|
|
| Right Royal Climb-down at Chatham House |
|
Monday, August 2nd, 2004
|
TOKYO. As can be seen from earlier contributions to this space, I have recently presented a fundamental challenge to the conventional wisdom on Sino-Japanese relations. In articles in Prospect magazine and The American Conservative , I have shown that Japan and China have entered into an increasingly close alliance -- an alliance moreover that looks forward to a time when China displaces the United States as the world's principal superpower.
That such an alliance exists is denied in Beijing and Tokyo. For good reason: if American policymakers knew how close Sino-Japanese relations have become they might be more circumspect in their dealings with the two East Asian great powers. In particular they might strike a tougher pose in pressing for the opening of Japan's markets.
Not surprisingly my analysis has proved a Rorshach test for the West's Japan watchers. On the one hand, many ivory-tower observers -- most of them working in Japan-funded think tanks and university East Asian studies departments -- have reacted with predictable fury. On the other, business executives familiar with the economic and political realities of East Asia have been flatteringly supportive.
One of the most intemperate reactions has come from Stephen Green, a former writer for The Economist who now runs an East Asian studies department at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Dr. Green recruited several associates to sign a round-robin letter of protest. The full text of both their letter and my rebuttal is reproduced below.
Strikingly most of the signatories, in common with Dr. Green himself, are supported in part at least by subventions from the Japanese economic system.
I have invited Dr. Green to debate Sino-Japanese relations before a live audience in London or Washington. For some reason he has been too busy to take up my offer.
How disappointing. British scholars were once noted not only for their scrupulous consideration of contrary evidence but for their self-confidence in defending their positions. In particular they welcomed formal public debates as an economical way to establish who knows what he is talking about -- and who doesn't.
I hope Dr. Green's schedule opens up soon and in the meantime he will, I am sure, forgive me if I offer him a few home truths.
Just as it is unthinkable for journalists to accept money from their sources, a fortiori it is wrong for the RIIA to solicit funding from nations whose affairs it professes to analyze. This applies in spades to the authoritarian nations of East Asia -- from Japan just as much as China. Japan owes its political culture not to a few years of American occupation but to centuries of immersion in Chinese philosophy (the same philosophy that gave the world the Tienanmen massacre of 1989). To anyone who knows the facts, it is as inappropriate for East Asia analysts to solicit money from the Japanese or Chinese politico-economic establishments as it would have been for sovietologists in the old days to seek funding from Moscow.
If all this seems overdrawn, it isn't. Consider, for instance, the matter of free speech. If Japan is a free speech zone, why didn't anyone long ago tell us the truth about Japan's trade policies (to name just the most obvious of dozens of key areas of Western misundertanding)? For decades, important Western publications such as The Economist and The Wall Street Journal have somehow been convinced that Japan's markets were "among the most open in the world." In reality the Japanese bureaucracy has throughout pursued a fundamentally mercantilist approach to trade.
That a massive policy has existed to mislead the West is hard to deny. Certainly you don't need to take my word for it. In unguarded moments Japan's own leaders have admitted as much. A stand-out in this regard has been top Mitsubishi executive Minoru Makihara. Speaking to the foreign press in 2000 (in his capacity as deputy chairman of Keidanren), he blurted out that as recently as the late 1980s the Japanese market was "closed and tightly protected." He made this admission as part of an argument that Japan's attitude to trade had subsequently undergone a transformation -- a point I will rebut some other time. For now let's merely focus on the 1980s. To say the least no one in the Japanese establishment acknowledged at the time that the Japanese market was "closed and tightly protected." Quite the reverse. As someone who reported from Tokyo in the 1980s, I know that to a man Japanese sources were on message presenting the Japanese market as substantially open. A top Japanese spokesman -- speaking in his then guise as head of the McKinsey management consulting firm in Tokyo -- argued that the Japanese market was as open as that of the United States!
Those in the West, who as the RIIA evidently does, assume that Japan is a free speech zone, should consider this question: why haven't Japanese intellectuals ever challenged the Japanese government's Orwellian approach to truth? Why, for instance, hasn't any prominent Japanese academic economist or political scientist ever come forward to tell the truth about Japan's trade policies? Why no letters to The Economist or the Wall Street Journal pointing out how absurd their characterizations of Japanese trade policies have been? And why haven't any top American and British members of the long-term foreign community in Tokyo ever spoken out? Yes -- once or twice over the decades a few strangulated voices have been raised in Tokyo. But such voices have usually quickly gone silent. The Japanese have a saying that sums up the problem: Deru kugi wa utareru. The nail that sticks out gets hammerd down.
