Japan to bask in diplomatic limelight

By Edward Neilan
Special to World Tribune.com

TOKYO - After being at the margins of world diplomacy for most of the year, Japan is finally moving to the center of the page in November.

There has been so much Japan-bashing, so much imploring by other countries of Tokyo to "do something in a hurry" to rescue Asia and its own banking sector from disaster, that some observers might have surmised that Japan's economic power was declining and that it was doing a disappearing act as a world player.

Not so, says Kenichi Ohmae, management consultant, futurologist and author (70 books, among them the best-seller "The Borderless World", Harper & Row, 1990).

"Japan is still an economic power," said Ohmae in a speech last week. "We are presently No. 2 in the world. I don't think we'll be becoming No. 3 anytime soon."

In diplomacy, likewise, Japan has to be counted in the world's "top ten" even though places like Israel, Palestine, North Korea, Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan have been getting more headlines.

This month Japan is back on the striped-pants circuit with a vengeance and with considerable meaning.

Start with the November 10-13 visit to Moscow by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi and a meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin to discuss details of a bilateral peace treaty and the Northern Territories issue. These are important leftovers from World War II and both sides have finally shown interest in tidying up.

A question mark is Yeltsin's health but Russia seems ready to go ahead with the meeting even with Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov as Yeltsin's stand-in.

Japan's leading expert on Russian affairs, Deputy Foreign Minister Minoru Tanba, noted recently "A post-Cold War world order has not yet been achieved in Asia." He said Russo-Japan rapprochement was vital and urgent in this process.

After visiting a November 17-18 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation(APEC) forum in Kuala Lumpur in which Japan will be the key Asian participant, Obuchi returns to Tokyo to host United States President Bill Clinton. The November 19-20 Clinton visit is described by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here as a stopover between the APEC meeting and a November 21-22 look-in on South Korea.

Japan is still in a mild diplomatic snit over the real or imagined slight it received from the U.S. on Clinton's grand tour of China last summer. Japan had requested that Clinton stop in Tokyo to or from Beijing. China said "no stops, either way" and the U.S. complied.

Responding to criticism on this point at a weekend symposium, Ezra F. Vogel, Director of Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asia Research, explained weakly that "at the time the U.S. was interested in improving relations with China."

This attitude, conveyed before if sometimes inadvertently by current and former U.S. officials (Vogel was the Central Intelligence Agency's top officer for East Asia, 1993-95), adds to a Japanese feeling of being taken for granted by Washington.

The month's event with the most luster for Japan is the visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, scheduled to begin November 25.

Flood damage was given as the reason for postponement of this visit from its original September date. The occasion--the 20th anniversary of the signing if the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China--means it is too important to be delayed again even though there are some difficulties.

Chief among them is a situation created by Clinton on his China trip to gain his hosts' favor.

Clinton recited a "three no's" policy toward Taiwan that seemed to be a change in policy by the U.S., although Vogel and others have denied there was a change.

Japan is likewise being asked by Beijing to state a less ambiguous position toward Taiwan and its future. There seems to be a reluctance at the foreign ministry to go as far as the Americans went in placating China, which is news in itself.

Beijing still feels that a new set of U.S.-Japan defense guidelines tilts against China.

One of China's leading analysts of Northeast Asian affairs, Zhang Yanling, Director of the Institute of Pacific Studies, of the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), put it this way on a recent visit to Tokyo:

"The relationship among Japan, U.S. and China should form an equilateral triangle of power. At present, the sides belonging to Washington and Tokyo are linked and outweigh China's side. This can lead to mutual suspicions and distrust."