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East Asia is gradually becoming one of the world’s flash points for future conflict.  China is extending its territorial claims into the Straits of Taiwan and the South China Sea, North Korea has nuclear capabilities and threatens its neighbors, Japan is flirting with the idea of scrapping elements of its pacifist constitution and providing for its own defense, China continues to claim that Taiwan is part of its territory, and America’s allies in the region are skittish about whether the United States will truly come to their aid in a time of crisis.  Since World War II, the United States has built its defense network in East Asia on the back of close relations between Japan and South Korea and although this defense network was meant to oppose the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it is now becoming a system to contain the rise of communist China.  However, United States foreign policy in the region could unravel based on the steps that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who came to power in December 2012, decides to take.  Aggressive moves by Japan could produce a war that America has to commit forces to in the near future and its strained ties with South Korea over historical issues could complicate a strong American response to China and North Korea.

This topic brief will provide an explanation of Japanese foreign relations with China and South Korea.  It will discuss Japan’s relationship with both nations and then provide an explanation for how to handle questions related to whether a war in East Asia is becoming unavoidable.  The analysis contained in this brief can help international and United States extempers best grapple with questions about Japanese foreign policy and understand what motivates the power players in East Asia.

Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.

Sino-Japanese Relations

One of the major themes in East Asian diplomacy is that historical animosities poison elements of the relationships of several countries in the region.  At the end of the nineteenth century, Japan was a rising global power, while China was in severe decline and was deemed the “sick man of Asia.”  After drafting a constitution and training a Western-style military following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, where the old Japanese shogun system fell apart and the Japanese emperor became a more powerful figurehead, the Japanese began to expand their influence in East Asia.  Japanese policymakers saw the growth of European influence in Africa and East Asia at the time and feared that maintaining traditional military and political structures would cause them to fall victim to foreign powers.  By adopting the mindset of becoming like the West to beat the West, Japan eventually emulated the imperial behaviors of other nations that they feared.  In 1894-1895 Japan fought China in the Sino-Japanese War over Korea, which Japan considered as a dagger pointed at its home islands.  Foreign observers at the time doubted whether Japan, a nation emerging from hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation, would be able to defeat China, but Japan emerged victorious.  As a result of the war, Japan acquired Taiwan.  Japan’s victory encouraged European countries to take advantage of China and partition it into “spheres of influence.”  If not for the United States Open Door policy at the time, which demanded equal trading rights in China for all foreign powers, it is very likely that China may have been partitioned during this period.  In 1904-1905, Japan fought another East Asian war against Russia.  In the Russo-Japanese War, which was also fought over Korea, Japan emerged victorious, becoming the first Asian nation to defeat a European power in the modern era.  The war solidified Japan’s grip over Korea and it annexed the territory in 1910.

Japan’s growing influence in East Asia eventually set it on a collision course with the United States, which saw control of Pacific islands that Japan desired as essential for its trade ties with East Asia.  The United States also had a large number of Christian missionaries in China, which caused it to take China’s side during its increasing tensions with Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.  Japan’s victories in the early twentieth century strengthened its military and navy, who were largely unaccountable to Japan’s elected government, and led to the rise of a militarist government by 1932.  Military officers staged an incident that allowed them to seize control of Manchuria in Northern China in 1931, which was in violation of international law.  However, the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations that was set up after the end of the First World War, failed to make Japan withdraw.  In 1937, Japan launched the Second Sino-Japanese War in an attempt to gain greater control of China and its economic resources.  World historians point to this war as the beginning of the Second World War, in contrast to European historians who like to say that the war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.  The war saw the deaths of millions of Chinese and Japanese forces committed brutal atrocities.  The most notable Japanese atrocity took place in Nanking, which was the site of the Nationalist-led Chinese government (Kuomintang).  For six weeks beginning on December 13, 1937, Japanese forces proceeded to rape and loot the city and killed an estimated 40,000-200,000 people.  Eventually, Japanese forces lost the Second World War and it took two atomic bombs from the United States at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to force the country’s surrender.  The war’s conclusion forced Japan to withdraw from the Asian territories it seized during its wars of conquest and this included Taiwan and Korea.  Japan also adopted a U.S. written constitution that disavowed war as a means of national policy and Article IX of that document spells out that Japan will not have armed forces that could be used for aggressive military actions.  Since Japan would not maintain a military of its own, the United States filled the void by establishing bases on the Japanese home islands like Okinawa, which have become a sore point for Japanese nationalists and right-wing groups.