In truth Japan is not a free speech zone -- and that is just the beginning of the story of Japanese authoritarianism.
To say the least the Western media's failure to glean the truth about Japan's trade policies stands as silent testimony to a degree of "social engineering" unfamiliar in the West -- unfamiliar, that is, outside the pages of 1984. E.F.
LETTER TO PROSPECT FROM STEPHEN GREEN ET AL:
We like debating conventional wisdom as much as anyone, but Eamonn Fingleton�s piece on Japan-China relations was bizarrely polemical, manipulative of the facts and misleading (�East Asian Alliance�, May 2004). The moment any author asserts that an ongoing secret alliance exists between the governments of China and Japan aimed at undermining the �hegemony� of the United States, we are no longer engaged in genuine social science.
Where to start? History creates huge tensions in the relationship and cannot be so easily papered over. Japan�s military leaders committed gross human rights violations in China in the 1930-40s, including the Nanjing Massacre in 1937-38 in which some 300,000 Chinese died, the use of sex slaves (euphemistically referred to as �comfort women�), vivisection, biological warfare, and so on. The government in Tokyo, in the views of many Chinese, has never fully apologised - a point which Beijing�s leadership neither chooses nor is able to ignore. Add to that regular spats over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands and concern over repeated Chinese incursions into Japan�s territorial waters (sharply increased in recent years). There is much Japanese irritation at what has often been viewed as China�s political opportunism in playing the �history card� in an effort to extract political concessions from Tokyo. It is simply not credible to argue that these have been disingenuously exaggerated to conceal from naive Western observers the depth of Sino-Japanese covert co-operation.
History is now complicated by China�s present economic rise. True, there are some in the Japanese business community who see investment in and trade with China as their salvation. And true, economic links are strong. However, fear, especially amongst Japanese public opinion, of what a resurgent China might do threatens to overwhelm all these considerations. Japan�s strong economic links are based upon necessity and the same logic that drives closer China-United States relations. The aim is to help China prosper and become intertwined in a global economic system in which she has a stake. That improves the chances of peaceful democratic reform and decreases the chances of military confrontation in Asia.
As for Japan�s generous development assistance to China, conservative opinion in Japan, rightly or wrongly, has taken umbrage at what they claim is the Chinese leadership�s refusal to acknowledge Japan�s generosity. And since the mid 1990s, the Gaimusho, Japan�s foreign ministry, has been explicit in stressing that Japan�s aid has a self-consciously strategic dimension.
Mr Fingleton claims that �Japan does virtually nothing to alleviate immediate poverty in China. Instead, it has mostly worked with the Beijing government to fund "muscle-building" projects that are clearly intended to speed China's emergence as an economic superpower�; it would be helpful if he could document some of these projects. He seems to have completely overlooked the Japanese preoccupation with the downstream pollution effects of Chinese economic development and Japan�s consequent desire to tie aid to environmental reforms.
Japan and China compete intensely in Asia for influence, most recently in forming trade agreements. Plans for an �Asian IMF� were torpedoed not only by Washington�s opposition, but also by rivalry between Beijing and Tokyo over leadership in the region. Japan�s plans for theatre missile defence are driven not only by the immediate North Korean security challenge, but also by a fear of possible future conflict with China. Japan�s energy strategists worry about their reliance on Middle East oil and compete with their Chinese counterparts in seeking to secure access to Siberian energy reserves.
Turning to Japan�s relations with the United States. Mr Fingleton claims that while Japan�s relations with the US and Europe �have hit rock bottom� it has switched to a policy of �building up China�. One problem with this view is that it implies a simplistic, Manichaen choice between two strategic options. However, closer economic ties with China are not necessarily inconsistent with a strong security and political stance that can at times conflict with Beijing�s own security ambitions. Post-9/11, the Bush administration appears to understand this point.
