Tom Plate :
There will be little rejoicing over this weekend’s Japanese election. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remains leader of his party and his country, but who can imagine him winning a single popularity contest anywhere else in the neighbourhood of East Asia? Nor are the Japanese people themselves exactly reacting in wild kanpai-yelling celebrations.
This was an election without elation. And yet the all-but-predictable result does provide Japan’s neighbours with something they haven’t seen lately (whether they want it or not): continuity at the top of Japan’s polity. Abe does look to provide that; and this determined patrician politician does not give up easily. In 2007 he became Japan’s youngest PM, serving for only 12 months, but then reemerged in 2012 for a second chance at it. Now, with a total of three years under this shogun’s belt, and a presumed four years more to go, history may record him as a longer-serving PM than Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006) or Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982-1987) – past mega-stars of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. So whether he succeeds or fails, Abe is anything but just another revolving door PM. Like him or not, the weekend warrior deserves to be taken seriously.
But where now does Abe take Japan? Consider that his blue-blood genes are embedded in nationalistic DNA: His career-diplomat father was foreign minister (1982-1986) under the transformative Nakasone and his mother’s father was a deeply controversial PM who had served in Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet. The worry then is that Abe roots offer dangerous strands of nationalism, fundamentalist values and militarism.
We also note that, while clearly the man of the moment, Abe might also be understood as Japan’s leader mainly by rank default. The opposition is such a pathetic shambles that the polity has reverted back to little more than a one-party deal. Many LDP voters took the resigned, pragmatic view that some kind of national leadership was preferable to none at all. Landslides are easier when the opposition is vacuous.
This domestic vacuum could make Abe more consequential abroad as well as at home. The world’s stake in Japan’s future is anything but peripheral. It remains the third-largest economy, ahead of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. If its political system now resembles what we Americans, half-jokingly, would call an Edsel (the famous iconic auto failure in US corporate history), economically it can still shine like a Lexus. Everyone accepts that China’s own economic rebirth would have been even more difficult without productive and consuming neighbours like Japan, not to mention South Korea (and, of course, faraway US).
For the foreseeable future, Tokyo remains America’s default Asian ally, its first go-to option. US opinion polls reaffirm support for that. In fact, the American public views this important society and talented people as the centerpiece of US-Asia security. But that sense of need could weaken if the Abe government becomes known for a policy of aggressive nationalism, which will trigger overwhelming regional pushback, as well as economic policies that backfire by shrinking Japan further.
The idea that the US could ever switch from a policy of containing China to one of seeking to align with China is far-fetched in the extreme. But Japanese rearmament and militarism could do the trick if it unites all of East Asia, with its haunting memories and unresolved bitterness of wartime, against Tokyo. This is why Abe would be foolish to choose that route, and wiser by far to dig deeper into his DNA and summon up his distant genetic linkage with another Japanese prime minister: Eisuke Sato (1964 to 1972). The first Asian to accept a Nobel Peace Prize, Sato was cited “for his renunciation of the nuclear option for Japan and his efforts to further regional reconciliation.”
The Japanese people themselves, still largely pacifist, deserve better than Tojo II. They deserve a transformative leader who can refocus the economy and reorient foreign relations. They deserve another Sato, not another Tojo.
Sometimes the US refers to Japan as its Asian Great Britain – a very rough analogy at best. But the comparison does remind one of a telling oracular observation by an iconic American secretary of state that offers perspective on Abe’s current challenge. “Great Britain has lost an empire,” the late Dean Acheson famously proffered in a 1962 speech at the US military academy at West Point, “but has not yet found a role.” Not much that PM Abe has tried in his first three years has worked, except the deft engineering of his slam-dunk re-election. Rooting for Abe to succeed might strike many in Easy Asia as emotionally problematic. But rooting for Japan to fail is a very risky business in all kinds of consequential ways. That’s one reason why I always root for Japan.
( Tom Plate is a distinguished professor and journalist based in Los Angeles)