So why does all of this history matter?  For China, Japan has not apologized enough for its actions during the Second World War.  The BBC on February 13th provides an excellent breakdown of the historical enmity between both nations and writes that Japanese history education provides its population with a poor overview of events that took place during the Second World War.  Like elements of Germany today, some of the Japanese population refuse to admit “war guilt” and claim that the actions taken by Japanese forces during the war were just part of normal operations.  The BBC goes on to write that in the 1970s, communist China, still under the rule of Mao Zedong, restored normal diplomatic relations with the Japanese government and refused Japan’s apologies for the war by saying that the Japanese actually helped the communists come to power by weakening China’s nationalists.  However, Tiananmen Square in June 1989, where protesters tried to bring down the communist system by arguing for democracy, caused China to change its tune regarding Japan.  Chinese policymakers now argue that Japan is responsible for restraining its rise as a power in foreign relations and that it caused the country to fall into the hands of foreigners in the first half of the twentieth century.  The BBC explains that although Japan has apologized to China twenty-five times for the war and given the Chinese government $35.7 billion in aid over the years, the Chinese have yet to tell their population about any of this through state-controlled media.

China has taken offense at recent actions by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and local Japanese communities that seek to remember the Second World War.  The Strait Times of Singapore on February 10th noted that the southern Japanese city of Minami Kyushu has petitioned UNESCO, the United Nations world heritage organization, to include the farewell letters of Japanese kamikaze pilots in its collection of documents to remember the war.  Kamikaze pilots were suicide pilots that Japan used against Allied forces in the last year of the war when it ran out of effective carrier pilots (pilots that could launch and land on aircraft carriers).  Kamikazes were given just enough fuel to get them to their target and they smashed their planes into naval vessels, terrifying Allied crews.  China argues that kamikaze pilots should not be recognized by UNESCO and that their contributions to the history of the war are nowhere near that of Anne Frank, whose diary is listed in UNESCO’s collection of documents about the Second World War.  The Guardian of December 30th explains that Prime Minister Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine in late December, which was the first visit there in seven years, when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made the trip.  Yasukuni houses the spirits of over two million Japanese soldiers from the wars of the last two centuries, but the Shrine has become a sore point for Asian nations that were victims of Japanese aggression during the Second World War because fourteen Class-A war criminals of that conflict are included in that number.  For other Asian nations, the visit of a prime minister to Yasukuni is symbolic of Japan’s unwillingness to accept guilt for the atrocities that it committed during the Second World War.  The BBC article quoted earlier mentions that the mayor of Nagoya, Takashi Kawamura, said in 2012 that there was no massacre at Nanking and he said last year that his views have not changed.  Public pronouncements like these have added tension to Japan’s relationship with China, who feels that Japan has not done enough to educate its population about the course of the Second World War and has not come to terms with its brutal occupation of its nation.  Another complication in Japan owning up to its participation in the Second World War, as The Los Angeles Times notes on February 2nd, is that a sizable percentage of the Japanese population feel that while they did lose the war against the United States, they did not really lose against China.

