in May.” For the first time in its history, Canberra airport was closed for two days in April in the absence of scheduled flights. On 21 April, just three arrivals and three departures were scheduled.

Japan, too, portends how Australia will be isolated from the wider world. During my visit, the country had seemed to prepare for Covid-19 more seriously than Australia had. Everyone, everywhere, wore face masks, trains and buses bore special electronic signs warning against infection, hotels and restaurants insisted on visitors using hand sanitiser before entering. Japanese norms of complying with official directions had helped to keep infection rates relatively low.

By late March, even with five times Australia’s population, it had fewer cases of Covid-19 than Australia. More than 10,000 cases later, it has one-and-a-half times Australia’s number, according to the World Health Organization. Under criticism for not imposing stronger social restrictions earlier, prime minister Shinzo Abe finally declared a national state of emergency on 16 April.

Japan’s popularity as a destination for Australians had been growing, with 600,000 Australians visiting last year. Four airlines had direct flights from Japan to six Australian cities. By early April, flights had diminished to just three a week, all of them to Sydney by one airline, ANA. Richard Court, Australia’s ambassador to Japan, wrote to Australians in Japan recently warning of uncertainty about whether any flights at all to Australia would continue after 24 April.

Despite how it may have seemed, Australians are not facing the end of the world, as they were in Nevil Shute’s novel. Nevertheless, as governments splurge money, increase controls over the lives of people and businesses, and watch gingerly how global power will shape up after the emergency, many realise that the world will never be quite the same again.

There is one other difference between the Australia of Shute’s catastrophe and the current one. Far from observing social isolation back then, Australians coped with the fear of impending annihilation by partying hard.

In the Melbourne of On the Beach, “restaurants and cafes were all full, doing a roaring trade; the bars were shut, but the streets were full of drunks. The general effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness… There was no traffic in the wide streets but for the trams, and people swarmed all over the road. As they passed the Regal Cinema a man, staggering along in front of them, fell down, paused for a moment upon hands and knees, and rolled dead drunk into the gutter. Nobody paid much attention to him.”

It will be a while before Melbourne sees such scenes again. •

The post Off the beach appeared first on Inside Story.

Cheery patriotism, benign internationalism, girl talent, radiant humour, sheer pizzazz: it’s all here. Lines from a world away ping in my ear: “The vale of tears is powerless before you… / Monsters of the year / go blank, are scattered back.”

That was back in January 2019, at a small railway station north of Tokyo. Local primary school students’ classroom posters for the city’s 2020 Olympics, fifty in all, had — for a few days only, it turned out — taken the place of advertising boards. Pure chance had put me there, and no doubt the discovery’s random and fleeting nature was part of the delight. Now, thirteen months on, as the Olympics inch towards the finishing line — warily eyeing the coronavirus’s spurt in the outside lane — that Miyahara hour feels as distant as the moon.

In part, that’s because a year ago the Olympics (here, the term embraces the Paralympics) were still more background hum than daily buzz. The transition to a new imperial era and the detention of Nissan-Renault executive Carlos Ghosn led the news, while the big sporting fixture on the horizon was rugby’s world cup. Even broadcaster NHK’s latest year-long Sunday night historical drama, Idaten, lacked sparkle. With the ageless Takeshi Kitano as a comic-monologue rakugoka, the series told Japan’s Olympics story from 1908 to Tokyo’s hosting in 1964. Artistic flaws, premature scheduling and the chilly media landscape for national broadcasters may have contributed, but lowish ratings also hinted that the public would catch up with the Olympics at its own pace.

With this new year’s diary switch, the Games of the XXXII Olympiad (24 July–9 August) and the XVI Paralympic Games (25 August–6 September) appeared in plain sight. A wealth of trimmings — days-to-go countdowns, transport ads, hi-tech promotions, festivals, merchandise, books — was making them inescapable. A December poll asking “Is it good for Japan to host the Olympics?” found 86 per cent said yes, 12 per cent no. The most popular reason was “a good opportunity to show Japanese culture to the world.” Tokyo 2020 was nearing the last lap in some comfort.

At that very point came a pebble in the shoe. The circulating respiratory disease 2019-nCoV, at first a down-page story, hit home on 20 January, when the imminent (and routinely welcome) arrival of thousands of Chinese tourists on their new year holiday became mixed with alarm that some high-spenders might prove virus-spreaders. A Japanese coach driver and guide tested positive, as did scores of international cruise-ship passengers quarantined at Yokohama, three elderly Japanese among them dying after disembarkation. Face masks and hand sanitisers sold out. Inevitably, the Olympics entered the frame. Yoshirō Mori, octogenarian head of Japan’s Olympics Committee, gave faltering assurances that the games would go ahead, but virology professor Hitoshi Oshitani and other Japanese specialists are wary.

The first Japanese death, of a posthumously diagnosed woman in her eighties east of Tokyo, came on 13 February. It had no obvious link to Wuhan. This was a second turning point. A recent vogue word, feizu (phase) — as in atarashii (new) feizu or feizu ga kawatta (the phase has changed) — was much used, soon followed by kurasutā (cluster). The mainland incidence of the renamed Covid-19 grew daily, reaching 146 on 25 February (with another 691 on the stricken ship).

Nerves, rightly, are jangling at the prospect of Tokyo 2020 being overtaken on the home stretch. But brains are also in overdrive managing the parallel tests of containing the virus and keeping the Olympics show on the road. Japan’s spring rituals are cutting back: the Emperor’s open day on 23 February, the annual Tokyo marathon on 1 March, school graduations, companies’ welcome to fresh recruits. And more dates are crowding in.

The torch relay of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures starts on 26 March in Fukushima, site of the nuclear meltdown on 11 March 2011 (or “3.11”). Public commemorations of that day’s triple disaster in the Tōhoku region (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear), which took 18,000 lives, will also shrink, as will remembrances of Tokyo’s sarin gas attack on 20 March 1995, which killed thirteen people. Pre-Olympic training and publicity events are thinning (or, for volunteers, going online) and the sense of diminishment is widespread. Abreast of the Olympics, yes, but primarily alert to the lung-attacking illness, Japan’s public is in a very different situation from even a month ago.

For as long as the virus flourishes, the games’ destiny is on hold. Turning back, even scaling down, looks unthinkable given the funds, deals, careers and reputations at stake. It would not be Japan’s decision alone, or even mainly. Covid-19 is mandating big transnational call-offs too: flights, conventions, Formula One. If the Olympics must go because of a worldwide health emergency, they will.

In aggregate, the incipient pandemic and sporting extravaganza presage a global moment. Covid-19 already serves as another topical lesson in the current human system’s fragility, and in the Olympics’ habit of crystallising global uncertainties even as they seek to dissolve them. Even that might not earn the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, overdue scrutiny. But Tokyo 2020 and Japan’s authorities, which own the Olympics’ share of Covid-19’s fallout, can’t long avoid the glare.

At the time of writing, the official Olympics line is unchanged. News and sports bulletins still hug their own track. A Japanese cabinet office poll on 17 February found 36 per cent saying the government is handling the crisis well, 52 per cent not. The government’s latest draft policy, announced on 25 February, focuses on keeping serious cases to a minimum, reducing social mixing and then, as needed, “asking the public to stay indoors.”

Covid-19 aside, insofar as that is possible, a just-completed stay in and around Tokyo has given me an insight into the efficacy of the plans made and messages honed since the 2013 bid was won. That bid, in turn, drew inspiration from Tokyo 1964. Tokyo 2020’s use of these two legacies is also in play now — and even perhaps its link to a third, 1940’s phantom games. That said, the supremely ambitious “recovery Olympics,” its motto “united by emotion,” will not easily be given up. The rest of this article touches on four of the many local aspects of this approaching world story: Tokyo 2020’s concept, locations, hazards and 1964 prototype.

Until Covid-19 hit, Tokyo 2020 had come almost unscathed through its seven-year gestation. There had been bumps on the road, and to say these didn’t deflect progress would only be half true. The other half is that the project raced ahead of them, its eyes on a prize outranking even the games themselves: Japan’s regeneration. The twin affective levers of this strategic purpose were the host city’s magnetism and that clever promotional tag on the 2013 bid: the “recovery and reconstruction Olympics” (soon, the first term was deemed to be enough).

Embedded in the notion was a subtle linkage of domestic and international audiences. The 3.11 tragedy, two years before, was still prominent in the nation’s psyche, while in many international minds it was recalled less for its dreadful images and heartbreaking stories than for the well-reported fortitude and dignity of survivors.

In this context, “recovery” gave Tokyo’s impressive sales pitch — and then its delivery plans — a quintuple kick. It deployed global admiration for Japanese kizuna (solidarity) and energetic voluntarism in the 3.11 aftermath. It positioned the Olympics as a means both to enhance Japan’s global standing and to inject prosperity — largely via tourism — into the country’s less favoured regions, notably Tōhoku itself. It mustered to the cause the omotenashi (hospitality) awaiting visitors. It readied Japan’s domestic sectors, and citizens for the challenges to come.

And the fifth ingredient: it displayed Japan as, in effect, twice over a phoenix nation. Just as Tokyo 1964 was intended to mark a turn from post-1945 pains towards modernisation and international respectability, Tokyo 2020 would be a route from 3.11’s destruction towards a more dynamic economy and a confident, outward-looking country. A parable of redemption from ruination thus bound the two events and eras.

That uplifting story looks most credible in two parts of Tokyo: the Kasumigaoka area of Shinjuku, where a new national stadium designed by architect Kengo Kuma has replaced the 1964 one on the same site, and the giant stepping stones of reclaimed land towards Odaiba, where athletics, tennis and swimming complexes are levers of an even more comprehensive project set to pull this vast city’s centre of gravity to the southeast.

Walking from Sendagaya station in mid January, an early glimpse of Kuma’s feat is the unobtrusive fit of his bowl with its environment. Closer up, a tiered mesh of walkways, timber pillars and greenery brings home his “living tree” designation. Across the road, a new Olympics museum bustles with active seniors and junior high students on school trips. More gather for group photos in the landscaped area outside, whose installations — a popular replica of the Olympic rings, the 1964 cauldron, and statues of the educator-athlete Kanō Jigorō, an Idaten hero, and Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement — are a model of spatial-social awareness.

Kanō Jigorō watching over Kengo Kuma’s Olympic stadium. David Hayes

The stadium area is rich in associations with the Meiji era (1868–1912), and nearby gardens, galleries and shrines give it a stately air. By contrast, to walk from glitzy Ginza over the Sumida River’s Kachidoki Bridge and onto Harumi Island — with its construction sites and towering new blocks, huge trucks thundering past on the gaping expressway — is to touch the future (ten minutes after the phrase hit, I disquietingly spotted it on a come-to-buy sign). An immense sky, rare from ground level inside Tokyo’s urban maze, enhances the sense of virgin territory, as does the surrounding water. Ginza, thirty minutes to the north, is already way past.

On Toyosu Island a hi-tech wholesale food market, relocated from creaking Tsukiji in late 2018 after a bitter wrangle, now keeps the tourist and business clocks in more equable sync. Ariake brings the Olympics into fuller view, its gleaming hotels, shopping malls, parks and railway stations as much a showcase as its sports facilities. Tokyo’s southeast flatlands were (like Ginza itself, and Asakusa and Taitō) once synonymous with the pungent culture of the shitamachi (low-lying tenement districts) that made the city’s wares, saw to its daily needs and kept it entertained. That phase in the city’s history is over, its legacy now most palpable in booming nostalgia for the Shōwa era (1926–89).

This airport-strip-like series of artificial islands ends at Odaiba, once fortified to deter any foreign incursion after Commodore Perry’s “black ships” probed Edo (later Tokyo) Bay in 1853–54. An observation deck is well placed to scan the official Olympic rings, which were hauled offshore by a barge on 17 January, as well as the athletes’ village on Toyosu (destined to become apartments), Tokyo’s glittering night skyline and, in the early morning — a kindly guard assures me on a grey afternoon — a beautiful view of Fujisan.

Throngs of amiable international tourists, mostly Chinese, were busily recording the sights, particularly Gundam, a giant humanoid robot. It was a foretaste of peak Tokyo during the northern hemisphere’s high summer. Two days later the Asahi Shimbun was reporting that an “old-fashioned confectionery shop” in the mountain resort of Hakone had already banned Chinese nationals from entering.

That day, the breathtaking scale and detail of Tokyo’s groundwork exuded promise of a mega-event that could well equal Sydney’s and London’s instant acclaim. Yet there was never, on either side of Covid-19, any guarantee of a smooth Olympics landing.

For one thing, the trek has been bumpy, even by host cities’ usual standards. The late architect Zaha Hadid’s florid stadium proposal was annulled in favour of local hero Kuma, to a many-sided uproar in the profession. (“The government is skilfully manipulating the public’s xenophobia,” said Arata Isozaki, who had nonetheless called Hadid’s design “a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away.”) An emblem design was replaced after plagiarism charges. Japan’s previous Olympic Committee president resigned over vote-buying. The ticket lottery and volunteer systems were skewed. Mounting costs fuelled regional ire over Japan’s Tokyo-centricity.

