When US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Japan’s new leaders in October, not long after their historic election, he pressed so hard and so publicly for a military base agreement that the Japanese news media labeled him a bully.
The difference between that visit and the friendly welcome that a high-level Japanese delegation received just two months later in China, Japan’s historic rival, could not have been more stark.
A grinning President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) of China took individual photos with more than a hundred visiting Japanese lawmakers, patiently shaking hands with each of them in an impressive display of mass diplomacy.
The trip, organized by the powerful secretary-general of Japan’s governing Democratic Party, Ichiro Ozawa, was just one sign of a noticeable warming of Japan’s once icy ties with China. It was also an indication that the US, Japan’s closest ally, may be losing at least some ground in a diplomatic tug-of-war with Beijing.
Political experts say Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s greater willingness to engage Beijing and the rest of Asia reflects a broad rethinking of Japan’s role in the region at a time when the US is showing unmistakable signs of decline. It also reflects a growing awareness among Japanese that Japan’s economic future is increasingly tied to China, which has already surpassed the US as its largest trading partner.
“Hatoyama wants to use Asia to offset what he sees as the declining influence of the United States,” said Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asia Studies at Keio University in Tokyo. “He thinks he can play China off the United States.”
Soeya and other analysts say warmer ties with China are not necessarily a bad thing for Washington, which has long worried about Japan’s isolation in the region. But some are concerned that the new openness toward China may also be driven by a simmering resentment within Hatoyama’s left-leaning government of what some here call Washington’s “occupation mentality” — feelings that have been stoked by what many Japanese see as the US government’s high-handed treatment in the dispute over an air base in Okinawa.
The White House is pressing Japan to follow through on a controversial deal to keep a base on the island that was agreed to by the more conservative Liberal Democrats who lost control to Hatoyama’s party last summer after decades of almost uninterrupted power.
“If we’re worrying that the Japanese are substituting the Chinese for the Americans, then the worse thing you could do is to behave the way that we’re behaving,” said Daniel Sneider, a researcher on Asian security issues at Stanford University.
The new emphasis on China comes as Hatoyama’s government begins a sweeping housecleaning of Japan’s postwar order after his party’s election victory, including challenging the entrenched bureaucracy’s control of diplomatic and economic policy.
On security matters, the Liberal Democrats clearly tilted toward Washington. Past governments not only embraced Japan’s half-century military alliance with the US, but also warned of China’s burgeoning power and regularly angered Beijing by trying to whitewash the sordid episodes of Japan’s 1930s-1940s military expansion.
US experts say the administration of US President Barack Obama has been slow to realize the extent of the change in Japan’s thinking about its traditional protector and its traditional rival.
Indeed, political experts and former diplomats say China has appeared more adept at handling Japan’s new leaders than the Obama administration has been. And former diplomats in Japan warn that Beijing’s leaders are seizing on the momentous political changes in Tokyo as a chance to improve ties with Japan — and possibly drive a wedge between the US and Japan.
“This has been a golden opportunity for China,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former high-ranking Japanese diplomat who was stationed in Beijing. “The Chinese are showing a friendlier face than Washington to counterbalance US influence, if not separate Japan from the US.”
Some conservative Japan experts in Washington have even warned of a more independent Tokyo becoming reluctant to support the US in a future confrontation with China over such issues as Taiwan, or even to continue hosting the some 50,000 US military personnel now based in Japan.
Despite such hand-wringing, Hatoyama continues to emphasize that the alliance with Washington remains the cornerstone of Japanese security. And suspicions about China run deep among Japanese, as does resentment over Japan losing its supremacy in Asia, making a significant shift in loyalty or foreign policy unlikely anytime soon, analysts say.
But in the four months since Hatoyama took office, there has been an unusual flurry of visits back and forth by top-ranking Chinese and Japanese officials, including one last month to Tokyo by China’s heir apparent, Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平).
The new mood of reconciliation is also evident in the novel ideas that have been floated recently to overcome differences over wartime history that have long isolated Japan from the region.
These include a recent report in the Yomiuri Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, based on unidentified diplomatic sources, of a Chinese initiative for reconciliation that would include a visit by Hatoyama to Nanjing to apologize for the 1937 massacre of Chinese civilians there by invading Japanese soldiers. Hu would then visit Hiroshima to proclaim China’s peaceful intentions.
While both countries dismissed the report as speculation, it spurred wide talk in Japan that the report might be a trial balloon by one of the two countries that could signal a new willingness to make some sort of diplomatic breakthrough on history issues.
And a week after the visit to Beijing by Ozawa and his parliamentary delegation, which Hu heralded as the start of a smoother era in Japan-China relations, Tokyo reciprocated with its own display of eager hospitality during Xi’s visit to Tokyo. Hatoyama arranged a meeting between Xi and Emperor Akihito at Tokyo’s Imperial Palace on short notice, breaking protocol that such audiences be arranged more than a month in advance.
Ozawa, a shadowy kingmaker whose power rivals Hatoyama’s, is said to have warm feelings for China, where he has often visited, and he is widely seen as the force behind Japan’s latest overtures.
Other members of Hatoyama’s Cabinet remain less convinced that any drift away from the US is a good idea.
One of the skeptics is Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, who has stressed the need for a US military presence to offset China and a nuclear-armed North Korea. Last month, Kitazawa brought in Yukio Okamoto, a widely respected former diplomat and adviser to Liberal Democratic prime ministers, to advise Hatoyama on security issues.
“The Democrats have to realize the threat we have on the Korean Peninsula, and that China is not a friendly country in military matters,” Okamoto said.
Soeya, of Keio University, warned that the new Japanese government should at least think hard before sidling closer to China, saying: “Mr Hatoyama does not have a clear sense of what relying on China would really mean, or whether it is even actually desirable.”
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