Rising Sun

In the halls of an office building near the Diet, Japan's parliament, aides are scurrying down corridors, planning for an upcoming national election. But Masaaki Nakayama, a former longtime MP from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), isn't focused on the poll. In a small hideaway office, he's drawing me a map of what he says is China's nefarious history of territorial conquest in Asia. Since the map goes back several thousand years, Nakayama has been drawing for more than an hour, his wrinkled hand scrawling furiously. Then he turns to current affairs. "You know how quickly a North Korean or Chinese missile could land in Japan?" he asks. "We have no spare time in the case of an attack." Then Nakayama says something that would shock many Japanese, even 60 years after the end of World War II: The country must rearm.Nakayama points to the wall, full of photos of young MPs getting chummy with Junichiro Koizumi, the LDP's popular prime minister, whose party, shortly after my visit to Japan, won a smashing victory in the election, taking a combined 327 of 480 seats with its coalition partner. Nakayama points out his son, an MP and a man who has quickly proved outspoken on foreign policy issues, pushing a harder line toward North Korea. My son agrees with me completely, Nakayama says, beaming. In pacifist Japan, the Nakayamas' beliefs might once have made them outlaws. A decade ago, Japanese politicians who wanted a more robust military and foreign policy--people like Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara--often were viewed as crackpots. But, today, such opinions are increasingly common in the Japanese leadership. In fact, while the press focuses on whether Koizumi can use his mandate to push through supposedly radical economic reforms, it is the LDP's foreign policy agenda, which Koizumi talks less about, that could prove more radical. Koizumi's younger allies are probably more conservative than the prime minister, and they want to reshape Japan's role in Asia--with the support of some hawks in the United States. If they're not careful, they could wind up isolating both Washington and Tokyo from the region. In the run-up to the September national election, candidates from the LDP seemed to descend out of nowhere onto intersections, in vans equipped with loudspeakers. In Shibuya, a crowded Tokyo shopping area, I followed one LDP van. Out stepped a local MP, and his aides immediately began yelling chants about privatizing the postal savings bank, a topic Koizumi made the centerpiece of his campaign. The screamers didn't mention foreign policy. That's probably not an accident. Though opinion polls suggest most Japanese want to change the country's postwar constitution, polling also suggests there is not majority support for rewriting the clause that prohibits Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) from combat abroad. Other polls showed last year that some 60 percent of Japanese opposed extending the deployment of the SDF in Iraq, where it is participating in reconstruction efforts, and a poll this week indicated that opposition to a further extension is even greater. "The vast majority of Japanese people still strongly desire to hold onto the spirit of pacifism," Matake Kamiya, an international relations specialist at the National Defense Academy, told the Christian Science Monitor last year. Within the LDP, however, young leaders are not simply following public opinion--they are moving rightward and trying to pull Japan with them. Japan was a major funder of the first Gulf war, but, to young Japanese conservatives, Tokyo received little thanks or boost in global power from its massive monetary contribution. The lesson, they decided, was that Japan needed a real military capacity. In the past decade, the traditionally pacifist opposition Social Democratic Party lost most of its seats, removing one obstacle to conservative foreign policy. Hawks also have gotten a boost from Koizumi, a magnetic, conservative figure who doesn't back down easily. Indeed, Koizumi has refused to stop visiting Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors not only Japan's war dead but also convicted war criminals--and thus enrages other Asian countries. The prime minister has shunned traditional LDP factions, instead building his own small cadre of younger MPs who agree with the need to strengthen Japan's military. Koizumi reshuffled his cabinet to promote these hawks--men and women like Shinzo Abe, Koizumi's tough top deputy, who has promoted economic sanctions on North Korea. Since party rules obligate Koizumi to step down from his post next year, deputies like Abe also are jockeying for position and must keep the support of this conservative bloc if they are to rise higher. The hawks have gotten lucky, too--recent actions by North Korea and China have undermined Japanese pacifists. On a brutally hot August day in Tokyo, I walked steep flights of steps to the cramped office of Kazuhiro Araki. A small, elfish man, Araki runs an organization investigating Japanese allegedly abducted by North Korea over the past six decades. For years, Pyongyang never admitted the abductions, and many Japanese who wanted closer ties to Pyongyang viewed groups like Araki's as distractions. But, in 2002, Kim Jong Il announced North Korea had indeed abducted