Japan
Japan from the Tokugawa Period till
today
Contemporary Japan faces a thorny series
of difficulties, most of which are disturbingly similar to (the by us earlier
described) Japan’s late-nineteenth-century concerns. What Japan cares about are
in two regions the Western Hemisphere and Southeast Asia, with only one
itty-bitty problem: Japans dealing
with China.
Tokugawa Period, Meiii
Restoration and Pan-Asian Imperialist Identity in
Japan.
Prior to the Opium
War, Americans had sought the opening of Japan in the spirit of accessing
markets after being expelled from the British mercantile system. Anglo-American ascendance.
During the 1930’s,
Roosevelt's idea of a financial siege of Japan backfired by exacerbating rather
than defusing Japan's aggression. And for sure the attack on Pearl Harbor was
not the result of a deliberate Roosevelt strategy (as right-wing conspiracy
theorists claim), but a Roosevelt miscalculation. The U.S. financial siege of Japan:
In July 1941 then,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt cited a shortage of oil products on the U. S.
East Coast as an important rationale for halting oil sales to Japan, even
though Japan drew oil solely from California and that oil could not be shipped
to the Atlantic. The U.S. Oil Shortage that never was.
Internal Geostrategic
overview: Japan is an archipelago with four “home islands” and some 6,800
smaller islands. The first salient fact about Japan’s geography however is the
short supply of habitable and arable land. At 378,000 square kilometers, Japan
is officially larger than Great Britain or today’s Germany. Three-fourths of
this territory however, consists of steep mountains, ravines, forests and
wasteland, inimical to human habitation. Mountains form spines up and down the
center of each of the four main islands, and the Japanese Alps, the country’s
highest concentration of peaks, lie in central Honshu, taking up the bulk of
the island most capable of holding a large population. Mount Fuji, an active
volcano that has not erupted since 1707, is Japan’s tallest mountain at 3,776
meters. Mountainous geography means that Japan is much smaller than it looks,
and Japanese society has been confined to thin strips and small enclaves on the
coastal plains that surround the main islands. Only about 12 percent of Japan’s
land is arable - compared to 13 percent in Indonesia, 16 percent in South
Korea, and about 28 percent in California (which is similar in size to Japan).
With a mountainous
landscape, disconnected river system, lengthy coastal plains and dangerous sea
travel as the major link between homeland and neighbors, Japanese society
developed as a series of islands within islands - that is, small social islands
within only slightly larger geographical islands.
Throughout Japanese
history, these three plains provided the greatest agricultural potential and
served as the economic, political and cultural centers of the island, with the
Yamato plain as the original center of power and the Kanto plain later
supplanting it. These three chief cities - Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya - are not
only seated on prime lands but also overlook spacious bays and thus serve as
ports. Together they account for about 45 percent of modern Japan’s total
population of 128 million and only 6 percent of the country’s total land area.
Japan’s other major cities sit in smaller plains along the coasts.
To form cross-country
connections, the Japanese developed a vibrant maritime culture. The Seto Inland Sea - separating Honshu from Kyushu and Shikoku
- served as a highway connecting Kyushu’s biggest settlements (Kitakyushu,
Fukuoka and Nagasaki) with a line of prosperous cities along the southwestern
coast of Honshu, including Hiroshima, Kobe and Osaka. Meanwhile, travel along
the eastern coast of Honshu linked the Inland Sea region with the many natural
ports along the Pacific coast, including the Nagoya and Tokyo areas. The
western coast of Honshu was less developed, but travel on the Sea of Japan
brought Niigata and nearby settlements, as well as Sapporo on Hokkaido, into
the country’s maritime network.
Rival Regions
Much of Japanese
history relates the internal struggles that consumed Japan as it attempted to
create a centralized and unified state. Its history of internal strife is a result
of the terrain and short supply of arable land, which made struggles over land
rights and food supply both bloody and inevitable. Throughout most of the
country’s history, farmers eked out a living growing rice and, to a lesser
extent, wheat and barley on small plots. The temperate climate and rich soil
were conducive to high crop yields, and Japanese farmers historically have been
highly efficient. But the scarcity of arable land meant that it was highly
sought after, fiercely contested, jealously guarded and frequently monopolized.
From the advent of wet-rice cultivation in the third century B.C. until the
19th century, Japan’s social and political systems were founded on a rice
economy. Political power rested in the hands of those who could control farmland
and food stores and command taxes paid in rice yields.
Primarily, this meant
that rival clans battled back and forth for control over the principal plains -
the Yamato (also called Kinki) plain and the Kanto plain. According to Japanese
mythology, Emperor Jimmu, having descended from the
gods on Kyushu, conquered central Honshu and established the imperial seat on
the plain that would take the Yamato name in 660 B.C. The historical Yamato
tribe seems to have risen to power above other tribes around 300-400 A.D. after
Yamato chiefs drove the islands’ prior inhabitants, the Ainu, into northern
Honshu and Hokkaido. Early Yamato burial mounds are common in the Osaka area.