Another source of historical tension arises when it comes to the territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands, which the Chinese refer to as the Diaoyu islands.  This is why when you read news articles about this dispute that the islands will be labeled Diaoyu/Senkaku so as not to give offense to either government.  These islands are uninhabited and are located in the East China Sea.  They lie east of China, northeast of Taiwan, and southwest of Japan.  Extempers may wonder why both governments care about uninhabited islands, but there are oil resources in the area and both nations need those resources.  Japan needs fossil fuels because it is moving away from nuclear power following the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 (although the recent governor’s race in Tokyo may change some of those calculations) and does not have adequate fossil fuel resources of its own.  China needs the resources to maintain its economic juggernaut.  Think Progress explains on February 7th that China argues that the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands are its territory because it controlled the islands under the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century.  Japan seized control of these islands after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, but the U.S. seized control of them following the Second World War.  The Japan Times of February 4th writes that the Cairo Conference in 1943 between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw both hint that China should regain all territories lost to Japan at the war’s conclusion.  China policymakers today use this as evidence that the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands should have been returned to it following the war or, at the very least, that the United States should have handed the islands over to China when it ceased to administer them in 1972 instead of giving them back to Japan (the 1972 reversion to Japanese control is when China argued that it controlled the islands).  Some of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands were sold to Japan’s Kurihara family by the family of Koga Tatsushiro, who tried to economically develop parts of the Senkaku/Diaoyu in the early twentieth century, but Japan bought out the Kurihara family’s control of these islands in September 2012, which effectively nationalized the Diaoyu/Senkaku under Japan’s control.  This sparked nationalist riots in Chinese cities, which the Chinese government encouraged.

Since the nationalization, China and Japan have increased their rhetoric over who controls the islands and some fear that it could eventually lead to a war.  The Diplomat on February 6th argues that the tensions are due to the political circumstances that surrounded the nationalization.  Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power at the time of the nationalization and he used the incident to consolidate his power by dispatching surveillance and fishery enforcement ships off the islands.  Similarly, Prime Minister Abe took office in December 2012 and China’s nationalist protests produced a similar nationalist reaction in Japan, which played to Abe’s right-wing foreign policy views.  Abe has flirted with the idea of renouncing Japan’s pacifist constitution and expanding Japan’s armed forces and some international observers wonder whether the dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku would give him the perfect pretext to do so.  Tensions grew in November 2013 when China established an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that covered the islands and other areas of the East China Sea that are claimed by Japan and South Korea.  The Japan Times of February 3rd reports that the Chinese government has demanded that any flights happening through the ADIZ must submit flight plans and follow Chinese instructions and if any aircraft does not follow these steps they could face “defensive emergency measures,” which in diplomatic-speak means they could be shot down.  One of the risks is that a foreign plane could fly through the ADIZ without adhering to Chinese instructions, be shot down, and that could provide a casus belli for war.  The Japan Times of February 8th went on to explain that the United States has publicly agreed with Japan that it will not allow the ADIZ to affect the operations of their military forces and The Diplomat of February 5th explains that when China announced the ADIZ, Japan and South Korea proceeded to conduct joint search-and-rescue operations with destroyers and helicopters in the area without alerting the Chinese government.  Although the area has avoided any minor disturbances thus far, The Wall Street Journal of February 6th warns that there are problems looming due to overlapping ADIZ’s from South Korea, Japan, and China as this image below attests:

Other problems go beyond the ADIZ and cover the rights to waters in the East China Sea, which also have rich deposits of oil, natural gas, and fish.  Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines are also finding themselves in conflict with the Chinese, as China is trying to assert claims to the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, which is rich in fish.  Both nations have fishing bans in the area and in 2012, China militarized the area by refusing to withdraw fishing enforcement and maritime surveillance vessels from the region.  Some experts fear that the ADIZ and entrance-denial strategies that China is practicing in East Asia will eventually be applied to the oil-rich waters of the South China Sea, which could cause China to clash with other nations like Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and Vietnam.  It could also roil international markets because the South China Sea is home to a lot of the world’s maritime trade traffic.  Bloomberg on February 10th explains that General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, the commander of American air forces in the Pacific, has warned that any measures by the Chinese to extend an ADIZ to the South China Sea would be “very provocative,” which in diplomatic-speak could mean that the United States would be forced to undertake naval maneuvers to protect regional allies.  This carries its own danger of eventually provoking a war between the United States and China and last year, according to The Guardian cited earlier in this piece, there was a near-miss of a Chinese naval vessel and a U.S. warship in the area.

