A New Good Neighbor Policy

By George Russell

Tokyo uses trade and aid to expunge old memories in the region

For many Asians, the notion of a strong, assertive Japan on their doorstep provokes a shudder. World War II has been over for nearly four decades, but the image of the swaggering Japanese conquerors who occupied and on occasion brutalized neighboring countries under the imperialistic banner of the "Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" remains vivid. As recently as 1974, the visit of former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka to Indonesia incited bloody street riots in the capital city of Jakarta. The Japanese government's proposals last year to gloss over the country's actions during World War II (among other things, officials wanted to change school textbooks to describe Japan's 1937 invasion of China as an "advance") caused major protests in Hong Kong, the South Korean capital of Seoul and in Peking. A few weeks later, Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines, publicly warned that "Japan will sooner or later, perhaps sooner than later, dominate."

President Marcos may well have been right in his assessment. By virtue of its tremendous economic success, Japan has once again become a major force in the Orient, even though the Japanese are far more anxious to identify themselves with the industrialized powers of the West. Asian trepidation over Japan's renewed strength, however, is exaggerated. The chief lesson that the Japanese have learned from their disastrous wartime experience is that peaceful trade and aid can yield far greater dividends than military aggression.

In recent years the Japanese have made energetic efforts to improve relations with the countries that they formerly bullied, or tried to. The results of Tokyo's good-neighbor policy are not yet in; indeed, wiping out the memories of war is likely to be, as a U.S. State Department official puts it, "the work of another generation." But thanks to those efforts, the image of Japan as a menace is fading.

No postwar Japanese Prime Minister has worked harder or more openly at burnishing his country's image in the region than Yasuhiro Nakasone. He has approached the task with an engaging frankness about Japan's past excesses, and with frequently repeated assurances that Tokyo now wishes to play a new and different kind of role in the area. That role, as he has said, attaches importance to "cooperation rather than confrontation, and modesty rather than self-assertion." Nakasone has been meticulous in presenting himself as the exemplar of Japanese humility. That personal care extends to the way he responds to the red-carpet treatment on trips abroad. Nakasone claims that on such visits, he never walks down the center of the traditional welcoming mat for heads of government, because to do so would display arrogance. "Because I walk on one edge and my host walks on the other," he says, "the center stays very clean."

Nakasone began breaking new diplomatic ground almost as soon as he took office. In January he decided to make neighboring South Korea, rather than the U.S., the destination of his first state visit. The choice had special significance: from 1910 to 1945, the Korean peninsula was under direct Japanese control. To this day, according to public opinion polls, South Koreans like the Japanese even less than they do their Communist rivals in North Korea. (The feeling is mutual: the 669,800 Koreans who live in Japan are generally treated as second-class citizens.)

Nakasone arrived in Seoul bearing considerable gifts. Chief among them was a seven-year, $4 billion aid package designed to assuage South Korean complaints that Japan has not been paying its share of the regional defense burden. Nakasone's largesse and charm were effective. South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan hailed the visit as a "historic, indeed monumental, milestone in our relations." The two leaders now talk frequently by telephone. Nakasone used a variation on the same theme with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a loose economic grouping composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. ASEAN has already received 37% of its foreign aid, or $800 million, from Japan. Nakasone extended friendship one step further: on a trip to the ASEAN capitals before May's

Williamsburg summit, he met with local leaders and promised to convey their concern over rising protectionism to the Western leaders at the meeting.

In contrast to the hostility shown Tanaka in 1974, Nakasone's reception in Indonesia was warm. Apparently confident that Nakasone will not lead his nation on an expansionist path, President Suharto did not even raise the question of Japan's recent military buildup. In Manila, Nakasone expressed his deep regret to President Marcos over Japan's wartime depredations in the islands. According to Nakasone, Marcos was sufficiently moved by the gesture to declare that "the era of stability has opened in Asia." In the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, Nakasone firmly rejected the notion of any future military superpower status for his country, "based on reflection of what Japan did in the past." He also offered additional pledges of aid, including investment in a $2.3 billion Japanese-style bullet train, which would run from Johore Bahru to Butterworth, 480 miles to the north.

In addition to providing aid, Japan is buying more from its neighbors. Last year Japanese imports from ASEAN amounted to $20.9 billion, an increase of 118.9% from five years ago. Japan is now the largest or second largest trading partner of every country in the area.*

Nowhere is the fundamentally economic nature of Japanese foreign policy more strikingly on display than in Japan's relations with Australia. Japan is now Australia's principal economic partner, buying chiefly such natural resources as iron ore, coal and wool. Last year those purchases were valued at $4.8 billion, 28% of Australia's total exports. In turn, Australia has become, apart from a few oil-producing countries, the world's largest per-capita importer of Japanese manufactured products ($4.2 billion worth last year). As a result of the economic links, cultural ties between the two extremely different societies are also becoming somewhat closer. There has, for example, been a virtual boom in Japanese language instruction in Australia.

Japan's relations with China are considerably more complex. A dozen years ago, China was still profoundly anti-Japanese. The official Communist press regularly published stories accusing the Japanese of reviving militarism and fascism. Beginning in 1972, when the two countries restored diplomatic relations, the climate changed. In 1978 a SinoJapanese peace-and-friendship treaty was signed, and last year the two countries agreed to promote long-term and stable ties based on, among other things, the principles of equality and mutual benefit. Within that framework, Tokyo and Peking have signed numerous agreements and protocols on trade, communications, culture, technology and transport. Soon after assuming office, Prime Minister Nakasone called his counterpart, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, and assured him over the phone that "it is one of the main pillars of our country's foreign policy to uphold and develop stable relations with China." On a visit to Tokyo in June 1982, Zhao declared that "our two sides have identical or similar views on many important international issues." One of those issues is mutual trade, which rose from $1.1 billion in 1972 to $10.4 billion in 1981.

Like many U.S. businessmen, Japanese entrepreneurs hoped to take advantage of China's ambitious modernization plans. As it turned out, the Chinese were not prepared to absorb foreign imports and investments as rapidly as was expected. Thus trade between China and Japan actually declined by about 14% last year, to $9 billion. Several major Japanese industrial projects in China, like the $5 billion Baoshan iron-and-steel complex near Shanghai, were salvaged only after Japan came up with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of subsidized low-interest loans. Japanese traders hope that China will continue its policy of giving top priority to modernization. Says a businessman in Tokyo: "If they ask for our technical help, we'll be glad to help them." As one sign of the two countries' optimism about their future relations, they have managed to avoid confrontation on age-old mutual irritants, like their conflicting claims to a small group of uninhabited islands 80 miles off the coast of Taiwan.

Japan's relations with Taiwan remain close despite Tokyo's 1972 decision to drop formal recognition of the island republic as part of its accommodation with mainland China. Trade is booming, and late last year Taiwan announced a joint venture with Toyota Motors to build a $582 million auto-assembly plant on the island. Japanese brand-name manufacturers of such items as color TVs and stereo components, including Sony, Sharp and Toshiba, have also moved to Taiwan to take advantage of cheaper labor costs. Despite the fact that some of those goods are now competing in Japanese domestic markets, Tokyo has so far taken a benign view of the economic shift.

As peaceful as the Japanese may be, there will doubtless always be friction between Japan and its Asian neighbors, just as there is between the U.S. and Western Europe. Nakasone knows that he will have to walk on the edge of the red carpet for quite some time to come. --By George Russell. Reported by Bing W. Wong/Hong Kong with other bureaus

*The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong is an exception. Japan ranks third among Hong Kong's trading partners, after China and the U.S.

With reporting by Bing W. Wong This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.