Tokyo’s Odaiba precinct. David Hayes

The IOC, like FIFA and other sporting hegemons an unaccountable nexus of commercial and political power, floats above all this: secure in its lucrative commercial deals, outsourcing of costs to the host, exclusion of local businesses from the jamboree, and covetous ticket allocations to members, family and cronies. On the big picture, the University of Lausanne’s Emmanuel Bayle, writing in 2019, is lethally restrained:

[There] are still no real international checks and balances on the governance of the IOC or the [International Sports Federations] within an Olympic System that now includes numerous stakeholders. Given the growing financial importance of the Olympic phenomenon and the Olympic Games, improper conduct, including poor governance, corruption, worship of mammon, doping and the use of sport to further geopolitical or economic aims, has the potential to severely damage the reputations of the IOC and organisations belonging to the Olympic System.

For another thing, these base mishaps and lockdowns join a high gambit shared by the IOC and Japan long before Covid-19 was heard of: the very decision to hold the Olympics and Paralympics in the country’s hot and humid summer, which is also its usual typhoon season. The 1964 games took place in October, safely beyond (as it happened) a torrid summer of water shortages. Today, American NBA and European soccer schedules, holy to sponsors and broadcasters, make such a diary shift unthinkable.

One peril of the wager is a repeat of October’s immense Reiwa 1 East Japan Typhoon, or Hagibis, the fourth such calamity in Japan since July 2018. Such typhoons’ increasing frequency and power is leading to “a major shift in Japan’s disaster policy,” says Koji Ikeuchi, Tokyo University professor of civil engineering and expert in water-related disasters. Hagibis forced the cancellation of three matches in rugby’s world cup, which pales against the ninety-eight deaths it inflicted, although the competition, spread nationwide to droves of enthused niwaka (overnight fans), absorbed the damage with an uplifting mix of brio and respect for the victims.

The same university’s Earthquake Research Institute works on the basis of a 70 to 80 per cent probability of a mega-quake by 2050 in the Nankai Trough, a Pacific Ocean trench under much of southern Japan. Tokyo itself may be more resilient than in 1923, its plans to cope elaborate, but its vulnerabilities — including its below-sea-level southeast’s exposure to storm surges — are a fact. The inner earth sends frequent reminders. The effects even of Ibaraki’s magnitude 4.8 quake at 2am on 1 February shook this non-tyro foreigner. “The ground is adjusting,” said one of my Japanese family, lightly, in the morning.

A dispute over health pressures on endurance athletes pushed the IOC, to its credit, to transfer marathon and race-walking events to Sapporo, the main city of Hokkaido on Japan’s northern island. There, July temperatures are on average five to six degrees cooler than Tokyo’s. “A painful decision, not an agreement,” protested Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s mayor. This climate-related concession leaves the outdoor program more than usually exposed to extreme heat and humidity.

Japan’s national tourist association expects forty million visitors in Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area during the events. Measures to alleviate any discomfort include free ice cream, artificial snow (the real thing is getting scarcer), heat-blocking road surfaces, and shade trees. The IOC entourage might not need those: its Tokyo base is — where else? — Ginza’s Imperial Hotel.

For all these hurdles and pitfalls, opposition has been relatively muted. A spate of books in 2013–16 assailed the choice of Tokyo, and anti-Olympics pressure groups such as Hangorin no Kai (No Olympics 2020) sprang into life. Resisting the inevitable became harder as the post-Rio juggernaut got into gear and prime minister Shinzō Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party cruised towards its third landslide in five years. But critics such as the indefatigable sports journalist Gentaro Taniguchi — whose new book says the Olympics “are at the mercy of commercialism and nationalism” — and the tabloid Nikkan Gendai newspaper continue to carry a dissident torch.

Tokyo 2020’s confidence, meanwhile, grew with each passing hitch. At its core is that parable of rebirth from rubble, a chain that goes beyond 3.11 to Tokyo 1964 — a future-oriented event that was only later seen in cyclical relation to Tokyo 1945 and the terrible fire-bombing that razed it and dozens more Japanese cities.

From the start, Japan’s second summer games have drawn heavily on the moral capital and potent symbolism of the first. The latter’s five-year run-up was politically febrile, but Tokyo 1964 turned out to be a landmark in the nation’s history. What made it so, above all, was that an unrepeatable psychic and experiential mix brought Japanese people, collectively and in their individual millions, to an (albeit complex) emotional release.

Such is the kernel of a tremendous NHK documentary, the fifteenth in its A Century in Moving Images series. Its archive footage of Tokyo’s pre-Olympics mania of demolition and construction depicts the capital as reeking, jammed, litter-strewn — and parched. Four months before the games, only 2.2 per cent of Tokyoites named them as a top priority, while 59.2 per cent said other issues (above all, a water shortage) were more important. With two days to go, the heavens burst: a cleansing typhoon.

Optimism took flight with sporting success, Japan’s sixteen golds earning third place in the medals table. Further buoyancy came from displays of popular enthusiasm, from avid crowds on the torch and marathon routes to the finale’s unexpected happy chaos. Athletes mingled and hearts melted to a mass chorus of the school graduation tear-jerker “Hotaru no Hikari” (“Light of Fireflies”), Japan’s emperor doffing his hat when a Kiwi athlete blew him a kiss.

The imprint of Japan’s 1937–45 wars is everywhere in the NHK series, as a marker of closeness and distance alike. Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima prefecture ninety minutes after the atomic bombing, lit the Olympic flame in 1964. Tadashi Matsudaira, engineer on the Tokyo–Osaka (Tōkaidō) Shinkansen, launched days before the games began, had worked on the navy’s wartime Zero attack planes. The novelist Sonoko Sugimoto, aged eighteen, heard prime minister Hideki Tojo address a mass rally of conscripted students on the same stadium site in 1943. (“Today is also connected to the past. I feel fearful of that fact.”) Hirobumi Daimatsu, oni (demon) coach of the women’s volleyballers who won gold against the Soviet Union, had survived the 1944 battle of Kohima; he played driving father to the textile factory team, several of whom had grown up without one, and later go-between.

Many intellectuals, including Yukio Mishima and Yasushi Inoue, were moved by the Olympics experience. (Kodansha’s instant collection of writers’ responses was republished in 2014.) The novelist Hitomi Yamaguchi, who saw in the marathon a spirit of human fellowship, had another epiphany when the hinomaru (national flag) was hoisted after Japan’s great hope Kōkichi Tsuburaya took bronze in the race. “For the first time since the war I could see the flag raised without any dejection. With no hesitation, a good feeling. Tsuburaya-kun, arigato!”

But Tokyo’s frenzied makeover, with its many ravages, led Akiyukii Nosaka and Takeshi Kaikō (Kaikō Ken) to ambiguous self-reflection. Only now that old neighbourhoods are gone, and links to a discreditable past broken — wrote Nosaka, with a hint here of his own — is it possible to look back without shame: a “half improvement.” Kaikō’s year-long reports for Asahi Weekly, often featuring the low-paid, insecure workers sweating to finish behemoths on time, concluded with one titled “Sayonara, Tokyo.” A fragmented city had become a mirror of his own anguish: “Walking around Tokyo, the more I knew the less I could understand. Just asking continually is the only answer — that’s all I can say.”

Tokyo 1964’s great dramas and intense emotions, understandably shorn of complexity, define its place in public memory. For 3.11, the agony of human loss and destruction does the same. Tokyo 2020 seeks to honour the two moments, in the latter case with gestures of symbolic inclusion at every stage during the games and by delivering promised reconstruction afterwards.

Astute as the prospectus is, its tone can’t help but imply that Tokyo 2020, even before it has happened, transcends these unique and dreadful precedents (and not only because it comes later). Its driving aim sounds assimilative, its wreckage-to-riches tale prescriptive, its insistent amity cloying. Its very seamlessness recalls the critic Jun Etō’s take on postwar censorship under American occupation: “a closed linguistic space.” There is a lack of humility. In the apt Irish phrase, Tokyo 2020 has lost the run of itself.

Tokyo 2020’s slick fusion of utility and piety has always left room for a scepticism that — like the many waterways buried in concrete by the first Olympics — runs deeper than mere opposition. In Kōtō-ku library, above a room lovingly devoted to film director (and local boy) Yasujirō Ozu, I came across a rich photographic record of 1964 in Tokyo, published in December by the Japan Press Research Institute and Kyodo News. The editor’s then-and-now reflection is pointed, even moving (and the last word, having come to it independently days earlier, was stunning to read):

The Japanese people [in 1964] were overwhelmed by the competition from foreign athletes. They had a feeling of yearning and a renewed sense of patriotism, while suffering from an inferiority complex about their backwardness… [Japan on the eve of 2020] is becoming more confident of its national power and sports. But Japan has lost a sense of freshness, dedication and humility.

More sweeping is the verdict of an acquaintance, a civil engineer in his fifties, who in lucidly cynical English cites a litany of reasons why Japan “has no need” for the Olympics now. As we talk in Ōmiya’s beautiful new public library, across the border in Saitama prefecture, T-san holds responsible a government with “no strategy, direction, vision,” and an “anachronistic” education system that holds young people back. The accursed games are, in this view, the epitome of a wider national and civic malaise.

Such bleakness could turn out to be justified without being vindicated. John Rennie Short skewers the IOC cohort’s fourfold “event capture” (infrastructural, financial, legal, political) that traps hosts even as they promise their citizens a new dawn. The post-Olympics backlash tends to take hold a year later, as debts mount, scams leak and memories fade. Its own passing can, in some cases, rekindle the original glow. Tokyo 1964’s homegrown hangover included a spate of bankruptcies, political imbroglios and environmental scandals. Yet its reputation soars above them. Tokyo 2020 could, assuming it delivers the initial goods, extend the pattern. The Olympic dream machine grinds facts, and critics to dust.

More immediately for Tokyo 2020, everything depends on Covid-19’s course. Nothing is foreordained — or foreclosed. The soon-to-be-pandemic, expanding in Iran, Italy and South Korea, continues to reset plans and minds in Japan. One plausible scenario is that a call-off becomes imperative as grim diagnostics rally an international bandwagon of competitors. Another, were a path to the games to be cleared, is that Tokyo 2020 audaciously enfolds the virus’s retreat into the “recovery Olympics” tale. A third, darker vista was seeded prior to the infection’s surge, in a tech store I visited where licensed Olympics merchandise adjoined disaster prevention goods. If they were to overlap during the games, Tokyo 2020’s mighty edifice would not escape the damage.

If it is to be the first, quick is best. If the third, preparing and praying will have to do. For everyone’s sake, sportspeople and worldwide niwaka foremost, the second must be devoutly hoped for. Let it be a great Olympics — and the last in this form. Neither Japan nor anyone else should indulge the IOC and its kind any longer. Once, under the station rafters, Miyahara’s elementary school students “put paid to fate, it abdicates.” Now, monsters of the year are regrouping. Those who would be on the angels’ side need seriously to raise their own game. •

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In early July, seemingly out of the blue, Shinzo Abe’s government restricted exports of three chemicals vital to South Korea’s high-tech industries, citing national security concerns. The row escalated quickly, with both countries taking other trade items out of the “white channels” that allow for quick customs clearance, and the South Koreans mounting a consumer boycott of everything Japanese, from Uniqlo clothing to hot-spring resorts across the Tsushima Strait.

According to Jeffrey Kingston, a professor of Japanese politics at Temple University Japan in Tokyo, Shinzo Abe is using trade as a “cudgel to get his way on other unrelated matters, right out of the Donald Trump playbook of scorched-earth diplomacy.” The acrimony was on display at an Asian security forum meeting in Bangkok this month: when the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, tried to get the foreign ministers of the two countries to pose with him for a happy photo, Taro Kono and Kang Kyung-wha twisted away, scowling.

The squabble is a case study in how visceral nationalism and historical memory can push aside what seems like economic and strategic rationality. It is a serious breach within the array of Asian democracies that America, along with Australia, hopes to bind together as a counterweight to China’s strategic rise. Yet it was not mentioned when Pompeo later visited Sydney for bilateral talks, at least in public statements.

The stoush began brewing in 2017 when South Korea’s conservative former president, Park Geun-hye, was removed from office by impeachment over an influence-peddling scandal involving the heir of the Samsung industrial conglomerate. Her replacement, the centre left’s Moon Jae-in, reopened the issue of the “comfort women” — the young women, many from Korea, forced or deceived into working as sex slaves for the Japanese during the second world war — which Abe thought he had finally settled with Park in a 2015 agreement.

At this point, an earlier agreement that Japan had also thought “final and irreversible” came under question, too. South Korean courts, which have a tendency to follow the political wind, awarded damages of around A$100,000 to four elderly men who had been taken to wartime Japan as forced labourers. To pay the damages, the courts seized property in South Korea owned by Japanese firms linked to the men’s former employers.

The treaty in question was the 1965 US-sponsored agreement normalising relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, under which Tokyo awarded US$500 million to Seoul for suffering during the Japanese annexation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Compensation for forced workers was factored in, but most of the funds were used for national projects rather than distributed to individuals.

Japan’s government now worries that the South Korean courts have embarked on an endless round of compensation cases on behalf of some 200,000 former workers (or, in the case of those no longer alive, their families).

