Seventy-five years ago today, Japan
launched surprise attacks against the Western powers in Asia, igniting the full
Pacific War that witnessed horrific war crimes by the Imperial Japanese Army
and climaxed in the atomic furies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki four years later.
Though best known in America for the early Sunday morning, December 7, attack
on Pearl Harbor, the main object of Japanese military operations was to
overwhelm European and American garrisons in Southeast Asia and break the
embargo on oil and other raw materials that threatened to strangle its national
power. Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand all were
besieged from air and sea that day, and the rest of Southeast Asia was
assaulted by January in a bold bid to destroy the balance of power in Asia and
create a new, Japanese-dominated regional order.
This week it was announced that
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President
Barack Obama in late December, finally closing the page on that day of infamy.
Further, in late November, Japan’s defense minister, Tomomi Inada, inaugurated the first
Japan-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) defense initiative, the
“Vientiane Vision,” at the second informal meeting of defense ministers from
Japan and ASEAN nations. In aiming explicitly to cooperate on maritime security
and promote the rule of international law in Asia, Japanese Prime Minister Abe
is positioning Japan as a bulwark of the post–World War II international
system, just the opposite of the role his country played in 1941.
From the ashes of defeat and global ignominy in 1945, Japan’s postwar history
has traced the arc of a nation both taking advantage of and contributing to the
liberal international order established by the victorious Americans and their
allies. As an occupied nation from 1945 to 1952, Japan was partially remade in
the image of its conqueror, although the thoroughgoing purge of wartime
officials and the permanent breakup of oligarchic business structures were arrested
by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Indeed, from an international pariah
and vassal state, Japan soon became an indispensable element of the
globe-girdling U.S. politico-military presence.
Japan’s uniqueness came from its near
abdication of military capability in the first decades after the U.S.
occupation, symbolized by the famous Article 9 of the American-written 1946
constitution, renouncing war forever. Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida and his
successors agreed instead to rely on Washington for most of Japan’s defense, in
return for the freedom to focus on industrial recovery and protection of
Japan’s markets. By 1964, less than twenty years after Hiroshima, as Tokyo
hosted the Summer Olympics, it was hailed a postwar success story and the world’s
fastest growing economy. For decades, indeed, Japan was the globe’s
second-largest economy, redefining everything from consumer design to personal
electronics to just-in-time inventory practices. Its standard of living
remained among the highest in the world, and the Japanese aesthetic influenced
everything from automobiles to interior design.
Yet Japan never developed the political
influence and military strength, commensurate with its economic standing, that
truly bestow superpower status. Hampered by constitutional restrictions,
celebrating its pacifist society and unwilling to bear heavy foreign burdens
that could derail economic plans, Japan seemed frozen in amber when it came to
the world around it. And once its economic growth came to a shuddering halt in
the early 1990s, so with it went much of Japan’s global influence. Almost
immediately, China supplanted Japan as the next big thing, and lived up to its
promise of becoming a major competitor to the United States.
Today, as Japan’s economy and military have been eclipsed by China’s, Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe is making a bold stand to move Japan closer to the ideal
many once assumed it would embrace, to battle for political leadership in Asia.
Abe is doing so by scrapping some of the restrictions on military cooperation
and activities abroad, increasing the military budget, and deepening the
alliance with Washington. Even more boldly, he has moved to provide defense
equipment to Southeast Asian nations, enhanced ties with India, increased
Japan’s presence in the South China Sea and now unveiled the defense
cooperation initiative with ASEAN.
Abe’s moves are controversial at home and
abroad. China, in particular, understands that this is a challenge to Beijing’s
bid for regional hegemony. But Abe has been steadfast throughout in claiming
that his actions are designed to bolster the postwar liberal international
order that benefited Japan more than almost any other country, and which now
struggles to deal with the challenges posed by Russia, ISIS, Iran, North Korea
and China. In doing so, and in going farther than his predecessors in
apologizing for the war, Abe has positioned Japan as a defender of global stability,
a far cry from the destructive role it played three-quarters of a century ago.
Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The
End of the Asian Century, which will be released in January.
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