For 75 years Japan has been trying to find a place in the international system. It is designed to reconcile with its economic and technological power, without provoking associations of murderous militarism. Japan is meant to be strong, but not too strong.
Shinzo Abe was the most prominent Japanese leader during his many years of trying to get out of the conch, to which Japan was pushed after the 1945 defeat. But he was not the only one, and at the end of his life he was far from congratulating the finished product.
The road was full of stumbles and misunderstandings. The prime minister of the early 1960s, Ikeda, was one of the architects of the Japanese economic miracle. But he is remembered, at least in the West, thanks to a contemptuous remark by Charles de Gaulle. In 1962, the Japanese surrendered to the President of France. De Gaulle was a grant of his generation, and was also much taller than Ikeda. The general wrote in his diary, “Today a transistor agent visited me.”
In 1960, that transistor agent set Japan the goal of doubling its gross domestic product within ten years. In 1970, Japanese GDP was almost five times higher. In 1960, France’s GDP was 40% higher than that of Japan. Ten years later, Japan’s GDP was 40% higher than France’s. It is safe to say that the Gulf field was shrugging its shoulders.
The weakness of Japanese politics is evident in the short tenures of prime ministers. Sometimes they lasted only a few months, usually they lasted up to two years, because that was the length of the tenure of the presidents of the Eternal, Liberal-Democratic ruling party. The issue of party tenure would automatically become prime minister.
In the following years, especially after Japan fell into chronic deflation, in the 1990s, and began to decline from its economic greatness, an attempt was made to strengthen this priesthood. A curious expression of the experience was the renovation of the official residence of the Prime Minister, which crumbled and went away. He was said to be infested with rats. A less curious expression was the lengthening of the priesthood time.
“Separating the Economy from Politics”
Japan’s policy was marked by a constant longing for pragmatic relations with the outside world. Its motto was “to separate the economy from politics.” It hoped to develop extensive economic relations with the two communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, in the midst of the Cold War, against the will of the United States. It planned to mine minerals in the Russian Far East and Siberia, which ultimately did not go well.
Japan has had a hard time presenting a global vision. It did not have a real foreign policy, but had a collection of bilateral relations. Although it was democratic, at least on the part of its constitutional format, it was difficult to find in it an active commitment to the well-being of the free world.
Even as the outside world admired its dizzying economic progress, or resented its selfish trading habits, Japan’s politicians made a faint impression on most of their viewers. They were generally perceived as weak and ineffective. It seemed that Japan owed its success to a brilliant bureaucracy, especially that of the Foreign Ministry (MITI), which aroused the fierce jealousy of quite a few Western politicians. His conduct even aroused serious doubts in the wisdom of the liberal Western model, which tended to lay near the vanishing to direct the market, without massive government intervention.
At least one prominent American politician, a Democratic presidential contender, Gary Hart, proposed in the 1980s that the U.S. copy the MITI model to improve its deteriorating balance of payments. The impression that they are about to claim the world economic premiere. Fear of Japan’s economic power and resentment over its behavior have been at the center of American politics for several years. In the 1992 election campaign, they played a significant role in overthrowing President George W. Bush and overthrowing him.
“Implementable aircraft carrier”
The United States has longed for Japanese interlocutors to talk to it about the situation, not the transistors. It has encountered them here and there. The first to be forced to retire amid corruption.Two years after his retirement, he was found to have received bribes from the Lockheed industry, nearly two million dollars, for ordering 21 passenger planes.
At the time, this was the most sensational bribery affair in the world. The fall of Tanaka confirmed Western stereotypes about the politics and society of Japan, although of course the bribes were no less guilty than the bribes.
The wait for the interlocutor continued. In the 1980s, it seemed to the Americans that they had found a man of their own. Yasuhiro Nakasuna matched Ronald Reagan at the White House, spoke some English, and the media reported with pleasure that he called Reagan “Ron” and Reagan called him “Yasu”.
Yasu annoyed the Soviets, in one of the last moments of the Cold War, when he declared in 1983 that Japan’s value for the defense of the free world was weighed against that of an “uninhabitable aircraft carrier.” The Soviets angrily replied that Japan was inviting “a heavier disaster than the one that befell it” in 1945. This was of course the disaster of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The constitution seeks peace
The recognition that Japan cannot passively shelter for days under an American nuclear umbrella began sometime in the days of Yasu and Ron. The pacifist constitution, which the Americans dictated in 1947 as an anti-aggression serum, was in jeopardy. This constitution, which outlawed war, is still in the eye of quite a few Japanese, including a small but influential Buddhist party. But gradually Japan is getting rid of the practical restrictions that the constitution has imposed on military intensification.
Even before Abe, but especially under his leadership, Japan became a regional military power. In 2018, it announced a large-scale military procurement campaign in the United States. It decided to increase its fleet of F-35s from 42 to 147, the largest outside of America. For the first time since World War II, Japan launched two aircraft carriers It is building a ballistic defense system. It has joined the most critical arms race of our time, the development of hyper-sonic missiles (five to 25 times the speed of sound).
The idea of an “uninhabitable aircraft carrier” conceived by Nakasuna nearly 40 years ago is undergoing an important mutation: from a stationary base to American forces Japan is adapting to an aggressive dynamic, becoming an active partner in collective defense of Pacific and Indian Ocean shipping lanes. Abba has the idea of the “quartet”: the strategic club that brings together the leaders of the United States, India, Japan and Australia once a year. The quartet is formed and developed to stop China.
In 2015, Abe told the Wall Street Journal that joining forces with the United States and Japan would “make one and another one two.” For years, this arithmetic was not self-evident. Of uninhibited dictators, in China, North Korea and Russia.
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