South Koreans who see the 1965 and 2015 agreements as sell-outs have been bolstered in their view by what they see as a striking coincidence. The 1965 treaty was struck by military dictator Park Chung-hee, who had been an officer in the army of the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria. As president, he applied the same model of state-directed corporate capitalism used in Manchuria. Park Geun-hye, the leader who signed the 2015 comfort women settlement, is his daughter.

That relationship feeds a narrative running through current South Korean politics that also draws on historical consciousness. According to Andrew Horvat, a scholar of both Japan and Korea at Tokyo Keizai University, it boils down to feelings of resentment towards a South Korean elite.

“You have a small group of people who graduate from the right university, go off to study in the United States, get jobs with a chaebol [industrial conglomerate] and have very bright futures,” says Horvat. “And then a very large group of people who graduate from very mediocre universities, have very few opportunities, and are actually victims of neoliberalism and a whole range of other issues that are related to Korea’s rapid economic development.”

According to Horvat, these people see Korea itself as having been unfairly treated. “If someone is rich now it’s because their family once collaborated with Japan or they benefited from the US–Korea military alliance.” The current president, Moon Jae-in, is very much representative of the “out” class: “Here’s a man who has been elected to correct historical wrongs, as perceived by a group of self-styled aggrieved parties with a very simplistic view of history.”

By another weird coincidence, those on the other side of the dispute also have a connection to long-ago Manchuria. Shinzo Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who masterminded the development of Japanese-occupied Manchuria as a young technocrat and then, as a prime minister in the 1950s, used that experience to help manage Japan’s remarkable period of post-1945 recovery and growth.

Abe is a nostalgic figure, trying to restore pride in Japan’s early-twentieth-century record, nudging the media and education system in more “patriotic” ways, restoring greater mystery to the role of the emperor, and endeavouring to engineer a Diet majority big enough to amend the non-belligerency clause of the post-1945 constitution.

He appeals particularly to Japanese in ultranational circles, who see their country as a victim of Western encirclement in the late 1930s, forced to strike out, and think Koreans should be grateful for the railways, roads, dams, electricity and factories that it built for them. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers evicted from Korea with nothing but suitcases after the surrender.

“Like Trump, Abe empowers a certain reactionary demographic,” says Jeffrey Kingston. He points to a recent decision to remove a sculpture of a comfort woman from the Aichi arts festival in Nagoya as an example of “how far freedom of expression is in retreat here.”

It’s likely, of course, that a majority of Japanese are reassured by their country’s “peace” constitution and mock Abe’s retro-orthodoxies, which include forcing the national broadcaster to use the quaint term “Nippon” instead of the modern “Nihon” as the country’s name. The spat with South Korea failed to boost Abe’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party in last month’s upper house election, held after his first trade sanction was announced. The LDP, which got about 19 per cent of the vote, remains safely in power only thanks to a vote-swapping agreement with Komeito, a party based on a Buddhist cult. “It’s not exactly a big mandate for anything,” says Kingston.

“The major problem is that the Japanese side is holding the Koreans to an agreement which, though in formal international law should be a binding agreement, shouldn’t be written in stone,” Horvat believes. “When the Koreans signed it their per capita GDP was the same as Sudan’s, and by that time Japan was ready to overtake Germany as the number three economy in the world. You couldn’t exactly call this an agreement among equals.”

Japan has had “many, many opportunities in the past to do what Germany did, which was to go beyond any legally binding obligations and to take the high moral ground,” he adds. “On countless occasions Japan missed this opportunity, mostly because of this divided memory within Japan.”

Opinion polls do show, however, that the Japanese public feels South Korea is excessively harping over occupation and wartime wrongs.

Both leaders have got themselves out on branches with no obvious way to climb down. While Moon has no affection for the chaebol, his popularity will suffer if the Japanese sanctions drag down the economy. Abe is also up against his own business establishment and home base.

“Regional supply chains were already rattled by Typhoon Trump’s trade war with China, and now have to cope with a petulant Abe,” says Kingston. “With Japanese business confidence at its lowest since 2009 the timing is terrible, because there will be blowback for Japanese firms. Still, it looks like this game of chicken will play out a bit more.”

So far, the Americans have been unable to bridge this argument. If it leads to an unravelling of the intelligence-sharing pact signed under Park Geun-hye and Abe in 2016, the row will have deeper strategic consequences. Reached under US auspices amid great mutual distrust, the pact was a key step in getting two of Asia’s most powerful militaries to cooperate. The new US defense secretary, Mark Esper, went to South Korea from Sydney to urge Moon to stick with it. “It’s key to us,” he told reporters.

“Trumpism is spreading in Asia with baleful consequences such as Abe’s epic own goal on South Korea and [Indian prime minister] Narendra Modi throwing fuel on the flames of Kashmir,” Kingston sums up. “These are troubling times.” •

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If voters do once again stay away from the polls, it may confirm that the dominant features of Japanese democracy during Abe’s tenure are voter apathy and the moribund state of inter-party competition.

Many commentators wonder how Japan has remained immune from the populism that is running rampant among its peers in Europe and North America. But the question assumes that the country has in fact been free of populism — and even a cursory look at Japanese democracy since the early 1990s suggests otherwise. In fact, the lower house elections of 2005 and 2009 that preceded Abe’s return to the prime ministership in 2012 turned on populist appeals and saw the highest levels of voter turnout since Japan adopted its new electoral system in 1994.

The collapse in voter turnout since 2012 may not have a single explanation, but it is at least partly a reflection of the public’s exhaustion with populist-tinged political competition.

Voters initially fell for former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s neoliberal populism, under which he castigated the LDP’s old guard as the “forces of resistance” and advocated for reforms that would open up Japan’s economy and break the old guard’s political power. They were then disillusioned when the LDP reverted to its old ways after Koizumi left office in 2006, and also wary of what they perceived as the harmful effects of Koizumi’s reforms — particularly growing inequality.

This combination created a unique opportunity for the Democratic Party of Japan. It promised new social programs to address post-Koizumi social anxieties while also foreshadowing a veritable political revolution that would not only toss the LDP from power but also cut the bureaucrats down to size and introduce proper political control of the government. But like many inexperienced populist parties, the Democratic Party’s time in power between 2009 and 2012 was characterised by mistakes both large and small, and the public abandoned it, clearing the way for Abe’s comeback.

The upshot is that Japanese politics since 2012 has essentially been a long hangover from the populist-fuelled frenzies of the 2000s. Voters, particularly independents, have not necessarily been enamoured of Abe or his policies for much of his second premiership. Still, his cabinet’s approval ratings are consistently robust, and when they have dipped in the wake of contentious legislative battles or other controversies, they have always drifted back to around 50 per cent or higher.

At the same time, support for the Democratic Party and its various successor parties since 2017 has been abysmal. Polling averages show that only the centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party has approached double-digit support. It is still well behind the LDP’s support, which consistently hovers around 40 per cent.

Disillusioned by the populist waves of the 2000s, independents resist Abe’s muscular conservatism but are also extremely reluctant to embrace the anti-Abe politics of the Democratic Party and its successors or the Japanese Communist Party. The occasional outbreaks of mass demonstrations have been the exception that proves the rule. Independents largely abstain, the grassroots supporters of the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito turn out in strength, and Abe romps to victory — this has been the story of every election since 2012.

A kind of managerial democracy has emerged as a result. Abe cannot push too hard with his ideological preoccupations, having tested the limits in 2014 and 2015 when he successfully reinterpreted the constitution to permit limited exercise of Japan’s right of collective self-defence. But so long as he makes a good-faith effort to grapple with some of Japan’s more pressing economic and social issues, the public is willing to tolerate his staying in office with the support of strong majorities in both houses of the Diet.

In fact, political volatility and the rise of populism in other democracies are likely to be strengthening the appeal of Japan’s Abe-dominated post-populist democracy. A stable, durable government bolsters Japan’s ability to cope with global instability — some of Abe’s highest marks from the public are for his foreign policies — and the status quo, whatever its faults, looks preferable to the alternative.

Japan’s post-populist democracy may not be particularly exciting. After all, the biggest question on 21 July is not whether the ruling coalition will win but rather just how big its victory will be. And it may not be good for Japan over time. Robust multi-party competition fosters the kind of creative thinking needed to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges — as Abe’s return and the birth of Abenomics showed.

But for the time being, Japan’s electorate seems content to be an island of stability in a volatile world, clearing the way for what looks like Abe’s sixth consecutive national electoral victory as prime minister. •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

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Perhaps uniquely in the world, the national meteorological bureau issues maps showing a cherry blossom “front” moving northwards through the archipelago as buds burst open. Office juniors are sent to stake out territory in parks where convivial groups will gather after work, scoffing sake and snacks under lantern-lit pink canopies.

But this year April is also the month in which, after thirty years, Emperor Akihito vacates the Chrysanthemum Throne because of his failing health. In the first abdication in modern times, the eighty-five-year-old goes on the 30th and his son Naruhito is installed the following day.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government is carefully orchestrating the whole process. It wants to use the sense of a new era dawning to shake Japan out of the economic lassitude of its “lost decades.” And it wants to promote a political message attuned to Abe’s retro-nationalism: that a restored Japan of proud tradition and identity can move from the soft and permissive democracy created by the post-1945 Allied occupation to a more rigorous version of its own.

The clue came on 1 April when the government announced the name of the new emperor’s gengo, or era, which will appear on the date stamps of everything official, from train tickets to tax returns. The choice, Reiwa, is being spun in different directions depending on the audience.

Abe’s supporters are doing their best to make it sound benign. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, for example, in its English-language online portal Nikkei Asian Review, explained the two characters in the name as “auspicious” or “orderly” (rei) and “harmony” or “peace” (wa). Tetsuji Atsuji, a Kyoto University scholar of Chinese-origin characters, which are known as kanji, was quoted as saying the rei character “conveys an image of seasonality with the change in emperor as well as the joy of peace.”

This interpretation derives from the character’s source in the Manyoshu, Japan’s oldest surviving anthology of poetry. Dating from the period 600 to 759 AD, the collection celebrates Japan’s changing seasonal beauties.

Prime minister Abe echoes this version. By referring to the Manyoshu, he is trying to pass on Japanese heritage to the next generation. “I want Japan to proudly bloom like plum blossoms,” he says. “Plum blossoms bloom beautifully after a harsh winter as a sign of the arrival of spring.”

But Atsuji also points out that the Japanese character for rei is a stylised image of someone giving orders to a kneeling person. This obvious allusion is not lost on Japan’s liberals and supporters of the postwar order, many of whom “cringed” at the announcement, says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian journalist and scholar, long resident in Tokyo, who teaches intercultural studies at the Josai International University.

“This is Abe’s statist philosophy in a nutshell,” Horvat tells me. “Japan will be a peaceful country, but there will at first have to be order, and by that I mean both domestically with restrictions on freedoms of speech and press, and regionally, meaning beefed-up armed forces and an ‘in your face’ foreign policy toward both Koreas and the PRC [mainland China].”

Japan’s foreign ministry is now putting out the message that the choice of Reiwa has been “misunderstood” and that of course it means “harmonious peace.” But that is “a bit funny,” says Horvat. “Because if you want to avoid misunderstandings then why choose a character that is so likely to be ‘misunderstood,’ unless, of course, you wanted to have it both ways from the start.”

The decision to select the gengo from a Japanese rather than a classical Chinese work — a break with a tradition that extends back over the 1400 years since era names were introduced — is also pointed. “That should already tell you what the people in power these days think about their ‘shared cultural past’ with China,” Horvat says. “It was a message to Beijing that Japan is not China. Basically, the choice reflects a present diplomatic, or rather undiplomatic, choice.”

Even so, Japanese themselves may not respond positively to this signal. So far voters have resisted Abe’s plan to amend the postwar constitution to allow Japan’s armed forces to operate more explicitly outside the self-defence role prescribed in the document’s famous Article 9.

Akihito’s own efforts to promote liberalism and openness within the constraints of his constitutional role have generated great affection among the Japanese public. From the start, he spoke to the public in ordinary language rather than the convoluted courtly style used by his father, Hirohito, who ruled for an unsurpassed sixty-eight years covering the invasion of China, the Pacific war and postwar reconstruction.

Akihito, whose consort Michiko was the first “commoner” in recent eras to marry a crown prince, made a point of referring to the emperor as a “symbol” of the Japanese nation, rather than a source of divine authority, as was expounded before 1945.

When a nationalist governor of Tokyo tried in 2005 to make it compulsory for public schools to fly the national flag and for their pupils to sing the national anthem, Akihito said these decisions should be left to individuals. Having often spoken of “standing close to the people,” he and Empress Michiko got down on their knees after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami to talk to survivors huddled in evacuation centres. When he visited Palau in 2015 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the final battles in the Pacific war, he said he’d come to remember “all people” who had lost their lives, implicitly including US marines and local civilians as well as Japanese defenders.

On his travels, as he recalled in his farewell address in February this year, he met many people of Japanese descent who were integrated into foreign countries, and expressed the hope that the foreign workers who came to Japan as its workforce declined would be warmly welcomed into Japanese society.