Later, Chinese-style centralized government and far-reaching bureaucracy was
established with collectively owned land, enabling a taxation system based on
agricultural output that kept the dominant clan in power. The early Yamato
chiefs founded the hereditary line of Japanese emperors - the longest-ruling
family in the world, still formally reigning today. The capital was established
in Nara in 710 and then moved to Kyoto in 794. The Yamato plain was
strategically located to allow rule over most of the other regions, with a
backdrop of mountains for protection, fields for cultivation and the Inland Sea
for fishing, trade and communications overseas.
However, centralized
rule was inconsistent with Japan’s mountainous geography. The imperial court
faced challenges consolidating power over distant territories, retaining
loyalty among regional powers, enforcing laws and collecting taxes. By the
mid-ninth century, provincial nobles had sealed off their lands from the
imperial bureaucracy and knit themselves into military groups that contended
for local and regional dominance. Powerful clans turned the imperial court into
a puppet government, inaugurating the lasting Japanese tradition of rule from
behind the scenes.
By the 12th century,
power had devolved into a loose feudal order commanded by a shogun, a revived
Yamato-era term for war chief. The first shogun established his bakufu, or “tent government,” on the Kanto plain in
Kamakura, near Tokyo. Though weak emperors continued to hold court formally in
Kyoto, the shogunate became the real center of power. The Kanto plain was not
only far larger and more productive than the Yamato, it was also more
strategically located. It sat at a remove from the multiple urban centers
striving for power along the Inland Sea and had excellent sea access for
fishing, trade and transportation through Tokyo Bay. In addition to their own
agricultural bases, the powers established on Kanto were able to lord over
neighboring plains on the Pacific coast and the surrounding fish-filled waters.
Later, in the
mid-14th century, power returned to the Yamato plain when the Ashikaga clan
overthrew the Kamakura government and established its own shogunate back in
Kyoto, taking advantage of the old imperial institutions. This reassertion of
the Yamato plain as a political base was not entirely successful, and civil wars
broke out across the regions throughout the following centuries. Firearms
gained from first contact with the Portuguese in the mid-16th century changed
the nature of the conflicts but also opened the way for greater centralization.
Three powerful shoguns unified the country, disarmed their rivals by banning
the lower classes from possessing weapons and paved the way for the Tokugawa
clan to establish a new shogunate in Edo, now Tokyo, in 1600.
This time, the
triumph of the Kanto plain was permanent. Even when the Tokugawa clan was
overthrown and the emperor brought back to power in the Meiji Restoration of
1868, the imperial court was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, in recognition of the
reality of where national power lay. By moving the
emperor’s seat to Tokyo, the Japanese virtually eliminated the Yamato plain as
a rival source of political authority, thus concentrating all power in the
country’s economic core, the Kanto. The unification of the country under a
single power center would make it difficult (though not impossible) for Japan’s
historical problem of fragmentation to reassert itself, and would require that
future struggles between regional powers play out in the capital region.
Parallel to the above
research we investigated the impact of contested national identity on both
Turkish and Japanese foreign policies, and why. Continue...
Introversion
Externally, the
crucial factor for Japan is its geographical separation from the Eurasian
mainland. This created several advantages and disadvantages, but primarily it
ensured that Japan’s behavior would reflect both its insularity and its need to
overcome it, i.e., a proclivity for alternating between introversion and
extroversion.
The first salient
fact arising from Japan’s distance from the Eurasian mainland was that Japan
was not subject to constant inflows of migrants or invaders. After the wave of
immigration around 300 B.C. that brought the Yamato people (considered the
original “ethnic” Japanese) to the archipelago, the island has seen no massive
influx of people. The Ainu, the original ethnic group on the home islands, were
driven into the northern parts of the country by the early Yamato and over the
centuries merged with the dominant Japanese group. There were only a few other
tiny ethnic groups, so the Japanese people became linguistically and culturally
uniform. Ethnic strife and separatism were not problems Japan would have to
face, though they were supplanted by regional and clan struggles.
The second salient
fact was that the threat of foreign military invasion was virtually nil. To
this day, in fact, Japan has never been successfully invaded. At the height of
their power in the 1270s and 1280s, Mongol forces tried to invade Japan, but
after launching from the Korean Peninsula and reaching Kyushu near modern
Fukuoka they had to lay siege to a well-fortified and mountainous fortress from
a scraggly coastal foothold and maintain supply chains across the stormy Korean
Strait. On their second major invasion attempt, the bulk of the massive Mongol
fleet was destroyed by a typhoon, which the Japanese called kamikaze, or
“divine wind.” Japan’s position has remained nearly impregnable even in the
modern world — the difficulty of staging a ground invasion was the United
States’ primary rationale for dropping the atomic bombs to bring Japan to its
knees in World War II.
One of the
disadvantages of Japan’s remoteness was that new ideas and technology came
late. The early Japanese lacked the means to make great innovative leaps by
themselves, hence their recurrent periods of insularity and isolation. The
earliest days of the Yamato period are recorded only in mythology, and the
first historical records of Japan come from foreign observers such as the
Chinese and later the Koreans. Only later, in the eighth century after adopting
and modifying the Chinese written language, did the Japanese fully make their
history known.
