On Japanese nationalisms

Robert Dujarric of Temple University Japan had an op-ed in the Japan Times Wednesday in which he argued, "Japanese society may have problems but nationalism is not one of them."

He argues:

Regardless of the metric used, Japan scores very low on nationalism. Its investment in its armed forces as a percentage of national income is small, especially for a country living in close range of two potential war zones (the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan).

Moreover, in the past two decades the offensive capabilities of North Korea against Japan, namely its ballistic missiles and nuclear program, have grown significantly.

China, another potential adversary for Japan, clearly has a much stronger military than 20 years ago. But Japan continues to keep its military investment at around 1 percent of national income (perhaps a little more if other expenses are included).

The phenomenal waste in Japanese procurement programs also shows that the military budget is as much a funding mechanism for Japanese businesses as a tool to build up a strong military.

Moreover, when it comes to dealing with the outside world, Japanese diplomats are as unlikely as those of the Holy See to resort to threats of force. There are no John Boltons in the Japanese Foreign Ministry. This peaceful, low profile reflects a basic fact often ignored by outsiders: Japanese voters favor candidates who care about bread and butter issues over those whose concern is Japan's greatness and military might.

He attributes this lack of nationalism to an absence of a sense of victimization — as in South Korea and China — and a lack of universal values, a "messianic urge" that lends itself to a desire to seek regional or global domination. It also lacks the need to use nationalism to distract citizens from domestic problems or to promote unity in the presence of social cleavages.

Granted, Japan lacks these factors. But are these the only causes of nationalism? And are the only manifestations of nationalism more expansive defense budgets and a more robust foreign policy? With that phrase "regardless of the metric used," M. Dujarric manages to duck this question of just what is nationalism.

I would argue that the Japanese people on the whole are quite nationalistic. I think that the Japanese people on the whole are proud of Japan and of being Japanese, if not to the same extent as their neighbors or Americans.

As Yomiuri found in an opinion poll in January of this year, a record number of respondents (1650 out of 1780, 92.7%) said that they felt some or a lot of pride, with a record portion (55%) saying that they felt a lot of pride. That pride, however, did not translate into support for a policy of remilitarization or normalization. Asked what they think about contemporary Japan — i.e., the country of which they are proud — 59.7% saw it as a "peace-loving nation," followed by 35.9% who saw it as an economic great power, 27.2% who saw it as a country with a high level of culture, and 25.2% who saw it as a democratic nation. Only 2% saw it as a military great power, fewer than those who saw it as an "insular nation." (Respondents were free to choose as many answers as they desired from a list that also included "nation with a high level of welfare protection," "nation that is trusted by other countries," and "independent nation." Obviously this does not necessarily suggest that this is how the respondents want to be, but it is reasonable to infer that the 1780 respondents to this poll are actually quite proud of Japan's achievements culturally and economically — and they are proud of Japan's postwar record of abjuring from the use of force to resolve disputes.

In other words, a Japanese citizen can be nationalistic without sounding like Abe Shinzo. A Japanese can be proud — should be proud — of the Japan that exists, not the beautiful Japan that exists if only the constitution were revised.

Accordingly, it is inappropriate to discuss Japanese nationalism only in terms dictated by nineteenth-century nationalism, the kind of nationalism that helps the state unite the people behind common goals (often involving besting foreign rivals), the kind of nationalism that can be measured by M. Dujarric's metrics. (Interestingly, both South Korea and China used conscription, that great tool of nineteenth-century nationalism, as a means to tap national power.) Japan obviously has nationalists of the nineteenth-century variety, but they are far from the most numerous variety. They may, however, be the most influential, given their concentration among Japan's political and media elites. Thanks to the media, they certainly have influence far greater than their numbers.

M. Dujarric suggests that Japanese voters care about bread-and-butter issues, meaning that there is little support for the agenda pushed by hyper-nationalist conservatives, whose nationalism may well be driven by the same sense of victimhood and manifest destiny cited by M. Dujarric as factors in Chinese and South Korean nationalism. But that doesn't mean that the Japanese people are actively opposed to the hyper-nationalist agenda. They are opposed to governments that neglect bread-and-butter domestic issues — and as Mr. Abe learned, they are willing to punish said governments — but if a government satisfies those needs, the public is willing to give some leeway to the government on foreign and defense policy, leaving a strong nationalist prime minister the freedom with which to pursue the kind of nationalist agenda M. Dujarric claims isn't an issue in Japan.

Furthermore, as I argue in the current issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, even Japanese citizens who do not support remilitarization or a cold war with China want their government to be more assertive in dealing with Beijing, especially in the case of China's transnational pollution and tainted products, which have consequences for Japanese households.

The picture is considerably more complicated than that provided by M. Dujarric. Yes, the Japanese public exhibits little of the nineteenth-century nationalism of conservative elites and Japan's neighbors, but that is quite different from saying that "nationalism isn't an issue" or relevant when considering how Japanese think about their country's place in the world.

