President Obama is on a state visit to Japan. It’s the first by a sitting U.S. president in almost 20 years. Therefore, you’d expect the media to be covering each step he takes on Japanese soil as if he were John Glen walking on the moon.
Yet his visit is competing for coverage not only with Monday’s “offering” by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Japan’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine to its war dead, but also with Justin Bieber’s visit to the country, which duly included his own ill-advised pilgrimage to this Shrine … as a cool tourist attraction. Incidentally, I’m flabbergasted and dismayed that the mainstream media continually report on the antics and musings of this teenage twit, as if what he says and does is relevant to anyone except the equally mindless twits who follow him on Twitter.
In any event, there’s simply nothing newsworthy about Abe, a hawkish nationalist, making this … offering. Even if he did so to signal his intent to put Japan on a war footing to prevent China from doing to its sovereign territory on the China Sea (i.e., annexing Senkaku Islands) what Russia did to Ukraine’s on the Black Sea (i.e., annexed Crimea).
After all, Japanese leaders have been making pilgrimages to this Shrine during spring and autumn festivals, as well as on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII, since it was first established in 1869. More to the point, Chinese and South Korean leaders have been hurling condemnations and hollow threats about these visits posing “extremely dangerous consequences” for almost as long.
As it happens, I’ve been commenting on this annual ritual for a number of years now – as I did most recently in “Japan and China Stoking North Korea-like Tensions,” April 24, 2013. Here’s an instructive excerpt:
These pilgrimages invariably incite militant outrage in China and South Korea – countries Japan invaded and/or occupied during that war and whose leaders decry these pilgrimages as a direct affront to their war dead…
How do you suppose the Poles, French, and British would feel if German chancellors made a similar show of annual pilgrimages to a shrine to Germany’s war dead, including Adolf Hitler and other Nazi war criminals? Surely you are aware that the Japanese committed atrocities against the Chinese and Koreans that were very much in kind to those the Germans committed against the Jews and other Europeans during World War II, no?
Yet, no matter how justified China and South Korea may be in their outrage, there has never been any real fear that the spat over Japan’s war shrine could escalate into full-scale war.
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On the other hand, apropos of war, it is newsworthy that Obama made a point of assuring Japan, and warning China, that the United States would honor its commitment to defend Japan if their backyard bickering over ownership of a chain of “resource-rich” islands in the South and East China Sea, which Japan now controls, becomes ballistic:
The president assured Japan that the Senkaku Islands are covered by a long-standing bilateral security treaty that obliges America to come to Japan’s defense.
‘The policy of the United States is clear — the Senkaku Islands are administered by Japan and therefore fall within the scope of . . . the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security,’ Obama said in a written reply to the newspaper. ‘And we oppose any unilateral attempts to undermine Japan’s administration of these islands,’ he said.
(The Japan Times, April 23, 2014)
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese reacted with even greater indignation over what they consider to be Obama’s “interference” in their territorial dispute with the Japanese than they did over Abe’s pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine.
The United States should reappraise its anachronistic hegemonic alliance system and stop pampering its chums like Japan and the Philippines that have been igniting regional tensions with provocative moves.
This, in part, is the almost farcical statement of protest they issued yesterday through the China state news agency Xinhua. It actually smacks of the kind of rhetorical temper tantrums the North Koreans routinely throw just for international attention.
But, like the North Koreans’ temper tantrums, this Chinese reaction will amount to little more than sound and fury signifying nothing. Not least because, no matter how emboldened they might be by Obama’s refusal to go to war with Putin over Ukraine, the Chinese dare not test Obama’s treaty obligation to defend Japan (or Taiwan); just as Putin dares not test his treaty obligation to defend fellow NATO countries, including the Baltic ones that border Russia.
Still, it’s an indication of the tightrope Obama is walking throughout Asia that he felt obliged to express disappointment over Abe’s pilgrimage in an overt attempt to appease the Chinese….
Of course, all of this managing and placating of petulant and bellicose egos will be entirely worth it if Obama can return home with adequate assurances that Japan will sign on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (“TPP”) – a trade agreement among the United States, Japan, and 10 other Asian countries.
If agreed – and there’s no guarantee given deeply rooted protectionism in Japan (especially for farmers and automakers) – the TPP would establish the biggest free trade area in history, accounting for 40 percent of global trade. Think NAFTA on steroids. This would be as much a crowning achievement for his presidential legacy in foreign affairs as passage of Obamacare is in domestic affairs.
Related commentaries:
Japan and China…
Japanese PM raises regional tensions…