China-Japan: The important relationship

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The bedrock of American foreign policy in Asia since the Korean War in 1950 has been to prevent Japan becoming either the victim or the willing partner of the forces on the Mainland. The Cold War is long since over, of course. But the U.S.-China-Japan relationship remains the fulcrum of any American Pacific ecurity concerns.

At a time when Washington’s attention is, rightfully, drawn to a worldwide war on terrorism and its principle locus in the Middle East, there is movement in northeast Asia: Tokyo is taking a more critical view of its relations with the Chinese Communists than at any time in the postwar period.

The evidence is spotty. And nowhere – except perhaps between the U.S. and Britain – is a political relationship subject to such vast, often unspoken and subliminal, cultural ties. Westerners have often found the Japanese ambivalent about China. The source is obvious: the enormous dependence of Japan’s culture on ancient Chinese learning. On the Chinese side, Japan may the exception to that proverbial celestial condescension [often bordering on racism] of the Chinese toward other Asians. The reason is obvious: “the hairy little dwarfs in the East” somehow made it into the modern world when their Chinese cultural masters did not.

The continuing episode of the so-called “mystery ships” – apparently North Korean infiltrators – which in late December were challenged by the Japanese Naval Self Defense Forces and fled into waters China calls her “economic zone” has demonstrated a new firmness on Tokyo’s part. The Japanese now want to salvage the second ship which sank in what the Chinese call their territory. The issue is compounded by a report in the Japanese press that similar ships have been spotted by U.S. satellite reconnaissance in Chinese naval military installations. Chinese and Japanese officials are to meet in Tokyo in mid-April to attempt to negotiate the issue.

The “mystery ships” episode is just the latest in a series of clashes between the Koizumi government in Tokyo and the Chinese. In August, Koizumi made a state visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto temple dedicated to war veterans and where some of the convicted war criminals of World War II are enshrined. Visits by the Japanese prime minister to the shrine have been a constant irritant all during the postwar period. Koizumi, however, has been t defiant, arguing that there is no other national memorial to the nine million Japanese who died in World War II, and that perhaps another less controversial one should be built.

Koizumi was quick to go to Beijing in October, in part to visit a Chinese museum dedicated to the horrors of the Japanese war and occupation in China, to offer abject apologies. But his one-day visit, postponed, also was to tell the Chinese Japan was sending its SDF forces for the first time ever into the Indian Ocean on noncombatant support of the US in Afghanistan, a move which Chinese interpret as part of a general Japanese rearmament.

Then there was the episode of a mini-trade war between Japan and China. The Japanese slapped on quotas for Chinese vegetables selling below domestic producers – traditional cornerstone of Koizumi’s Liberal Democrat Party vote . The Chinese retaliated with a 100% duty on Japanese automobiles, air conditioners and mobile phones. The episode quickly blew over, but was uncharacteristic of a trade that in 2001 surpassed $83 billion with a traditionally strong lobby in Japan.

Whether, as the Chinese media charge, the Koizumi Administration is bowing to the "rightward turn and anti-Chinese currents in Japanese politics.", other issues are impinging on the relationship. Japanese reaction to the flight of a North Korean missile over Japan in August 1998 was profound. It was seen to present new security risks, to make new demands on Japanese intelligence, and helped stimulate U.S.-Japanese defense collaboration. Japan sees China as North Korea’s only friend and expects it to pressure Pyonyang for more normal relations. Japan’s China trade lobby which once saw its only aspect as sales of manufactures to the Mainland and imports of raw materials now faces the prospect that China, is “hollowing out Japanese manufacture” as its multinational race to China for lower cost production for third markets. Japanese official aid to China has been cut back. And Tokyo’s strong traditional ties to Taiwan – since the 19th century Japan’s strategists have seen it as essential to Japan’s defense – are affected by the slow steady movement of the ruling Democratic People’s Party away from the “One China” concept, and its [contradictory?] growing private sector investment on the Mainland.

All these episodes and trends add up to an evolving Japan-China relationship, one that must be paramount as the Bush Administration attempts to steady the volatile U.S.-China relationship [n the post-Clinton era] and seeing Beijing as a potential adversary.