Like China, Japan is a nation-state with a deeply ingrained sense of its unique character and special status. Its insular history, even its imperial mythology, has predisposed the highly industrious and disciplined Japanese people to see themselves as endowed with a distinctive and superior way of life, which Japan first defended by splendid isolation and then, when the world imposed itself in the nineteenth century, by emulating the European empires in seeking to create one of its own on the Asian mainland. The disaster of World War II then focused the Japanese people on the one-dimensional goal of economic recovery, but it also left them uncertain regarding their country’s wider mission.
Current American fears of a dominant China are reminiscent of the relatively recent American paranoia regarding Japan. Japanophobia has now yielded to Sinophobia. A mere decade ago, predictions of Japan’s inevitable and imminent appearance as the world’s “superstate”—poised not only to dethrone America (even to buy it out!) but to impose some sort of a “Pax Nipponica”—were a veritable cottage industry among American commentators and politicians. But not only among the Americans. The Japanese themselves soon became eager imitators, with a series of best-sellers in Japan propounding the thesis that Japan was destined to prevail in its high-tech rivalry with the United States and that Japan would soon become the center of a global “information empire,” while America was allegedly sliding into a decline because of historical fatigue and social self-indulgence.
These facile analyses obscured the degree to which Japan was, and remains, a vulnerable country. It is vulnerable to the slightest disruptions in the orderly global flow of resources and trade, not to mention global stability more generally, and it is beset by surfacing domestic weaknesses—demographic, social, and political. Japan is simultaneously rich, dynamic, and economically powerful, but it is also regionally isolated and politically limited by its security dependence on a powerful ally that happens to be the principal keeper of global stability (on which Japan so depends) as well as Japan’s main economic rival.
It is unlikely that Japan’s current position—on the one hand, as a globally respected economic powerhouse and, on the other, as a geopolitical extension of American power—will remain acceptable to the new generations of Japanese, no longer traumatized and shamed by the experience of World War II. For reasons of both history and self-esteem, Japan is a country not entirely satisfied with the global status quo, though in a more subdued fashion than China. It feels, with some justification, that it is entitled to formal recognition as a world power but is also aware that the regionally useful (and, to its Asian neighbors, reassuring) security dependence on America inhibits that recognition.
Moreover, China’s growing power on the mainland of Asia, along with the prospect that its influence may soon radiate into the maritime regions of economic importance to Japan, intensifies the Japanese sense of ambiguity regarding the country’s geopolitical future. On the one hand, there is in Japan a strong cultural and emotional identification with China as well as a latent sense of a common Asian identity. Some Japanese may also feel that the emergence of a stronger China has the expedient effect of enhancing Japan’s importance to the United States as America’s regional paramountcy is reduced. On the other hand, for many Japanese, China is the traditional rival, a former enemy, and a potential threat to the stability of the region. That makes the security tie with America more important than ever, even if it increases the resentment of some of the more nationalistic Japanese concerning the irksome restraints on Japan’s political and military independence.
There is a superficial similarity between Japan’s situation in Eurasia’s Far East and Germany’s in Eurasia’s Far West. Both are the principal regional allies of the United States. Indeed, American power in Europe and Asia is derived directly from the close alliances with these two countries. Both have respectable military establishments, but neither is independent in that regard: Germany is constrained by its military integration into NATO, while Japan is restricted by its own (though American-designed) constitutional limitations and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Both are trade and financial powerhouses, regionally dominant and also preeminent on the global scale. Both can be classified as quasi-global powers, and both chafe at the continuing denial to them of formal recognition through permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
But the differences in their respective geopolitical conditions are pregnant with potentially significant consequences. Germany’s actual relationship with NATO places the country on a par with its principal European allies, and under the North Atlantic Treaty, Germany has formal reciprocal defense obligations with the United States. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty stipulates American obligations to defend Japan, but it does not provide (even if only formally) for the use of the Japanese military in the defense of America. The treaty in effect codifies a protective relationship.
