Ten days after being injected with the Covid-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga rushed to prepare his best suit and left for Washington D.C. to meet President Joe Biden. Suga's visit to the White House in mid-April was related to the agenda to strengthen the US-Japan Alliance, a symbolic action related to strategic cooperation in order to maintain peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region.
This event seems important, considering that Suga is the first world leader Biden has met in person since his appointment as president. The Biden administration appears to be trying to rekindle romance with allies across the Pacific—Japan in particular—that have shrunk a bit under Donald Trump's (2017-21) protectionist "America First" era.
One month before meeting PM Suga, Biden had held an online meeting with member countries of the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue)—consisting of the US, Australia, India, Japan—a forum for dialogue on military, economic and technological cooperation initiated in 2007 by ex-Japanese PM Shinzo Abe and is seen as a compact move to counter China's power.
Although it did not mention the names of Chinese authorities in its document, the Quad said it would always prioritize international maritime law in order to deal with “challenges” in the East and South China Seas. Meanwhile, the US-Japan Alliance has more explicitly declared China a global threat.
According to the White House website, the US and Japan are "equally concerned about China's activities that are inconsistent with the international rules-based order, including in economic deployments and other forms of coercion". The two countries agreed to promote stability in the Taiwan Strait, and oppose any actions that disrupt the Japanese government's policy on the Senkaku (Diayou) Islands, which have been disputed by Tokyo and Beijing for the past decade.
Therefore, the US and Japanese governments said they would continue to cooperate. The two claim to be united by “a commitment to universal principles and values, including freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, international law, multilateralism, and a free and fair economic order”—characters that seem contradictory to the way things work. Chinese government.
One of the products of the US-Japan alliance is a cooperation program titled Competitiveness and Resilience (CoRe). The contents include points of agreement, especially in the field of information and communication technology research (advancing a "secure and open" 5G network, encouraging the participation of "trustworthy vendors and a diverse market", to supply chain cooperation for sensitive products including semi-conductors). ), in addition to various measures to overcome Covid-19 to climate change.
Predictably, the US-Japan Alliance was responded to angrily by the Bamboo Curtain Country. On its editorial page, the Chinese state media mouthpiece Global Times (insinuating that the similarity of democratic values upheld by the US and Japan is nothing more than "sentimental rhetoric" that is "hypocritical".
The reason is that US-Japan relations are seen as reflecting the power of the US over Japan since the end of the World War. II, so that the relationship between the two is more like "boss and subordinate".
China also quipped the similarities between the US and Japan as “jealousy and hatred of China's strong development momentum”: the US refuses to take over its status as a world superpower, while Japan is reluctant to be a “second-class country” compared to China.
Similarly, the Chinese Embassy in Washington considered the US-Japan Alliance "ironic" for seeking to "incite division" and form its own bloc under the principles of "openness and freedom".
Since the Cold War, Uncle Sam's foreign policy has never been far from the topic of geopolitical stability in Asia—or now more popularly called the “Indo-Pacific”, referring to Asian countries around the Pacific or Indian Oceans, as well as a recent political concept. it is fondly used by the Washington elite when discussing strategic steps to counter China's economic, technological and military expansion.
The difference is, the fears that the Washington elite have heralded in the past centered on the influence of Soviet and Chinese communists in the former colonies in East and Southeast Asia.
Japan is Uncle Sam's mainstay to help support his strategic interests in East Asia. Japan, Uncle Sam's Favorite Child This US-Japan romance did not appear suddenly, but was withdrawn on September 8, 1951, when the Allies and Japan made peace in San Francisco.
On the same day, the US and Japanese governments signed the US-Japan Security Treaty, a controversial pact that gives US authorities the right to have military bases and deploy troops in Japan in order to promote stability in the region around Japan, as well as protect Japan from foreign attacks. This agreement does not regulate how long US troops can operate in Japanese territory.
Keep in mind, Japan's armed forces have been disarmed according to the new constitution rewritten under the US occupation (1945-52). In addition to stipulating reforms related to the land and business practices of the zaibatsu conglomerates, the new constitution stipulates that the Japanese emperor is no longer an absolute monarch and is instead a symbol of the state and the unification of the people.
According to the writings of historian Andrew Gordon from the book A Modern History of Japan (2014), the majority of audiences in America and Asia view the US military presence in Japan as nothing but the purpose of restraining or curbing Japan, as well as protecting it from various attacks. This fact is often a sensitive issue, especially for leftist politicians (the Japanese Socialist Party).
The existence of the US military is seen as violating Japan's neutrality and the principle of peace upheld by the constitution. Both the left and the conservative camp also criticized how the agreement had straddled Japan's sovereignty or put Japan under US control.