Periodically the
Japanese have deliberately turned away from the outside world, closing off
communications and focusing attention on internal matters. In some cases
Japanese culture reasserted itself against foreign ways, in other cases outside
influences posed a threat to the authority of the political elite or to
national security. When China’s Tang and Song dynasties passed, Japan’s
imperial court, though an imitation of China’s, became more self-sufficient and
discontinued regular diplomatic exchanges with China. Later, Japan had much to
fear as China and Korea were overrun by Mongol hordes. Thus, Japan was mostly
isolationist from the ninth century until the 13th century.
Similarly, when
Europeans first made contact with Japan, Christianity and European mercantilism
spread so quickly that the country’s leaders were faced with insubordination
and instability among elements of society that were adopting European ideas and
practices. The Tokugawa clan rose to power around 1600, purged the Christians
and cordoned off a few small places for trade with the Dutch and Chinese,
otherwise maintaining a hermetically sealed but relatively stable feudal Japan
for nearly three centuries. Essentially, when Japan saw more risk than reward
in remaining externally engaged, it tended to shift back to seclusion, and
unlike most countries, it was able to do so because of its geographical
remoteness.
Extroversion
At times, the
Japanese would overcome their insularity by energetically imitating and
borrowing from more advanced cultures in order to quickly catch up with them.
Being far away from foreign cultures, they were not susceptible to common fears
about adopting foreign practices and would often do so with relish. During
imitative periods, Japan’s combined energies would naturally become focused
outward, toward the source of the knowledge and skills that the Japanese felt
themselves sorely lacking and hoped to acquire from other (potentially rival)
states. While all culture spreads through imitation and replication, the
Japanese are nearly unique in their ability to adopt foreign practices quickly
and expertly.
The first major
borrowing phase The first major borrowing phase began around 550 A.D., when the
Yamato court adopted Buddhism and Confucianism and all the administrative and
organizational skills they entailed after introductions by Korean and Chinese
embassies and missionaries. From the seventh to 10th centuries, Japan sent
scholars to study abroad and sought very carefully to recreate Chinese
political, military and cultural systems, including Chinese civil engineering
as well as China’s written language.
Similarly, when the
Portuguese arrived in the 16th century, the Japanese avidly learned to make and
use firearms and cannons. As mentioned, Christianity initially spread like
wildfire. From the Dutch the Japanese learned bookmakingand
early scientific study, and from various European visitors they kept up with
state-of-the-art shipbuilding. In the 19th century, Japan also imitated
British, French, American and especially German industrialization and
socio-political development, and in the post-World War II period Japan closely
mimicked the United States in developing a capitalist and consumer-based
economy.
But Japan’s eagerness to obtain what it does not have at home and stay on par
with its neighbors periodically translates into extreme extroversion. Japan’s
maritime capability has enabled it to aggressively pursue strategic objectives
abroad, through both mercantilist or militarist means. Korea, Japan’s closest
neighbor, has frequently been the first target because its geographical
proximity makes it the closest continental location and hence a strategic
threat. Trade routes on the peninsula were susceptible to foreign influence,
and any potential invader, from the Mongols to the Chinese or Russians, could
attack from the peninsula. Japanese forces invaded Korea during the fourth
through seventh centuries, in the late 16th century, and in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, establishing military dominance and often semi-colonial trade
relationships.
Mercantilist endeavor
reached a frenzy during the Ashikaga period, when Japanese merchants and
pirates (known as wokou) extended their control along
the Ryukyu islands to Formosa (Taiwan), up and down the length of China’s east
coast, and through Hainan to the Vietnamese and Thai coastlines and the Strait
of Malacca. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Japan’s outward push took a
militarist turn, with Japan invading Taiwan, Korea, Siberia, Manchuria, China
and most of Southeast Asia, until the move was cut short in World War II.
Japan’s vacillations
between extroversion and introversion are usually short, creating stark
contrasts in behavior, usually due to jarring external forces beyond its
control. Just as the coming of Buddhism revolutionized the imperial court in
the sixth century, opening it to China, so the arrival of Europeans in the 16th
century generated a new isolationism, while the forced opening of trade with
Western powers in the 19th century triggered a renewed outward-looking period.
Hence the analogy of Japan as an “earthquake society,” one that periodically
experiences social and political change as sudden and overwhelming as the
tectonic movements that frequently shake its foundation to the core.
Japan’s Failure to Escape from Asia: Cold War Japan
Geopolitical Imperative
The following
geopolitical imperatives have governed and will continue to govern Japan’s
behavior as a geographical and cultural entity:
• Establish and
maintain central authority and internal unity in the home islands.
• Gain sovereignty
over peripheral seas and islands.
• Secure autonomy by
controlling strategic approaches to the home islands, especially from Korea and
Taiwan but also Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands in the north.
• Acquire necessary
goods, resources and labor by expanding military or mercantilist power farther
abroad, including Siberia, Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia.
Grand Strategy: Japanese Militarism
Japan’s geopolitical
imperatives gained sharper definition in the modern era due to the rapid pace
of events, especially leading up to the confrontation with the United States in
the Pacific during World War II.
