‘Towards a beautiful nation’: How Abe’s nationalism isolates Japan and amplifies the tension in East
Ever since the reelection of Shinzo Abe as Japan’s Prime Minister in 2012 his new government is implementing nationalistic policies which are not just disregarding the sentiments of Japan’s war victims but also pushing Japan into economic and political isolation.
It was a late afternoon in July, 1942, when Lee Ok-Seon got caught. The 14-year old girl was on her way home. Suddenly, she was grabbed by two men and thrown in the back of a truck.
Overnight they drove from her hometown Busan in the southeast of the Korean peninsula across the Chinese border to the provincial capital of Yanji. After the arrival, the girl was brought to a shabby barrack, locked into a tiny wooden room. It was dark in there, with no window through which she could have seen the outside world. And it was silent, except the continuous tapping of heavy military boots onthe wooden floor. The room itself was empty, except a washbowl and a bed – a bed in which shewas going to be raped for the next three years.
This description of her life as a ‘comfort woman’ - women from different Asian countries who have been systematically captured by the Japanese army in order to force them to work in brothels duringthe Pacific War from 1937 to 1945 - can be found in many news articles throughout the world. But a person who got really close to her is Tsukasa Yajima. The Japanese photographer lived with some of the surviving ‘comfort women' together in the 'house of sharing', in Seoul. Together they keep the memory of what happened to them alive, and share it with the world. Yajima spent three years inside the house, documenting there the women's stories and working as a translator and tour guide.He wanted to know more about what he had never learned in school.
“I didn't learn anything aboutthe World War II, besides the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, Yajima says. “For thefirst time, I heard about Japanese war crimes from friends in university.”
“Every woman has a single room in the house, but they spend a lot of time together, talking, arguing and planting vegetables,” remembers Yajima from his time in the house. “But what helps them the most is to talk to a public audience. It is a kind of therapy for them, because they kept silent for so long. Their biggest fear is to be forgotten.”
ABE, A NATIONALIST?
To forget, it seems, is what the Japanese government would like to do. Japan still hasn't acknowledged the crimes and pains caused to the ‘comfort women’. And now, Japan's new Prime minister opens the gates for a new wave of nationalism, which is not just isolating Japan and intensifying the conflicts in the region, but also makes the likelihood of compensation for the victims even more questionable.
The current ruling coalition led by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) under ShinzōAbe takes a hard line on people demanding compensation. During his first legislation as prime minister in 2006, Abe published his book Towards A Beautiful Country, which can be read like a political manifesto. He gives insight into his political and historical thinking. He wants to bring Japan back into the row of the world powers and restore Japan's national strength. The image of Japan as the aggressor doesn't fit into this picture. But does this mean Abe is a nationalist?
Abe is often portrayed as a pragmatist, only seeking voter support from the far-right sector. But this assumption is misleading. By taking a closer look at Abe's decisions and his choice of ministers, itis obvious that actually Abe himself is a nationalist.
Abe is part of several right-wing organizations, for example the organization Gambare Nippon by Toshio Tamogami. Tamogami was Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff in 2006 during Abe's first legislature, but had to step back later because he said that Japan was lured into trap from the United States and thereby drawn into the Second World War.
Abe's Education Minister, Hakubun Shimomura, said in relation to the 'comfort women' in 2007, “itis true that there were comfort women. I believe some parents may have sold their daughters. But it does not mean the Japanese army was involved.” In 2012, he demanded from Abe that he should publicly declare that the Nanking massacre – in which the Japanese army slaughtered more than 200,000 civilians and war prisoners – didn't take place. Recently, Shimomura forced schools in Japan to use textbooks that follow Abe's historical revisionism.
Abe himself joined the LDP's 'History and Deliberation Committee' in 1995, which among other things, announced that the Second World War was a self-defense war and that war crimes committed by the Japanese Army did not take place. In 2007 he stated that he does not believe that women were forced into working in military brothels. Abe and other conservatives are now trying to find a way of revising the so-called Kōno Statement. The statement was published in 1993 after a government study concluded that the Japanese military was partly involved in “recruiting comfort women”.