Meanwhile, PM Shigeru Yoshida from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), known as a conservative, believes that Japan needs to take shelter under US protection (including allying with it against communists) during the post-war recovery era. This principle became known as the Yoshida Doctrine. The administration of PM Nobusuke Kishi (1957-60) tried to revise the US-Japan security pact to make it more balanced.
The agreement was renewed in 1960. The contents of the revised article emphasize that Japanese authorities are involved in various decisions regarding US military activities there rather than being the provider of military bases.
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| Image: Japan-United States Relations |
This agreement also has a limited validity period, which can be renewed every ten years. Apart from that, some Japanese people show an antipathy attitude towards everything that smells of militarism. Between 1959-60, and briefly in 1970, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest policies related to US-Japan military cooperation. The demonstrators consisted of peace activists, trade unions, and Marxist students.
Historian Nick Kapur describes it as the largest mass demonstration in modern Japanese history. Launching Kapur's review in the book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (2018), both the administrations of President Dwight E. Eisenhower and PM Kishi viewed the Anpo protest movement as nothing more than the agitation of a handful of communist sympathizers.
However, Harvard professor of Japanese studies Edwin O. Reischauer (later appointed US ambassador to Japan in 1961-66) has a different view. According to Reischauer, the Anpo demonstration illustrates the dissatisfaction of Japanese people from various circles, who want a "reformulation" or reformulation in US-Japan diplomatic relations.
Furthermore, in written records of Kapur, Japanese conservative groups considered the protest a sign that Japan was entering the vortex of the communist revolution. Overshadowed by the horror, the ruling conservative party elite, the LDP, has launched reforms in its party structure. Right-wing figures even began to form ultranationalist groups and cooperate with the yakuza mafia to prepare resistance if the revolution exploded in the future.
In fact, the polemic of the US-Japan Security Agreement and the Anpo demonstrations six decades ago did not develop into a socialist revolution. This leftist movement did not succeed in leading Japan to become a modern socialist-leaning country, or vice versa, in making the country of cherry blossoms again adopt pre-World War II militarism. These protests died down shortly after PM Kishi resigned and was replaced by PM Hayato Ikeda (1960-64), a moderate conservative politician chosen by the ruling LDP, who tends to be pro-US government.
Under his administration, Japan's economic growth accelerated thanks to the Income Multiply Plan (a government program related to social welfare, vocational training, education) and new policies in the industrial sector by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) since 1959. Previously, Japan's manufacturing industry had made a fortune. thanks to the Korean War (1950-53) the demand for goods and services was so booming.
Findings from Kapur reveal that Japan has already been made comfortable with rapid economic growth. Because of this overly comfortable status quo, the Japanese people are seen as no longer feeling the need to take the risk of major changes in terms of their socio-political order or international orientation.
As Kapur emphasizes, to this day, Japan persists with pacifist principles (Article 9 of the Constitution), the US-Japan Alliance continues, and social welfare programs are still promoted only to support the economy to remain strong.
The dynamics of Japanese domestic politics in the Cold War era were also inseparable from the role of American intelligence services. Just as the CIA supported the Suharto administration and the TNI-AD in eradicating the communist movement in Indonesia, they had financed the right-wing Japanese conservative party, the LDP, which has controlled parliament since the US occupation era until now.
In 1994, the New York Times published an article about secret CIA documents that were beginning to be declassified. It was revealed that the CIA had routinely provided financial support to LDP politicians throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
According to former diplomats and retired intelligence agents, these efforts were made to siphon intelligence about Japan, as well as to make Japan a bulwark against communism and tame the left (especially politicians from the Socialist Party).
This grant was discontinued in the early 1970s, when Japan's economic power and trade activity skyrocketed. The CIA felt that it no longer needed to finance the LDP politicians because they were already able to finance their own activities with state assets. Still quoted from the Times, Douglas MacArthur II (former Japanese ambassador and nephew of General MacArthur) revealed in an interview that the Japanese Socialist camp was funded secretly by Moscow, although this was denied by related parties.
“If Japan becomes Communist, it is hard to imagine that the rest of Asia will not join in. Japan bears an extraordinary degree of importance because nowhere else in Asia can project American power [besides Japan],” MacArthur said. To this day, particularly at the start of the Joe Biden administration, Japan is seen as an important American partner.
However, today's Japan tends to be more daring in taking the initiative. According to a review by The Economist, in the fields of trade and diplomacy, Japan has decided to move forward to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was abandoned by the US president last term, Donald Trump.
Japan is also involved in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest free trade pact signed just five months ago, involving Asia's three strongest economies (China, Japan, South Korea), the ten ASEAN members, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
Although not allowed to have an armed force, Japan has a Self Defense Force (SDF) which is often assigned to peace and humanitarian programs.
Recently, Japan has been increasingly active in encouraging the SDF's cooperation with foreign militaries, including an agreement to mutually supply military logistics with India and training with Australian troops. In May, for the first time Japan will conduct military training with the US and French forces.
Source: Tirto.id