But since the name of the new era was announced, conservative mainstream reports have associated Akihito’s Heisei (“peace everywhere”) reign not with those positive attributes but with the recent decades of deflation and population decline, ignoring how the seeds of these problems were sown in the speculation and economic rigidity of the last decades of his father’s Showa (“enlightened harmony”) era.

With Japan’s economy slowing again, the Reiwa era may be starting with less than stellar prospects. The fact that the slowdown mainly results from China’s growth contraction, abetted by the protectionism of Abe’s friend Donald Trump, emphasises the degree to which Japan depends on its Asian neighbour.

Emperors used to choose the gengo of their own reign. With the removal of powers under the postwar constitution that he subtly defended, Akihito was the first to have it chosen by the government and its selected scholars. Likewise, the new emperor, the fifty-nine-year-old Naruhito, had no say, and was only formally notified of the choice of Reiwa in person by Abe a week after it was made public.

It remains to be seen whether he and Crown Princess Masako, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated former diplomat who has suffered greatly from the stuffiness surrounding the imperial household, will continue Akihito’s quiet pushback against Abe’s illiberal tendencies.

The post What’s in a name? appeared first on Inside Story.

But time can also mean unlearning. That same year, the esteemed journalist opened a London conference on the twentieth anniversary of the revolutions in east-central Europe. In a lunch-queue conversation, he said something I found impossible to forget: that after 1989 he’d had to junk everything he knew about Poland. Those words would resonate in 2011, when northeast Japan was hit by its biggest-ever earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. It was instantly apparent that this very different convulsion, frequently referred to as “3.11,” would change the country and require a system upgrade by everyone concerned.

My annual visits to Japan over the intervening years have extended these pedagogic tests, with the “great east Japan earthquake” (higashi nihon daishinsai) gradually being subsumed into the nation’s historical experience. Public memory of “3.11” was already becoming more ritualised when, in 2016–18, less intense if still deadly quakes hit Kumamoto, Osaka and Hokkaido, and epic floods Okayama and Hiroshima. The 2011 disaster, its epicentre the northern region of Tōhoku, is now also a warning.

Small, table-rattling tremors are a way of life. But there is a 70 to 80 per cent chance of a major quake in the Nankai trough, under the vast area between Tokyo Bay and southern Kyushu, by 2050. Design and planning for emergencies is apparent everywhere, from specified gathering points to crocodiles of helmeted tots on a local drill.

Living with seismological uncertainty might be good training for the geopolitical kind. In five weeks spent here from mid December, the international dimension of many top media stories is striking. Most dramatic is the arrest and trial of former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn over alleged financial misconduct, which has led debate about Japan’s corporate management, its declining appeal to top business talent, and its disciplinarian judicial approach. (Ghosn’s family has called his continued detention “hostage justice.”) The fate of “Ghosn-san” adds fuel to a concurrent spat between two rival power centres, the trade ministry and the new Japan Investment Corporation, about executive pay.

In foreign policy, Japan’s relations with its four neighbours — China, South Korea, Russia and North Korea — vary from cool to freezing. Jostling for space are Seoul’s spikiness over radar tracking and wartime legacies, Moscow’s contempt at Tokyo’s efforts to discuss the offshore northern islands seized in 1945, and Pyongyang’s obduracy over its abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s. The current Beijing–Tokyo thaw brings some relief, though the underlying tensions are profound. Trump’s waywardness, a source of barely concealed dismay, overhangs all.

The government of Shinzō Abe is pushing through labour and immigration reforms which, from April, will allow up to 345,000 migrant workers — many from Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal — to enter fourteen sectors, including construction, care and agriculture. Unlike contract labourers now tied to a single employer and vulnerable to exploitation, they will be able to switch jobs. Two new categories of workers are created: one with fixed five-year visas; another, high-skilled, with the expectation of long-term settlement and rights to bring family.

Underlying the policy shift is a forecast 20 per cent decline in the workforce by 2040. Foreign employees, African and Pakistani among them, are already an everyday sight in Tokyo’s far suburbs and beyond. Intensive language training, partly to ensure a future of “becoming Japanese” (the anthropologist Joy Hendry’s term), is central to the government’s strategy. That means seeking to avoid a clustering into immigrant neighbourhoods, if that is possible.

Warabi, just across Tokyo’s northern border in Saitama prefecture, has come to be cited as “Warabistan” in fevered minds, though my unsensational if unscientific impression was of a quiet place with more Chinese and Vietnamese than south Asians and Kurds (plus one shop selling halal food). A peace sculpture at the railway station attests to the town’s left-leaning image, offset by a large banner on a nearby house denouncing lack of consultation with residents over plans to renovate the area. In 1946, in an effort to give postwar hope to its young people, Warabi held Japan’s first coming-of-age ceremonies for twenty-year-olds, an observance now part of the national calendar. In Japan as elsewhere, innovation makes tradition.

Outside this year’s ceremony at Saitama City’s sports and music arena, north of Warabi, the air was briefly disturbed by the approach of around thirty bad boys in their twenties and upwards wearing hakama (formal male attire) and carrying flags. Ultra-nationalist in appearance and swagger, they had come to back those of their “antisocial” band who were turning twenty. One was detained, smiling as he was marched away, whereupon his fellow show-offs posed for a group photo and gave a defiant roar of farewell. Waiting mothers and friends of the new adults ignored them. The incident, if it deserves the name, didn’t make even the local news.

The arena will be basketball host of Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Games, which are already ubiquitous. Public broadcaster NHK’s marathon weekly drama Idaten, an episodic portrayal of Japan’s Olympic history 1912–64 written by the versatile Kudō Kankurō, leads the way. The media coverage of overseas tourists, already high, feeds into the build-up. A popular show on TV Tokyo, Why Did You Come to Japan? (Yū wa Nani Shi Nippon e?) waylays visitors at Narita airport then follows their entertaining adventures with the locals.

By contrast, a prime-time report on overtourism in the historic capital Kyōto features an affable Chinese landlord busily adding to his hotel-rental portfolio as local oldsters expire and shops shut down. China-owned land, resorts and homes are on the rise across the country. The hyperactive Abe, having overseen a rise in annual tourist numbers from twenty to thirty million, needs another ten to achieve his target of doubling visitors in four years. A law to allow casinos at integrated resorts, passed but not yet ratified, should help.

Delivering uplift with a trace of melancholy is the transition to a new head of state, with the retiring eighty-five-year-old emperor Akihito giving way to Naruhito, his son and heir, on 30 April. When the Shōwa (“enlightened harmony”) era ended unexpectedly in January 1989, parties and the cherry-blossom season were cancelled. This time, the thirty-year Heisei (“peace everywhere”) era is closing in nostalgia for its fashions, gadgets and even crises, before its as-yet-unnamed successor is given a formal welcome.

The visitor seeking respite from Tokyo’s sensual delirium may find that the city’s bookshops and libraries only amplify it, even if their heart-rattling combination of plenitude and stillness testifies to this society’s school and job pressures as much as its eagerness for knowledge. Chiko-chan’s motto — she a TV star in the anime-mascot form of a huge-eyed, one-toothed, razor-sharp five-year-old who goes puce with rage at celebrities’ bumbling answers to mundane questions — is surely also Japan’s: Bōtto ikitenja nēyo! (“Don’t sleep through life!”)

Everything under the Western sun is translated, including most recent blockbusters, while local texts abound on the travails of media, tech giants, capitalism and Japan itself. Some have a hint of conspiracism, as with Naoki Hyakuta’s bestseller Nihon Kokuki (A History of Japan), promoted as “the past they won’t tell you.”

The garish To Kill Japan is a potboiler about artificial intelligence, a high-profile oeuvre swamped by the prolific tech entrepreneur Yoichi Ochiai. Fuyuki Aizawa’s The NHK vs Abe Kantei, the title referring to the premier’s official residence, looks at the media fallout of a scandal involving a right-wing Kyōto school with links to Abe’s circle, while the blogger Kazue Fujihara’s linkage of sexual and power harassment is but one sign of #MeToo’s reverberations here. Akira Ikegami, a former foreign correspondent and TV host with gravitas, publishes regular overviews of Japan’s now troubled international relations. The publishing pace is relentless: six weeks after Ghosn’s detention, on the last day of the year, two hefty tomes on the case were in the shops.

Japan’s economy is a major theme in a range of books and journals. The eco-socialist Kohei Saito, well connected to the German left, was one of the impressive young voices in a recent two-hour discussion of Japan’s dilemmas in the NHK’s Jirenma (Frustration) slot. Punchy messages of individualist system-busting, as in the zestful Taichi Kogure’s multimedia project, have wide appeal. More realist critics include Noriko Hama of Doshisha University and David Atkinson, an ex–Goldman Sachs analyst, whose latest diagnoses respectively scythe four myths and invite seven paradigm shifts.

Hama was a fearless declutterer before Marie Kondo was ever heard of, early in spotting an emergent winner-loser society and in puncturing the claims of Abeonomics; here, she focuses on tax, growth, profit and productivity. Atkinson — England-born, resident in Japan for forty years — argues for a sharp fall in company numbers, improved management, rising wages and more in order to consolidate productive energies. Their proposals differ, but each makes clear that capitalism in Japan, too, needs an overhaul.

In an interview with TV Asahi’s Tōru Tamakawa (a sometime target of right-wing netizens), the engaging Atkinson saw the Ghosn case as evidence of Japan’s out-of-step corporate culture, raising the question of what international order it might now seek to join. The great Japanese political scientist Takashi Inoguchi, influenced by the modern discipline’s postwar founder Masao Maruyama, wrote during the Junichiro Koizumi era, 2001–06, of a journey towards “Japan as a normal country.” In an age of deranged leaders, polarised societies, discredited democracies and fevered media, with the redefinition of normal proceeding apace, what Japan needs to avoid is clearer than what it should emulate.

Tokyo is (not) Japan is another entry in those decade-old notebooks. In fact, my research focus on that 2009 trip was precisely Japan’s regional medley, with Tōhoku its centre. This visit didn’t allow an excursion to the north, but the bookshop chain Kinokuniya’s awesome foreign-language store in Shinjuku was an opportunity to catch up with the many specialists who have tracked the impact of 3.11 in its several dimensions: reconstruction, survival and trauma, nuclear risks, civil-society efforts, memory, and literary and art-therapy responses. Most works, in truth, already look dated. Richard Lloyd Parry’s genre-defying Ghosts of the Tsunami is justly prominent.

It is striking how few studies there are of Japan’s internal diversity as such, a theme long channelled into vital if often reductive study of minorities (Ainu, Burakumin, Okinawa people, the Korean minority, and immigrant groups). In the same vein, and guidebooks apart, here are books on Kyōto; Osaka; Tokyo, of course; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course. But none on any other cities, and none on any region, not even Hokkaido. The sole exception is Tōhoku, but it is seen exclusively through the lens of the catastrophe.

One of the books is a pioneering study, appropriately on a different shelf from the 3.11 batch: Nathan Hopson’s Ennobling Japan’s Savage North East: Tōhoku as Postwar Thought 1945–2011, an intellectual history that reframes the entire field of Tōhokugaku (Tōhoku studies), rethinks its connections to wider Japan, and for the first time puts the 2011 disaster in these larger contexts. The penultimate chapter is a searching critique of Norio Akasaka, the iconoclast turned doyen of modern Tōhokugaku.

I interviewed Norio Akasaka in the folklore-drenched town of Tōno on the chill early morning of 11 March 2012, the earthquake’s anniversary, before being kindly invited by Kuroki-san, a student of the professor — and a collector of the region’s ghost stories — to a moving commemoration in his grandmother’s devastated town. That privilege of a lifetime brought the tragedy, its victims and survivors, very close.

A lasting impression of that and other journeys is how multifarious the country is, down to the smallest unit, and how far Tokyo seems from its corners. But all realities are in motion, and learning never stops. In the city’s Ikebukuro district, descending the Junku-do bookshop’s escalator, a Japanese relative broke a silence from a place well out of my own reach:

“I think Japan has become more confident in these years. Media now always show proud Japan, positive, not ashamed. After 3.11 people were very down so there was a mood to cheer up. But this got taken over by something more nationalistic. Now it’s established as an atmosphere. Even in the programs that show foreigners on TV, people who come and admire Japan are being used to support it. Before, in the bubble years, media generally liked criticism of Japan. Now there is more boosting than bashing from outside, and that is picked up and praised here while negative points are ignored. Inside Japan you feel or are encouraged to feel that Japan is the centre of everything, but when you go outside you realise how small it is. Maybe with anime or manga, young people in Japan have more in common with abroad, making soft power real, and that will change things more. But no one really knows Japan.” •

The post Japan between eras appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the grand rise-of-Asia narrative, we are seeing the end of the era that began when Vasco da Gama set out from Europe in 1497 in search of new trade routes to Asia, and launched the 500-year epoch in which the West both ruled and created the rules. Against this broad sweep, Donald Trump’s arrival is a mere symptom, not a cause, but he will accelerate the trend in unpredictable ways.

Asia’s rise is the new normal, a defining element of our times, and certainly of the twenty-first century. Australia has been living amid its expansion for so long that the response can be a blasé “ho-hum, what’s new?” Yet almost everything alters when epochs change. New truths emerge and old verities collapse. New rulers strain against old rules.