The first imperative
required establishing centralized control and national unity. During the
Tokugawa period from 1600 to 1868, Japan had a relatively decentralized,
feudalistic governing structure and was almost entirely withdrawn from the
outside world. Though the society was remarkably stable for most of the period,
with only a few rice riots and peasant rebellions, different factions emerged
throughout the 19th century as Western powers became more persistent in
demanding that Japan become commercially engaged with the outside world.
In 1853, U.S. Navy
Commodore Matthew Perry famously demanded that
Japan open its doors to foreign trade. The Japanese faced the prospect of either being
colonized like their neighbors (including the long-admired Chinese) - violating
the first imperative - or industrializing in order to negotiate with the West
on an equal footing. This confrontation triggered the Meiji Restoration of
1868, when a radical group of young samurai from the western territories
launched a coup against the Tokugawa shogun and restored the emperor as the
formal national leader, igniting a rapid process of re-centralization and modernization
of Japan’s socio-economic, political and military systems. Newly unified under
a stable leadership, Japan had met its first imperative.
Next was to establish
sovereignty and autonomy in surrounding areas. Tokyo was able to achieve this
relatively easily once it had built a modern army and navy. Some Meiji leaders
pressed for invading Korea (as Toyotomi Hideyoshi had done after unifying Japan in the 1590s). This
was rejected and instead an expedition against Taiwan was launched in 1874,
when the Japanese reinforced their claim over the Ryukyu Islands. These islands
offered a pathway for any naval power in the South China Sea to approach the
Japanese core and were therefore critical for Japan to hold (as the United
States would later show after seizing Okinawa and conducting devastating
bombing raids from its base there in World War II).
By 1894, Japan looked
again to Korea as a potentially threatening land approach. It fought a war with
China over influence on the peninsula, increasing its influence over Korea and
gaining Taiwan and the Shandong Peninsula, a crucial trading post and launching
pad into the East China Sea. (Japan lost Shandong in the treaty that ended the
war but would later regain it.) Japan tried to prevent Moscow, whose power was
growing in the region, from staking a claim on Manchuria’s mineral resources
and labor pool and from making advances that could give it a firm position in
Korea. From 1904 to 1905, Tokyo crushed Moscow in war and seized these areas as
well as the southern portion of Sakhalin Island and other territories in the
Sea of Okhotsk, potential approaches to Japan from the north. In 1910, Japan
formally annexed Korea and brought Taiwan under its control, thereby meeting
its three primary imperatives.
From this position,
Japan had the option of reaching out in almost any direction in the region. Its
goals were primarily economic. After industrialization, Japan’s focus was on
obtaining the resources it needed to maintain its vastly expanded empire. The
rapid growth of the economy had made Japan painfully aware of its limited
natural resources, since as industry grew it required ever-increasing inputs of
raw materials such as oil, iron, coal and rubber, among others, as well as food
to feed Japan’s booming population, which doubled from 30 million to 60 million
from 1868 to 1926. Demand very quickly outpaced Japan’s domestic production,
and Japanese policymakers - who increasingly were military leaders - were
keenly aware that the very existence of a modernizing Japan depended on imports
and trade routes that were vulnerable to innumerable threats.
Thus, in the 1930s
Japan fully appropriated Manchuria and surged deep into China to exploit labor
and resources. Yet the situation with China quickly deteriorated and war broke
out while tensions with the West were coming to a boil. The United States,
concerned about its Pacific territories, especially the Philippines, gave Japan
an ultimatum to abandon its territorial acquisitions or face an oil embargo (at
the time, the United States provided about 80 percent of Japan’s oil). Tokyo
had to make a choice: it could either capitulate or lay claim to the vast
resources of Southeast Asia - especially oil-rich but Dutch-controlled
Indonesia. The latter option involved striking the Dutch and British, both U.S.
allies, and thus engaging in war with the United States. This was an
excruciating geopolitical dilemma: whether Japan should aim for its final
strategic goal or give up on previously achieved imperatives. The Japanese made
a hard gamble and lost, pre-emptively attacking U.S. naval forces at Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and plunging the country into all-out war with the
United States while it attempted to snatch up all of the resources of Southeast
Asia to gain economic independence.
During the 1930’s,
Roosevelt's idea of a financial siege of Japan backfired by exacerbating rather
than defusing Japan's aggression. And for sure the attack on Pearl Harbor was
not the result of a deliberate Roosevelt strategy (as right-wing conspiracy
theorists claim), but a Roosevelt miscalculation. The U.S. financial siege of Japan:
In July 1941 then,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt cited a shortage of oil products on the U. S.
East Coast as an important rationale for halting oil sales to Japan, even
though Japan drew oil solely from California and that oil could not be shipped
to the Atlantic.The U.S. Oil Shortage that never was.
The U.S. victory in
World War II stripped Japan of its sovereignty, even on the home islands
temporarily, thus depriving it of its fundamental strategic imperative. The
United States rebuilt Japan but imposed upon it a constitution forswearing the
maintenance of land, sea and air forces, to eliminate any future Japanese
threat to American strategic imperatives, which include naval domination of the
Pacific.
