Leaders | Japanese foreign policy

Down-turn Abe

The country’s dangerously nationalistic new cabinet is the last thing Asia needs

THE new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wants to emphasise security. In economic terms, ordinary Japanese feel vulnerable. The country is back in recession, and doubts are growing about whether the state can meet its long-run commitments to the elderly. In terms of external security, Japan faces the most perilous situation in years. Wayward North Korea is on the way to developing a nuclear warhead and the missile technology to deliver it. Japan has island disputes with all three of its neighbours, Russia, South Korea and China, leaving it diplomatically isolated in its near-abroad. Escalating Chinese aggression over Japan’s control of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands raises the very real (if underappreciated) prospect of conflict.

Yet if security is the word, then Mr Abe’s new cabinet rings alarms on both counts. It is short of economic modernisers. Taro Aso, the finance minister, has proposed the sort of budget stimulus he implemented as prime minister in 2008-09, at the height of the global financial crisis. But there has been no attempt to link this short-term splurge to long-term fiscal discipline, and proposals for bold structural reforms are thin on the ground. The idea of joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade grouping, seems likely to be quietly dropped. For the rest, economic policy amounts to bashing the central bank and pandering to the “nuclear village” of big business which wants Japan’s unpopular reactors switched back on.

In foreign policy the government looks even more alarming. Calling the cabinet conservative misses its revisionist obsessions (see article). It is far from meritocratic, with half the positions going to MPs who inherited Diet seats from their families. Worse, its members are gripped by a backward-looking, distorted view of history that paints Japan as a victim. The great majority of cabinet members favour visits to Yasukuni, the controversial Tokyo shrine that honours war criminals among the soldiers, and reject Japan’s “apology diplomacy” for its wartime atrocities. Almost half of them want school textbooks (which already downplay Japanese atrocities) to be rewritten in ways that obscure the militarism still further. Mr Abe is, alas, steeped in this stuff: his grandfather oversaw occupied Manchuria’s development in the 1930s.

The revisionists’ real argument over perceptions of Japan’s wartime conduct is that their country was treated to victor’s justice. They reject the pacifist constitution that America imposed. Japan was cast as a junior partner, they maintain, and neutered at home and abroad. The education minister, Hakubun Shimomura, says that the years since the war have been a “history of Japan’s destruction”; he and Mr Abe talk about overturning a despised “post-war regime”. This is a baffling portrayal of the economic miracle—overseen by the LDP, no less—that brought peace and prosperity to the region.

We’re all victims now

In a part of the world that specialises in victimhood, this is dangerous. If Mr Abe rescinds Japan’s 20-year-old apology to wartime “comfort women”, he will provoke South Korea (see article). The stakes are even higher with China, whose own idea of victimhood is also nourished by its manipulation of history. China is now stoking tensions over the Senkakus. Last month a surveillance plane buzzed the islands, the first recorded Chinese incursion into Japanese-controlled airspace.

This puts America in an awkward spot. Mr Abe, despite his views on the constitution, wants to cultivate closer ties. When China is aggressive, Mr Abe needs its full support. But that should not extend to rewriting history or provoking China (let alone South Korea). This cabinet is a bad start.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Down-turn Abe"

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