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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Shinzo Abe

Namaskar, Abe-san!

11 Fri Dec 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Namaskar, Abe-san!

Tags

bullet train, CEPA, Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, defence, economy, India, infrastructure, Japan, Narendra Modi, nuclear, Shinkansen, Shinzo Abe, US-2 ShinMaywa

Japan’s Shinzo Abe is in India for his third prime ministerial visit and it has the feeling of a meeting between friends rather than between the leaders of two major states. On the morning of his arrival, the Times of India ran an article by the Japanese prime minister in which he briefly outlined the history of India-Japan relations. Calling India a key international player and a natural partner who shared Japan’s values, Abe stated his belief that the two countries held the greatest potential of any bilateral relationship in the 21st century and declared his intention of “dramatically developing” the bonds between India and Japan. Not to be outdone in a show of warmth, the Indian prime minister tweeted, “India is all set to welcome its great friend & a phenomenal leader, PM @AbeShinzo. His visit will further deepen India-Japan relations.”

The rise of Abe in Japan and of Narendra Modi in India tells an interesting tale. Both men are nationalists leading nations that had retreated from the international spotlight during the Cold War, Japan via its pacifism and India through its non-alignment. Both nations have seen a generation pass and the younger crowd does not share the sentimentality of the old, though vast numbers yet remain unsure whether the risks of a more dominant global role are worth taking. Both leaders seek to remake their countries but face substantial opposition at home.

Relations between the two prime ministers go back to Modi’s chief ministerial days. This is the fifth meeting between the two men, the initial one being in 2007 when Abe was in his first term as prime minister. Modi and Abe connected well, or at least understood that they needed each other as the post-Cold War honeymoon drew to a close. Their personal chemistry has certainly helped Modi domestically: at a time when the West was trying to isolate him over the 2002 Godhra riots, Japanese firms made major investments in Gujarat’s infrastructure and industry. It is partly the successful outcome of these projects that propelled Modi to the top position in the country in May 2014.

Abe is in India for three days to attend the ninth annual India-Japan Summit talks. These talks broadly encompass three shared strategic interests: Indian infrastructural and economic development, civil nuclear cooperation, and defence ties. Expectations of the summit are big this year, something to top Japan’s promise in August 2014 to invest $34 billion in the Indian economy over five years. And Abe might deliver – it has been reported that the summit will likely see India and Japan seal an agreement for the latter to provide the former $15 billion at 0.5 per cent interest over 50 years to construct India’s first high speed rail line connecting Bombay to Amdavad. India is expected to adopt Japan’s Shinkansen technology and invest at least 30 per cent of the soft loan back into the Japanese economy. Construction is expected to start in 2017 and service by 2024; it has even been suggested that the line might, at a later date, be extended to Delhi as part of India’s Diamond Quadrilateral scheme to link its four metropoles with 10,000 kms of track. Besides this big ticket item, Japan has taken a role in developing the Amdavad and Madras metro projects and is negotiating its involvement in several highway undertakings, airport construction, industrial townships in Tumkur, Ghilot, Mandal, and Supa, and other infrastructural ventures.

An issue that has received less attention in the press is the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between the two nations. For several reasons, the full potential of this agreement has not been realised and the Indian and Japanese delegations would do well to ponder this. India is eager to enter the services sector in Japan, not just in information technology; meanwhile, it wishes Japan to give Indian Small and Medium Enterprises a closer look. The individual transactions may not be as headline worthy as nuclear cooperation or bullet trains but the impact over the entire economy will be greater. As India continues to grow and develop into a manufacturing hub as well, its markets promise to revitalise a flagging Japanese economic story.

While there are few hurdles on the economic front, civil nuclear cooperation is much more complicated. The Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 readmitted India to international nuclear trade circles after four decades of nuclear apartheid and the South Asian country has since concluded several agreements for supplies of uranium for its small fleet of nuclear reactors. It had been hoped that Japan would also promptly begin to engage in nuclear commerce with India but that has not been the case. Tokyo has strict policies governing nuclear commerce, and one of them prohibits any such relations with a country that is not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Delhi will not sign the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state and allowing it to join as a nuclear weapons state will in all likelihood mean the collapse of the international non-proliferation regime. Over the years, India has worked to persuade Japan of its trustworthiness and it is rumoured that Abe is closer to accepting the Indian view.