Remarkably, Mr Fingleton overlooks the steady evolution of closer US-Japan security co-operation since the late 1970s. To cite just a few examples: the 1978 US-Japan Security Guidelines; Ohira�s articulation of Comprehensive Security (Sogo Anzen Hosho) and the willingness to provide development assistance to front-line strategic states such as Turkey and the ROK; the 1981 commitment by PM Suzuki to expand Japan�s defence commitment to a 1,000 nautical mile boundary beyond its shoreline; the 1983 US-Japan Technology sharing agreement; Nakasone� frequent references in the 1980s to the indivisibility of Western and Japanese security interests; the FSX US-Japan fighter co-development agreement; the Japanese Defence Agency�s explicit identification, from 1995, of China as a potential military and political rival and the consequent need to strengthen ties and alliance coordination with Washington; the revised US-Japan Security Guidelines of 1997. And then there is the fact that Japanese troops are on the ground in Iraq.
The claim that shared �Confucian values� are a basis for an alliance against America, is, frankly, nonsensical. This sort of writing is �Yellow Peril� stuff at its worst and eerily reminiscent of racist 1930s novels and films such as Fu Manchu. Even Samuel Huntington�s Clash of Civilizations did not stoop so low to presume a cultural equivalence, let alone a global cultural conspiracy, between China and Japan. That �equivalence� did not stop conflict less than seventy years ago in Asia, or in Europe. And how does Mr Fingleton square their supposed cultural hatred of �the US economic model� with the deregulation and market reforms favoured by Messrs. Koizumi and Takenaka or by the wide-ranging liberalisation that has taken place in China?
We are not suggesting that Japan and China do not have good reasons and opportunities to work together. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is happening in a number of important areas. But this does not amount to evidence that Japanese policy is driven by a covert pro-Chinese bias.
We accept that polemical writing can provoke debate, but it should also inform, as well as engaging meaningfully and responsibly with the widely available evidence. We could go on at much greater length, but trust that our letter provides enough evidence that Mr. Fingleton�s essay did not meet this standard.
Stephen Green, Head, Asia Programme, Chatham House, London
Axel Berkofsky, Research Fellow, European Institute for Asia Studies, Brussels
Devin T. Stewart, journalist, Tokyo
Jean-Pierre Lehmann, Professor, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland
Jack Marr, Director of Business Development, State of Missouri Office of Investment and Trade, Japan and China Office, Tokyo
John Swenson-Wright, Lecturer, East Asia Institute, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge
Edith Terry, Author, How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China and the Asian Miracle (M.E. Sharpe, 2002), Hong Kong
Paul J. Scalise, Editor, JapanReview.Net, Tokyo
THIS IS HOW I REPLIED:
In critiquing my account of Japan's tacit alliance with China (Prospect, May 2004), Stephen Green and his cohorts (Prospect, June 2004) have made several errors.
I never said -- and do not believe -- that Japan's relations with the U.S. have hit "rock bottom."
In their only challenge to my facts, they question my statement that Tokyo's aid to China has gone largely on "muscle building" projects. My statement is attested by, among other sources, Austin and Harris in "Japan and Greater China" (see pp. 168-169).
They cite ten developments that supposedly reflect Tokyo's desire for closer U.S.-Japan defence ties. Actually most of these reflect something quite different: Tokyo's gift for tokenism. Japan's despatch of troops to post-war Iraq, for instance, was merely a minimalist tip of the hat to a beleagured Uncle Sam. (It was also good business: in return for contributing a few hundred troops for strictly civilian duties, Tokyo was assured that its financial obligation would be pegged at a mere $5 billion. This is little more than one-third of what it was forced to fork out for the Gulf War.)
Then there is the FSX project. Again, pace my critics, this hardly represents closer U.S.-Japan ties. Quite the contrary. When the Japanese military needed new fighter planes in the 1980s, Washington leaned on Tokyo to buy American. Tokyo refused and, in the so-called FSX project, defiantly set out to build its own planes. Moreover, in a lobbying scandal of epic proportions it persuaded the U.S. Congress to transfer vast amounts of secret aerospace technology to the planes' Japanese makers. As Jeff Shear showed in The Keys to the Kingdom, the net effect was severely to weaken American competitiveness in one of the few industries where the U.S. still enjoyed a lead.
Now for the most disappointing aspect of the Green letter: its charge that my theme is racist. Transparently false charges of this sort have become standard in Japanology in recent decades (as such impeccably decent observers as James Fallows, Pat Choate, Ivan P. Hall, and Brian McVeigh, among others, can testify). My real crime is of a lesser order: it is merely that, in contrast with my critics, I have lived long enough in East Asia to see through the slanted and often manipulative nonsense printed daily in the local establishment press.
Eamonn Fingleton
Tokyo, Japan
|
|
Contact Eamonn Fingleton |
|
|
|