China and Japan are also clashing with each other in wooing foreign nations abroad, especially in Africa.  The Japan Times of January 31st provides a great overview of this new “scramble for Africa” by explaining that Abe visited African nations like the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) and Mozambique to promote the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and increase Japanese investment in the region.  Japan is in need of new raw material markets and Africa is a continent rich in these resources.  Japan fears that China is extending control over African economies and that it will eventually deny Japan these resources that it needs to be an economic power.  The Japan Times points out that China has invested $75 billion in aid to Africa since 2000 and while Japan has come nowhere close to this, they have some advantages.  For example, China’s African ventures have been criticized for not employing native Africans (China prefers to imports its own Chinese workforce rather than employ locals) and for failing to invest in local communities.  Prime Minister Abe’s visit promised funding for public and private projects and also promised $14 billion in development assistance and $6.5 billion in infrastructure projects.  It appears that in the battle for hearts and minds, Japan is winning some of the early battles, but it is also true that several African nations like Zimbabwe, which have been shunned by the West for poor human rights records, may find Chinese investment preferable because it comes with no such qualms.  Thus, this new scramble for Africa could be another source of tension between Japan and China (albeit not one that would immediately lead to a war) and extempers should consider it when answering questions about the topic.

Japanese-South Korean Relations

On face, there are a lot of characteristics that would make Japan and South Korea appear as natural allies.  Both nations have close relationships with the United States, both nations are democratic, both have strong economies, and both oppose similar nations in the region like China and North Korea.  In fact, both nations have faced provocations from North Korea in the past and have flirted with the idea of starting nuclear programs to counterbalance the nuclear activities of the North Korea government.  However, much like Japan’s relationship with China, history complicates the relationship between both nations.  Korea was controlled by Japan for the first half of the twentieth century and that subjugation is still resented by South Koreans to this day.  Rajan Menon of the City College of New York writes in The National Interest on February 14th that South Korea disputes the Japanese narrative that its conquests of Asia during the early twentieth century were meant to protect the region from Western aggression.  During the Second World War, Japan forcibly impressed tens of thousands of Korean women as “comfort women” during the Second World War.  “Comfort women” is a euphemism for “prostitutes” and in reality the system was a brutal form of sexual slavery.  Japan recognized this history in 1993 when Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono owned up to Japan’s role in impressing South Korean women as “comfort women” and in 1995 Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama apologized for Japanese aggression, but this was not enough for South Korea.  Japan desires a bilateral security treaty with South Korea, but South Korea called off negotiations when Prime Minister Abe visited Yasukuni in December.  South Korea opposes the visits to Yasukuni on the same grounds as the Chinese and Abe’s visit actually saw his approval rating in South Korea hit rock bottom.  The Straits Times of Singapore on February 12th reveals that Abe’s popularity fell to 1.0 on a 10-point scale after the visit, which makes him as unpopular as Kim Jong-un.  Still, that same article points out that 60% of South Koreans want President Park Geun Hye to improve relations with Japan and 50% still support the idea of a summit with the Japanese.  This may be due to lingering concerns about North Korea and China.

Another historical sore point between both nations involves Ahn Jung-guen.  The National Interest article cited in the previous paragraph explains that Jung-geun was a young Korean nationalist that assassinated Prince Ito Hirobumi, a four-time Japanese prime minister and the first “resident general” of occupied Korea in 1909.  Hirobumi was assassinated at a Japanese railway station in Harbin, China.  The Diplomat of February 10th says that China is trying to use the historical animosity that both nations feel toward Japan to break the United States existing alliance with South Korea and Japan in the region.  One of the ways it has done this is by building a memorial in Harbin to Ahn Jung-geun.  As one can expect, Japan is not happy about this memorial because they feel it commemorates the actions of a terrorist.  South Korea disputes this assertion, though, and has welcomed the memorial.

