ed Unrepentant neighbor

Japan’s global advance should start in Asia

Emboldened by a recovering economy, the newly confident Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is showing its dangerously nationalistic colors.

Four Japanese Cabinet ministers and 168 lawmakers visited the Yasukuni Shrine that honors 2.5 million fallen soldiers, including 14 Class-A war criminals, in the last couple of days. One visitor, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, audaciously said he didn’t think such acts would have much effect on Japan’s relationship with its Asian neighbors.

Such superciliousness sets the current Japanese Cabinet apart even from the two previous ones ― led by Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s and Junichiro Koizumi in the 2000s ― which also visited the military-religious temple to justify Japan’s wartime atrocities.

Contrary to Tokyo’s wishes, however, Korea canceled quite their foreign ministers’ talks scheduled for early May, and is reportedly considering delaying a planned bilateral summit, too. China also put off a visit by a delegation from Japan’s ruling party. All these developments have been expected since Prime Minister Abe took power, and the only question was when.

And the bilateral diplomatic friction will not get any better before it gets worse in the months, even years, to come, depending on Abe’s tenure.

Tokyo’s latest provocation resulted not from diplomatic insensitivity, as some Japanese media outlets described it, but from careful calculation with an eye on its July parliamentary elections. For Japan’s conservative ruling party, similar visits in Aug. 15, the anniversary of the end of World War II, will be too late to drum up the support of right-wing voters. Prime Minister Abe himself is expected to go to the shrine during an autumn service if his party emerges victorious in the summer poll.

Prime Minister Abe made it clear that his administration would modify Tokyo’s previous statements by apologizing for Japan’s militaristic past, in ways to further whitewash its historical wrongs and blur the already unclear expression of regrets. But the real problem is, what appears to be a rapid nationalist surge to the eyes of foreigners is not solely due to the efforts of some conservative leaders but rather reflects nationalistic sentiments currently widespread among the Japanese public, with or without the instigation of political leaders.

A survey on historical awareness shows that 65.2 percent of Japanese people support their prime minister’s visit to the war shrine, with 80.6 percent regarding it as proper for Tokyo to take the territorial dispute over Dokdo to the International Court of Justice.

It seems as if the Japanese people, except for some conscientious intellectuals, are mired in mass self-hypnosis to glorify their history, in which Japan, the only modernized Asian country during World War 2, waged a lone campaign to protect the East from Western imperialists, and that the 14 war criminals were actually victims sacrificed for the cause.

All this shows that East Asians themselves will hardly be able to solve the Japanese conundrum, and the key may lie in the West, the United States and major European powers ― the few countries that Japan admires and listens to. This explains why Washington and Brussels should no longer shy away from advising Tokyo to first reconcile with its closest neighbors before aiming to take on a larger role.