When people complained about Japan’s economic triumphalism in the 1980s, Singapore founder Lee Kuan Yew told them to be content. Let the Japanese have the satisfactions of mercantile success because “they were greater warriors than they are merchants. Don’t misjudge them. I do not think they have lost those martial qualities.”
Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister and president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), surveys election results in Tokyo on Sunday.Credit:Bloomberg
In other words, be happy that they’re making money so long as they’re not making war. Japan’s pacifist constitution, imposed on the defeated nation by the US in 1947 during the Allied occupation, forbids it: “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation” says its famed Article 9.
The life’s work of Shinzo Abe, assassinated on Friday, was to change that. Abe wanted Japan to have prosperity as the world’s third-biggest economy as well as the ability to make war.
As prime minister, and then afterwards as the leader of the biggest of the five factions in the ruling party, he devoted himself to removing the constraint, to making Japan a “normal nation”.
Today, thanks to Abe’s murder, Japan is closer to achieving this aim than at any time since the 1947 constitution was written. His shocking death generated a surge of extra support for his party, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in Sunday’s election for half the members of Japan’s upper house of parliament.
Tetsuya Yamagami, who is accused of assassinating former prime minister Shinzo Abe by opening fire on at him from behind as he delivered a campaign speech on Friday.Credit:AP
Before he was shot, the LDP’s coalition government had been projected to win around 60 seats, close to the 63 needed to take most of the seats up for grabs. Instead, it has won an overwhelming 76 on the count so far.
This helps the government to pass its bills, of course, but it also transforms the prospects for a historical revision of Article 9 of the constitution. Any change requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of parliament. Until Sunday, a two-thirds majority in favour of amending Article 9 existed in the lower house only. Today, thanks to the LDP’s Sunday surge, it exists in the upper house also.
This is necessary but insufficient. Any change must win majority support in a referendum as well. And that is likely to be tough, with public opinion divided pretty evenly in the most recent polls on the matter. But the LDP secretary-general, Toshimitsu Motegi, said on Sunday that the party will move to attempt revision of Article 9 “as soon as possible”.
Japan seems now to be cautiously considering removing its constitutional pacifism. To be able to use military force as a tool of its foreign policy. You might say that Abe’s inadvertent martyrdom helped his cause of making Japan a “normal nation”.
Abe could not have done it without Xi Jinping. China’s dictator was his indispensable ally in persuading the people of Japan that it’s time to rearm.
Japanese soldiers take part in joint military exercises between the U.S., Japan, France and the United Kingdom in Guam in 2017.Credit:Haven Daley\AP
The Japanese people have been deeply committed to the country’s pacifist constitution for 75 years.
Abe needed a credible threat to persuade the people beyond his conservative base. At first he seized on the danger of North Korea’s nuclear arms program, but this alone didn’t prove convincing.
Xi Jinping supplied the missing threat. With China’s increasingly intense encroachments on the territory of its neighbours including Japan, Xi made the case for Japan to rearm and remobilise.
Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.
First was the Quad. Abe conceived it at officials’ level; Joe Biden later convened it at the leaders’ level to bring Australia, India Japan and the US together to “balance” against Beijing’s power.
Second was the policy goal of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, now embraced by democracies everywhere as the conceptual framework for their policies and operations.
Third was, in the words of former Australian ambassador to Japan, Bruce Miller, to “set the template that most Western countries adopted” in dealing with Xi Jinping’s China: “Holding firm on sovereignty and not conceding any of China’s conditions for resumption of high-level dialogue, but not adopting a defiant tone and still being open to engaging with China in areas where co-operation was possible.”
And this is a good summary of the Albanese government’s emerging position. When Penny Wong met China’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Wang Yi, on Friday, she made no concessions on any of Beijing’s demands. Indeed, the country that made a concession is China. It reversed its three-year ban on political contact with Australia to allow meetings with Wong and, earlier, with Defence Minister Richard Marles.
At the same time, Australian ministers have dropped the “defiant tone” of the Morrison government.
Wang Yi has issued four new preconditions for any further concessions by Beijing, including a demand that “we must adhere to building a positive and pragmatic social foundation of public opinion”. Which appears profoundly to misunderstand how public opinion functions in democracies.
Asked his view, Albanese on Monday said: “Australia does not respond to demands” but “we will cooperate with China where we can”.
After leaving the prime ministership, Abe continued to press for firmer resistance to Xi’s expansionism. He broke two taboos in the last year.
Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression.
Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.
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