The nationalism question, revisited yet again

Although the comfort women resolution appears to be on hold until after Japan holds Upper House elections next month, the waters have been roiled by a full-page advert in the Washington Post taken out by a bipartisan group of Japanese legislators, as well as journalists and commentators (including Abe confidante Okazaki Hisahiko) laying out "The Facts" on the comfort women issue. (The ad is available here, courtesy of Occidentalism.)

At the same time, a group of legislators led by former LDP member (and postal rebel) Hiranuma Takeo, who also signed the Wapo ad, has protested to China that it should remove photos from war museums that distort the past and defame Japan.

Ampontan has addressed both these acts of "assertiveness," arguing that the comfort women issue reflects worse on Japan's neighbors and the US Congress than on Japan, and that Japan is rightfully standing up to China in demanding changes to China's war museums.

I have written about my unease about the US Congress demanding an apology on this issue from Japan before, but that should not be taken as an endorsement of the position that Japan has apologized enough and we should all start paying attention to China's wrongs, instead of Japan's. As I have written before, Japanese governments may have apologized before, but the contemporary Japanese right — the political and in some cases familial descendants of the figures who led Japan to war — has never apologized for the war. Through various indiscreet comments made by Japanese conservatives, including the current prime minister in his younger days, it is clear that to them the worst thing about the war was that Japan lost. How that is consistent with former Prime Minister Murayama's apology is beyond me. The leaders who apologized before were those who thought that Japan was right to lose the war and were proud of Japan's unique pacifist identity (or were otherwise insincerely repeating what their predecessors had said).

It does not take much effort to see why Chinese, Koreans, and certain sections of the public in Australia and the US might have a problem with a Japanese prime minister who has never properly expressed remorse for Japan's colossal historical crimes and yet at the same time talks about abandoning Article 9 and the postwar regime built around it — abandoning the constitutional provision that has served as a mark of Cain, showing the world (and reminding Japan) of its bloody past.

The question is not a matter of resurgent militarism; as Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, said in an interview in the July issue of Ronza (my translation), "During the first phase of globalization, in the first half of the twentieth century, Japan's response to globalization was to commence invasions, starting with Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Manchuria, and finally annexing the various countries of Asia. However, this kind of thing will likely not happen again. In theory, one can imagine war between Japan and China. However, now the act of a victorious country's seizing a defeated country is nonsense. Until the Second World War, the two countries had mutual, violent animosity that could be expressed in war, but now that does not apply."

Rather, it is a question of historical justice. Regardless of the questionable legitimacy of the Tokyo trials, regardless of what Japan suffered, regardless of what the other imperial powers did or did not do, Japan committed egregious acts of violence against its neighbors. It is not up to Japan to dictate when the wounds it inflicted upon its neighbors and their citizens have healed. And denying or relativizing Japan's actions only rubs salt into the open wounds of its victims.

Yes, China has historical issues of its own with which to grapple. Mao's crimes were monstrous, and that his visage can still be found all over China is deeply unsettling. But guess what? Mao's crimes were against the Chinese people. The Chinese people will one day have a serious reckoning with their country's history during the twentieth century, but that is a matter for the Chinese. And so with the Koreans. Between Japan, Korea, and China, it seems to me that only one has launched a massive war of aggression against the whole region in the past century — and has the responsibility to show sincere remorse for its crimes and to not make excuses for what happened.

The question of Japan's making a proper account and atoning for its wartime behavior has nothing to do with placating the Chinese and Korean governments, who for reasons of their own will not be placated by Japanese apologies. Nationalism and the attendant historical sensitivities will be a part of the landscape of Northeast Asia for decades to come, because vigorous, rising powers shape their histories to flatter their contemporary aspirations. No bilateral or trilateral panel of historians is going to overcome the urge to present history in a light that flatters oneself and makes one's rivals look bad.

No, Japan's historical reckoning is for its own sake, to clean out its wartime closet once and for all.

So what Ampontan sees as Japan's standing up for itself, I see a country for which pride and the redemption of honor take priority over historical justice — and I see a country that is, as of yet, unfit for the global leadership after which it lusts.

Breaking for book notes

Another day, another session of the budget committee, with the opposition once again raking the Abe Cabinet over the coa...by which I mean soberly discussing Japan's policy goals and requirements.

As such, I want to take a brief break from tracking the current Diet session to post some notes on a book I recently finished reading.

But first, I now have a dedicated email address for questions and comments concerning the content of this blog. Please direct your email to observingjapan@gmail.com.

As longtime readers of this blog will note, I have a particular fascination with China (er, who -- especially among observers of the Asia-Pacific -- doesn't these days). In any case, I have been reading as many books worth reading on China that I can get my hands on in order to get a more nuanced view of the country that may claim the twenty-first century in the same way that America claimed the twentieth. (Find a previous review here.)