The latest affront took place only a few months ago. Abe visited the famous Yasukuni shrine, where Japan's more than 2.5 million war dead are enshrined. The shrine became the center of controversies since the head priest enshrined the souls of 14 Class-A war criminals in 1978. After his visit Abe declared it regrettable that visiting Yasukuni became a diplomatic issue. However, it is not his “intention at all to hurt the feelings of the Chinese and Korean people.” Nevertheless, complaints from China and South Korea followed immediately. Even the US expressed their disappointment.
GOOD-BYE 'POST-WAR' REGIME
Abe chose a significant date for his visit at the shrine, the 26th of December, the one-year anniversary of his re-election. It almost seems like he wants to tell the world, “this visit is about me, about my beliefs.” The statement is clear: Finally the time has arrived that he and Japan is 'back'. Bringing Japan 'back' seems to be one of the most important concerns of Shinzo Abe. But what does 'back' mean to him? Back from where?
To fully understand Abe's intentions, one needs to fully understand Abe's view on the past. For conservatives like Abe, ever since the end of the war, Japan has been a defeated country. The war heroes – unfairly condemned by the victors of the war. The constitution – forced on the Japanese state by the United States. Japan's image – forever damaged. By signing the San Francisco Peace Treaty 1951, Japan officially accepted this outcome of the war, the sentences of the Tokyo trials and accepted the 'post-war regime', as conservatives in Japan call it.
Abe himself is a history revisionist. He never accepted the sentences spoken by the victors. In his 2006 published book, he is not just defending the Class-A war criminals – Abe's grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was a Class-A war crimes suspect – but also questioning the legitimacy of the Tokyo trials. What Abe is working for is a 'strong' Japan, economically, militarily and diplomatically, and the key to this is the departure from ‘the post-war regime.’
'PROACTIVE PACIFISM'
One significant part of his 'come back' is what Abe calls 'Proactive Pacifism'. Japan should play amore active role in international military operations securing world peace. One step into this direction is Abe's plan to revise the pacifist Japanese postwar constitution, in particular Article 9.This article renounces Japan's right to wage war and forbids it from maintaining armed forces.
Abe wants to pave the way for a constitution, which allows him to sharpen Japan's military profile and enable collective self-defense.
These plans go together with a new national security strategy, which shall be implemented over the next five years. The strategy would involve, among other things, the loosening of limitations on exporting weapons and a stronger military force. Therefore Abe plans on increasing the military budget by 2.6% over the next five years and announced the acquisition of drones, stealth bombers, submarines as well as amphibious vehicles.
Abe also installed a new National Security Council (NSC), which was constructed after American security agencies and created in order to improve information gathering and analysis. The NSC is supported by a new 'state secrecy bill', which the government rammed through in November2013. Under the new law, state officials and journalists who leak sensitive information can be fined with prison sentences of up to 10 years.
Thousands have protested against the new law outside the parliament. For them the parallels between the new bill and the 'Peace Preservation Law' from 1925, which served for gagging the political opposition and arresting critical journalists, are obvious. The government on the other side claims that the law is necessary to share intelligence and information on national security with Japan’s allies and that there will be no restrictions to press freedom.
Sebastian Maslow, Assistant Professor for Japanese politics at the University of Heidelberg, has amore critical stance. “The law in its current version clearly represents limitations for journalisticand academic work in Japan,” says Maslow, “and the law leaves open what the term 'state secret' actually contains.” This is especially dangerous since the office in charge of defining the meaning is part of Abe's Cabinet Office, so basically under his control. “The decisions made by this office will definitely not be transparent for the public,” argues Maslow.
ISOLATION, ONLY ONE STEP AWAY
Shinichi Kitaoka, key adviser to Abe, remarked recently that all of these steps are simply trying to bring Japan closer to a 'normal country.' But is this true? Is Japan just on its way to catch up with allthe other countries?