One of the elemental changes is the erosion of the West’s power to dominate global politics. Gideon Rachman’s statement of this is a conventional rendering of the new normal, but beneath that “normal” the ground shifts and roars. “For more than five hundred years, ever since the dawn of the European colonial age,” he writes, “the fates of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been shaped by developments and decisions made in Europe — and, later, the United States.” He goes on:

But the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is Asia’s extraordinary economic development over the last fifty years. Western political power was founded on technological, military, and economic dominance, but these advantages are fast eroding. And the consequences are now defining global politics.

Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of London’s Financial Times, is an Atlanticist marvelling at the power shift to the Pacific. His new book (published in the United States with the title Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline) is built around the themes of Asia up, America down and Europe out.

Asia’s resurgence, he writes, is “correcting a global political imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism. In that sense, the rise of Asian powers is an important step towards a more equal world.” But his account of US decline is counterpointed by a “largely positive view of the role of American power in the world.” America’s policing of the rules, he argues, offers the best chance for a just world:

The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive. In practice, however, I fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be unstable and dangerous: The “rules” are very hard to enforce without a dominant power in the background.

Asia rises, but is divided. Rachman points to two significant obstacles to the Asian century. The first, corruption, eats at the ability of the coming powers, China and India, to create trustworthy institutions for a globalised system: “Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.” The second, and more serious, is the divisions and rivalries within Asia: “For the foreseeable future, there will be no Eastern alliance to supplant the Western alliance.”

Asia’s rise will be even quicker if it’s accompanied by an American retreat, real or perceived. Image can swiftly shape reality in international affairs, and Rachman worries the notion that America is losing its grip on world affairs is “in danger of becoming conventional wisdom — from Beijing to Berlin to Brasilia.” In power politics, vacuums are always filled, but there’s much jostling, misjudgement and mishap along the way, especially if the occupant of that supposed vacuum vehemently denies that it’s shifting.

Rachman thinks that if the United States has the will then it has the resources to stay near the top of the global rules game. But while America grapples with relative decline, he says, Europe is slipping and slinking out of the contest. Turning his eyes to his own turf, this Atlanticist frets that Europe, which wrote the manual for the world’s system of states, is losing its right to sit at the top table: “The European powers are in precipitous decline as global political players.”

Much changes in the shift from the Enlightenment to Easternisation. Britain has decided to go solo, leaving a smaller Europe led by a Germany that’s determined to stay out of fights. Britain’s “self-isolation,” Rachman writes, is “a potentially shattering blow to European self-confidence.”

The military dimension of Europe’s retreat is what Rachman calls a “breathtaking” reduction in French and British military might over the past forty years. Europe, he says, is gambling with its own security:

The cumulative effect of America’s growing reticence, Germany’s semipacifism, and defence cuts in Britain and France is that the NATO alliance — the bedrock of Western security since the end of the Second World War — is in disrepair. The sense that NATO’s decade-long mission in Afghanistan has effectively failed has further sapped the West’s interest in acting collectively around the globe.

A key feature of our rapidly shifting era is China’s expanding view of its power and prerogatives in relation to the United States. At the end of the twentieth century, China was still following Deng’s admonition to hide and bide — hide its power and bide its time. At the start of this century, it was still easy to sketch the comfortable view that the deep intertwining of the American and Chinese economies and their mutual interest in the global system would define the relationship.

By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, as America crashed into recession, China had decided it would rise on its terms, not abide by American understandings. The power contest has quickly become intense and sharp, as Rachman illustrates:

Over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years in power, America came increasingly to see China as more a rival than a partner. Quite how far the balance had tipped was brought home to me in the spring of 2014, when a senior White House official told me that he regarded the relationship as now “80 per cent competition and 20 per cent cooperation.” I was so surprised that I got him to repeat the formulation, in case I had misheard — “80 per cent competition,” he said again.

If it took Obama’s team two terms to arrive at that view of China as 80 per cent rival, that perspective is one of the few settled elements of the Trump worldview.

The national security strategy Trump issued in December attacked China as a revisionist power, challenging “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” seeking “to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region.” The companion national defence strategy issued in January states that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” America ranks a clash with China ahead of the threat from jihadists. As the Economist headlined, the next war looms as great-power conflict.

Australian official language is more restrained than America’s, but Canberra is just as vexed about what sort of ruler China aims to be. Australia’s 2016 defence white paper fretted constantly about the need for international rules, using the word “rules” sixty-four times, forty-eight of them in the formulation “rules-based global order.”

To see US–China rivalry only in bilateral terms, though, is to miss much that is shaping Asia’s future. Widening the frame beyond the world’s top two economies to include the third-biggest economy, Japan, is what Richard McGregor offers in his new book on Asia’s reckoning and the struggle for global dominance.

McGregor’s focus is on the “cold peace” between Japan and China — the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. “The story of Japan and China,” he writes, “is one of stunning economic success and dangerous political failure.” China harbours “a sense of revenge, of unfinished business” about Japan. The two countries seldom find equilibrium, he says, and rarely manage to treat each other as equals.

Pondering Asia’s future, McGregor is uncertain about what course the US will take: perhaps it will turn its back on the world under an isolationist president, or maybe Pax Americana can survive, with a resilient American economy and refreshed alliances robust enough to hold off an indebted and internally focused China. “The spectre of a renewed Sinocentric order in Asia, though, is upending the regional status quo for good, whatever path the US might take,” McGregor writes:

Geopolitically, the three countries have increasingly become two, with Japan aligning itself more tightly with the US than at any time in the seven decades-plus since the war… As its power has grown, China has begun building a new regional order, with Beijing at the centre in place of Washington. The battle lines are clear.

China’s rise and Japan’s relative decline have fed a poisonous cycle. McGregor quotes a Chinese saying — “two tigers cannot live on one mountain” — to illustrate the view of many Chinese that their competition with Japan to be Asia’s dominant indigenous power is a zero-sum game: “What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within coming decades, go to war.”

McGregor is one of the outstanding Asia hands of this generation of Australian journalists. He started as an ABC correspondent in Tokyo, moved to newspapers, and eventually served as chief of the Shanghai, Beijing and Washington bureaus of the Financial Times. His previous book, on the Chinese Communist Party, The Party, was a revelation, built on a framework of fine reporting. Asia’s Reckoning has the same strengths; this is history that draws vivid force from the notebooks of a journalist who did daily duty as the past few decades unfolded.

McGregor describes how, after Japan established diplomatic relations with China, the two enjoyed a high point of “seemingly amicable relations from the late 1970s until the 1980s” as China’s leaders reached out to Japan for investment, technology and aid. Zhou Enlai’s line was that the two countries had enjoyed 2000 years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune. That playing down of history did not become the prevailing view.

Sino-Japanese rapprochement was commercial and diplomatic, but issues of war and history were merely covered over like land mines left just under the surface. As the conflict over history built, McGregor writes, “a corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become imbedded within their ruling parties and large sections of the public.”

The Chinese government has played the history card — demonisation of Japan — in a desperate effort to maintain its own legitimacy. After the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, McGregor writes, Japan became “collateral damage” to Beijing’s most pressing priority: to rebuild the party’s standing after having unleashed the military on its own people. Beijing “opened a vast new political front to ensure that such protests never got off the ground again.”

Popular anger must be directed at Japan, not the party. Beijing has stoked rage with “the decades-long party campaign to burnish its patriotic lustre with an unrelenting diet of anti-Japanese history and news.” Beijing’s first use of the now regular criticism of foreigners “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” was directed at Japan. McGregor quotes the view that the party has raised young Chinese on a diet of “wolf’s milk.”

McGregor offers a masterful account of the complex fifty-year dance between China, Japan and the United States, describing “a profound interdependence alongside strategic rivalries, profound distrust and historical resentment.” His book stays true to one of the central maxims of news journalism: report what you see, don’t be a seer. So McGregor offers little about what might come next: about whether China, Japan and the US are heading to a smash, a muddle through or a major realignment. Granted, publishing at the dawn of Trump throws even more variables into the choices and changes confronting the world’s three biggest economies. Spare a moment’s compassion for the author of a narrative who has to finish his work with the arrival of The Donald. Flux all around and the fog of the future abounds.

The history McGregor offers has plenty of evidence the reader can use to construct two vastly different futures for Japan. I’d call these opposed visions Strong Japan and Comfortable Japan. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution this year is a reminder of how Japan has twice during that period shown the ability to make huge shifts in its governance and society in order to respond to external challenges.

Strong Japan foresees a Tokyo that refuses to bend to Beijing. Japan reclaims its rights as a “normal nation,” building its military strength as America’s key Asian ally and leading Asia in both balancing against and engaging with China. This is prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of Japan, reaffirmed by his victory in the October general election. Strong Japan is expressed in the unusual role Abe has taken in leading Asia’s response to Trump: saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump dumped the trade treaty, reshaping the Japanese constitution, and making a fresh effort to create a “quadrilateral” alliance of democracies linking Japan, the United States, India and Australia.

McGregor’s version of Strong Japan includes his belief that Japan will not be fighting on its own if it does go to war with China in coming decades. He offers a significant judgement about the resilience of the Japanese and Chinese systems in contemplating conflict — and calculating the impact of a defeat: “In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, and the government would certainly fall. But that would be nothing compared to the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail.” He cites the view that such a loss would be terminal for the Chinese Communist Party, marking the moment for regime change.

Comfortable Japan, by contrast, sees Abe as a political outlier who won’t be emulated by future prime ministers. In this version, Japan matches the decline of its population and economy by declining gently to middle-power status. This Japan embraces the peace of its pacifist strain, no longer wanting to serve as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US–Japan alliance fades away, dismissed as the strange joining of two nations with vastly different histories and values. Putting aside its old nightmares about being betrayed or abandoned by a US turn to China, Japan would drift out of Washington’s orbit. Tokyo could quietly decide that the cost of resisting Beijing is too high.

Comfortable Japan would accommodate China as the new ruler. For the Japanese, this would be portrayed as Japan’s turning back to Asia. In China, the Community Party would proclaim victory in the history war and start to turn down the heat.

If Richard McGregor won’t make any bets on the future in his book, Hugh White puts all his money on red. White thinks China is going to win and America is going to leave. His prediction is that Comfortable Japan will beat Strong Japan because of tensions in the alliance with the United States:

Japan is the key to East Asia’s emerging order as China’s power grows and America’s wanes. Japan’s alliance with America has been the keystone of America’s strategic position in Asia. While the alliance lasts America will remain a major regional power, and when it ends America’s role in Asia will end with it. So we can best understand how America’s position in Asia might collapse by considering the future of the alliance.

The alliance might look robust, but China’s growing wealth and influence has changed the equation:

For America, the costs of the alliance are growing, while the benefits are not. China’s rise makes it both a more valuable economic partner and a more formidable military adversary, and so the costs to America of protecting Japan against China go up both economically and strategically… By the same token, the benefits of the alliance to Japan are falling, as US support in a crisis becomes less certain. This worries Japan more and more as both China and North Korea look more and more threatening. There will come a point when Tokyo reluctantly concludes that America simply cannot be relied upon any longer.

White dismisses the Strong Japan option as too hard. Japan has all it needs to break the nuclear taboo and get nuclear weapons; the difficult part would be explaining the nukes to its own people and getting acceptance from Asia.

A Strong Japan would have to create a coalition of like-minded countries, including Australia, to balance China’s power and prevent Beijing from dominating the region. White judges that the other countries won’t join — all have their own interests with China and all would be reluctant to accept Japan’s direction and serve Japan’s interests — and so middle-power status is more or less inevitable.

In Canberra, Hugh White is always one of the smartest men in the room — and these days one of the most controversial. His customary cheeriness prevails, despite the storms he’s stirred with his writings on Australia’s choice between China and the US. One of the bravura habits of Hugh is his ability to walk into a conference room or lecture hall armed with only a takeaway coffee (muffin optional) and a single sheet of blank paper; the paper is folded down the middle and, before the coffee has cooled, he jots down a series of notes on both sides of the fold. Then he delivers a flawless speech which is both to time and on topic. It’s the performance of a formidable and disciplined intellect, well attuned to the rhythms of Canberra.

After university in Melbourne and Oxford, Hugh White arrived in the national capital in the late 1970s to work as an intelligence analyst in the Office of National Assessments. He jumped to journalism in the parliamentary press gallery (and sharpened his prose style) as defence writer for the Sydney Morning Herald before joining the office of defence minister Kim Beazley and then becoming international adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. As the defence department’s deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence, he wrote the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper. He was the inaugural director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is now professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

White’s seer service was displayed in his previous Quarterly Essay, Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing, published in 2010. This new Quarterly Essay proclaims that the issue of choice is fading and the result is looming.

The onrush of China has been so central to this decade that it’s difficult to summon up the hysterical response eight years ago to Hugh White’s heresy: the proposition that America should cede some power to negotiate a new regional order, retaining a lesser but still substantial American strategic role in Asia to balance China’s power. As an example of the convulsive response to this proposition, here’s Greg Sheridan in the Australian in September 2010, attacking White’s “astonishing,” “ridiculous” and “weird, weird” essay:

Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University has done something remarkable. He has written the single stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility… His central thesis is that the growing strategic competition between the US and China is almost certain to produce deadly and convulsive conflict unless the Americans can be persuaded to give up their primacy in Asia and share power with China as an equal.