Truth be told, the value of a nuclear agreement between the two countries has been blown out of proportion. This is entirely because of the symbolic significance India has placed on international recognition of its nuclear credentials as a safe and reliable state. However, even if Abe and Modi were to be able to come to an agreement on this issue, it is unlikely that India will gain anything owing to its unique interpretation of nuclear liability. Japan has become an important manufacturing node in the international nuclear supply chain with major nuclear vendors in France and the United States depending upon vital components from the island. Yet the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA) has brought India’s nuclear renaissance to a screeching halt and GE has refused to enter the country’s nuclear sector. Westinghouse has been silent too and Areva has slowed down its activities in Jaitapur, awaiting clarification on some of the problematic clauses of the CLNDA. If Modi successfully closes a nuclear deal with Abe, the only possible benefit to India in the near future is access to the high quality forging of reactor pressure vessels by Japan Steel Works. This will not bring back the foreign vendors but will at least indigenous nuclear industry the option to accelerate its expansion.

The third leg of the India-Japan relations triad is defence ties. This is a difficult subject for Japan: since World War II, the country has been avowedly pacifist – albeit under a US nuclear umbrella – and has abjured from any military activity outside Japan’s boundaries. Tokyo also forbade itself from selling defence equipment to other countries, even allies. It is only recently that there has been a thaw in this position: in 2011, Abe managed to pass several amendments to Japanese law that now allow him to engage in defence trade. This allowed Japan’s ShinMaywa to respond to Delhi’s Request For Information for nine amphibious aircraft capable of search and rescue operations, radar surveillance, and transportation of cargo. India and Japan set up a Joint Working Group in 2013 to explore the possibility of manufacturing the US-2 ShinMaywa together. Though a new era has begun for the Japanese defence industry, it is still early days and Abe faces strong domestic opposition to his reforms. Even an agreement on joint manufacture of the US-2 will not herald a rapid expansion of Indo-Japanese defence trade in the near future. However, such a deal is to be welcomed as a step in the right direction.

It cannot be ignored that the urgency motivating closer relations between two of Asia’s largest economies is the mutual perception of the threat of a more powerful and assertive China. Both Delhi and Tokyo have looked on with concern as Beijing strengthened its military on the back of a booming economy over the last two decades. China’s show of muscle in the South China Sea, its noxious relations with Pakistan, the quest for assets around the Indian Ocean, and the rapid modernisation and expansion of its military have not only pushed the nations of Southeast Asia together but also raised warning flags for the United States. However, neither Delhi nor Tokyo wish to antagonise Beijing too much just yet for both have substantial economic relations with their troublesome neighbour. An open and aggressive alliance is to neither country’s benefit, at least just yet, and both India and Japan hold out hope that their blossoming security relations will dampen the Middle Kingdom’s impetus for expansionism.

The silent partner in Indo-Japanese security relations is the United States. Washington indicated its willingness to pivot to Asia in 2011 but found little local support for it for no South, East, or Southeast Asian mouse wanted to bell the Chinese cat. Robust ties between Delhi and Tokyo offer the most viable foundation for a quiet US pivot to Asia and the several recent naval exercises between these three nations indicates the substance of this invisible partnership. Australia has been another quiet comrade, making the troika into a quartet. Before the guns start roaring, however, Modi and Abe have astutely chosen to strengthen economic and military ties, coordinate policies, and support regional security architecture as a hint to Beijing to desist from its threatening behaviour.

The outcome of this summit appears positive on the economic front, cautiously optimistic in the security arena, and uncertain in the nuclear field. Yet what still makes it pleasing for Modi to engage with Abe is the shared values and intellectual framework between Indians and Japanese. As the inheritors of a similar set of ancient Asian cultural values, the two countries make ready partners in an Asian century. Mutual security concerns and economic complementarities only further highlight the logic of a close relationship between India and Japan, even if this summit does not deliver all that observers expect of it. There may be no permanent friends in international affairs, but Shnizo Abe and Japan are probably as close to it as India can get in the short and medium term.

