How Will Japan's First Female PM Handle China?
Looking Back, Moving Forward
Sanae Takaichi made history last October by becoming Japan’s first female prime minister. Earlier this month, she made it again, leading her ailing party – the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP – to a landslide victory, winning a larger proportion of seats in Japan’s powerful lower house than any other party since the end of World War II.
The LDP now enjoys a ‘supermajority,’ meaning that, if necessary, it can override the upper house in pushing policies through the Diet. But what does Takaichi want?
A major question for what may become a historic premiership is what use Takaichi has for the past. Looming over Japan’s relationships with China, Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbours is the grim and ever-contested history of Japan’s twentieth-century empire. A regular refrain in postwar Chinese critiques of Japanese defence spending, right up to the present day, has been that it risks awakening a dormant militarism.
Those critiques hold less weight now that China is expanding its naval and nuclear capabilities at a rapid rate. But Takaichi has declared her desire to revise Japan’s American-authored postwar constitution in order to clarify the role of the Self-Defence Forces. She is a member of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a powerful conservative lobby group dedicated to a traditionalist vision of Japan with the Emperor at its core. And she is mulling a first visit, as prime minister, to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine.
This is a lightning-rod issue in East Asia because it pits those in Japan who wish to honour their war dead stretching back to the late nineteenth century (this was the shrine’s original purpose) with those in countries like China and Korea who focus on the fact that amongst around 2.4 million souls enshrined at Yasukuni are those of convicted war criminals from World War II.
Relitigating the Second World War’s controversial episodes and cultural consequences – which many in Nippon Kaigi equate with excessive Americanization since Japan’s defeat in 1945 – may well prove counter-productive. If she wants to revisit that period, Takaichi would be better off studying the intensifying perception in Japan, around a century ago, that it was becoming encircled by hostile powers: Soviets, Chinese Nationalists, Europe’s Asian colonies and the United States. China may soon find itself in a similar position, feeling surrounded by insufficiently friendly countries just at the point where its ageing population and slowing economy suggest that the window for reorganising its neighbourhood is beginning to close.
Japan is the most important link in a ‘First Island Chain’, which runs from the Kuril Islands down to Borneo and constrains Chinese access to the Pacific. The US-Japanese aim remains, for now at least, the strengthening of that chain and the cultivation of a coalition in the Asia-Pacific that is capable of balancing out Chinese economic and seaborne military power and maintaining freedom of the seas. It’s a reasonable project, but one that will need to be pursued with sensitivity.
The ‘First Island Chain’, running from the Kuril Islands in the north down to Borneo in the south
A careful reading of the past may also help Takaichi and her administration think through China’s likely long-term intentions. This is a topic on which analysts around the world are deeply divided. There are those, in the United States especially, who believe that Chinese reluctance to pronounce on the internal affairs of other countries is about current capabilities rather than political culture: once its military is able to project power in the way that the United States can, and European nations once could, then we will begin to see a more interventionist China.
Another way of reading the past and present is that the benefits of territorial or maritime expansion are not what they once were. Power and prosperity in the mid-twenty-first century rest more on economic and commercial leverage than boots on the ground and the taking of direct and costly responsibility for other countries’ affairs.
Takaichi’s conclusion may be that China seeks prestige rather than empire. Rather than replace the US as global policeman, it may simply want to do away with that role, exchanging a postwar international culture of liberal co-operation under American auspices with one defined by national self-interest and multipolarity. This may happen slowly, avoiding the risk of upsetting China’s highly globalised economy and allowing the impression to set in that it is a natural rather than a managed transition.
For now, it is in both Japan and China’s interests to continue their economic co-operation, even while Japan and its partners try to balance out Chinese attempts at gaining economic leverage in parts of Asia, Africa and South America – via loans, investments and supply-chain dependency. Japan is already at the forefront, globally, of reducing reliance on China as a supplier of key components and raw materials including rare earths. That leadership role may expand under Takaichi.
There is one last way in which Takaichi might usefully look back in order to forge a path forward. It is not so much a clear-cut lesson as a question: at what point does a relationship between rival nations shift from prioritising prosperity based on economic co-operation to allowing strategic aims or fears to dictate their actions? And what, if anything, can Takaichi do to prevent that shift occurring when it comes to Taiwan? If hers ends up being a lengthy premiership, it is highly likely that the Taiwan question will be ‘resolved’ on her watch.
For all the anger in China when Takaichi made her comments last November about the Self-Defence Forces becoming involved in a conflict over Taiwan, the chances of Japan remaining unaffected by a Chinese attempt on the island are very slim. War games consistently emphasise the importance of Japan as a re-supply base for US forces responding to such an attempt, and as a source of essential supplies for the Taiwanese population in the event of a Chinese maritime blockade.
There is a chance that China may yet engineer a peaceful takeover of Taiwan, such is the island’s divided domestic politics and ongoing efforts by China to normalise such an outcome both in Taiwan and internationally.
This, however, would hardly bring tensions in the region to an end. Japan would face the very dangerous scenario of having the People’s Republic of China on its doorstep – visible, on a clear day, from the south-western Japanese island of Yonaguni.
The Japanese island of Yonaguni, seen from Taiwan. Japan and the PRC might one day find themselves this close
This would be worrying enough, for Japanese security. But the next question would be whether or not China’s strategic aims end there. From the Chinese point of view, taking Taiwan is a matter of bringing a renegade province to heel rather than expanding its borders. In time, however, that same logic could be used to make and perhaps enforce a claim over some or all of the Okinawan islands – of which Yonaguni is one.
At present, such claims appear periodically in Chinese media and academic writing, rather than in government pronouncements. Still, they are encouraged by China’s leadership at times of tension with Japan, including late last year in the wake of Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan. And for analysts who suggest paying more attention to the balance of military power than to political rhetoric – or indeed to what historians or legal scholars might argue about Okinawa – it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that soon after talk of a ‘Taiwan contingency’ ends, talk of an ‘Okinawa contingency’ might begin.
Even if China had no intention of pursuing a sovereignty claim on the Okinawan islands, the stoking of nationalist sentiment in China would be useful to the CCP while the effects on Japan could be profound: a drop in international investment and a constant sense of threat – after all, if China’s leaders proved willing to act on their Taiwan rhetoric, why wouldn’t they do so on their Okinawan rhetoric too?
Takaichi’s political leanings mean that the past is often on her mind, as it was for her mentor Shinzō Abe. As she sets about reviewing Japan’s National Security Strategy this year, alongside continuing her wooing of Donald Trump and perhaps thawing her relationship with Xi Jinping, we must hope for a creative and purposeful approach to Asia’s history.
The wrongs and the suffering of the 1930s and 1940s are not to be forgotten. But the stakes are now too high for indulging in the weaponisation of those wrongs and that suffering. Rather than refighting the last war, we must focus on preventing the next one.
Thank you for reading! Please share your thoughts in the comments - and I always appreciate a share and a like if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read…
A longer version of this essay was first published at UnHerd.
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Images
Takaichi and Trump: Japan Times (fair use).
Yonaguni, seen from Taiwan: Taipei Times (fair use).
Excellent essay, Chris. What I always find interesting is that "those in Japan who wish to honour their war dead stretching back to the late nineteenth century" conveniently forget that they were all wars of aggression, or "colonial," "imperialist" wars anyway.
FWIW I am fairly sure that the majority of Taiwanese do not want to be part of the People's Republic. A decade or so ago that was more questionable, but they have seen the decline of Hong Kong and the Covidiocy and don't want that.
I find it interesting that Taiwan seems to - generally speaking - remember it's period under Japanese control positively and to value a continuing friendly relationship with Japan.