Back then, I told White to send Sheridan a big Christmas card of thanks: the gnashing gusher about astonishing weirdness ensured Hugh’s essay had to be read by everyone who mattered in Canberra, and many in Washington. Today we’d be blessed if we’d achieved the comfort of the Washington–Beijing power-sharing agreement that White advocated in 2010. Now he thinks the chance is gone.

White’s new essay judges that the rivalry may proceed peacefully or violently, quickly or slowly, but the most likely outcome is becoming clear:

America will lose, and China will win. America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power. War remains possible, especially with someone like Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But the risk of war recedes as it becomes clearer that the odds are against America, and as people in Washington come to understand that their nation cannot defend its leadership in Asia by fighting an unwinnable war with China. The probability therefore grows that America will peacefully, and perhaps even willingly, withdraw.

It’s happening already, says White. And although it is “not what anyone expected,” the process can’t be reversed.

What does Australia face in Rachman’s era of Easternisation and what Hugh White describes as a new regional order delivered by a profound shift in Asia’s distribution of power?

Rachman thinks Australia “faces an acute strategic dilemma,” even as it greets “the rise of Asia with exuberant enthusiasm, treating it as an unparalleled opportunity to secure Australia’s prosperity long into the future.” The dilemma facing Australia and New Zealand deepens if Southeast Asia becomes a Chinese sphere of influence. “Australasia,” says Rachman, “risks becoming an isolated Western outpost, cut off from its political and cultural hinterland. As a result, the vision of China asserting its influence across the South China Sea and in Southeast Asia set off alarm bells in the Australian elite.”

The fear of a coercive China bending Southeast Asia to its will has driven Australia to change its definition of the region from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific. “The notion of the Indo-Pacific emphasises India’s importance and challenges the idea of a region that inevitably revolves around China,” says Rachman.

It also stresses the central importance of the Indian Ocean, as well as the South China Sea. And it makes the Australians feel less lonely. Rather than being stuck out on the edges of the Asia-Pacific region, Australia could style itself as at the centre of a vast Indo-Pacific region framed by the two democracies of the United States and India.

Hugh White’s account is of an Australia little prepared for what it faces, especially a US retreat from Asia which, under Trump, “is probably becoming irreversible.” Canberra didn’t see this coming because Washington didn’t expect it, and we have got into the habit of seeing the world through Washington’s eyes. Australia’s misjudgement, White writes, was to depend more and more on America as its position became weaker:

America has no real reason to fight China for primacy in Asia, shows little real interest in doing so and has no chance of succeeding if it tries. Until our leaders realise that, they will not address the reality that we are, most probably, soon going to find ourselves in an Asia dominated by China, where America plays little or no strategic role at all.

White has cemented his unpopularity in official Canberra because his vision of America vacating the region is completely at odds with the views of the Turnbull government. Its November 2017 foreign policy white paper does describe a new, contested world of great-power rivalry where America’s long dominance of the international order is challenged, but its conclusion is that the US will keep winning:

Even as China’s power grows and it competes more directly with the United States regionally and globally, the United States will, for the foreseeable future, retain its significant global lead in military and soft power. The United States will continue to be the wealthiest country in the world (measured in net asset terms), the world’s leader in technology and innovation, and home to the world’s deepest financial markets. The Australian Government judges that the United States’ long-term interests will anchor its economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Its major Pacific alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia will remain strong.

The structure and conclusion offered by the Australian government can encompass the competition described by Richard McGregor and stretch to take in Gideon Rachman’s Easternisation. But Hugh White describes another world.

We are unlikely to face a single sliding-door moment — a big, one-time choice. We will make constant choices because that is what diplomacy and the world of states is all about. We can no longer chant John Howard’s reassuring mantra that we will not have to choose between our history and our geography.

Our geography presses. China, the United States and Japan — along with India and Southeast Asia — will all be integral to the way we weigh our options and make selections. The constant effort will be to maximise flexibility and minimise zero-sum calls. And Australia isn’t alone in experiencing this angst about our Asian future: it is shared by the other middle powers that will gather at the ASEAN summit in Sydney next month.

China and the United States will push and woo Australia. “We will be able to defy Chinese pressure if we choose,” writes White, “but China will be able to inflict heavy costs on us if we do. It will not be able to dictate to us, but it will be able to shape our choices very powerfully.” A foretaste of how this will go is the Turnbull government’s pushback against China over cyber espionage and perceived interference in our political system, and China’s angry response. This foreign policy quandary has deep domestic roots: in Australia’s census, 1.2 million people declared themselves of Chinese heritage and about 600,000 were born in China.

China’s geopolitical aim is to turn Australia into a neutral, to detach America’s oldest and closest ally in Asia. America fears that Australia will be “Finlandised,” slowly slipping into China’s orbit. White quotes a senior official in the Obama administration venting his frustration about Australia: “We hate it when you guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China’! Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!”

For his part, Donald Trump threatens to bring a frightening clarity to one of the essentials of the Asian security system: the US military guarantee to Asia, which is of such importance that any future peacetime threat to the formal and informal alliance system will most likely come from the United States itself. Short of war, only major new US demands — or US failures to deliver — could imperil the value of its multi-tiered alliance system in Asia.

A superpower always has the potential to underdeliver or over-demand. Washington will underdeliver if it doesn’t have the means to fulfil its security guarantees to its Asian allies, followers and even free-riders. That underperformance will show first in US political will or regional commitment rather than in the sinews of US military power.

The other end of the same equation is a United States that demands too much from its allies, causing them to baulk. Trump is forcing Asia to ponder both problems, especially the nightmare of an America that could underdeliver by departing.

Even if China were still hiding and biding and America wasn’t being roiled by its president, Australia would confront tougher decisions because of the relative power and wealth we bring to Asia’s table. The key word is “relative”: our long-term relative decline as a power and an economy in Asia continues as it has for decades. That doesn’t signify Australian decline or failure — merely that we are growing at a slower rate than a lot of others in the pack. An ever more prosperous neighbourhood is obviously better for us as well as them, but regional success challenges our power and our choices.

The times will require an independent foreign policy because the times will be tougher. We will fashion our own suit, not ride the coat-tails of others. Australia must be clear about what it sees, and precise in describing it. Our pride in the Australian tradition of straight talking must be matched by even straighter thinking.

An independent foreign policy will demand a capability for independent thinking. For a long time, when Australia talked about China it was actually talking about the United States; that American lens was why we didn’t give diplomatic recognition to China until 1972. Over the past decade, there’s been a flip. Now when we talk about the United States, often we’re really looking at China.

No longer can we afford to allow either Washington or Beijing to frame the other in our thinking. Nor can we see Japan’s strategic options solely through the fifteen-year-old trilateral strategic dialogue of the United States, Japan and Australia — any more than we’re going to deal with India only through the resurrected quadrilateral of the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Australia must see others in the region as their own agents with their own agendas. Lots of independent players will inevitably mean many surprises. Depending on your temperament, it’s an exciting new era or terrifying in its uncertainty. Foundations shift and structures shake.

As a great joiner, Australia wants to be in every conversation and club; but that is just the starting point. Then it’s a matter of how the various clubs and cohorts and Australia itself can contribute to Asia’s future. Independence is more easily declared than displayed; it’s not one of our strongest habits. Just as our geography is going to force us to confront choices, the times will demand independent thought and sometimes independent action. It’s no contradiction to say that an Australia best able to define and declare its independent interests will be better placed to be an ally of the United States, a partner to China, a friend to Japan and a fellow middle power to ASEAN nations.

Australia confronts a rapidly changing Asian system, beset by rivalry and great-power contest. “In this dynamic environment,” says Australia’s foreign policy white paper, “competition is intensifying, over both power and the principles and values on which the regional order should be based.” Power. Principles. Values. We have a core interest in the rules of this game and how the region is ruled, but Australia’s future in Asia doesn’t look much like what we knew during the bipolar stand-off of the cold war or America’s two-decade unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Time to run the ruler over what’s left and start to work for the rules we want. ●

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Prospects were already looking good for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party–Komeito coalition; they only got better after weather forecasters began tracking a typhoon headed for Japan’s main islands. Typhoon Lan disrupted voting in some remote parts of the country before making landfall at Shizuoka, southwest of Tokyo, in the early hours of Monday morning. Despite a record level of pre-polling — boosted by voters anticipating Sunday’s bad weather — the overall turnout for the election was a paltry 54 per cent, the second-lowest since the war.

With a handful of results still outstanding, the conservative coalition has won at least 312 of the 465 lower house seats. The newly formed centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party has at least fifty-four seats, making it the second-biggest party — exceeding the forty-nine won by another new group, the right-leaning Party of Hope.

The order of second and third is significant because the Constitutional Democratic Party has specifically opposed moves to amend the war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution. The result is also a setback for the political ambitions of the Party of Hope’s leader, Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike.

Prime Minister Abe took a risk calling the snap election more than a year early. Although it paid off handsomely, he may find it hard to claim a mandate for radical change given that only half the Japanese electorate participated in the poll.

Those who did bother to vote chose the status quo — largely, it seems, because they were offered little in the way of an alternative. Both the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Party of Hope had only a few weeks in which to select candidates and organise their campaigns, putting them at a severe disadvantage against the well-oiled LDP machine.

The disintegration of the former ruling Democratic Party, and the dispersal of its members to run as candidates for the new parties or as independents, gave the opposition parties an odour of weakness and confusion that hung over their campaigns and helped the ruling coalition. Abe also successfully exploited fears about North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons program. In these circumstances, voters (those who did vote) decided to overlook the scandals and blunders that have dogged the government through most of this year.

The election result virtually ensures that Abe — if his health holds — will be re-elected as LDP president for another three-year term next September. “I will humbly face the victory and continue to work humbly and sincerely,” he told NHK, the national broadcaster. His emphasis on humility, while culturally unexceptional, is an implicit acknowledgment of one of the factors behind the slump in Abe’s popularity earlier this year.

On the opposition side, the only figure who could claim a measure of success is Yukio Edano, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which fielded seventy-eight candidates and won at least fifty-four seats. Edano attracted large crowds to his street rallies, particularly in Tokyo, and by the time the next election rolls around his party will have had the opportunity to build a supporter base and groom a full list of candidates.

Another aspect of the result worth noting is the level of support for the Constitutional Democratic Party in proportional representation voting for the Tokyo district. (Under Japan’s hybrid system, candidates stand in single-seat constituencies and/or for seats allocated by proportional representation.) According to NHK, the CDP attracted no fewer than 1.4 million votes (24 per cent) in the capital compared to the LDP’s 1.8 million (31 per cent).

Yuriko Koike, on the other hand, has had to take responsibility for the poor showing of her Party of Hope, which initially seemed poised to make a serious challenge to the LDP. Some ill-judged remarks during the campaign, which conveyed an impression of arrogance, and her decision not to run as a candidate for the Diet but instead keep her job as governor of Tokyo are the main reasons for the sharp reversal in the party’s fortunes. (The fact that Koike was in France on election day, fulfilling a prior commitment to attend a meeting of local government leaders, only served to emphasise her divided loyalties.)

For all the early expectations of something different emerging in Japanese politics, Sunday’s election has delivered more of the same. It’s as if nothing happened. A typhoon blew in and blew out again, leaving the skies clear for the LDP and Shinzo Abe. ●

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Abe claimed he needed a new mandate for a plan to allocate revenue from a scheduled increase in the nation’s consumption tax (from 8 to 10 per cent) to spending on childcare and subsidised education. To many observers, this was merely a smokescreen; he had simply chosen the most propitious moment, politically, for his ruling coalition. With the villain-in-chief Kim Jong-un lobbing missiles over Japan, voters could be expected to rally round the government rather than punish it.

Since the influence-peddling scandals have been simmering for most of this year, it could also be argued that the opposition has had ample time to prove any wrongdoing by Abe or his wife. All that’s been established so far is that bureaucrats acted improperly to clear the way for the construction of educational facilities operated by friends of the Abes. Whether they did so on their own initiative or were following orders (which Abe denies) remains the unanswered question.

Partly as a result, the Abe cabinet was on the nose with Japanese voters: for every one who approved of its performance, two others disapproved. Abe sought to win back confidence by firing several unpopular ministers and adopting a more modest demeanour during public appearances. But the main reasons for the revival in the government’s ratings over the past three months — more voters now approve than disapprove — are North Korea’s missile and nuclear testing and the disarray in opposition ranks.

Abe’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party returned to power in 2012, replacing the centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (since merged into the Democratic Party), which had been in office at the time of the massive Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and was blamed for mistakes in the response to that disaster. Since losing office, the Democrats have been dogged by internal divisions, policy blunders and collapsing public support. Abe chose the opportunity of another of his opponent’s leadership changes to call the election.

Abe may also have been alert to the need to head off a flanking attack in the form of Tokyo’s female governor Yuriko Koike. Immediately the election was called, Koike stepped into the fray at the head of the Party of Hope (the name Kibō no Tō was registered earlier this year), the latest offering in a smorgasbord of new political groups over recent years. Koike has herself flittered from one micro-party to another, as well as serving in two LDP administrations as environment and then defence minister.