at least ten Japanese, infuriating the Japanese public and boosting support for a harder-line Korea policy. Suddenly, the Japanese press started running features on Kim's gulags and coming to Araki for interviews. "Until recently, if you took up the issue of human rights in North Korea, you were considered in Japan a conservative, a right-winger," says Hishahiko Okazaki, a hawkish Japanese former diplomat. "Now, if you talk about human rights in North Korea, you're no longer regarded as a right-winger." "The Japanese public wants economic sanctions on North Korea," agrees one Korea expert in Japan's foreign ministry. Beijing also seems to be playing into Japanese hawks' hands. Japan provides China with roughly $1 billion in annual direct development assistance, but a rash of anti- Japanese riots in China this spring reinforced the positions of Japanese politicians like Abe, who have questioned this assistance, as well as the broader Japan-China relationship. After the riots, The New York Times reported, a poll by Japan's trade agency showed that the percentage of Japanese companies planning to expand in China fell by more than 30 points. Koizumi and his allies have taken advantage of these gifts from Pyongyang and Beijing. Last December, the Japanese government decided it would build a missile defense system, an idea that, only a decade ago, would have sparked larger protests from pacifists in Tokyo. The LDP-led government also has loosened a ban on arms exports, pushed for Japan's defense agency to be upgraded to ministry status, and openly announced that Japan should change its constitution. And, last year, Tokyo for the first time explicitly named China as a potential concern and suggested that Japan should develop the capacity to launch preemptive strikes against foreign nations. In Washington, where the fear of a rising Japan--a prime concern of the 1980s and early '90s--has been replaced, for some, by the fear of China, these moves are welcome. Koizumi and Bush have developed a personal relationship, and Japanese hawks are close to key conservative American officials like former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who co-authored a prominent October 2000 report tacitly urging Japan to change its constitution. "Japan can count on America, and, increasingly, America can count on Japan," Armitage said on a visit to Tokyo last year. Shortly before leaving his post in February, former American Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker told reporters Japan should have a permanent, veto-wielding seat at the U.N. Security Council and then suggested that Japan might have to revise its constitution to fulfill the Council's duties. Amore powerful Japanese military may be inevitable, even necessary, if Washington's relations with other countries in the region, such as South Korea and China, continue to deteriorate. And Japan today is a democracy with strong civilian control over the armed forces, which have participated effectively in international peacekeeping. But many American officials don't recognize the potential damage Japanese remilitarization will do to America's already shaky image in Asia. Americans may have forgotten about Japanese abuses in the Pacific Theater during World War II, but the populations of countries in the region have not, and these abuses are often magnified by nationalist governments in China and other Asian nations eager to deflect attention from their own shortcomings and to justify increases in defense spending. Koizumi's rightward push on foreign policy has not been ignored in Asia. After visiting Tokyo, I went to Seoul, Beijing, and Bangkok. Seoul has claimed a disputed cluster of islands located between Japan and South Korea. South Korean protestors even cut off their fingers to signify that they would shed blood for the rocky outcrops, and, at large shopping centers, I noticed entrepreneurial South Korean merchants selling t-shirts, mobile phone holders, and other kitsch emblazoned with the word dokdo, the Korean name for the islands. At each stop, officials and analysts seemed more concerned about Japan than about Kim Jong Il's nukes, terrorism, or other vital regional issues that probably threaten them more than Tokyo. Ordinary citizens seem to share these views. As Time reported last year, a poll of 100,000 young Chinese by China Youth Daily revealed that 56 percent associate the personality trait "cruel" with the Japanese. At higher levels, this unease is growing as well. South Korean President Roh Muh-Hyun, who already has a rocky relationship with the Bush administration, has warned of a possible "diplomatic war" with Japan, and, earlier this year, China abruptly canceled a meeting between Vice Premier Wu Yi and Koizumi, with Wu simply jetting out of Tokyo. Wu's snub was a warning. If the United States openly backs Japan's rearming, it could find itself and Tokyo ostracized by vital allies like Korea and Thailand, moving it even further from China. Many Japanese hawks don't seem to care. "What's the solution to North Korea?" Okazaki asked me when I visited his office. "A closer U.S.-Japan alliance." "What's the solution to China? A closer U.S.-Japan alliance." He pauses. "What's the solution to South Korea?" You can guess the rest. But, in the long run, America might not like the answer.

By joshua kurlantzick