But the Japanese were
quickly rehabilitated and back on the trail toward achieving their geopolitical
goals, this time with the help of the United States. By returning to Japan its
sovereignty through the San Francisco peace treaty in 1952 and admitting it
into the U.S. security alliance in 1960, Washington restored Japan’s first
three strategic goals. South Korea and Taiwan were secure, from Japan’s point
of view, because of their participation in the U.S. alliance. The United States
was also there to counterbalance threats from the Soviet Union and encouraged
Japan, from the mid-1950s on, to rebuild some military power. The resulting
Japan Self-Defense Forces were mostly aimed toward countering any potential
Soviet encroachments in the north. In fact, with the U.S. Navy dominant in the
western Pacific, Japan enjoyed the security that it had attempted to win for
itself through conquest but without having to shoulder the attendant fiscal
burdens. Through the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, Japan developed a limited
military capability to preserve the security of its home islands while letting
the United States provide for its security abroad.
Japanese foreign policy
during the Cold War was largely a response to the memory of its pre-World War
II history. The U.S. Occupation of Japan and the Return of Liberal
Conservatives and the Yoshida/Kishi School divergent
policies toward Asia: Making the New Japan:
Over the course of
the past century; two consensuses about national security, the first militarist
and the second pacifist, were established. Each was built by shaving the sharp
edges of ideological division to accommodate a coherent national strategy. In
the process, the mainstream shifted course; once-marginal views were embraced,
and broadly shared values splintered. Japanese grand strategy was buffeted by
shifts in the domestic civil-military relationship from political leadership to
military leadership in the 1930s, from military leadership to bureaucratic
leadership in the 1950s, and from bureaucratic to political leadership today. The New Japan P.1:
To reduce associated
risks, Japan will be cautious. It will be normal. It will hedge. The security
strategy and institutions abetting this hedge will be neither too hard nor too
soft. The New Japan P.2:
Despite a pacifist
constitution imposed on it in the wake of its defeat in World War II, Japan has
largely rearmed and has aligned itself with Washington. The only challenge that
remains is the occasional need to make rearmament politically acceptable to the
Japanese public - such as, for instance, when public disapproval nearly
scampered the reauthorization of Japan’s naval refueling mission in the Indian
Ocean.
Members of the
Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force and supply vessel Tokiwa
return Nov. 23, 2007, from their mission to refuel U.S. and other ships in the
Indian Ocean.
Grand Strategy: Japanese Mercantilism
With U.S. security
guarantees in place, the Yoshida doctrine called for Japan to pursue its fourth
geopolitical imperative - acquisition of resources - through mercantile rather
than military means. By 1948, the United States began to focus on rebooting
Japan’s economy, a process that was soon accelerated by the U.S. need for
military supplies during the Korean War. As the Cold War developed, the United
States wanted Japan to be a strong example of capitalism in East Asia to
counterbalance communism. Japanese government and industry took advantage of
the opportunity with the same zeal they had previously committed to warfare.
The first step
involved developing an industrial policy. Japan’s prewar economy was powered by
zaibatsu, giant industrial conglomerates that had been established by oligarchs
during the Meiji period. The chief conglomerates were Mitsubishi, Mitsui,
Sumitomo and Yasuda. The zaibatsu operated in strategic industries, like steel,
mining, chemicals, construction, machinery and shipping, and were intimately
connected with the wartime government and the war effort. In a purge during the
postwar occupation, the United States ousted many of their top executives and
demanded that the companies be broken apart in order to bring more competition
to the economy.
However, the United
States changed policies as the Cold War ramped up and as it needed Japan to
retain its strong industrial backbone, so the dissolution of the zaibatsu was
never completed (Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo survived). Moreover, new
industrial groups quickly took shape from the remnants of broken zaibatsu and
emerging companies - this time they were called keiretsu (company groups). The
keiretsu retained the same essential structures of the zaibatsu. Each group has
a core bank and several smaller banks, each of which owns shares in and grants
preferential loans to the group’s companies. Meanwhile, the companies are
spread out across the breadth of the economy, with one company for each major
sector. Each keiretsu is vertically integrated with smaller suppliers,
wholesalers and retailers, forming a distribution block. Unlike the prewar
zaibatsu, which had a strict top-down chain of command, the individual
companies in Japan’s modern industrial groups have more freedom to take their
own actions and potentially compete with each other. Nevertheless, the keiretsu
still exemplified the close relationship between industry and government that
characterized Japan’s postwar economic development.
The next step was to
use this manufacturing power to bulk up shipping capacity and lay claim to the
world’s sea-lanes, strengthening Japanese manufacturer’s supply chains and
boosting exports. With trade surpluses surging, and commodity prices relatively
low throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Japan temporarily overcame its inherent
problem of relying on imports of raw materials. It soon became a giant in
global trade.