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Romancing the Crane

26 Sun Jan 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

China, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, CTBT, defence, electricity, India, Indo-US nuclear deal, infrastructure, Japan, labour, land acquisition, law, Liberal Democratic Party, Manmohan Singh, manufacturing, Narendra Modi, New Komeito Party, Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, nuclear, rare earth metals, retroactive taxation, Shinzo Abe

Today, India commemorates its 65th Republic Day today with pomp, fanfare, and a display of its paradomania worthy of any military dictatorship. This year, Delhi’s chief guest to its premier annual function is Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Analysts have read much significance into this invitation due to stormy climes in the neighbourhood and several high-level visits between India and Japan over the past couple of years.

Just last week, Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera made a four-day trip to Delhi and invited his Indian counterpart to visit Japan. Last month, His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Akihito and his wife, Empress Michiko, visited India for a week, and six months earlier, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh had led a delegation to Japan. Several lower level exchanges have also taken place between the two governments.

The benefits of a symbiotic relationship between India and Japan have been stated often and there is little benefit in repetition. In fact, the more pertinent question is why such a fruitful partnership has not yet materialised. In a 2013 poll in India, 80% said that they saw their country’s relations with Japan as very friendly or friendly; 95% thought Japan would be a reliable friend and desired greater Japanese business presence in India. In a similar poll in Japan, 42% had a positive view of India and only 4% – the lowest percentage anywhere – had a negative image. While the makings of a beautiful friendship exist, Abe and Singh – or whoever is prime minister in three months – have more work to do at home in creating the ambiance for partnership than with each other, both strategically and economically.

While large-scale Japanese investment in Indian industry and infrastructure interests both sides, India’s ability to absorb investments, aid, and technology are in doubt. Delhi’s laws on labour, manufacturing, land acquisition, and foreign investments are a veritable chamber of horrors, not to mention crippling inadequacies in water, electricity, road and rail networks, and legal protections. The eight-year delay POSCO suffered is not an exception but the rule in Indian industry. Vedanta is another cautionary tale to foreign businesses as is the retroactive tax the Indian government slammed Vodafone with recently.

The decades of neglect India has shown its manufacturing sector means that it is ill-equipped to handle any truly transformative economic agenda that may result from an Indo-Japanese romance. Even with technology transfers, India will still have to import machinery and equipment in the near future until it can develop its own capacity. This expansion needs to be sustained by skilled and semi-skilled manpower which India is already struggling with. Japanese companies will be reluctant to invest wholeheartedly in India until these bottlenecks are resolved.

To Japan, India represents not only an enormous market but also another source of raw materials. Japan is particularly desperate to find a reliable source for rare earth metals, vital to its electronics industry, as it currently depends on China for 90% of its supply. Keeping this in mind, optimists point to increasing trade between India and Japan (approximately $18 billion in 2013) as signs of a blossoming relationship but the paltry amount is a better indicator of how badly trade has floundered between the two states. For a country of India’s size and the complementarity of its economy to that of Japan’s, trade ought to have been at least the order of a magnitude higher. The increase in trade more likely represents streamlining and greater efficiency by industry rather than improved relations just yet. Close relations are built on content of trade more than volume; China is a larger trading partner for the United States than Britain is but one would hardly hazard a suggestion that Beijing is close, let alone closer, to Washington. Similarly, India’s $65 billion annual trade with China is also an indicator of economic efficiency without good relations.

Nuclear commerce straddles the strategic and industrial divide, and India stands to benefit greatly with closer ties to Japan’s nuclear industry. Though not a large vendor of complete reactors, Japanese industry has cornered the market on certain key components for Western reactor designs. Japanese cooperation with India would not only simplify nuclear trade with France and the United States (who depend on Japan in their supply chain), but it would also improve India’s ability to design and build safer and better reactors. Collaboration on Generation III and IV reactor designs is another arena for cooperation.