In this vein, I have just finished reading journalist Ian Buruma's Bad Elements, in which he travels the Chinese world, from the suburbs of Washington, DC to Tibet, to talk with prominent and not-so-prominent Chinese dissidents, including dissidents who have resisted governments in Taipei and Singapore. While already several years old, Buruma provides a thorough look at the dynamics of resistance from which the successful removal of the CCP might spring. At the same time, however, Buruma should be credited for not writing hagiography. It is altogether too easy to lose one's critical eye when assessing individuals who have risked everything to resist tyrannical governments, and while Buruma gives the subjects of his book the credit they deserve, he doesn't not hesitate in his probing of their motives and their goals.

I drew several especially salient points from Buruma's book.

First, there is no question that the CCP will fall sooner or later. Having unleashed the tremendous forces of a modern market economy without having relinquished power, the CCP cleared the way for rampant corruption -- while at the same time ever so slightly giving citizens space to begin demanding accountability (how else does one explain this). The question is how long before demands for accountability metastasize into demands for greater political accountability. Buruma's frequent references to Chinese history -- which is filled with examples of long-ruling regimes overturned -- serve as a constant reminder that sooner or later each regime that has governed China has faltered and fallen, usually overwhelmed by systemic failures and flaws. The timeline at work in the demise of the CCP regime may not conform to the demands of the twenty-four news cycle, but the forces that will cause its downfall are already at work, and they were unleashed by the CCP itself when it opted for vast liberalization. (For a look at how this might happen, I strongly recommend Bruce Gilley's China's Democratic Future.)

Second -- this is a more philosophical point -- Buruma was surprised to find that many of the exiled dissidents with whom he talked converted to Christianity while in exile, which suggests that no matter how hard materialists like the CCP try to extinguish the human soul, that deep need to believe in something greater than oneself, it finds a way of re-emerging, often as religious belief. I suspect that the cadres in Beijing realize this, hence the promotion of nationalism in the wake of Deng's reforms.

Speaking of nationalism, Buruma expertly documents the twisted skein that is Chinese nationalism in the twenty-first century: sometimes racialist, sometimes cultural, sometimes political, often belligerent, the impact Chinese nationalism will have on the political and social evolution of China in the coming decades is probably the greatest wild card at present.

One final point that I found interesting is that in contemporary China, as in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, when the ruling party has politicized everything, the act of carving out a place for the non-political in society becomes, paradoxically, imbued with great political significance (This phenomenon was deftly described in Tony Judt's Postwar).

I can very easily imagine research institutes in Beijing full of newly minted Chinese PhDs digging through the history of the demise of the Eastern bloc -- not to mention Chinese history -- looking for clues to avoid the same fate as the "people's democracies."

In any case, I give credit to Buruma for not simply writing a book that cheers China's dissidents and looks to post-CCP China with rose-tinted glasses. China's democratic transition, when it comes, is bound to be a messy and potentially bloody affair, and Buruma successfully treads the thin line between realistically assessing the future and worshipping the present power on the throne in Beijing. The picture that emerges from his account is of a China that's more than ready for a change, thanks to a population more politically astute than observers often suggest.

Setting the record straight

On the sidelines of the APEC summit in Hanoi, Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhao Xing discussed plans to convene a joint Sino-Japanese committee to review Sino-Japanese history. The committee is expected to meet before the end of the year, consist of ten members, and have subcommittees that discuss both ancient and recent history. The committee will present its findings by 2008.

This committee could have value -- but I'm doubtful, because, as an op-ed in the IHT (not online, so far as I can tell) by Brookings visiting fellow Masahiro Matsumura notes, nationalism has proven politically useful to both governments. In particular, he writes about China, "The Chinese do not have a deeply entrenched sense of national identity. Instead China is divided by competing regional, ethnic and class identities The Japan history question is an issue on which all Chinese can reach consensus and on which a temporary and precarious sense of unity can be fabricated."

In other words, Chinese nationalism -- which has become more virulent as the country has developed -- may be a necessary and unpleasant evil preferable to the alternative, namely a China on the brink of splintering due to intense internal pressures, some of which have been exasperated by China's rapid growth. Beijing criticizes Japan for historical misdeeds for which Tokyo has apologized repeatedly because it is too politically useful for it to refrain from doing so.

The CCP's mounting of the tiger of nationalism may ultimately result, however, in dire consequences for the CCP itself and for surrounding nations. Should the CCP be perceived as failing to protect the Chinese nation's (where do the minorities fit in this China), will the party's standing be diminished, perhaps fatally so? Will it drive more adventurous forays abroad, whether in the Taiwan Strait or in the waters surrounding Japan?

Perhaps a joint committee could be useful as a tool for helping Beijing dismount from its nationalist mount, but if that is the case, Beijing has a lot of work to do in the next two years to dampen nationalist sentiment among its people.

Hey CCP, good luck walking that tightrope. Better find a new raison d'etre.