The economic boom was
astounding. The United States granted Japanese manufacturers preferential
access to technology and to its massive consumer markets while tolerating the
protectionist policies Japan used to boost its domestic economy, such as
capital controls to ensure domestic investment and depreciated currency to
promote exports. The Japanese government harnessed citizens’ high savings rates
(through its Postal Savings System) and reinvested them through the Ministry of
Finance and the former Ministry of International Trade and Investment to boost
capacity in strategic sectors. Politicians, bureaucrats and corporate heads
formed an “iron triangle” that ruled Japan both politically and economically.
Although Tokyo’s deep involvement in directing the economy would later create
problems, initially it was hugely successful and Japan experienced an “economic
miracle,” with its economy doubling in size between 1960 and 1967, when it
became the second-largest capitalist economy in the world. Despite a few
slowdowns, the Japanese economy continued to surge throughout the 1970s and
1980s.
Yet as the economy
grew, Japan’s need for raw materials increased, raising the perennial Japanese
fear of overdependence on the outside world. Tokyo felt vulnerable to events
beyond its control, and there was no military option to reduce this
vulnerability. As a result, Tokyo began more concentrated efforts to direct its
economic might outward, increasing control over its crucial supply lines and
forging manufacturing and trading relationships abroad.
Wielding economic
power externally came naturally to Japan because of the close linkages between
Japanese government and corporations. Japanese banks already provided
subsidized loans to businesses in line with domestic policy objectives, and
from the late 1960s onward these policy objectives shifted toward outsourcing
production, securing resources and opening markets abroad. Japanese investment
poured forth, accelerating especially after the oil shocks of the 1970s brought
home the dangers of Japan’s heavy reliance on imports of essential goods.
Outward investment further accelerated in the 1980s, when the superabundance of
capital in the Japanese bubble economy enabled banks to go on a lending spree,
promoting industrialization in neighboring economies that craved
yen-denominated capital and served as suppliers for Japan’s manufacturers and consumers.
Tokyo’s investment
aims followed the same paths as its early 20th-century conquests: South Korea,
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Even China received Japanese investment,
especially after it opened up trade to the capitalist world and the United
States and China normalized relations in 1979. In Southeast Asia, Japan gained
access to the same energy sources that it had attempted to seize outright
during World War II. Japan solidified its economic dominance in East Asia by
recreating its keiretsu supply chains, providing development aid and easily
accessible and cheap financing, and forming strong bureaucratic and personal
connections.
In other words, Japan
largely achieved its fourth geopolitical imperative of economic security in the
1970s and 1980s through purely mercantile means. By the late 1980s, the
“Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that Japanese wartime planners had
once imagined now seemed to be taking shape through Japan’s regional economic
dominance.
Post-Cold War Economy
Japan’s mercantilist
strategy worked remarkably well until the Cold War ended. Since then, however,
Japan has been losing ground in its ability to meet its fundamental strategic
objectives.
The early 1990s were
geopolitically momentous with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost as if on
cue, the Japanese economy crashed. America’s preferential Cold War policies had
done more to boost Japan’s economy than was apparent, and as the Soviet machine
ground to a halt in the 1980s and as Japan seemed increasingly capable of
rivaling the United States’ economic dominance, Washington no longer had as
much reason to favor Japan. Specifically, the United States leaned on Japan to
undertake reforms, especially to open up its financial and consumer markets and
let its currency appreciate. The result was a massive stock and real estate
bubble that popped in 1990, triggering a decade of financial crisis and
on-again, off-again recession.
Thus, immediately in
the post-Cold War environment, Japan was cut adrift. The so-called “lost
decade” followed, in which Japan struggled with a series of deflationary
recessions and bank failures and was propped up by massive stimulus packages
and emergency financial measures paid for with public funds, only to slump back
into recession as soon as these supports were removed. The government resorted
to whatever tools it had to prevent the entire financial system from
collapsing; budget deficits bulged, bond issues soared and public debt
ballooned to a world record. Only in 2003 did the Japanese finally emerge from
more than a decade of economic malaise as it rode the wave of the robust U.S.
post-9/11 economic recovery and the optimism of Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi, who briefly seemed capable of penetrating the vested interests of Japan’s
political and bureaucratic morass to initiate the reforms needed to revitalize
the economy.
But Koizumi left
office in 2006, and the economic crisis of 2008-2009 gradually came to reverse
what little he had managed to accomplish. Japan entered its worse
recession since World War II, while another completely unsustainable round of
government-secured, zero-interest bank loans and emergency stimulus packages
were foisted on the economy. Japan’s economic tools were getting dull fast,
while Japan’s fiscal situation continued to deteriorate.
Asia-Pacific Rim
Hegemony: An Assessment P.1.
Asia-Pacific Rim
Hegemony: From Japanese to Chinese Containment? An Assessment P.2.