Japan has historically refused to engage in nuclear commerce with states who have not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 has carved out a special place for India in the nuclear hierarchy. However, Tokyo wishes for Delhi to accede to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty before it concludes a bilateral nuclear deal. This is beyond what the United States demanded of India, and India has used its agreement with the United States as a template for all its other nuclear deals (France, South Korea, Canada, Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan).

Japan would need to accept India’s non-negotiable position on the CTBT and NPT if any deal is to be struck between the two, something unlikely in the near future. There is, however, some hope as the New Komeito Party, perceived to be against nuclear exports to India, recently backed a civil nuclear pact between the two countries and called for a more flexible approach. For its part, Delhi must reconsider its recalcitrance over its nuclear liability law before nuclear trade can flourish between the two states – another difficult needle to thread.

Many analysts point to a strategic imperative for India to develop close ties with Japan. China’s recent belligerence, it is suggested, will push India and Japan closer. Sadly, this is more an expression of desire than any concrete observation. Unlike trade, however, Japan has reservations about strategic relations beyond the US nuclear umbrella and is yet to make up its mind on the role it wants to play in an era of receding US power.

Despite Article 9 of Japan’s constitution which prohibits the maintenance of a military, India’s defence budget of $37.4 billion (2013) is less than Japan’s budget of $45.9 billion (2013). However, Japan’s constitution permits a self-defence force and Tokyo followed an unofficial guideline to restrict defence spending to below 1% of the Gross Domestic Product until 1986.

Due to India’s failures in defence manufacturing, the country has emerged as the world’s largest arms importer. Indigenous production has been the buzzword in Delhi for a while with little to show for it yet. It is hoped that cooperation with Japan in defence research and manufacturing will help India reduce its imports bill while lowering the cost of Japanese equipment due to economies of scale. Contrary to popular perception, the land of the rising sun is hardly the epicentre of high-tech weaponry – corporations and universities have usually shied away from military research. Nonetheless, there is ample scope in application of dual use technologies such as carbon fibre, radar, engines, avionics, and microchips.

However, Japan’s reluctance to engage in substantial military commerce is a hindrance. Yet recent developments in North Korea and China have caused Tokyo to rethink its minimalist stance on security and ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering major reforms in the country’s defence posture as well as its strict arms export policy. The difficulty in carrying out these reforms should not be underestimated – there is strong opposition to the LDP’s proposal in the Diet (Japanese parliament) as well as among the Japanese citizenry who fear that Tokyo’s arms sales would weaken Japan’s neutrality and make it a seeming participant in conflicts that are not its own. Until Japan pacifies the ghosts from its past, there is little possibility for defence ties to grow much beyond joint military exercises and cooperation on piracy and terrorism.

A thriving relationship with Japan is a commonsensical quest for reasons of trade and security. There exists among some, perhaps, also a sense of civilisational affinity. Though this is superficial and deceptive, it cannot hurt foster better ties. Yet given the difficulties on both sides, strong ties will take time well beyond the tenure of either Abe or the next Indian prime minister to develop. Besides, any lasting relationship must be institutional and not based on personality alone – while Abe appears keen to prioritise India on his agenda, his successor may not have the same patience.

Despite such strong impetus from both sides currently, there are fundamental difficulties that need to be addressed. Japan needs to decide whether the strategies of the past are still relevant to it in a new world order and if it is ready to jettison them if not; India needs to realise that announcing a yojana is not the same as implementing it – for far too long, India has been long on promises but short on delivery. As Thucydides reminds us, one is “convinced by experience that very few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought.”


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on January 26, 2014.