The United States may also find itself dragged into these historical issues sooner rather than later.  U.S. News and World Report on February 11th reveals that Virginia passed a bill on February 6th that requires new textbooks in the state to refer to the Sea of Japan as “the East Sea.”  Korean American associations in the United States are pushing for the change because they say that referring to the area as the “Sea of Japan” only became popular when Japan dominated their nation in the twentieth century.  These associations are pushing similar measures in New York and New Jersey where they are growing elements of the electorate.  The Japanese government has not made an aggressive push against these measures in American education, but one wonders if these changes take off in other states if the United States will find itself in a historical quagmire between its two Asian allies.

Nevertheless, despite some historical animosity between the two and, as Bloomberg explains on January 6th, suspicion from some South Koreans about Japan becoming a military power and renouncing its pacifist constitution, there are areas where the Japanese and South Koreans have cooperated in the past and can do so in the future.  The Diplomat on February 5th suggests that both nations can build up their ballistic missile defenses and tactics in anti-submarine and mine-warfare to prepare for a war with North Korea.  As indicated in the previous section of this brief, both nations also worked together to thwart the Chinese ADIZ in November.  A shared relationship with the United States is also likely to keep both nations together, but tensions need to be resolved to make sure the relationship can be more productive.  These center on the historical disputes described above, as well as resolving territorial disputes over the Dokdo (South Korean term)/Takeshima (Japanese term) islets.  Also called the Liancourt Rocks, since they are actually volcanic rocks, South Korea has administered the territory since 1954, but Japan maintains its claim.  Both nations argue that older maps illustrate that they control the territory dating back to the seventeenth century and South Korea has thus far refused to submit the matter to international arbitration.  Interestingly enough, North Korea is said to support South Korea’s claim to the islets, but this is keeping with North Korea’s idea that it is the true governing body for the Korean peninsula.  While extempers might find it silly that both nations are fighting over some rocks in the Sea of Japan/East Sea, the dispute is really over the waters that surround the area since those are rumored to contain oil reserves.

An East Asian War?

When receiving a question on the Sino-Japanese-South Korean relationship and Japan’s foreign policy with each area, it might be tempting to give a speech on how a war is approaching between these three nations.  After all, military and economic factors, as well as nationalism by all of the participants, seem to indicate that tensions are at an unhealthy level.  Recently, Prime Minister Abe and other Asian leaders have compared the situation with pre-1914 Europe, with the implication that tensions are rising to the point that a Third World War might begin in East Asia and necessitate a larger global response.  Nevertheless, this would actually be an incorrect response.

The first reason is provided by China & U.S. Focus, a blog that discusses Sino-American relations, provides an interesting piece on February 7th that suggests that China’s recent actions in Asia regarding the ADIZ over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and its enhanced presence in the South China Sea are signs of weakness and not strength.  The proper historical parallel according to China & U.S. Focus is not casting China as a rising power like Imperial Germany in 1914, but instead as fascist Italy in the interwar years of 1919-1939.  At that time, fascist Italy was staking a claim to the Mediterranean Sea, which it insisted was an “Italian lake” and it sought to build up its naval forces and take control of Malta, which was controlled by Great Britain and contained Italian naval expansion (the modern parallel would be the role that U.S.-backed Taiwan plays against China today).  Although world powers feared the Italian navy at the time, the Second World War illustrated that it was a poorly trained, untested tested that lacked an offensive doctrine necessary to win major battles.  The implication of the article is that China is in the same position today and that the world should not overstate its strength.

A second reason can be found in economics.  Although Japan and China do not agree on the same historical interpretations of the Second World War and are engaged in territorial disputes, commerce between both nations has increased over the last decade.  The Christian Science Monitor on February 5th explains that trade between both nations has tripled over the past decade and was valued at more than $340 billion in 2012.  China needs Japan for machinery and parts for its factories and Japan needs China for cheap products.  Japanese firms like Nissan have also seen growth in China as 25% of the firm’s sales now take place in China.  A war between both nations would hurt everyone involved and while it appears that Japanese firms are adopting a contingency plan in reducing their foreign investment in China and taking it to other nations in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), they would prefer to maintain their business contacts in China, which has a market of over one billion consumers.

