The conservatives humbled

Perhaps one of the positive consequences of Japan's economic crisis is that it has silenced Japan's conservatives.

By silenced I do not mean literally silenced — they're still fulminating. What I mean is that they have been rendered irrelevant by events. Despite their media power, their ability to churn out a seemingly infinite amount of books, magazine articles, and op-eds, it turns out that they have remarkably little to say about Japan's economic problems. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is indeed the conservative poster child in this respect: eager to flaunt a rising Japan and its newfound powers, he was almost completely indifferent to the hard work of remaking the Japanese system.

But it is not just the economic crisis that has silenced the conservatives. It is the marriage of the LDP and Aso Taro, one of their own, that has been responsible for quieting the conservatives. The conservatives, with Mr. Aso as prime minister, Nakagawa Shoichi as finance minister, Amari Akira as administrative reform minister, and Hatoyama Kunio as general affairs minister, are now responsible for what happens to Japan in the coming months and years. The fate of the modern conservative movement — which has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past two decades — is now tied to the LDP and the Aso government. Of course, it is for this reason that Hiranuma Takeo's quixotic quest to create a new conservative party (yes, he's still at it, although now the plan is to create a party after the general election) is so foolish. Japan already has a conservative party, and it is drowning as (in Mr. Aso's words) the "tsunami" of the global financial crisis washes over Japan.

What I am not saying is that the conservatives are vanquished evermore. They still have considerable power and their ideas appeal to a sizable minority. What I'm saying is simply that events have rendered the conservative movement irrelevant to the policy debate. It is little surprise that Mr. Abe has attempted to carve out a middle ground in the LDP's tax debate — Mr. Abe and his compatriots barely have a position on the issue to advance.

All of this is a way to introduce this stemwinder by Sakurai Yoshiko.

Published in the January 15th issue of Shukan Shincho, the title says it all: "In the Sino-Japanese War, China had more fighting spirit than Japan."

The essay is the latest attempt to rewrite the history of World War II along terms that exculpate Japan and pin blame for the war on China (and communism). Actually, not only does she pin the second Sino-Japanese war on the Cominform, she finds a new, somewhat surprisingly culprit in the widening war: the Nazi Party, which she blames for providing military assistance to Chiang Kai-shek during the 1930s. In other words, Ms. Sakurai blames any outside power that enhanced the ability of Chinese forces to resist Japan for widening the Sino-Japanese war, instead of blaming the military that was invading China, as if the Chinese people were just supposed to accept the advance of the Imperial Military passively.

I don't want to get bogged down in the history, because the conservative obsession with history is precisely the problem. The conservatives are so obsessed with making the case for the Pacific/Great East Asian War as a just war that they have nothing relevant to say about the many problems facing the Japanese people today.

As such, the more the conservatives are ignored, the better. Japan and the world have too many problems to be consumed with fighting old wars and nursing old hatreds, while looking to stir up new ones. This is, to some extent, the message of President Obama's inaugural address: "...an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics." He was talking about American politics, but he might as well have been talking about the history problem in East Asia.

Fear and loathing in the wake of Hu's visit

As Jun Okumura notes, a poll by Fuji TV's Hodo 2001 program found that Fukuda Yasuo gained nothing from Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Japan last week.

The poll recorded that nearly sixty percent of respondents disapprove of Mr. Fukuda's China policy.

Beyond public doubts, Mr. Fukuda's action (or inaction) during Mr. Hu's visit have driven conservative commentators into paroxysms of rage over Mr. Fukuda's supposed pusillanimity in the face of Chinese outrages, especially poisoned gyoza and human rights violations in Tibet.

In Shukan Shincho, Sakurai Yoshiko vented her spleen about the visit, arguing that Mr. Fukuda failed to defend Japan's national interests in his meetings with Mr. Hu.

She claims that Fukuda pere et fils have worked on behalf of China to the detriment of Japan, Takeo for consenting to a friendship treaty that "ignored national interests" and contributing to the expansion of the Chinese military by providing ODA, Yasuo for his failure to address the East China Sea dispute and for offering technological assistance on environmental grounds. To Ms. Sakurai, the Fukudas are traitors, "injuring Japan's national interests and betraying the people."

She also criticized Prime Minister Fukuda for calling the Tibet problem an internal problem, even as other world leaders have criticized China and threatened to stay away from the Beijing Olympics. (Of course, when foreign governments criticize Japan for one reason or another — take the comfort women issue, for example — that is a grave offense against Japan for commentators like Ms. Sakurai.) She also attacks Mr. Fukuda for opposing independence for Taiwan.

Komori Yoshihisa, Ms. Sakurai's ideological compatriot, also condemned Mr. Fukuda in the strongest possible terms at his blog. Examining the joint statement, he observes that the statement fails to include the words "democracy," "human rights," and "liberty," while using words like "cooperation," "peace," "mutual," and "friendship" numerous times. Mr. Komori attacks the Fukuda-Hu meetings on the basis of Mr. Fukuda's failure to defend the aforementioned universal values.