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Yasukuni and Japan’s Simmering Nationalism

29 Sun Dec 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Akira Muto, Asian Women's Fund, Belgium, Boshin War, Britain, China, Chiyoda, comfort women, Congo, Fujimaro Tsukuba, Heitaro Kimura, Hideki Tojo, Hiranuma Kiichiro, imperialism, IMTFE, International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, kami, Kenji Doihara, Kenya, Koki Hirota, Kuniaki Koiso, Mao Zedong, Mau Mau, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, Nippon Izoku Kai, Osami Nagano, Radhabinod Pal, Ryutaro Hashimoto, saijin meihyo, Seishiro Itagaki, Shigenori Togo, Shinto, Shinzo Abe, South Korea, Spain, Takeo Miki, Temple wage, Tokyo, Tokyo Rusu Kazoku Kai, Tokyo Shokonsha, Tomiichi Murayama, Toshio Shiratori, United States, World War II, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Yasukuni, Yohei Kono, Yoshijiro Umezu, Yosuke Matsuoka

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Jinja, or Yasukuni Shrine, on December 26 has yet again created a political storm in Asia and across the Pacific. Singapore, Russia, and the United States have all expressed disappointment over Abe’s decision to visit the controversial shrine, and South Korea’s condemnation took on a much sharper tone. China has not only strongly denounced the visit but also singled out the prime minister for attack. One newspaper even demanded that Abe and other Diet members who have visited Yasukuni be banned from entering China. However, no Japan-related events have been cancelled nor have there been any public demonstrations. Japanese officials have said, however, that the prime minister visited the shrine in a private, not official, capacity.

For disinterested bystanders, the outcry is puzzling. China’s denouncement of Abe, as it celebrates Mao Zedong’s birth anniversary, comes off as particularly farcical considering that the dictator was responsible for, even by conservative estimates, approximately 35 million deaths during his rule; the higher estimates put the number closer to a staggering 100 million victims. Similarly, Russia’s legacy of Lenin, Stalin, and a brutal communist dictatorship gives it little moral ground to criticise Japan. As for the United States, not only do they have the dubious honour of attacking Japan with nuclear weapons not once but twice, their conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia hardly make them shining examples of military virtue. There are, of course, other colourful instances in recent US history such as the Tuskegee experiment which went on for forty years, from 1932 to 1972.

Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, commemorating Japan’s war dead from the Boshin War of 1867 until the end of World War II. Originally called the Tokyo Shokonsha, meaning ‘shrine to summon the souls,’ the structure was renamed to its present title, meaning ‘pacifying the nation, by Emperor Meiji in 1879.

Since 1946, the shrine has been privately funded and operated. This is because the management of a religious shrine went against post-war Japan’s secular laws. Abe is not the first prime minister to visit Yasukuni – in 1975, Takeo Miki became the first prime minister to visit the shrine, though in a private capacity, followed by Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1985 and Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1996. Junichiro Koizumi visited the war memorial every year of his prime ministership from 2001 to 2006, and since then, Abe has been the first sitting prime minister to go back to Yasukuni. Junior members of Japan’s government, across administrations, have visited the shrine on several occasions.

The site has almost two and a half million kami, spirits, enshrined, including some 28,000 Taiwanese and 21,000 Koreans. Of the two and half million kami, about a thousand were judged to be war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) set up after World War II. Of these thousand, 14 were designated as ‘Class A’ convicts. It is interesting to note that among the war criminals and the foreigners, many were enshrined at Yasukuni without consulting with surviving family members and in some cases, expressly against the wishes of their families.

The controversy at Yasukuni starts with the IMFTE. Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal argued that the trials were invalid and only a form of siegerjustiz. His book-length dissent, while admitting the horrors of Nanjing, excoriated the Americans for their use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing cities, and provoking Japan into a war. Furthermore, he argued that all the crimes Japanese officials had been accused of came under Class B (mistreatment of prisoners, murder of civilians, wanton destruction) offences and had no need of post facto Class A (waging wars of aggression) or Class C (crimes against humanity) trials. In response, the United States did not allow the publication of his opinion until 1952 after Japan had signed a treaty recognising the validity of the Tokyo Trials. As a result, Pal’s dissent is the basis of many nationalist Japanese claims and Pal holds a revered place in Japan to this day.