All of this factors into a third reason why a war is unlikely and this because of Abe’s electoral coalition.  Abe is right-wing and nationalist in his foreign policy aims, but Foreign Affairs described him as a pragmatist and realist when he took power in 2012.  Abe’s primary focus has been domestic and he is trying to pull the Japanese economy out of its stagnant state, which has existed for the better part of twenty years (in fact, Japan’s economic problems began with a housing bubble that burst in 1990 and some economists warn that the U.S. could face a “lost decade” or two in economic growth similar to Japan’s).  A war would harm Abe’s popularity because it would damage the Japanese economy by cutting off its export markets to Japan.  It may also harm Japanese trade with other nations depending upon the strength of the Japanese and American navies in protecting Japanese trade routes.  This could become more problematic when one considers Japan’s reliance on natural resources and this is why Abe is trying to cultivate a strong friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Reuters on February 6th explains that the closure of the Japanese nuclear sector after Fukushima has caused Japan to consume one-third of the world’s liquefied natural gas shipments and is causing eighteen months of trade deficits, which is a Japanese record.  Military hostilities could choke off Japan’s energy sector and create great hardship for the nation, thereby eroding Abe’s political standing.  Abe also has an electoral coalition that depends on pacifists.  The Think Progress article mentioned earlier in this brief points out that Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is in coalition with New Komeito, a party of Buddhist libertarians that are extreme pacifists.  New Komeito would restrain Abe from launching a war with China and may complicate his plans for constitutional revision to enable the Japanese to rebuild their military.  Even rebuilding the military may create problems for Abe, since it may lead to demands by the American public for the U.S. to reduce its military presence in Japan if the Japanese are going to supply their own army.  Japan has benefitted from having the United States operate its defense network because it does not have to pay for a large military.  This allows it to reallocate economic resources elsewhere.  Moving away from the pacifist constitution would jeopardize this benefit.

Despite all of this, though, there are still some legitimate arguments that can be made for why tensions are increasing in the region and that risks still exist for war (albeit small ones).  The National Interest article previously cited suggests that East Asia is going through a power transition.  The power transition theory argues that when there are shifts in the balance of power between major global powers that the nations that are on the rise are prone to take greater risks.  Leaders of the nations that are declining in strength attempt to maintain the status quo, but they also want to take risks to illustrate to other major powers that they are not falling into decline.  During these shifts, the countries that are caught between the major powers feel uncertain about their existing security commitments and this situation of a rising major power, declining major power, and the countries caught in the middle produces a climate thick with fear, uncertainty, misperceptions, and a gradual escalation of crises.  The rising nationalism in Japan and China is evident of this trend as China is growing as a power and seeks to step up its presence in areas like the East China Sea and South China Sea, while the United States promises to realign its foreign policy toward the region.  Meanwhile, the South Koreans and Japanese are worried about America’s willingness to commit to them and this has prompted Japanese nationalists to push for more defense spending and revising the nation’s pacifist constitution.  The National Interest adds that Asia lacks strong multinational institutions like Europe’s European Union (EU) that can defuse crises.  Still, the risks of a completely disorderly power transition are small because as Think Progress noted in its article cited earlier, the modern era has nuclear weapons and East Asian nations recognize that a nuclear exchange between China and the United States would be disastrous for the entire region, if not the globe.

As a final aside, the Council on Foreign Relations on February 6th provides a great overview of the tensions between Japan and South Korea and how both sides can overcome their differences and increase their cooperation against China and North Korea in the region.  The Council on Foreign Relations suggests that a joint declaration that addresses all historical grievances would be useful and that the declaration should provide Japan’s support for a reunified Korea under South Korean control.  The joint declaration should also commit both nations to bilateral trade and maritime security in the region and create a day when both countries can commemorate the shared legacy, painful as it may be, of the Second World War.  Japan needs allies in the region and South Korea is the best of the lot.  The United States has kept both nations together, but the last element of the alliance needs to be unified and that is a Japanese-South Korean security arrangement.  By avoiding provocative actions, like the visits to Yasukuni, and emphasizing shared interests, Japanese and South Korean policymakers may help each other acquire a greater security in East Asia and help avert a disastrous East Asian war in the process.