Last year, she defied head office to run against the LDP’s anointed candidate for governor of Tokyo. Following her landslide victory, the LDP lost its majority in the city assembly, and the stage was set for the articulate and telegenic Koike (she was a television news anchor earlier in her career) to reach for higher laurels.

Koike is not the first woman to lead a Japanese political party, but none before her has been both an English and an Arabic speaker (she graduated from Cairo University) or so at ease in a television studio. Ideologically, however, her cloth is cut from the right wing of the LDP, which was her natural home (she failed in a bid to become party president in 2008) until she flew the nest. While she was a member of the ruling party, she served as national security adviser to the right-wing think tank Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) and was active in advocating visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where war criminals are among the honoured dead.

Like the LDP, Koike’s Party of Hope supports the amending of Japan’s postwar constitution to formalise the status of the country’s defence forces. Following the election, it is likely that, for the first time, the ruling and largest opposition parties will both be committed to constitutional reform along similar lines. If North Korea continues on its bellicose way, the revisionists will have an easier path to success.

In opinion surveys taken immediately the election was called, public support for Koike’s party soared (to more than 20 per cent in some cases). But the euphoria, if you can call it that, did not last long. More recent surveys give the new party as little as 5 per cent. (Voters in Tokyo, the most familiar with Koike’s methods, are said to be the most disenchanted.) The LDP and its coalition partner, the Komeito, are currently expected to win around 300 of the 465 lower house seats, dwarfing the sixty or so seats the Party of Hope is on track to secure.

There appear to be several explanations for Koike’s faltering bid for power. Rather than absorb into her fold all the MPs of the now-defunct Democratic Party, Koike showed her true colours by excluding liberal members who oppose any change to the war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution. Her decision not to stand as a candidate in the election undermined the Party of Hope’s claim to be ready to govern the nation. And her party’s manifesto has been criticised as trite and gimmicky, typified by its adoption of the slogan “Yurinomics” to match the LDP’s “Abenomics.”

Meanwhile, the rejected MPs from the centre-left wing of the Democratic Party have regrouped under a new banner, the Constitutional Democratic Party, led by a well-known and respected politician, Yukio Edano. Recent opinion surveys indicate this group may return around thirty members to the Diet.

Cynics might say Japanese politics has now acquired a full set of bookends: a Liberal Democratic Party that is not liberal and a Party of Hope that has no hope. The most likely outcome of the 22 October election is the return of the LDP–Komeito coalition government. The size of its majority will determine how long Shinzo Abe remains prime minister. A desire for change may well exist in Japan — as indicated by the initial surge of support for Koike’s “coup” — but, once more, the electorate is being offered no credible alternative to the status quo. •

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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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Any nation is the subject of multiple narratives, but much of Japan’s twentieth-century history has been seen through one in particular: the path through war to peace. Japan’s rise as a military power, beginning in the 1890s, follows a narrative arc that is taught in textbooks and shown in television series, feature films and newspaper articles. With its several acts and dramatic climax, the story is well known to much of the audience.

It often goes like this. Fearful of Western expansionism, Japan fortifies itself with a modern military. Imperial Japan expands its borders to create a protective barrier; in the process, countless East Asian and Southeast Asian lives are sacrificed. The expansion begins to plateau as the Allies apply pressure during the second world war, and the dramatic climax is expressed through atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seventy years ago. The Japanese people are plunged into darkness and despair.

The occupation and reconstruction periods in Japan opened a new narrative. At the start of this story, Japan “forever renounce[d] war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling disputes,” in the words of article 9 of the national constitution. In essence, Japan’s Peace Constitution worked as a kind of plot device, transforming a tragedy into a new work in progress. This “master narrative,” arising from the highest legal document in the land, meant that Japan could redirect its history towards a new goal.

Decades later, Japan is known ly for its peace movement, which is nearly always connected to its anti-nuclear movements. Japanese peace activists have spoken powerfully at gatherings; Japanese atomic bomb survivors are closely involved in UN studies of disarmament and non-proliferation education. When UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon visited Hiroshima on 6 August 2010 to participate in the sixty-fifth anniversary ceremony, the Japanese peace movement featured on an stage. In these and other events, Japan’s historical narrative has projected a future in which nuclear bombs or other weapons of mass destruction would never be used again.

But other narratives, of course, survived. Militarism could not be completely erased from Japanese society by the final defeat in August 1945, and it still lingers in the expression of military values in contemporary Japanese legal practices, in law enforcement, in the organisation of the Self-Defense Forces, and in the continuing revision of the militaristic narrative by historians and bureaucrats. The “history textbook wars” began in the 1950s, when the government and the teachers’ union squared off over who should write, and who should authorise educational materials. The Saburo Ienaga case, which spanned decades, was brought to court on claims that government censorship of passages dealing with wartime atrocities had infringed the author’s freedom of speech. In 2005, Nobel Prize–winning author Kenzaburo Oe faced a libel suit instigated by two war veterans who disputed his account of forced civilian suicides in Okinawa.

Japan’s peace narrative has not had an easy road, but its place in the constitution has guaranteed that it remains part of the national master narrative. Public support for article 9 was extremely high in the early postwar period, buoyed by a genuine sentiment for peace (and hatred of war) after the population’s direct experience of conflict. Over the years the Peace Constitution has been challenged by “interpretations,” such as those that allowed Japanese Self-Defense Forces troops to go to Cambodia as part of a UN peacekeeping mission in 1991, and to be deployed in Iraq in 2004–06 for “non-combat” tasks. These challenges were based on the argument that Japan should revise its constitution to pull it into line with other “normal” nations (meaning powers with large military forces). The claim is that Japan will never be treated as an equal on the stage until it abandons this provision. Fears of a strengthening Chinese army have further fuelled the desire for change.

The narrative of normalisation squarely challenges the peace narrative. In July, the Abe government used its overwhelming majority in the Japanese parliament’s lower house to push through a new bill to expand Japan’s capacity in military action overseas, despite the fact that the majority of legal scholars polled said that the new law is unconstitutional. The bill, ironically called “The Legislation for Peace and Security,” will go to the upper house in the coming weeks.

While the Abe bill claims “collective defence” – attacks on allies would be considered the same as an attack on Japanese soil – as its main purpose, its most powerful effect would be to wind back article 9. But the bill has been so vaguely worded that few commentators have been able to unravel its real implications, and this will make it particularly easy for the Abe government (or future administrations) to make its own interpretation of the law.

The Abe government’s rewriting of the narrative of postwar Japan is often seen as a simple reflection of a new mood of nationalism in Japanese society. But there are good reasons to question that view. Fifty-nine per cent of the Japanese public do not support his military bill (and only 24 per cent support it). Even more strikingly, support for the existing Peace Constitution appears to be rising. While a Nikkei opinion poll of 2005 found a majority of respondents in favour of revising the constitution, an opinion poll taken by the Kyodo News Agency in July 2015 found 60 per cent in favour of retaining it as it stands. Of those who support the existing constitution today, 88 per cent cite the peace clause as one of its most valuable features. The Kyodo poll also revealed that a majority (52 per cent) believed Japan was heading in the wrong direction, with pessimism being highest among respondents in their twenties and thirties.

If “normalisation” becomes Japan’s new national narrative, it will undermine the hopeful story that has been told in classrooms and at rallies and memorial services since 1945. “Normalisation” strengthens the right-wing narrative that claims self-protection as a justification for expansion. All too easily, overseas military ventures could be justified as essential for deterrence and self-defence. Was not prewar Japan merely acting as a “normal” great power?

Many of us charged with writing and teaching the historical narratives of postwar Japan have recognised the power and logic of the peace narrative, and sought to refine and deepen it. The emerging narrative undermines core understandings, not just of the Japanese, but also of the Asia-Pacific and indeed of human history. We need to confront, debate and challenge its underlying assumptions. •

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Beyond numbers, the “great Tokyo air raid” (Tokyo daikushu) also has a singular horror. The tide of war had long turned decisively against Japan. The capture of the Mariana Islands in November 1944 had made it possible for America’s powerful B-29 bombers to launch long-range raids on its territory. Pounding attacks on the port city of Kobe and Tokyo itself in February, causing extensive damage, were a foretaste. To total air superiority and immense explosive power was added a change of tactics from high-altitude to lower-flying bombing. Three more ingredients completed the mix: clear skies, the preponderance of wood-and-paper buildings in the target areas (including the industrial flatlands in the city’s east), and strong winds conducive to the quick spread of fires. On a highly combustible city, 325 B-29s dropped around 2000 tons of incendiary bombs in two hours.

A recipe for carnage, then, from burning by napalm to suffocation by noxious smoke to laceration by molten glass. Individual fires met, and exploded into infernos. Many people sought relief in the river, only to be boiled to death, asphyxiated or drowned. There were few places to hide; shelters dug under homes were more often death traps. By early morning, the relentless barrage and conflagration had flattened much of the cityscape. Survivors buried relatives where they could, set up impromptu shrines, sought shelter and relief. Firefighters and hospitals continued to work against the odds. Officials made records, collated statistics, issued orders. The hard core of a militarised and police state pulled ever tighter around itself and over its exhausted citizens.

The air campaign was repeated across Japan over the ensuing weeks. Sixty-six urban centres were pulverised, at huge cost to lives and infrastructure. Each city, every neighbourhood, was afflicted from on high in its own way. Military options narrowed to last-ditch homeland defence, diplomatic ones to the desperate search for an exit short of absolute defeat, human ones to survival. Then, the double use of a “new and most cruel bomb” in early August led to political crisis and surrender from on high. Eight years of war were over. Japan entered the unknown.

What happened in Tokyo took its place among the many horrors of those years across the world. But where was that place? The short answer is, elusive at best. Inevitably, the brute realities of the war’s outcome imposed a taxonomy of suffering that would shape perceptions of the global conflict for years to come. The millions of dead Japanese and German civilians, including tens of thousands who in the immediate postwar period were slaughtered in or expelled from lands their armies had conquered, featured hardly at all.

In the convulsive era of occupation, cold war, and recovery after 1945, both winners and losers had a lot on their minds. Japanese and Germans gradually negotiated their way towards admission to the new order. There was little moralism and a lot of rationalisation. Most, consumed by the business of living, deferred a backward look. Memories were buried, discarded, revised, sentimentalised, privatised. And in circumstances of dependency and political constraint, much was either off limits or already taken care of. By the time the covers began to lift, and people could in principle think and speak more freely, many routes to the past were overgrown.

Tokyo boomed and bloomed. But the catastrophe that had visited the city in March 1945 remained largely out of sight. Indeed, each addition to the skyline made it more remote. When the Olympic Games in 1964 marked new Japan’s opening to the world, Tokyo celebrated its ability to rise from the depths. It was a way to enfold the century’s two colossal disasters, the “great Kanto earthquake” (Kanto daishinsai) of September 1923, whose toll was also well over 100,000, being the first. The link was real: in each case, incineration had consumed the wooden shacks of the working class “low city” (shitamachi) between the Sumida and Arakawa rivers.

There were other reasons for relative silence. The firebombing, though devastating, was a late episode in the war yet several months from its end. August’s climactic events would deliver to Hiroshima and Nagasaki an unwanted, existential status as both “victim” and “peace” cities. Tokyo escaped that fate and the dilemmas it entails. The calamity and its dead, however, were left in the margins of remembrance.

In the atomic cities, Hiroshima especially (Nagasaki had more going for it), politicised memory was an unavoidable drag. But there was a certain convenience for Japan’s elite that the main symbol of national suffering, and site of pietistic peace pilgrimage, was far from the capital. Sustained memorialisation of Tokyo’s experience of war might invite unwelcome questions, not least about Japan’s own aerial assaults, from Chongqing in 1938–43 to the late madness of suicide planes. Better let tortured souls lie.

Or else exhume them for a cynical purpose. Yushukan is the museum attached to the Yasukuni shrine (jinja) in central Tokyo. A bronze statue of one of those kamikaze pilots, erected in 2005, lurks on a plinth in a discreet corner a few yards from the entrance. It’s an augury for the tendentious panorama of national history inside, whose later stages in particular mix grotesquerie and farce. As I exited into the teeming crowds (it was the new year holiday), the odd, perhaps essentialist but somehow apt thought struck me that this was the most un-Japanese place I had ever visited in Japan.

Elsewhere there is relief. The Edo-Tokyo museum, in Sumida ward, has a discerning section on Tokyoites’ exposure to war in the context of the city’s multilayered history. And a ten-minute walk from Yushukan, the 300,000 unidentified Japanese soldiers and civilians from the war in Asia are recalled at the Chidorigafuchi national cemetery. A panel maps numbers, dates and locations. In the middle of the sedate park is a hexagonal hall, open to the elements, with a ceramic coffin at the centre. The remains are housed in subterranean ossuaries. There is room to breathe. It is deserted.