In 1952, the occupation of Japan ended. Groups like the Tokyo Rusu Kazoku Kai and Nippon Izoku Kai had been lobbying the government in the name of the war dead, including war criminals, for public benefits. In May of that year, the Ministry of Justice declared that war criminals were not in the same legal category as criminals convicted by a Japanese court, thus restoring their civil rights. In 1953, a change in how public benefits were managed gave families and survivors of war criminals access to the same benefits families of any public servant who died in the line of duty would get.

In April 1954, the Yasukuni shrine started working closely with Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry to recover the records of those killed in World War II. Once the data was compiled, the priests would decide who qualified to be enshrined at Yasukuni and by April 1959, enshrinement of all World War II casualties except war criminals was completed. Concurrently, due to an enormous public movement in Japan, the United States agreed to lessen the sentences of those found guilty by the IMFTE, and by the end of 1958, all war criminals were free and political rehabilitated.

In view of the release of the war criminals, the Repatriation Relief Bureau, the section of the Health and Welfare Ministry that liaised with the Yasukuni shrine, sent the records of Class B and Class C war criminals to the shrine. The head priest, Fujimaro Tsukuba, moved to quickly and quietly enshrine the war criminals. By 1967, 984 such war dead had been enshrined, some without permission from their families and others against the express wishes of their families.

The Health and Welfare Ministry also started sending Class A saijin meihyo, or enshrinement information cards, to the Yasukuni shrine in 1966. These included seven war criminals who had been hanged (Hideki Tojo, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Kenji Doihara, Akira Muto, Koki Hirota), five who had died in prison (Yoshijiro Umezu, Kuniaki Koiso, Hiranuma Kiichiro, Toshio Shiratori, Shigenori Togo), and two who had died of natural causes before sentencing (Osami Nagano, Yosuke Matsuoka) and were temporarily in a special category. The enshrinement was supposed to be done quietly to avoid a potential public backlash but vocal proponents of enshrinement in the Yasukuni Shrine Council passed a resolution denouncing the IMTFE and demanding that the war criminals be enshrined. The resolution left the date of enshrinement in the hands of the head priest, and Tsukuba, who had reservations about Class A war criminals, put it off until his death in 1978.

The incoming head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, had an imperial background. His grandfather was a feudal lord during the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, his father the last minister of the Imperial household, and his father in law a vice-admiral in the Imperial Navy who was tried by the Dutch for Class B and Class C crimes and executed. Matsudaira himself served in the Imperial Navy and later in Japan’s Self Defence Forces. Not surprisingly, Matsudaira abhorred the IMTFE and within three months of his appointment to the high office of the Yasukuni shrine, had all 14 war criminals enshrined.

The covert nature of the enshrinement has evoked much resentment even within Japan. When news of the enshrinement of Class A war criminals broke in April 1979, Emperor Hirohito refused to visit the shrine until his death in 1989. However, imperial emissaries have visited the shrine annually. Contrary to claims of religious or filial piety, the nature in which the war criminals were enshrined betrays the blatantly ideological basis behind the act. It is this fact that fuels the controversy to this day.

Interestingly, in a poll conducted immediately after Abe’s visit to the shrine, 43.2% of those polled said that they appreciated the gesture but a whopping 69.8% said that the prime minister should consider the international ramifications of his actions. Many Japan watchers consider visits to the Yasukuni shrine as playing to a domestic audience rather than international messaging. Indeed, the Abe administration’s approval rating has gone up one point to 55.2% and disapproval has gone down 0.4 points to 32.6% since last week.

Beyond Yasukuni, Japan’s neighbours and the United States are concerned about the country’s historical revisionism, apologies that are seen as half-hearted to the victims of Imperial Japan’s atrocities, and lack of any compensation to the victims as West Germany did with many Jewish families. Yet these issues are not so simple either.

Japan’s historical revisionism is based on the argument that they behaved as any other imperial power of the time. The atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in China, Korea, or elsewhere are to be expected in times of war and no different from European experiences in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia. This is not easy to refute. European barbarism in many of its colonies was hardly any better, if at all, than life under Japanese occupation. India is familiar with the massive famine in the late 1800s which caused, according to historian Mike Davis, approximately 29 million Indians to perish, and with Colonel Reginald Dyer. The Herero and Nama in Namibia remember the Germans well, as do the Congolese life under Belgian rule. British torture and war crimes in Yemen, Oman, Malaya, or during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya are best left unmentioned for the benefit of those with a queasy stomach. None of this exonerates Japanese war crimes but it puts them in the context of the milieu of the age of imperialism, thereby distributing the culpability to actors traditionally left unconsidered when discussing Japan.

