How Japan Sees its Future

...And the very quality of caution and patience is likely to pay off in the long run...

...The answer to all these questions must be a tentative "No...

...It leads the world in shipbuilding, is the second largest producer of radios and television sets, third largest producer of steel, autos and watches...

...Japan, the wealthiest and most stable nation of Asia, would seem to be the natural leader of this vast Continent...

...As William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, has noted, "even the threat to security posed by Communist China has occasionally been as much a divisive as a consolidating force...

...But all of these, again, have been in the area of economic cooperation: In late 1965 the government succeeded in normalizing its relations with South Korea, quite a feat considering the preliminary lengthy and delicate negotiations with its proud ex-colony, while the Leftist opposition and numerous anti-Seoul Korean residents in Japan heckled in the wings...

...But for the moment Japan is content to improve its own standard of living and national assets, to depend on the U.S...

...That is why there were so many exchanges of visits last year between our leaders and those from other Asian countries...

...Or, at least, a "not yet...

...But the effect of these visits is too small to evaluate...

...The scene at the school house was as much a display that the Japanese value their democracy as an excuse for the men to discuss their tractors, and for the women to talk about their acquisition of the newest time-saving appliances??the signs of continuing prosperity...

...To Sato's credit, it must be pointed out that since assuming office following the resignation of the cancer-striken Ikeda in 1964, he has been more active diplomatically than his predecessor, whose sole concern seemed to be the nation's income doubling scheme...

...In the past 18 months, however, the Sato government has taken concrete actions that suggest Japan's emergence from its postwar hibernation...

...Even though it is now more than 20 years after the end of the War, we Japanese remain very conscious of it...

...You cannot really say we don't have a policy...

...We fear that Asian people might regard us as politically ambitious or aggressive...

...As a consolation prize, a Japanese heads the bank...

...While it will surely be some time before Japan assumes any major leadership role in the Asian community, it does seem to want to become a "contact point" between the diverse nations of that community through its participation and sponsorship of various economic conferences...

...Our industrial power is great...

...Suzuki's view is not the isolated feeling of a conservative rural farmer...

...In the same period, Japan quietly launched its own Peace Corps in Asia and enthusiastically supported the idea of an Asian Development Bank, matching the U.S...

...we are still cautious...

...A sub-editor of the mass-circulation and highly respected newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, who has been foreign correspondent in Europe and the United States, also insists that the election result would not change the direction of Japan's economic foreign policy...

...in Vietnam is questionable...

...Then he went on: "Deep in our hearts we would like to play some role in Asian affairs...

...Following up this first step, Japan hosted a Southeast Asian conference on agricultural development in December which focused on specific ways to increase food production, especially at the rice paddy level...

...After being prodded by the U.S., but in the interest of its own investments there as well, Japan late last year also called the "Tokyo Club" meeting of Indonesian creditors...

...While one may think of the Far East in regional terms for some purposes," Bundy added, "one must not delude oneself into thinking of it as an area anywhere near as homogeneous as the Western Europe of the Marshall Plan and oeec days...

...Japan had hoped to have the bank's headquarters in Tokyo??and it would seem to have been economically advantageous for its Asian members to have agreed to a site in Asia's financial capital...

...Instead of working concretely for higher wages, better housing, lower taxes, they consolidated all their energy into mass demonstrations against the berthing of U.S...

...Nor does farmer Suzuki, who served in the War, see any advantage in Japan becoming a dominant Asian power: "We tried it once and failed...

...If we were to try it again, I doubt whether we would succeed in holding these countries together...

...What they get in return they are grateful for...

...our target is to raise our standard of living to that of Europe or the U.S...

...Before we could begin to do this, we had to achieve certain targets to join the big boys...

...Yet, for all its potential power it seems content to remain a big factory and a friend to all, with a special relationship to the U.S...

...To sum up how Asia still feels about Japan, the consensus, as revealed in a recent Associated Press survey, is that of "uncomfortable neighbors...

...In the area of economic aid to Asia, Japan has been slow in fulfilling its repeated pledge to reach the internationally approved level of one per cent of Gross National Product...

...Last June, with some initial reluctance but no later regrets, Japan participated in the Korean-sponsored Asian and Pacific Foreign Ministers Conference (aspac...

...Bernard Krisher, a previous contributor to these pages, reports from Tokyo lor Newsweek magazine...

...Under the treaty, Japan agreed to give South Korea a $300 million outright aid grant, an additional $200 million in soft loans, and the promise of a million more on a commercial basis...

...Tokyo's Haneda airport practically became a Who's Who of Asia—everyone from Indonesia's Adam Malik and Sultan Hamengkubowono to the Philippines' Marcos and Burma's Ne Win came here...

...to say this publicly to the Japanese, who are so violently against anything that even mildly approaches militarism, would be political suicide...

...Korea and Taiwan wanted the nine to band together in a formal anti-Communist grouping, but Japan, mindful of its domestic politics and booming China trade, threw its weight toward making aspac loose in operation and moderate of purpose...

...Then, last April, the Japanese on their own initiative convened the Southeast Asian Ministerial Conference for Development, bringing the ministers of eight nations to Tokyo to discuss regional development plans...

...Then they drove off in their tractor to the modern new town school to vote...

...in 1965, .73 per cent, and more than 80 per cent of that went to Southeast Asia...

...He is said to believe privately that Japan should rearm...

...Under the treaty, reasoned our farmer, Japan was protected by America's nuclear umbrella and the Japanese, without footing expensive defense bills, could concentrate their energy on building their own economic prosperity...

...The Socialists, he complained, were too impractical...

