Although the US was happy for Japan to act as its proxy, seeing its close involvement in China’s reform as pushing the country towards capitalism, it consistently opposed this role leading to any closer political integration of Japan with East Asia. Since 1945 the US has maintained ‘implacable opposition to any moves towards Japanese involvement in an East Asian community’ or any proposed reorientation of Japan’s policies in Asia that might tend to make Japan more politically independent. For example, when the Cold War ended Japan put forward a proposal for ‘cross recognition’ whereby China and Russia would normalise relations with South Korea, while Japan and South Korea normalised relations with North Korea, with the aim of laying the basis for a new ‘East Asian commonwealth’. The US intervened to ‘caution’ against this and reasserted its veto over any independent Japanese diplomatic initiatives in the region.
Similarly, the US objected when Japan’s response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was to propose an independent Asian Development Fund as a source of loans and short-term liquidity outside of the IMF, whose prescriptions Japan believed had deepened the crisis. It dropped the suggestion. It also gave in to US pressure to stay out of the AIIB.
This ultimate subordination to the demands of the US was most starkly illustrated by the failure of the 2009–12 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government’s short-lived attempt to plot just such an ‘Asian’ course. The electoral success of Hatoyama’s DPJ in 2009 – virtually the sole break in the dominance of the pro-US LDP in post-war Japanese politics – was achieved on a platform of pursuing a foreign policy more independent of the US, symbolised by its pledges to close the base at Okinawa, to improve relations with China and seek to develop a regional trade bloc with South Korea and China, an ‘Asia-Pacific community’ modelled on the EU.
The DPJ’s ‘new growth strategy’, which was based on this turn towards Asia, made sense at many levels given the complementarities of China and Japan’s economies and the stagnation in Japan’s exports to the US. But the attempt foundered in the face of intransigent US hostility. Locked out by the US, snubbed by Obama and forced to concede on Okinawa, Hatoyama was gone before 2010 was out, an outcome largely put down to the US. The DPJ government limped on for a further two years, but resumed Japan’s previous course, adopting the harsher toned policy towards China demanded by the US’s rising priority to corral its Asian allies into a bloc against China. With the return to power of the LDP in 2012 all suggestion of a political and economic ‘turn to Asia’ was abandoned, and instead Abe took Japan into the TPP negotiations.
The result has been that, despite the synergies between Japan’s economy and those of China and its other neighbours, rather than emerging in the twenty-first century to play a leading role within a group of successful East Asian economies, instead Japan is politically distanced from its neighbours and a rather isolated if powerful presence in the region.