Moreover, Germany, by its proactive membership in the European Union and NATO, is no longer seen as a threat by those neighbors who in the past were victims of its aggression but is viewed instead as a desirable economic and political partner. Some even welcome the potential emergence of a German-led Mitteleuropa, with Germany seen as a benign regional power. That is far from the case with Japan’s Asian neighbors, who harbor lingering animosity toward Japan over World War II. A contributing factor to neighborly resentment is the appreciation of the yen, which has not only prompted bitter complaints but has impeded reconciliation with Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even China, 30 percent of whose large long-term debts to Japan are in yen.
Japan also has no equivalent in Asia to Germany’s France: that is, a genuine and more or less equal regional partner. There is admittedly a strong cultural attraction to China, mingled perhaps with a sense of guilt, but that attraction is politically ambiguous in that neither side trusts the other and neither is prepared to accept the other’s regional leadership. Japan also has no equivalent to Germany’s Poland: that is, a much weaker but geopolitically important neighbor with whom reconciliation and even cooperation is becoming a reality.
Perhaps Korea, especially so after eventual reunification, could become that equivalent, but Japanese-Korean relations are only formally good, with the Korean memories of past domination and the Japanese sense of cultural superiority impeding any genuine social reconciliation.[7] Finally, Japan’s relations with Russia have been much cooler than Germany’s. Russia still retains the southern Kuril Islands by force, which it seized just before the end of World War II, thereby freezing the Russo-Japanese relationship. In brief, Japan is politically isolated in its region, whereas Germany is not.
In addition, Germany shares with its neighbors both common democratic principles and Europe’s broader Christian heritage. It also seeks to identify and even sublimate itself within an entity and a cause larger than itself, namely, that of “Europe.” In contrast, there is no comparable “Asia.” Indeed, Japan’s insular past and even its current democratic system tend to separate it from the rest of the region, in spite of the emergence in recent years of democracy in several Asian countries. Many Asians view Japan not only as nationally selfish but also as overly imitative of the West and reluctant to join them in questioning the West’s views on human rights and on the importance of individualism. Thus, Japan is perceived as not truly Asian by many Asians, even as the West occasionally wonders to what degree Japan has truly become Western.
In effect, though in Asia, Japan is not comfortably Asian. That condition greatly limits its geostrategic options. A genuinely regional option, that of a regionally preponderant Japan that overshadows China—even if no longer based on Japanese domination but rather on benign Japanese-led regional cooperation—does not seem viable for solid historical, political, and cultural reasons. Furthermore, Japan remains dependent on American military protection and international sponsorship. The abrogation or even the gradual emasculation of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty would render Japan instantly vulnerable to the disruptions that any serious manifestation of regional or global turmoil might produce. The only alternatives then would be either to accept China’s regional predominance or to undertake a massive—and not only costly but also very dangerous—program of military rearmament.
Understandably, many Japanese find their country’s present position—simultaneously a quasi-global power and a security protectorate—to be anomalous. But dramatic and viable alternatives to the existing arrangements are not self-evident. If it can be said that China’s national goals, notwithstanding the inescapable variety of views among the Chinese strategists on specific aspects, are reasonably clear and the regional thrust of China’s geopolitical ambitions relatively predictable, Japan’s geostrategic vision tends to be relatively cloudy and the Japanese public mood much more ambiguous.
Most Japanese realize that a strategically significant and abrupt change of course could be dangerous. Can Japan become a regional power in a region where it is still the object of resentment and where China is emerging as the regionally preeminent power? Yet should Japan simply acquiesce in such a Chinese role? Can Japan become a truly comprehensive global power (in all its dimensions) without jeopardizing American support and galvanizing even more regional animosity? And will America, in any case, stay put in Asia, and if it does, how will its reaction to China’s growing influence impinge on the priority so far given to the American-Japanese connection? For most of the Cold War, none
