Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit on 26 December, 2013, may prove even more damaging than these previous ructions. Northeast Asia is currently beset by rising strategic tensions, epitomized by the territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands to China). The islands are administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Although Abe has since attempted to minimize the impact of his visit, it could easily escalate such tensions. Unsurprisingly, China and South Korea, which also has territorial and historical disputes with Japan, have been quick to denounce the visit.
Yasukuni is a potent strategic problem for Japan and Asia. It reveals unresolved antagonisms emanating from Japan’s conduct before and during the Second World War. It has also become a vehicle for domestic politicking, particularly of the nationalist kind, as well as an emotive form of diplomacy. China and South Korea regularly use the ‘history’ card to castigate Japan, while Japan often seems to be deliberately snubbing its nose at the region. Yasukuni thus distorts how these countries perceive each other’s security intentions and exacerbates Northeast Asia’s rising sense of insecurity.
Potential Chinese responses to Abe’s visit highlight how misunderstood intentions could play out. Predisposed to viewing other countries’ behaviour as encirclement, China may view Abe’s visit as signalling rising Japanese nationalism and remilitarization, especially since the visit comes in the wake of Japan’s recently released national security strategy, defence build-up and musings on collective defence. China may now attempt to assert what it views as its core interests even more forcefully.
The most obvious short-term scenario for rising Sino-Japanese confrontation continues to be the Senkakus. Diplomacy over the islands has long been troubled, but has worsened considerably since 2012 when Japan nationalized three islands of the five-island chain. China’s recent announcement of an Air Defence Identification Zone covering the islands has strained relations further. If China now backs up its outrage at Abe’s visit by acting with greater determination over the Senkakus, the chances of a conflict rise significantly.
Misperceptions triggered by Yasukuni could also isolate Japan from others in Asia. Abe has achieved some success in developing closer relations with countries around the region, especially in Southeast Asia. However, Japan’s relations with its major potential partner in Northeast Asia, South Korea, are at serious risk of suffering long-tern deterioration.
The two countries share a number of common interests — strong bilateral trade, democratic politics, close relations with the US, concerns over China’s increasing assertiveness, and fears about North Korea. Japanese leaders may feel that South Korea is unreasonably nationalistic in responding angrily to such visits — or that all history issues were resolved in 1965 when the two countries normalized their diplomatic relations — but the reality is that Tokyo’s too often dismissive approach to Seoul’s grievances is a major obstacle to a closer bilateral relationship.
Finally, Abe’s visit could create misunderstandings with its major security partner, the United States. The visit undermines US attempts to reduce frictions stemming from China’s rise while encouraging greater cooperation between its regional partners (especially Japan, South Korea, and Australia). In a rare rebuke from the US Embassy in Tokyo, the US stated that it was ‘disappointed’ at Japan and that its actions would ‘exacerbate’ problems with its neighbours.
Despite his strong history of support for the US-Japan alliance, Abe already has a reputation for unreliability in Washington. Abe does appear to have achieved some success in resolving the military basing problems in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, an issue that has long bedevilled the alliance. However, a weary and more inward-looking superpower will not appreciate being dragged into a potential regional conflict. If the US perceives Japan as entrapping it in such a conflict (whether intentionally or not), the alliance will be damaged. Indeed, US policymakers might now be quietly considering how to establish greater leverage over Japan and Abe.
Considering all this, the obvious question is: why? Electoral politics do not appear especially relevant: the government currently enjoys majorities in both houses of parliament and has been implementing a decisive if incomplete package of economic reforms. Given his particular understanding of history, Abe’s nationalist credentials in Japan hardly need buttressing.
Perhaps Abe’s visit reflects wider problems in political leadership. Political leaders around the world, struggling to solve the many intractable problems caused by globalization and the 2008 financial crisis, may be tempted to indulge in political grandstanding. Accordingly, Abe might believe that, in the current climate, China is unlikely to allow relations to deteriorate further, making it an opportune time for some grandstanding of his own.
Yet the visit is also indicative of the stubbornness and insularity prevalent in Japanese politics today. With the fragmentation of national party politics over the past two years, the country has become more susceptible to right-wing populism. The problem is that, in the fragile strategic environment Japan now inhabits, such hubris will likely prove costly.
H. D. P. (David) Envall is a research fellow at the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies, The Australian National University.
In asking, as the author of this post does, why Abe has insisted on visiting Yasukuni Shrine, it may be helpful to reflect on his family background. For students of Asian dynastic politics, it is interesting to see how Abe Shinzo resembles his maternal grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, much more than he does his father, Abe Shintaro.
His father was a long-serving Foreign Minister, who took over the leadership of Fukuda Takeo’s faction in the LDP on the latter’s retirement. Although the Fukuda faction belonged to the right wing of the ruling party, Abe himself was a bland, not very noticeably ideologically-minded politician, who was blessed, or cursed, with a singularly inexpressive face.
Kishi, born in 1896, was a more engaging man possessed of a certain grandfatherly charm even in his eighties. He had been a close associate of wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki. According to the American scholar, Richard Samuels, Kishi was notorious as a money-launderer during his time in the Manchukuo administration. He spent three years after the war in Sugamo Prison as a suspected war criminal. Kishi was released in 1948 after the Americans had lost their zeal for reforming Japanese politics as fighting global communism became their priority. His cell-mates in Sugamo had been Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryoichi, who later became notorious ultra-rightist politicians and crooks, and remained friends of Kishi’s.
Kishi was the first postwar Prime Minister to embrace Southeast Asia. Yoshida Shigeru had dismissed Southeast Asians with the comment: “You can’t trade with beggars”. But Kishi realised that, by giving reparations to Southeast Asian countries in kind, that is, in Japanese manufactures or services, you could do great favours to your friends in Japanese industry and attract political donations. One of Kishi’s services to Southeast Asia, for example, was to employ Kodama Yoshio and his thugs to provide security for a private visit to Japan by President Sukarno in 1958. It was, sadly, only on a later visit that Sukarno met his future Japanese wife, Dewi. Abe Shinzo’s recent get-together with ASEAN leaders in Tokyo, where he offered $20 billion in aid, somehow how recalls Grandfather Kishi’s pioneering ploughing of the Southeast Asian aid paddock.
When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Japan in 2006, he expressed his gratitude to Kishi, then deceased for almost twenty years, for having been the first Prime Minister to include India in Japan’s ODA program. One wonders what India’s attitude to Japan might have been had Japan managed to conquer British India, forcing the Indians to exchange the injustices of British colonialism for the barbarities of Japanese occupation. Abe Shinzo has inherited his grandfather’s generous disposition towards India.
Even after his retirement, Kishi was a patron of the Taiwan lobby in the LDP, which had earlier opposed Japan’s recognition of ‘Red’ China. Here, again, Abe Shinzo seems something of a reincarnation of his grandfather.
When Abe visits Yasukuni, does he ever glimpse the image of Grandfather Kishi, who might well have been, in slightly different postwar circumstances, enshrined there as a martyr along with Tojo and some of his other wartime colleagues?
Nobody is interested in excuses. It was an uncalled for provocation.