hankyoreh

By Selig S. Harrison, Asia Director, Center for International Policy

Is Japan moving toward right-wing nationalism and an inevitable growth of tensions with China and the Korean peninsula?

Until the withdrawal of Yasuo Fukuda from the race to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister, front-runner Shinzo Abe faced in Fukuda a serious challenger who offered Japanese voters a clear alternative to Abe's right-wing nationalism. Abe still faces opposition from Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, but his victory appears likely.

One imponderable will be the impact of the recent revelation by all leading Japanese media two weeks ago that Abe had secretly visited the Yasukuni shrine on April 15, followed by his refusal to comment on reports of the visit and Tanigaki's pledge that he will not visit the shrine if he wins the September 20, 2006, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) election.

Fears that Abe will take Japan to the right are based not only on his continual hawkish statements regarding North Korea and China but also on his political DNA. Like Koizumi, Abe belongs to the dominant Mori faction of the LDP, but he also happens to be the grandson of the late Nobusuke Kishi, a member of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's World War II Cabinet. Until his death in 1987, Kishi worked to keep alive the wartime dream of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

In Taiwan, Kishi channeled Japanese support to the Taiwan independence movement. In South Korea, he tried to get Park Chung Hee to set up a "Japan-Korea Industrial Zone" in which labor and capital would move back and forth freely without national tax and investment restrictions between coastal areas of Korea and Japan's Kansai. As Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo at the time, I was one of those who exposed the plan, which soon died after a bitter attack on it by Dong-a-Ilbo as "a resurrection of their old dream of a Co-Prosperity Sphere that would make us a permanent processor and subcontractor for Japan."

To se sure, Shinzo Abe cannot be blamed for the sins of his grandfather, and it is possible that he will moderate his policies once he faces the responsibilities of power, as many politicians in many countries have done. In a speech on July 23 in Yokohama, Abe made a surprising comment about Kim Jong Il, describing him as having a "rational" way of thinking. A Kyodo report said that Abe "hinted at the possibility of being able to resolve the abduction issue."

A hopeful scenario would be that Abe turns out to be a politician at heart, who acts opportunistically to advance his own interests, not an ideologue with rigid convictions. In this view, as Kishi's grandson, he knows how rightists think and what they want to hear, but is not really one of them. That description fits Koizumi, who broke from the rightist mold when he went to see Kim Jong Il without telling the Bush administration and many of his close advisers.

A plausible scenario, suggesting that an Abe victory might prove to be short-lived, has come from Columbia University Japan expert Gerald Curtis. The next prime minister "will be coming into office," Curtis wrote in the Financial Times, "at a time when the Liberal Democratic Party is not as strong as it looks and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is not as weak as it appears." The Democratic Party has a "strong, popular leader" in Ichiro Ozawa, Curtis points out, who will face an LDP with a leader "seen to be weaker than Koizumi, which could turn politics around." The test will come in the July 2007 upper house elections. By that time the six-year term of members elected on Koizumi's coattails will have expired. A Democratic Party victory in the upper house elections, Curtis speculates, could spark a power struggle in the LDP and produce demands for an early lower house election that could lead to a new prime minister.

Even if Abe does not last long, the danger of rightward drift in Japan will be great. Ichiro Ozawa is himself a right-wing nationalist who has long argued that Japan should amend Article IX of the Constitution so that it can become a "normal" nation. At times, Ozawa has implied much more strongly than Abe that he favors a nuclear-armed Japan. Indeed, Ozawa's election as leader of the Democratic Party came soon after a speech proclaiming that "we have plenty of plutonium in our power plants, so it's possible for us to produce 3,000 to 4,000 nuclear warheads. If we get serious, we will never get beaten in terms of military power."

Apart from how he will handle North Korea, the most important immediate cause for concern if Abe becomes prime minister is that he will expedite action by the Diet to implement the revision of Article IX formally put forward by the Liberal Democratic Party on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary last November. Diet approval requires a two-thirds vote by both the lower and upper houses, and the revision would then have to receive majority approval in a national referendum.

Whoever the next prime minister is and whatever he does, Japan is already moving quietly to become a "normal" country without waiting for the Constitution to be amended. As Cabinet Secretary, Abe has worked with Koizumi to accelerate the creeping expansion of Japan's military power projection capabilities under the legislative cover of the "Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law" enacted following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Maritime Self-Defense Forces in 2006 had 16 submarines, 54 destroyers and frigates and 109 Lockheed P-3C anti-submarine warfare planes. Most of the destroyers and frigates have been stationed since November 2001 in the Indian Ocean, where they have helped to refuel U.S. vessels and aircraft operating in Afghanistan and Iraq and to intercept vessels regarded as "suspicious" by U.S. forces.

Looking ahead, what makes a continuing shift to the right in Japan likely is the growth of a nationalistic cultural climate and the steady decline of moderate and pacifist forces that has been taking place ever since the collapse of the Socialist-led opposition to the LDP in the 1993 elections. The most dramatic example of this in popular culture is the growing popularity of comic strips like those of the manga artist, Yoshinori Kobayashi, some of which depict the "comfort women" driven into Japanese brothels in Korea and China as greedy prostitutes, and deny the Nanking Massacre of 1937 as a Chinese fabrication.

For the past 10 years, the Society for History Textbook Reform has been working steadily to put a nationalistic slant on the version of history presented to the emerging generation of Japanese students. It is the change in Japanese "hearts and minds" resulting from the entrenched strength of the right that seems certain to create a growing psychological distance between Japan and its neighbors in the years ahead, with unpredictable political and military consequences.