I have a particular problem with Ms. Sakurai's casual invocation of the phrase "national interest." She uses the phrase as if its meaning is commonly understood, self-evident to one and all. In no country is that the case. Ms. Sakurai has one vision of the national interest, one that views cordial relations with Japan's rapidly growing neighbor and largest trading partner as not in Japan's interest, and Mr. Fukuda has another, one that recognizes that Japan cannot afford to neglect China, even if pursuing a constructive relationship entails muting criticism of China's human rights record, among other things, and prioritizing process over substance. If there is a problem with Mr. Fukuda's approach is that he has failed to make the case for why Japan needs a constructive relationship and why it cannot adopt the conservative approach to China that entails little more than criticizing China for its failings. As I've noted before, the conservative vision of China policy is not a strategy. They offer no constructive, long-term ideas of how Japan can co-exist with a growing China. Their China policy is nothing but rage, rage that has become especially potent since their ideas get little reception at the center of power.

But because there are so few voices in the Japanese media capable of countering the arguments made by conservatives, their rage resonates, stoking public fears about a menacing China.

What choice does Japan have? Antagonizing China is a dead end for a depopulating, stagnant Japan whose regional and global influence is dwindling. The opposite of antagonism isn't surrender. It is prudent policy for Japan to construct a framework for Sino-Japanese relations within which the two countries can make steady progress on solving bilateral issues and ratchet down the hatreds and fears of the Japanese and Chinese peoples. Japan (and other developed countries) shouldn't totally ignore human rights issues, but, as William Schultz argues, they should be realistic about what pressuring China on human rights can actually achieve. In focusing on cooperative mechanisms and not mentioning the history issue — which, as Mainichi notes, did not go unnoticed by the Chinese people — Mr. Hu indicated that he acknowledges the value in a stable relationship. Mr. Fukuda clearly shares his vision. But can he convince the Japanese public of the wisdom in his approach?

The fantasies of "true conservatism"

For a glimpse into the twisted thinking of the Japanese right — the revisionist right — in the aftermath of the downfall of Abe Shinzo, there is no better place to look than the conversation between Sakurai Yoshiko and Hiranuma Takeo published in the January 2008 issue of Voice.

The bizarre, distorted facts and outright fictions published in this article brought me to the point of laughter on more than one occasion, although I didn't laugh nearly as much as the discussants apparently did, judging by the little parenthetical laugh marks that followed all too many of their remarks.

The discussion did, however, give me another reason to be glad that Mr. Abe was forced to resign (for whatever reason — these two think that fault for Abe's resignation lies not with Mr. Abe himself, but with his secretary, Inoue Yoshiyuki, who Ms. Sakurai describes as being "like [Koizumi secretary] Iijima," apparently a bad thing). It's not that their ideas are especially dangerous, it's that they're so irrelevant. They continue to insist that what they know what the Japanese people want, and that is the abductees brought home and the constitution revised. Ms. Sakurai at one point castigates Prime Minister Fukuda for failing to act on constitution revision, which, she reminds us, has been one of the core principles of the LDP since its founding in 1955. True, but so what? Why should a government in 2008 by following an agenda formulated before 1955 when it has to deal with the problems of 2008 and beyond?

How many elections does the LDP have to lose before they recognize that the Japanese people don't share their priorities? Did the July 2007 defeat not register?

Of course, the discussion inevitably turned to Mr. Hiranuma's planned "true" conservative party, because both the LDP and the DPJ are rotten (even if, they say, there are capable individuals within both parties). When asked about the timing of its formation, Mr. Hiranuma was reluctant to say whether it would occur before or after a general election. Undoubtedly he will have to make that decision with the cooperation of his friends within the LDP, who I suspect would prefer to wait until a general election before acting. Instead of forming a new party, it seems to me that the ideological right is starting to hope openly for an LDP defeat in a general election that will take down Fukuda and give them an opportunity to retake control of the party, purging "fake" conservatives in the process.

Towards the discussion, Mr. Hiranuma very nearly veered into relevance when he broached the question of economics, but it turned out he only wanted to castigate the Finance Ministry before directing the conversation back to more familiar ground, puzzlement over the reaction to Nakagawa Shoichi's 2006 calls for a debate about the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

I don't want to linger too much longer over this, but there was one more nugget worth mentioning. The two of course talked at length about the US about-face on North Korea and had a good laugh about Christopher Hill. Mr. Hiranuma also spoke about his recent trip to Washington along with other Diet members and the abductee families, where they spoke with members of Congress about resolutions in the House and Senate calling for a linkage between the abductions issue and the removal of North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list. For some reason, these ideologues really take congressional resolutions seriously. Mr. Hiranuma spoke with pride about how Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-18) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) promised to push for these resolutions, and was impressed that the House resolution already had a whopping twenty-eight co-sponsors.

That said, they acknowledged the shortcomings of Diet members' diplomacy, thanks in part — wait for it — the influence of the Chinese in Washington, whose embassy has ten times more political specialists in their embassy than Japan's and who have significant numbers of Chinese-Americans whose support Beijing can apparently mobilize at will, as in the case of the comfort women resolution.

You would think from reading this interview that Japanese society was healthy and that there was not a long list of problems facing the government for years to come. And you would be wrong, just as the ideological right is wrong. The decisions made by the Japanese government in the coming years will determine whether Japan remains influential regionally and globally, whether it remains an economic power with a voice in shaping East Asia. Its power will not rest on a new constitution that enables Japan to send its robust military to fight abroad. It will not rest on its children being proud of being Japanese. It will depend on Japan's becoming a country that is more open to the world, more willing to take risks, better able to provide security for its aging citizens, and better able to educate Japanese children for the world in which they will live.

The vision of Mr. Hiranuma, Ms. Sakurai, and their compatriots in the mass media and the Diet is a vision from 1950. (I guess that's what they mean by "true conservatism). Too bad it's 2008.