Japan has also had trouble with its history textbooks trying to whitewash the role of the Imperial Army during World War II. The use of Korean women as sex slaves for their soldiers, chemical and biological warfare conducted by the Imperial Army, and inhuman medical experiments conducted by the infamous Unit 731 are sometimes dampened. Nonetheless, Thomas Berger, a professor at Boston University, says that these are not nearly as universal as made out to be and that Japanese history textbooks discuss Nanjing or the use of Korean comfort women in a fairly open manner. Evidence of this is seen in opinion polls that show most Japanese to be apologetic for their country’s behaviour in Asia during the Second World War. In addition, Japan has also sponsored joint historical research with both South Korea and China. In comparison, Chinese and South Korean textbooks opt for a far more hateful view of Japan than attempt any reconciliation.

Japan’s apologies have admittedly been awkward and half-hearted, and always been under a threat of retraction; it is no secret that Abe is uncomfortable with the 1993 statement released by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono as well as the 1995 statement by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama over Japan’s wartime actions. Nonetheless, these apologies remain unchanged for now. There is, however, the question of whether any apology by Japan will ever be good enough and if Seoul and Beijing are ready to accept an apology from Tokyo.

So far, there have been few signs that receptive ears await in Asia. When Japan set up the Asian Women’s Fund in 1994 to offer compensation to South Korea’s comfort women, Seoul established a rival group rather than support the Japanese effort. Meanwhile, other countries in Asia such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines have forgiven the Japanese and moved on.

China, like South Korea, remains unmoved by Japanese apologies. Beijing has opportunistically stoked its subjects’ passions against Japan and allows their display conveniently such as in August and September 2012. China has also used exports of rare earths, a critical component for Japan’s technology industries, as a bargaining chip on several occasions. All signs from China indicate that they want to use Japan’s war guilt as a psychological weapon rather than find genuine reconciliation, a technique not entirely unknown to them. In Abe, they might have met a prime minister who does not care anymore and seeks to forge links with Australia, India, and China’s southeast Asian neighbours to counter China’s bullying.

The reaction from Japan’s neighbours, however much it needs to be contextualised, is understandable but the United States’ disappointment is harder to fathom. Arguably, the United States meted out harsher punishment to the Japanese than they received from them during World War II; furthermore, the attack on Pearl Harbour may have been militarily unexpected (due to logistics) but hardly out of the blue politically – the crippling sanctions imposed upon Japan in the 1930s and the Hull note were designed to provoke a response. Interestingly, after the war, the United States’ NSC 48-2 imagined an Asian order almost identical to Japan’s pre-war Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Today, when Washington is actively seeking partners for its pivot to Asia, stomping on one of its closest allies in the region seems counter-productive.

It is also hard to miss the irony in the US criticism of Abe’s visit to Yasukuni when US presidents visit the Vietnam War Memorial regularly. Washington’s conduct in that little squabble in Southeast Asia has been spared the war criminal tag only because they did not lose the war as completely as Japan did World War II; even the annual celebrations of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving may be questioned for their genocidal roots.

The knee-jerk outcry over a Japanese prime minister’s visit to Yasukuni shrine is very much overdone. Admittedly, the enshrinement of war criminals was ideologically motivated and done surreptitiously; however, it is equally true that there are legitimate questions about war-time conduct and the trial for both sides. This is not to excuse the cruelty of Japan’s Unit 731 but to recognise, as the old cliché goes, that all war is a crime. The enshrinement of IMTFE criminals at Yasakuni shrine, especially against the wishes of the families, is an issue that must be solved internally by the Japanese. It has, no doubt, tainted Japanese nationalism; but then, which nationalism has ever remained untarnished?

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