Strategic objectives confront history

It is not always a pretty story

Last week the Fumio Kishida government announced it will double Japan’s spending in defense, a dream come true for many around the world increasingly worried about a more potent People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China, as part of a new defense strategy. As the United States encourages others to modernize their armed forces both to deter China’s expected aggression and to address Taiwan’s probable need for armed support should China seek forceably to reunite the island with the mainland, most U.S. analysts expect Tokyo to take a substantial role in those efforts. Greater Japanese military readiness, especially since Japan still technically does not have a military, needs more work to be as effective as many analysts hope they can be.

The US occupying forces, following their victory over the Imperial War machine in 1945, prohibited Japan from having a standing army under Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Instead, Japan defends itself with Japanese Military Self Defense Forces positioning themselves as a de facto military to protect the nation. This is to be done without the formal title of military, in what admittedly is a word game, because Japan caused so many deaths in Asia between 1931 and 1945. Americans, Asians, and Japanese all know this.

Japan’s aggression in Asia remains a considerable sticking point, albeit below the polite surface in many international meetings, for Asian leaders because their countries often suffered a great deal at the hands of Japanese soldiers. It is impossible to overstate the visceral hatred for Japan that older Asian had, especially in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other countries where the war between 1931 and Tokyo’s defeat in 1945 was such a burden, leading to millions of deaths. Taiwan, curiously, where Tokyo governed somewhat benevolently between 1895 and 1945 is perhaps the only exception as Japan treated Taiwanese more humanely

As bad as relations were with China or Singapore, probably the worst relationship remains that between Tokyo and Seoul more than seventy-five years after the war ended. The hatred preceded the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere that Tokyo sought to create in the 1930s when it launched assaults on nations across East Asia. Japan actually occupied and governed the Korean peninsula as a colony after 1910, putting the Koreans under incredibly harsh treatment through the end of Asia’s World War II thirty-five years later.

During the war itself, Tokyo inhumanely subjected thousands of Korean women to the horror of prostitution for Japanese military forces under the euphemism of ‘being comfort women’. The Japanese leaders then denied repeatedly for generations the truth of this abuse or the need to attempt compensation to those women whose lives were forever destroyed. Even in the much more recent period, the relationship between Seoul and Tokyo remains tense with each side focused on their perceived victim status as much as focusing on common shared fears about Asia. Japan still appears able to turn a blind eye to its own behaviour over the year, at least in some segments of society.

It therefore completely unsurprising to read this morning that voices in Seoul are already quite concerned that Kishida’s dramatic increase in defense expenditures threatens Korea. King Seung Woo, ‘Korea needs preemptive measures against Japan’s new security strategy’, the Korea Times, 20 December 2022. The tensions between these governments and peoples, no matter who is in charge or what external actors cause, seem secondary to the historic hatred that time never improves.

This matters for Washington because it diverts attention from the widely embraced threat most people fear: China. The White House and Pentagon cannot assume that all of Asia put China above everything else all of the time; they demonstrably do not. And there is no guarantee we can remedy this particular tension, much less by shifting the balance of power towards a stronger Japanese armed force.

Worse, the attempt to build coalitions that could ultimately become permanent seem destined to fail, even though Japan and Korea have not been to war with one another for seventy-seven and a half years and they have both been mutual defense treaty Allie’s with Washington for nearly seventy years. That remains insufficient.

These problems illustrate why history matters a great deal when addressing a region. Those who do not understand a region’s experiences run a dramatic risk of falling prey to the fury of those who do remember. History and nationalism are powerful in the hands of both a state or even mere individual citizens whose families suffered in any historical incident, much less over multiple generations. These domestic voices can thwart all sorts of plans by demanding the ‘aggressors’ repent for their behaviors..

Creating a NATO-like enduring framework for Asia illustrates might help with the China threat but it is not so easily going to occur. Too many folks hoping a stronger Japan will emerge immediately are still not sufficiently assessing the depth of historic hatred in Asia as they work through options for partnerships there. Perhaps those advocating for a stronger Japan either willfully ignoring factors in both Korea and Japan or they are hoping time will prove more healing than it has so far. The statements from Seoul today are not definitive to kill Japan’s actions but they do show that anxiety and memory still burn brightly. China certainly threatens both Japan and Korea but they each see the threats somewhat differently. Particularly in Seoul, fears about an overly strong Japan mean less support for Tokyo being ready to take on Beijing if the Japanese actions remind the rest of Asia of Japan’s rather than China’s aggression there.

Establishing objectives to support a strategy must align with reality. We constantly need reassess the assumptions we are making to assure we are starting from reality rather than from merely wishful thinking. I fear we have quite a ways to go on this one.

Which is the more immediate priority—keeping Japan and Korea together or a more heavily armed Japan to stand in the face of the China challenge. That strikes me as the most important question today. FIN