Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006 Japan Times

Japan-India partnership key to bolstering stability in Asia

Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI — Japan and India are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interests and actually share common goals to build stability, power equilibrium and institutionalized multilateral cooperation in Asia. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo this week offers an opportunity to the two countries to add real strategic content to their fast-developing relationship.

The ascension of Shinzo Abe as postwar-Japan’s youngest prime minister has symbolized the rise of an assertive, confident Japan eager to shape the evolving balance of power in Asia. Faced immediately with the crisis triggered by North Korea’s provocative nuclear test, Abe has pursued a pragmatic foreign policy while seeking to accelerate the nationalist shift in policy instituted by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.

India, for its part, has moved from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, reflected in the greater realism it displays in its economic and foreign policies. It has come to recognize that it can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. A close strategic and economic partnership with Japan chimes with its vision of a dynamic, multipolar Asia.

Close ties with Japan is an objective dear to Singh, whose host in Tokyo is a friend of India. Abe, in his book, Toward A Beautiful Country, published last July, declares that, “It is of crucial importance to Japan’s national interest that we further strengthen our relations with India.” Indeed, Abe optimistically states that “it will not be a surprise if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-U.S. and Japan-China relations.”

To realize that scenario, Tokyo and New Delhi have to focus sustained attention on boosting their now-stagnant trade and building a multidimensional political relationship. The two also need to hold closer consultations on Asian economic and political issues, given that neither would like to see the emergence of a Sino-centric Asia.

Such is the international hype about China’s growth that it is frequently forgotten that Japan remains the world’s largest economic powerhouse after the United States, with an economy that is today double the size of China’s, with only a tenth of the population.

Tokyo may not share Beijing’s obsession with measures of national power, but Japan’s military establishment, except in the nuclear sphere, is already the most sophisticated in Asia.

            Encouraged by economic recovery, with a 2% yearly Japanese growth translating into an additional output almost the size of the entire annual gross domestic product of Singapore and the Philippines, Japan is going through a quiet transition from pacifism to being a “normal” state. Today, even as it has reinvigorated military ties with the United States, it is beginning to cautiously shape an independent foreign policy and rethink its security.

            India has also strengthened its relations with America. But from being non-aligned, India is likely to become multi-aligned, even as it preserves the kernel of nonalignment — strategic autonomy.

A key challenge for both Tokyo and New Delhi is to manage their increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s dominant power. Yet it makes sense for Japan and India to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship with Beijing and put the accent on cooperation. This is what Abe and Singh have sought to do.

An emphasis on cooperation also suits China because it is in accord with its larger strategy to advertise its “peaceful rise.” China’s choir book indeed has been built around a nifty theme: its emergence as a great power is unstoppable, and it is thus incumbent on other nations to adjust to that rise.

A strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. China’s emergence as a global player, however, is dividing, not uniting, Asia.

The sharpening energy geopolitics in Asia also undergirds the need for a strategic partnership between Japan and India, both heavily dependent on oil imports by sea from the Gulf region. Mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, and strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along vital sea-lanes of communication, certainly risk fueling tensions and discord.

Before the United States and India unveiled plans to build a global strategic partnership, it was Tokyo and New Delhi that agreed in August 2000 during Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s visit to develop a “Global Partnership of the 21^st Century.” Yet that proposal has moved forward rather slowly, even as India has overtaken China as the largest recipient of Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA).

A recently released global-opinion poll by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed the high positive rating Japan enjoys in India, and India in Japan, reflecting their close historical and cultural ties.

There is expectation that a true Indo-Japanese strategic partnership will now take off, given the foundation laid by an increasing number of high-level visitors. In the past year alone, Japan’s chief of joint staff as well as the chief of each of the three self-defense forces has visited India, while the Indian defense minister and the navy and air force chiefs have been to Japan.

Their partnership should seek to build greater defense cooperation, intelligence-sharing and joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism, disaster prevention and management, and energy security. To maintain a peaceful environment that promotes security and economic growth, Tokyo and New Delhi need to promote institutional cooperation in Asia.

In that context, Abe’s idea of a four-sided strategic dialogue among Japan, India, Australia and the United States deserves careful reflection. A constellation of democracies tied together by strategic partnerships can help build Asian power equilibrium.