Maybe, but what needs to be considered is that East Asia is a region with a unique history and the ongoing Japanese-Chinese territorial conflict contains a lot of diplomatic 'gunpowder'. The fact that a stricter national security policy will also lead to a more 'aggressive' image of Japan for the neighboring countries is obvious to see. In East Asia, Japan's image as the aggressor is still prevalent. Reasons for this are surely connected to the unwillingness of the Japanese government todeal with its past history. Moreover, Abe's visit to the Yasukuni shrine did not just upset minds in China but also in South Korea, Japan's most important partner in East Asia.
The two countries share a long list of common interests - bilateral trade, concerns over China’s increasing influence, and fears about North Korea. But in South Korea, memories of Japan's invasion and colonization in the early 20th century are still omnipresent. And due to Abe's diplomatic affronts, closer security ties have become more and more unrealistic. But it is exactly these security ties with Asian countries that could help Japan in the territorial conflict with China.
A higher level of nationalism in Japan combined with Japan’s intensified military build-up will probably continue to cause needless political and diplomatic disputes with China and South Korea.This can be considered exceptionally thoughtless from Abe's government, since he should know that China and South Korea frequently use the 'history-card' to penalize Japan. Especially in China,where nationalism is on the rise as well, every small occasion is used by the communist government to bash Japan, in order to gain support for domestic politics.
ECONOMIC FRICTIONS
During the election campaign, one of Abe's core projects was boosting Japan's economy. But theeffect of his nationalistic politics on the economy are not insignificant. “As Japan’s politics turn decisively to the right, more and frequent spats between Japan and China are expected,” says Liu Li-Gang, chief economist for Greater China at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, who used to work for the World Bank, in an interview with Bloomberg. And with each political 'spat' the economic effect has grown.
In 2010, when a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese Coast Guard vessel collided, China stopped exporting rare earth metals to Japan, thereby withdrawing from the automobile and electronics industryits most precious material. In 2012 when the territorial dispute escalated, Japan’s industrial output fell 1.7 percent, to the lowest level since the 2011 earthquake. The Japanese car brands lost their number one rank in market share in China to German car producers. Toyota Motor Corporation declared that they experienced in November 2012 the biggest output decline in more than 10years. Similar experiences made the Nissan Motor Company spokesman Ryosei Nomura from theAll Nippon Airways Company say that 46,000 passengers canceled their flights only between September and November 2012, because of the conflict.
Abe's nationalism is not just damaging relations to China. After his visit to Yasukuni, the Russian foreign ministry declared that “this visit cannot but evoke a sense of regret”, and also this visit is not compatible with the “globally accepted view on the result of World War II.” Abe is on his best way to ruining the improving relationship to Russia, which held opportunities for expanding trade.
Abe is kind of achieving quite the contrary to what he wants to achieve. He is not strengthening his country, but he is isolating it. By pushing away its friends and further distancing its 'enemies', Japan's diplomatic position will probably become weakened. Japan stands on the edge of political and economic isolation. Abe has the choice, pragmatism or nationalism. Pragmatism could help release tension in the region. However, a higher level of nationalism might have unpredictable consequences.
STILL FIGHTING
In Seoul, every Wednesday a small group of supporters of the 'comfort women' gather in front of the Japanese embassy. “They are fighting for an apology and compensations from the Japanese state”, Yajima, the Japanese photographer, explains. “And they want to assure that future students in Japan learn in history class what their ancestors did.”
But the reaction from the Japanese embassy is as disappointing as upsetting for the survivors. The reaction itself stands as a symbol for the fate of the old women, for their suffering, their pain, and their disregard. Every Wednesday when protesters approach, the embassy shuts its blinds at the windows. It seems like they close their eyes to reality. And with the current prime minister, they will not be opened up.
Tobias Widmann is a freelance journalist from Germany, where he worked for different smaller and bigger newspapers. I’m very interested in different cultures, especially since my studies led me to the heart of Japan, Tokyo, where I got in touch with a interestingly different society.
