TOKYO - The American comedian Rodney Dangerfield made a career and established a national catch phrase from his line, “I don't get no respect.” There are many in Japan who believe the country’s political and diplomatic leaders are turning their country into the geopolitical Rodney Dangerfield.
“Everything is a mess,” says Takashi Kawakami, a professor of security matters at Takushoku University. “I think Japanese diplomacy may be the worst in postwar history.” Most lay the blame squarely with Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his inexperienced party, which took office a little more than one year ago.
In recent weeks it seems like Japan has become a punching bag between its two largest neighbors, China and Russia. The first blow stems, of course, from the incident surrounding the detention of a Chinese fishing boat captain last September.
Japan’s decision first to detain the captain of the fishing boat that reportedly rammed coast guard vessels, and its subsequent decision to release him to return home in the face of unprecedented pressure from China, may have been a practical move, but it was taken as a major diplomatic defeat by most Japanese people.
Since then, Kan has been scrambling in a rather unseemly way to meet with China’s Premier Wen Jiabao to open dialogue on this and other issues. He flew to a European meeting he was planning to skip just to engage in a brief corridor meeting. His efforts to corral Wen in Hanoi made him look like a supplicant, as the Chinese premier abruptly cancelled on Kan on the sidelines of the recent East Asia Summit, reportedly after only giving a half-hour’s notice.
Meanwhile, Russia has thrown Tokyo into a turmoil because of a recent visit by President Dmitry Medvedev to Kunashiri, one of the four islands in the southern Kuril chain that were once occupied by Russia, though still claimed to this day by the Japanese. It was the first time a Russian leader had ever visited any of the disputed islands.
The rainy windswept islands are known as the Southern Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan. The Kuril chain stretches from the tip of Hokkaido to the large island of Sakhalin. Before the war, Japan occupied all of the Kurils and the southern half of Sakhalin as booty from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
Kan described the visit as “regrettable” in a dozen different ways and ordered Japan’s ambassador to Moscow, Masaharu Kono, to come back to Tokyo. Officials were careful to stress that Kono was not being “recalled,” a serious diplomatic move, only asked to personally brief the premier and Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara.
Medvedev’s visit has been attributed to domestic political posturing, though some suspect some kind of hidden Chinese-Russia pincer move. Regardless, the Russian president didn’t seem to care how the visit might impact Russo-Japanese relations, and he has even expressed interest in visiting other disputed islands in the chain. A stopover at Shitokan or the Habumai islets would add a new dimension to the dispute, since both territories have been suggested in the past as bargaining chips for a peace treaty.
Japanese diplomacy has been unsteady ever since the Democratic Party of Japan took over the government after winning a smashing victory in 2009. The DPJ came into power focused mainly on domestic issues and a vague idea of pursuing a foreign policy more independent from that of its ally, the United States.
Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama squandered the early months of his administration in an unproductive and futile effort to reopen the question of relocating the U.S. Marine Corps airfield at Futenma outside of Okinawa. The effort only served to irritate Washington, alienate Okinawa's residents and cost Hatoyama his job.
The Okinawa matter was given a rest following Hatoyama’s announcement in May that he would honor the base realignment agreement as negotiated by the preceding government with only technical modifications. However, the issue will likely raise its head again following the November 28 gubernatorial election. Both candidates oppose moving the base to another part of the island.
If nothing else, the imbroglio with China, and now Russia, has sobered Tokyo and likely enhanced the value of the U.S. alliance in the government’s mind. One hears very little these days about Japan pursuing a foreign policy more independent of the U.S.
Meanwhile, it is fair to say that Beijing’s ambiguous threat to embargo rare earths, of which it currently enjoys a near monopoly, has severely shaken Japan’s business community and punctured the complacent idea that the large and growing economic ties between Japan and China would somehow trump diplomacy in any future crisis.
As one usually pro-China business daily, the Nikkei, opined: “Now is the time for Japanese business to extricate itself from excessive reliance on China in order to be protected from the ‘China risk’ of unexpected and unfathomable regulations.”