Post-Cold War Military
Nevertheless, Japan’s
military powers steadily expanded in the post-Cold War environment, made
possible by the changing geopolitical context and made legal through flexible
interpretations of Japan’s pacifist constitution. In addition to maintaining
the alliance with the United States, Tokyo had already developed a credible
domestic military deterrent through a rearmament process that had taken place
gradually since the Japan Self-Defense Forces were established in the 1950s. This
rearmament process accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s, with the U.S. shift in
focus away from the region and the resulting increase in Japan’s responsibility
in developing defense and security capabilities for itself and the region. Most
important, the rise of China, both economically and militarily, caused Japan to
speed up its military reform, which the United States encouraged. And with the
North Korean regime’s frequent saber-rattling, Japan has been able to undertake
rearmament with a good excuse that does not raise too many eyebrows.
A few sovereignty
issues in Japan’s periphery remain unresolved and are unlikely to be resolved
anytime soon. A number of contested maritime boundaries touch on areas
potentially rich in natural resources, including Takeshima (Dokdo),
in dispute with South Korea; the Senkaku (Diaoyutai) islands, in dispute with
China; and the Northern Territories (or southern Kuril Islands), in dispute
with Russia. On a lesser note, the Japanese still rankle at the presence of
American bases and hope to speed up the process of removing these remnants of
the occupation. As far as the island disputes are concerned, these are
long-term issues on which few of the interested nations want to compromise,
since the disputes stimulate nationalist sentiment and provide a rationale for
further defense upgrades and territorial claims.
The Japanese are also
concerned about the vulnerability of seaborne supply routes for the raw
materials they need for their economic well-being, since most of their energy
imports go through the Strait of Malacca choke point and are therefore
susceptible to interference or interdiction. With a view to increasing the
security of these lines of supply, Japan has sought specifically to upgrade its
Maritime Self-Defense Forces and expand its roles. (Japanese naval vessels have
already undertaken missions in the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean and off
the coast of Somalia.) Territorial issues and regional naval activity are
likely to become even more competitive in the coming years as Japan and other
East Asian states react to China’s increasing assertiveness in its maritime
periphery as well as to each other’s actions and the actions of outside forces,
such as the United States.
Japan continues to
profess a belief in internationalism as an ideal and to take on international
security responsibilities, such as peacekeeping and disaster relief. This is at
once an effort to create a role with more freedom from the United States in
foreign policy matters and a way to expand its range of military action within
its narrow constitutional constraints. Japanese ground troops have deployed as
U.N. peacekeepers in the Golan Heights, Mozambique and Cambodia, and Japanese
forces assisted with disaster relief following the 2004 Southeast Asian
tsunami.
Yet Japan’s military
rearmament, despite its many strides in recent years, will eventually face an
impasse. The obstacle is not so much legal, since Japan has already shown that
it can expand its roles and capabilities far beyond what it once thought
possible by re-interpreting the constitution (Tokyo even has an aircraft
carrier for helicopters). Nor is the obstacle Japan’s non-nuclear status, which
could be changed if Japan summoned the will to do so and the United States
granted permission. Beneath these issues lies the question of how Japan can
continue to expand its military at a time of economic decline, especially given
the deeper crisis lurking beneath the surface of both economic and military
realities: demographics.
Thus, constitutionally
pacifist Japan is locked in a defense debate - not over whether it should
expand its military capability and activity, but rather how. A consensus has
emerged that Japan needs to take responsibility for its own defense in a
post-Cold War world.
In August 2008 then,
war broke out in the Caucasus, and Moscow’s decisive victory over Georgia - and
the West’s incapacity to respond - answered any doubts about Russia’s
seriousness in maintaining control of its periphery. With its powerful navy and
firm alliance with Washington however, Tokyo does not need to fear Russia’s
resurgence in the way that members of the former Soviet Union must.
In this initial phase
of re-engagement, Moscow is using its old partner North Korea. As a participant
in the six-party talks, Moscow has an automatic "in." By offering
North Korea economic incentives, Russia can capitalize on the rift between
Pyongyang and Beijing, drawing North Korea closer to Moscow as Pyongyang looks
for ways to reduce its dependency on China. This, in turn, weakens China's grip
on North Korea and reduces its leverage with the United States, South Korea and
Japan, as all three are relying on Beijing to deliver North Korea. If Moscow
can fill that role, then why look to China?
But Russia's engagement of North Korea is just one piece of its overall
strategy. Russia also is working to strengthen its military forces in the
Pacific. Traditionally, Moscow uses its military to influence developments in
neighboring states. But its military history in the Far East is made up mainly
of failures -- such as the Russo-Japanese War -- with few successes. The
country has not forgotten this.
Russia has always
kept its military strength focused in the Western part of the country in order
to protect Moscow, and has largely ignored its Pacific forces. However, during
a visit to the disputed Kurile Islands in early April, Russian First Deputy
Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced Russian plans to focus its efforts on
the Pacific naval fleet. Of Russia's four fleets, three -- the Black Sea,
Northern and Baltic fleets -- are designed to cope with threats from the West,
but its Pacific fleet lacks the capability to keep up. Addressing the reason
for the move, Ivanov said, "[The East] is a region where there is a risk
of conflict. Here you have the United States, China, Korea and Japan, and there
are absolutely no rules of the game." Other Russian government officials
have hinted before that the country might be setting its sights on the East,
but this is the first time anyone has said this outright.