Two sites of memory bring the firebombing closest. In quiet Yokoami park, also in Sumida, the Tokyo Memorial Hall (Tokyo-to Ireido) is the de facto official monument to the victims. The three-storey building in pagoda style had been rededicated in 1930 to those killed in the earthquake seven years earlier; many thousands who sought refuge in the park had been consumed by the firestorm sparked by the quake. Their ashes were joined in the postwar years by those of the victims of the fire bombing, a symbolism made formal in 1951. Respective ceremonies are held here every 1 September and 10 March.

The scaffolding is up in preparations for the seventieth anniversary. Inside is tranquil, the rows of hard chairs suggestive of a lecture theatre. In a corner, the visitor can switch on a ten-minute video, pulled from the public broadcaster NHK, telling the story of the 1945 raid. Along the walls, enlarged photos of desolation: a group gathered round a water pump, a family dragging a cart with their possessions. Beside the hall is a memorial artwork sculpted in 2001: a landscaped amphitheatre, its focal point is a small pond and a door into the dark.

The other site, to the south in Koto ward, is the independent Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai Shiryo Senta). This modest institution was founded in 2002 by Saotome Katsumoto, a tireless educator and author of many books about the air raid, prominent among them The Day Tokyo Burned (Tokyo ga moeta hi), published in 1979. Its vast archive includes rare artefacts, meticulous documentary records, and survivors’ testimonies, accessible in its library and museum run by a small team of dedicated volunteers. Much of its work is research, publishing and outreach to schools, citizen groups and media. Katsumoto-san, now eighty-two, is invited to give talks all over Japan, the on-duty volunteer told me before taking a call from NHK about an anniversary program it was making.

Here is the collection of images, thirty-three in all, seen in part at Yokoami. They were taken by the young photographer Koyo Ishikawa, whose prewar Leica-shot street scenes rank with his great French and Hungarian peers. On 10 March, commissioned by Tokyo’s police department to record the impact of the raid, Ishikawa produced a haunting portfolio of tragedy. It survived only because he buried the negatives, thus ignoring the occupation authorities’ order that all such materials should be handed over.

The centre is a precious resource, all the more for retaining the spirit of its founder. That from-below and civic example continues to inflect understanding of one of the last century’s most terrible events. Every wave of renewed interest, whether expressed in exhibitions, advocacy, articles, websites, or support for recognition, owes Saotome Katsumoto and his colleagues a profound debt.

If not a hidden or forgotten atrocity, then, the great Tokyo air raid is certainly an under-remembered one. All the more reason to retrieve, compare and debate it. When East Asia’s future is uncertain and tensions over history acute, that might be thought impolitic. But much more harm is caused on every side by avoiding reality than facing it. Even seventy years on, Tokyo 1945 is an unhealed wound. •

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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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EARLIER this year, the US and Japanese governments agreed to transfer around 9000 American marines from the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa to Guam and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific. The two countries were trying to make some progress on the wider issue of US military “realignment” in Okinawa and Japan more generally, but without relocating the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from one part of Okinawa to another.

Back in 2006, when the United States and Japan agreed on the “roadmap” for this military realignment, the relocation of Futenma – away from the built-up city of Ginowan to the Camp Schwab area in the less-populated northeast – was intended, together with the marines transfer and other changes, to reduce the impact of America’s military presence on the everyday lives of Okinawans.

The new facility at Camp Schwab would be based around two runways forming a V-shape across Cape Henoko and protruding into Oura and Henoko Bays. Construction, which was meant to be completed by 2014, is yet to begin, however. And where public sentiment was previously split, Okinawan opinion today is shifting from simply opposing Futenma’s ongoing presence in Ginowan to also opposing its relocation anywhere else in the prefecture. For most Okinawans, the only acceptable relocation is outside Okinawa. But now that the transfer of marines has gone ahead regardless of the progress made on the relocation of Futenma, the airbase is likely to remain where it is for the foreseeable future.

Events in Okinawa over the past couple of months have reinforced how complex and intractable the many issues surrounding the US military realignment have become. The alleged rape of a woman on 16 October by US sailors has led to outrage in Japan and recalls the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three US military personnel in September 1995. And in September of this year, the scheduled deployment of twelve American MV-22 Osprey vertical take-off and landing aircraft to the Futenma base was the subject of large demonstrations because of safety concerns.

THE roadmap agreement, it should be remembered, was not a sudden development. It was more than a decade prior to the May 2006 agreement, in February 1996, that the two governments first raised the Futenma issue at the highest level – during a meeting between prime minister Hashimoto Ryutaro and president Bill Clinton at Santa Monica in the United States. A subsequent report laid out the idea of moving the base (or at least those parts that couldn’t be absorbed elsewhere), with the move to be completed within “five to seven years” (that is, 2003 at the latest).

One of the key reasons why Hashimoto and Clinton were discussing Futenma at their meeting was that, in the wake of the 1995 rape, Okinawan governor Ota Masahide had rejected an application for lease extensions for a number of US military facilities in Okinawa. Ota’s decision caused dismay in both Tokyo and Washington. In particular, the decision jeopardised the legal basis of the leases and thus the alliance, at least until the central government applied sufficient legal and financial pressure to force the governor to reverse his position. In 1997, the central government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, consequently amended the laws that gave the governor a central position in the base-leasing process, establishing instead the national government’s right to override local objections to lease renewals. Hashimoto noted in the Diet (Japanese parliament) at the time that, were Japan unable to obtain the land, it could “cause a rift in Japan–US relations.”

Raising the Futenma issue at Santa Monica, however, proved far easier for the two governments than actually agreeing to and then implementing a plan for the base’s relocation. Even when the Japanese government finally signed the roadmap in 2006, it appeared unable to obtain Okinawan assent to the plan.

Yet dissent in Okinawa is not universal. Successive Okinawan governors have wavered over the relocation plan, sometimes offering support but on other occasions opposing either certain details or the entire proposal. A number of factors have contributed to this pattern: the long history of base problems in Okinawa, the prefecture’s sense of distance from the rest of Japan, and a number of political and social differences within Okinawa itself. Even when opposition to the bases in Okinawa is high, many in the community remain supportive of their presence since they make a living from base-related industry, services and leasing arrangements.

Okinawan attitudes are shaped as much by the prefecture’s relations with the central government as by its relationship with the United States. For instance, the central government’s reputation in the eyes of Okinawans was greatly damaged by the Ministry of Education’s decision in 2007 to excise sections in history textbooks regarding the role played by the Imperial Japanese Army in Okinawans’ mass suicides during the second world war.

Some of the problems worsened when the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in September 2009; in fact, by early 2010 the realignment process seemed to have broken down entirely. Prime minister Hatoyama Yukio promised the Okinawans that, if they were opposed to moving Futenma somewhere else inside the prefecture, the government would work to shift it outside the prefecture instead. In terms of delivering his promise, however, Hatoyama failed miserably. The US administration reacted angrily to his unilateral decision to revisit the roadmap agreement, and the ensuing standstill compelled the prime minister to retreat to the old position of accepting the roadmap. Hatoyama resigned soon after.

RECENT events in Japan – notably the tragedy of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011 – have overshadowed concerns about the US military presence in Okinawa. But the problems, as the last month has shown, haven’t gone away. When prime minister Noda Yoshihiko reshuffled his cabinet in January this year, he was forced to replace defence minister Ichikawa Yasuo because of comments the minister made about Okinawa. By publicly stating that he was not familiar with the 1995 rape case, Ichikawa had quickly become the subject of outrage in Okinawa and a censure motion by the opposition LDP in the upper house.

But when Noda visited Okinawa the following month, he still failed to obtain the backing of governor Nakaima Hirokazu for the roadmap. Noda attempted to persuade the governor that the Henoko plan would be the only way to solve the impasse, but Nakaima steadfastly maintained his position that the base should be relocated outside the prefecture.

From then until the alleged rape in October, the Osprey deployment to Futenma took up most media attention. With a far greater flight range and the capacity to be refuelled in mid-air, the MV-22 Ospreys are meant to replace the older CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters. They can cover key potential flashpoints in Northeast Asia, notably the Senkaku Islands, which have been the subject of recent Sino-Japanese tensions (and are known as the Diaoyu in China).

Okinawans, who have experienced numerous military-related accidents over the years, are concerned about the Ospreys’ safety, even if they are considered to be a significant upgrade. The 2004 crash of a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter into Okinawa International University, near the Futenma base, led to numerous protests and remains contentious. The accident was a watershed event, described by William Brooks, an academic and former US diplomat, as a “symbol of the US base problem in Okinawa.”

According to Tanji Miyume, a specialist in Japanese politics and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, local opponents have long been deeply concerned about the possible deployment of the Ospreys. Whatever their capabilities, they have suffered a number of well-publicised crashes or emergency landings in the lead-up to their Okinawan deployment. In April, an Osprey crashed in Morocco, and the plans for deployment were delayed; since then, further accidents have occurred in Florida and North Carolina. As a result, the deployment was a hot issue for the June 2012 prefectural assembly elections in Okinawa; groups that were hostile to the Futenma relocation plan and the Osprey deployment – even more hostile than Nakaima – did especially well at the elections. In July, Nakaima called on the central government to stop the deployment until further investigations into the Ospreys’ safety were carried out.

One result of all this has been a significant increase in anti-Osprey protests. Indeed, Okinawan opposition to the Osprey deployment appears to be generally on the rise, suggesting that further progress on resolving wider base problems may remain impossible for some time. Around 5000 people protested against the deployment in June this year; tens of thousands attended a major anti-Osprey rally in early September; and when the first six Ospreys arrived at the Futenma base in early October, they were met by protesters.

Then the alleged rape took place, meaning that tensions in Okinawa, already inflamed by the Osprey deployment, could easily rise further. Japan’s central government has summoned the US ambassador to lodge its protest, while prime minister Noda, defence minister Morimoto Satoshi and foreign minister Genba Koichiro have publicly expressed their anger over the incident. Nakaima has described the alleged rape as “insane” and called for reform of the Status of Forces Agreement (the legal framework under which America’s military personnel operate in a host country). The prefectural assembly has adopted a unanimous resolution expressing its “burning resentment” over the alleged crime.

CAN these problems actually be resolved? Okinawa’s troubles are so intractable because they go to a dilemma at the heart of Japanese grand strategy and the United States–Japan alliance itself: burden sharing.

Japan has three principal options for basic national defence. First, it might continue to rely on the United States and keep the bases, with some realignment but largely as they are. Second, it might further develop its own military capabilities and thus reduce the need for such a large US presence and associated bases in Japan. Third, it might adopt a policy of unarmed neutrality in response to any conflicts and thus eliminate, in theory at least, the need for any military capabilities, American or Japanese.

Japan has never seriously attempted the third option, even at the height of the Cold War, and has in any case moved further away from this choice over the past decade. Moreover, given the unstable nature of the Asia-Pacific today – and Japan’s various territorial and historical problems in the region – such an approach would appear highly impractical.

Yet the second option also remains problematic, both ly and domestically. A military expansion by Japan would likely add further instability to the already tense regional environment and could prompt significant responses from other Asian powers, such as China and North Korea. Short of a major crisis, it remains a major project (even if the nationalist Abe Shinzo becomes prime minister once again).

Accordingly, Japan continues to stick with the first option. Indeed, the alliance remains popular and America’s security guarantee is still welcomed. The central bargain that has so successfully underpinned the alliance – that Japan hosts the United States in return for America’s security guarantee – still has great appeal for both sides. Japan, for instance, is happy that the United States considers that the Senkaku Islands fall within the scope of the security treaty.

The dilemma is that this option contains the seeds of its own undoing in Okinawa. So long as Japan prefers the alliance option, but continues to be seen in Okinawa as unwilling or unable to spread the associated base burden more widely through the country, the alliance will suffer ongoing reputational damage. Accidents and crimes in the prefecture fuel Okinawan discontent over the US military presence and the central government’s negligence, perceived or otherwise.

Robert D. Eldridge, a historian and civilian official for the Marine Corps in Okinawa, talks of a “vicious cycle” in the domestic politics of the basing issue, whereby discussion gradually becomes more contentious and emotional, with little place for compromise. If such a cycle were allowed to persist, it could conceivably weaken the United States–Japan relationship to a point where the viability of this central bargain might be questioned. Under such a scenario, Japan would consider itself unable to support such an ill-behaved sponsor, while America would no longer be willing to defend such a fractious client. The breakdown in this bargain would in turn weaken America’s position in the region while pushing Japan towards the kind of rapid security “normalisation” that could produce the very tensions in the Asia-Pacific that the two allies are hoping to avoid.

A fourth option would be to maintain the US presence but spread the base burden more evenly across the country. The policy of realigning the US military presence in Japan, including relocating the functions of bases in Okinawa to mainland Japan or Guam, has been an important step in this direction.

There are significant obstacles to this process, however. A greater emphasis on the East China Sea region in US and Japanese strategies – illustrated by America’s “pivot” to Asia and Japan’s new “dynamic defence” doctrine – arguably increases Okinawa’s strategic importance. Meanwhile, “nimbyism” in Japan makes it extremely difficult to move key US bases out of Okinawa to other places around the country. This was well illustrated by the criticism Hatoyama received in 2010 when he considered transferring parts of Futenma elsewhere in Japan.

As the cycle of resentment in Okinawa becomes increasingly entrenched and the regional security environment grows more uncertain, tough choices lie ahead for Japanese policy-makers. •

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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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