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No other potential global leader has faced such increasing internal attrition as Japan in the 21st century. When it first sought some sort of global leadership over a century ago, it caught external attention by defeating China in 1895, then shocking the world with the May 1905 Tshushima naval humiliation of a legitimate European power, Russia. Depending far too much on an all-powerful navy, as another European island power did, for its supplies, exports, and existence, Japan also sought, unlike Great Britain, a landed army, only to find the 1931-2 Manchurian invasion exposing internal fissures (in this case, disrupting the chain of command).
Just as Japan has painstakingly avoided mistakes this second time at a world leadership bid, secular circumstances still intervene to taint expected outcomes. World War II was so quick that by the 1950s, much like another World War II culprit, Germany, the external audience marvelled the 'economic miracle' underway. Japan soon boasted the world's second largest economy (and Germany the third largest), yet a turning point loomed in the visible future from its dependence upon the United States: by out-competing the United States, it triggered producer and nationalist wrath in the world's largest economy, evident in the 1980s US 'Japan-bashing'. China's far higher economic growth-rate in the 1990s relieved Japan from this pressure, but also displaced Japan as the world's second largest economy by 2010. A rudely awakened Japan again faced the very country it had invaded some 85 years ago.
With no escape route, Japan stands flat-footed. On the one hand is China's slowly strangulating policy-approach that could leave Japan globally isolated. On the other, is a demographic nightmare that has forced the country to loosen its persistently stiff immigration pattern just to keep the economy functional. China's leadership strategy involves constructing a South China Sea island to safeguard its sprawling trading and debt-servicing network. Once completed, the East China Sea, over which both China and Japan sparred less than a decade ago, would shift to the front-line of attention, exposing more past wounds. Although an October 2018 China-Japan thaw, triggered no less by actual/potential US tariffs on both countries, may weave a much-needed pathway out of this imbroglio, all cannot remain tranquil on the eastern front when two countries compete to represent the single sun.
Astutely measuring this nightmare, Shinzo Abe is forcing Japan into an even more internationalist outlook: inviting more immigrants, loosening pathways for immigrants to acquire residency, extending trade to new markets, revamping developmental and technical aid, and reinitiating military armament. Just when Japan's security concerns increase, its economic capacities falter. Left lamentably amid no-longer-reliable friends, such as the United States, Japan must deal with adversaries, like China or North Korea, stubbornly refusing to treat it as an equal.
Japan's 'economic miracle' of the 1950s/1960s was dramatically ended by the 1974-5 petroleum-price quadrupling. Though it readjusted admirably to the changing circumstances so that it could again seriously threaten a steadily weakening US economy, by the 1990s, when neo-liberalism was in full bloom, protectionist Japan slid back into the doldrums: the 1989-90 recession went on to become the longest recession in the industrial world. Abe must navigate Japan around these choppy waters through internal reforms and forging equal external relations.
Compounding a malfunctioning economy has been a crippling sociological development: the slow but certain evaporation of Japan's much-fabled salarymen, who worked for 80 hours each week and at wages too low to raise a complete family. As they age, their more multidimensional children resemble less their workaholic father and housewife mother. Even with a free-pass to the same assembly-line job in the same company with the same dull pay as their father would get, or as housewives, Japan's youth struggles. Many women, for instance, turn to the emergent 'gig' economy (part-time jobs), while finding a husband remains so elusive that sociologist Yamada Masahiro calls them 'parasite singles' consuming their parent's pension. Technological changes have further restructured the work setting, demanding different and more intellectual skills than can be easily supplied, and full-blooded competition in the global market without the governmental supports of yesteryears. These will be hard to harness for a recession-plagued generation, while a time-bomb that could cripple any foreign leadership quest ticks on.
Abe's calculations led him to match China as best as he could, infusing a sense of strategic urgency few prime ministers before him brought to bear. Picking on fragments of well-intentioned past plans (especially the internationalisation of Yoshihiko Noda, Japan's fifth prime minister before Abe in as many years), Abe matched China's African forays, and countered its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by invoking other Asian partners.
Aid to China was slowed from the moment he rejoined as prime minister in 2012 (his 2006 tenure ended with health problems in 2007), until it was stopped in 2018, after 40 years. Then he took TICAD V (the fifth session of Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which began in 1993), dispatched Self-Defence Forces (SDFs) to combat piracy along African shores, with a base in Djibouti (precisely where China has a naval base).
Like China, Japan is playing up both soft-power and hard-power options. With the United States dropping out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which sought to commercially encircle China, Japan produced the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP-11) in September 2018, even inviting China on-board. Its logistics agreements over military base-sharing with India is supplemented by helping India build Iran's Chahabar port as a more convenient outlet for Afghanistan and Central Asia than Pakistan's China-built Gwador port. In spite of the US sanctions upon Iran, India and Japan continue with their Iranian businesses.
With Australia, India, and New Zealand, it offers a 'democratic' alternative to China's BRI project, together with a naval wing, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with New Zealand replaced by the United States), to patrol the India-Pacific Region for those democratic states to conduct trade. Its economic relations (and low-wage factories) across Latin America, also faces Chinese competition.
Japan may be more extended, committed, and constrained in its foreign policy reaches than ever before, but political/military cues guide the way more than economic ties, reversing the post-World War II pattern. Though Japan stands out as a potentially vital partner within any other Indian Ocean or Indo-Pacific Region alliance system, it must still court China given its ailments. Abe apart, Japan lacks the leadership for the occasion, and faces both a demographic ghost and economic sclerosis. Japan's vulnerability predicts a harrowing future without shoulders to lean on, and an Asia ready to rescue it.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.