Russia has never
really needed to protect its eastern front, which is mostly unpopulated -- and
for good reason. There is little risk of a major Chinese land grab, given the
inhospitable climate. However, now Russia has a very good reason to turn its
eyes eastward. Vast, though largely untapped, resources -- from energy to
timber to minerals -- lie there, and Moscow appears to be preparing to exploit
these resources. Energy, in particular, can offer Moscow additional leverage in
East Asia; China, Japan and the Koreas are hungrily eyeing Russian natural gas,
and Moscow could very well trap them into depending on it for energy as it did
to Europe.
But executing the
other parts of Russia's strategy for the East will not be easy or quick.
Russia's military and energy strategies will eat up an enormous amount of
money; time, which Russia has; and technology, which is rusty at best. This is
not to say Russia cannot revamp its military or build many of its planned
energy projects, but this would take decades and a lot of cash.
Still, Russia's years
of ignoring the Far East are coming to an end. Moscow now sees a small window
in which to regain influence, and its first target is North Korea -- which
currently acts as a pivot around which the large regional powers rotate. If
Moscow can gain a stronger foothold in Pyongyang, it can attain increased
leverage and undercut the other large powers.
But Japan does
need to be wary of Russia’s above new strategy. And Japan will strive to
contain Russia and China and prevent them from growing closer, as the mere
thought of an alliance between these giant neighbors worries Tokyo more than anything
else.
Should relations
worsen between Moscow and Tokyo in a new Cold War environment however, the
Kremlin could pinch Japan in a number of ways. It could object more
aggressively on the missile defense issue, push against Japanese interests in
Sakhalin-2 or even interfere with Japan’s energy supply. It certainly could
continue to delay progress on negotiations about the Kuril Islands. Russia could also continue seeking ties with
China.
Japan was keeping all
this in mind as it - like other countries - reassessed its relationship with
Russia. Tokyo’s interests are for the most part aligned with those of the
United States, but even without Washington’s influence, Tokyo would be working
to distance itself from the Russians.
Japan at a Crossroads Today
The gravest threat to
Japan’s ability to achieve its strategic imperatives in the 21st century is its
rapidly shrinking and aging population. It is important to grasp the full
extent of this decline. From 1970 to 1990, the population of elderly people in
Japan nearly doubled, which is many times faster than the rate of population
aging in comparable European countries. This was a crucial background element
to the economic crash of the 1990s, as more retirees began to put greater
burdens on the economy. But that was only the beginning.
The generation of the
second baby boom, born between 1971 and 1974, has seen a dramatic fall in fertility
rates due to a variety of socio-economic factors such as greater population
density, divorce rates and child-rearing costs. So as this generation and
earlier generations retire, fewer young people will be available to carry the
torch. According to the Japan Statistics Bureau, Japan’s total population
peaked at nearly 128 million in 2004 and is projected to sink to 115 million by
2030 and to 95 million by 2050. Meanwhile, between 2010 and 2050, children
under 14 years of age will fall from 13 percent of the population to less than
9 percent, while adults over the age of 65 will rise from 23 percent to nearly
40 percent. The working age group will fall from 64 percent to 52 percent of
the population.
With the Japanese
people vanishing and growing gray, Japan faces the evisceration of its
economic, political and military capabilities. The economy will continue to
decline as the workforce and consumer base shrink. Government finances will
worsen beyond their already dismal state, as the fall in corporate profits and
private incomes translates to smaller tax revenues and as social spending
balloons to care for the aging population’s pensions and health care (and the
Japanese have the longest life expectancy in the world, requiring further
public outlays). While these changes cause social and economic dislocation,
Japan’s national defense capabilities will also weaken as the military budget
shrinks and as recruitment becomes more and more of a challenge.
Thus, Japan has
reached another historical crossroads. On the present path, the country will
slowly diminish in population and economic power over the coming decades, and
the result will simply be a much smaller, older and more isolated
social-welfare state, with little ability to preserve its minimal strategic
imperatives. This path essentially leads to another of Japan’s historic periods
of introversion.
An alternate path
would require Japan to return to the extreme extroversion that it has
demonstrated before. With a failing economy and a shortage of labor, Japan
could eventually unleash its formidable military power and once again seize the
labor and resources it needs to rejuvenate itself. To do so would almost
inevitably mean going out in a blaze of glory, but historically Japan has not
shrunk from daring all-or-nothing moves.
There also remains a
third possibility: that Japan could pioneer a technologically advanced society
for the post-consumer age in which it manages both a sustained increase in
production despite decreasing consumption and sets an example for many other
countries facing similar demographic declines (though it is hard to tell what
such a post-postmodern state would look like).
Ultimately, then,
Japan is in a period of transition, with its current strategies falling short
of meeting its core imperatives. Shifts in domestic politics (likely to occur
in parliamentary elections just around the corner) are only a surface
reflection of this underlying fact. And much of Japan’s future will depend on
the evolving global environment. Nevertheless, throughout history Japan has
shown an ability to change tack quickly and rejuvenate its national energies.
If history is any indicator, the next change will come with the suddenness and
force of a Japanese earthquake.
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