Tom Plate :
I don’t know whether I am rooting against Shinzo Abe in the sudden election the incumbent prime minister teed up for next month. It’s a hard call. After all, Japanese culture has given to the world reason to be grateful for some of the best electronics, the healthiest food, the cleverest anime, the neatest cars, the most fabulous novelists, the most subtle and daring film directors – and at the same time it has bequeathed itself (and to us) some of the least worthy prime ministers ever – anywhere. The gap between its general culture and its political culture seems about the dimensions of Mount Fuji.
Japanese politics, often mired in mediocrity, occasionally has the capacity to make you wish this planet could get along entirely without politics. Alas, the truth is that giant Japan, the world’s third largest economy and America’s lead ally in the Pacific, tends to produce prime ministers who are such lemons, they are almost constantly being recalled, in effect. Since 1990, Japan has suffered through no less than 16 prime ministers, including the present one – twice. Genetically, Abe hails from the upper crust of Japanese ruling-class stock. His grandfather and father were prominent political figures; his mother is the daughter of a former prime minister. For a year in the last decade, this blue-blood held the PM office, but only briefly – his short unsuccessful tenure blown to the heavens by one of those dreary Japanese political scandals that seems to yield both a ritual suicide (in this instance the then-agricultural minister’s) and renewed hopelessness about Japan ever getting its political act together.
Yet the resilient Abe, rising from political ashes and dusting himself off, managed to win anew the leadership of his Liberal Democratic Party when some two years ago the LDP recaptured the lower house of Japan’s parliament; and Abe II was reborn.
He’s back! So what is to be said? Really, I do not intend to be negative, but Abe’s feral nationalism (in substance as in style – he proposes to unleash and build up the military) is not only off-putting to me but turns off much of Asia as well. Historical memory will do that to one.
We need to be cautious, however. Keep in mind that Japanese politics tend to produce dinosaurs with three legs. We agree that its political culture has been stuck in the age of black-and-white TV, failing to produce (with the exception ten years ago of the most unusual Junichiro Koizumi) anything as elegant as a Scandinavian leader, or as clearly competent as a Singapore prime minister, or as hope-inspiring as – say – the spanking new president of Indonesia. But, supposing Abe flops next month, what will Japan and an anxious world get in his place?
As the saying goes, it is always best to look before you leap.
Here in the United States we are looking at the election (carefully, attentively, worryingly) for two main reasons.
The first is this: As the US “pivots” its foreign policy and defence deployment toward Asia and edges away from its preoccupations with Europe and the Middle East (but is such possible!), it has no wish to slip on its divot and fall on its face. And the challenge of constructing better relations with China is crucial. This is now America’s most important bilateral relationship in Asia. No longer is it with Japan, as important as Tokyo remains from the American perspective.
And so President Obama looked very good indeed in handshaking the beginning of a bilateral climate control understanding with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Japan should consider what a mistake it would be in its relations with the US to be the seeming spoiler of any happy ending in the Sino-US relationship.
The second reason for intense interest in the snap election next month is simply that many Americans care about (and indeed some of us adore) Japan. And this can also prove the case with truly sophisticated Chinese, who also find this archipelago country deeply interesting and enormously cultivated.
The Hate-Japan crowd in China is as loathsome and adolescent as is Japan’s obnoxious Hate-China rightwing. The fact of the matter is that the world’s third-largest economy and its second (or is China now officially the world’s number-one?) need to get along much, much better if Asia is to continue to evolve without the colossal setback of war.
These nagging worries explain why it is hard to root for Abe to win reaffirmation. There sometimes seems a scary touch of a Dr. Strangelove in this otherwise well-educated man. Given that, maybe in fact a colorless, ineffectual septuagenarian successor would be preferable after all. Ineptitude and torpor have their merits if the alternative is mainly macho aggressiveness and a get-even chip on the shoulder.
In East Asia these days, there is little reward in major risk-taking. So perhaps a boring, do-little prime minister or Japan would be the better ticket – even though it does sell this brilliant nation and its people very considerably short. So what would be new?
(Tom Plate is a distinguished professor and journalist based in Los Angeles)