In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, Japan and India, are set to become close partners. Their strategic relationship would help adjust balance-of-power equations in Asia and aid long-term stability.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

Japan-China: Nationalism on the Rise

With China and South Korea expressing anger after the visit Tuesday by Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni war shrine, it will be tempting for the rest of the world to draw a simplistic message. A halt to such pilgrimages, one might think, could put an end to strategic antagonisms in East Asia.

The reality is that revisionist history is being employed as a political tool not only by Japan but also by those who have turned Yasukuni, where 14 top war criminals are honored, into a potent symbol of friction between countries. In fact, resurgent nationalism has become the single biggest threat to Asia’s renaissance.

For more than half a century, both China and Japan have been dominated by a single party that now finds pandering to nationalistic sentiment attractive in the face of an eroding political base. The spats over history also represent a tussle for leadership in East Asia at a time when China’s dramatic rise has begun to influence geopolitics.

China uses the Nanjing massacre and Japan uses the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as national symbols of crimes by outsiders. Since China became Communist, it has employed purported history to gobble up Tibet, seize Indian territories, assert its claims in the East and South China Seas, and demand Taiwan’s "return."

Today, unassuaged historical grievances not only engender ugly nationalism but also help spread the virus of xenophobia to the homogenized societies of East Asia. Focusing on unsavory history amplifies mistrust and runs counter to the liberalizing elements of globalization.

Yasukuni, a private Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead, is a symptom of the Asian malady, not the cause.

Koizumi’s annual visits as prime minister to Yasukuni, a legacy of pre-1945 Japanese militarism, have certainly been provocative, particularly his latest – his first on the highly symbolic Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. Yet it would be naïve to assume that nationalism-mongering in East Asia will end if his successor were to avoid the shrine.

China’s use of the history card against Japan predates Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits. Even if Koizumi’s successor were to change course, Beijing would still be able to exploit the issue of controversial Japanese history textbooks and what it sees as Japan’s insufficient penitence for its 1931 occupation of Manchuria and 1937 invasion of Han China.

In fact, it was in the 1990s, when Japan was still China-friendly and the main aid provider to Beijing, that the Chinese Communists began a "political education" campaign demonizing Japan for its past atrocities. That campaign laid the groundwork for the upsurge of nationalism and the deterioration of China- Japan relations.

In seeking to address domestic political imperatives to replace the increasingly ineffectual Communist ideology with fervent nationalism, China’s rulers have helped whip up Japanese nationalism. That is the kind of political shortsightedness that could one day spell doom for the Communist hold on power.

Those who seek to turn Yasukuni into a bigger issue than it really is are not only taking sides but also playing into the hands of Japanese nationalists, gratuitously arming them with leverage and even encouraging them to raise the stakes.

It is thus little surprise that Foreign Minister Taro Aso last week called for turning Yasukuni into a state memorial, while Koizumi’s most likely successor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Allied tribunal that convicted as "Class A" war criminals – guilty of "crimes against peace" – 14 leading figures who in 1978 were added to Yasukuni’s rolls. For his part, Koizumi has used Yasukuni to stand up to China and fashion an extraordinary legacy pivoted on a nationalist shift in policy.

In his five years in office, Koizumi has not only built popular support for revision of the U.S.-imposed pacifist Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan. To the nationalists, his Yasukuni visits epitomize Japan’s return to being a "normal" state.

Both Japan and China need to break free from history. Yet in April 2005, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China demanded that Japan "face up to history squarely," setting the stage for his country’s scripted anti-Japanese mob protests.

While railing against the risk of renewed Japanese militarism in Asia, Wen appeared oblivious to the fact that while Japan has fought no conflict in the past 60 years, China has waged wars on several flanks in the years since it came under Communist rule. Before asking Japan for yet another apology for its atrocities, China should face up to its more recent history of aggression by apologizing to the Tibetans, Indians and Vietnamese.

Disputes over Yasukuni, history textbooks, war museums and xenophobic cultural programming need to be resolved through quiet diplomacy, not an outpouring of inflammatory rhetoric that incites more forbidding nationalism.

Brahma Chellaney, author of the forthcoming "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

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