...Why vote for a loser...

...Jts booming trade with Red China, for instance, strictly separates the economics from politics...

...They thought of themselves as a modern, industrialized country that had more in common with us than Asia...

...Since that war, we haven't been involved in fighting for 20 years and look at the result...

...The Democratic Socialists, he felt, had a good platform, but they were too small a party...

...nuclear-powered ships in Japanese ports or to protest the U.S...

...They make it seem like a two-way deal, fair and square, though they may be on the losing end sometimes...

...bombings in Vietnam...

...Since the election strengthened the government, Miyazawa visualizes a greater economic contribution to Asian aid programs, increased trade ties with neighbors, and more focus on world affairs??which were almost totally ignored in the crucial months before the election??but "I don't think we will play much of a political role...

...If you asked them to join a group, they wanted it to be oecd, ilo, gatt...

...As a seasoned Western diplomat and old Asia hand in Tokyo notes: "Up to two or three years ago, the Japanese didn't even want to feel like Asians...

...Forty-six million other Japanese also voted last January 29 in this country's 10th postwar election, which gave Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and his conservative Liberal Democratic party (ldp) a clear mandate to run Japan for four more years...

...A BIG FACTORY AND FRIEND TO ALL' How Japan Sees its Future By Bernard Krisher Tokyo On a cloudy Sunday four weeks ago, Kentaro Suzuki, a 55-year-old fairly well-to-do rice farmer in the small but average village of Tamura-machi, in Japan's northern Tohoku district, rose early, dressed, and watched the morning news on television in the dining room of his 200-year-old farmhouse while his wife slipped into her kimono...

...we've bten able to build up our country to its present prosperity...

...We have a great deal of initiative in the economic sense, but we don't associate ourselves with a very definite anti-Communist approach...

...Politically, Japan has an almost traumatic fear of failing again as it did in the War...

...Despite prodding from Washington to take a more active and constructive role among its neighbors, Japan continues to s-;e itself only in an economic role...

...Farmer Suzuki, for example, explained he voted for the ldp??as he has consistently, with most Japanese, since the end of the War??because he figured that even though it was not perfect it was still the best of the lot...

...Former Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda's main aim, you know, was to make our country rich...

...It has overtaken Germany in the production of cameras...

...200-million contribution...

...Also, in order to have power you must have a military force and we are against rearmament...

...I think just because we don't align ourselves, we are able to keep ourselves in a position to talk to the guys the U.S...

...This lesson has taught us not to rely on military force to improve our standard of living...

...Economically, Japan is the only advanced nation in Asia today and one of the world's industrial giants...

...With India's Jawaharlal Nehru, who once promisingly loomed as the leader of a neutral Asia, now gone from the scene...

...At any rate, our aim is not to dominate other countries...

...He scratched his head a moment and elaborated: "Before World War II, Japan was at war every five or 10 years and we spent a fortune to support our military adventures...

...We want to cooperate globally through the United Nations or other international agencies...

...We will be the salesman," he predicted, as we talked in a downtown Tokyo coffee shop over the roar of construction crews putting up another of the new elevated freeways that are changing the face of the capital...

...he did not like the fanaticism of its members...

...It was under ldp governments that the economy in recent years had grown an average of 10 per cent in real terms, higher than any other country in the world...

...the salesman...

...I fail to see Japan as a recognized political leader in Asia...

...Nine Asian nations attended the Seoul session, where machinery was established for strengthening solidarity and cooperation, safeguarding national independence, and developing national economies...

...Significantly, too, the Japanese themselves have not until recently given any serious thought to playing any postwar leadership role in Asia...

...He was equally suspicious of the Komeito (Clean Government party), an arm of the militant Buddhist Soka Gakkai sect...

...But in the past few years they have come to see themselves much more as Asians, even to the degree of telling Westerners that 'you don't understand us Asians.' " A Japanese Foreign Office official continues the theme: "We have been accused of being a 'timid giant.' But there are definite advantages to our policy of emphasizing economics...

...Another is the diversity of this land and water mass called Asia??the economic, climatic, political and cultural differences that for centuries have worked against any efforts for unity and regional cooperation...

...unlike the Socialist parties of Europe, their chief concern seemed to be not domestic reform but foreign policy...

...They wanted to dissolve the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty when it comes up for renewal in 1970, and what good would that be for Japan...

...Now that Prime Minister Sato has been given a mandate to run the government at least through the critical year of 1970??which most Japanese fear will be an ominous one because the Security Treaty comes up for renegotiation or abrogation on one year's notice??people are wondering where this tiny island nation, the seventh most populous in the world, will go from here...

...Having established our prestige, first we had to raise ourselves??reaching out to be in the ranks of the advanced countries...

...with the spreading chaos in Communist China??a power vacuum is waiting to be filled...

...Japan will remain the industrial center of Asia," he says...

...Thus, he concluded, although it would be a good thing for the country to have a strong opposition party to throw some fear and balance into the ldp, he did not feel the party was so bad it deserved to lose...

...Farmer Suzuki dismissed the Communists in a word for being a party that owed its allegiance to a foreign power (recently switched from Peking to Moscow...

...I don't know, perhaps we are over-sensitive and Asians don't really feel that way about us, but we fear that they do...

...Our priority now is Southeast Asia...

...Even the Latin America of today, with its enormous variations, is far more nearly a single common area than the Far East...

...Representatives of 20 institutions in 16 countries, ranging from Taiwan to Iran, came together to discuss mutual problems and the Asian bank...

...But we still are reluctant to do anything on our own, politically...

...But there apparently was enough anti-Japanese feeling to convince the majority that the bank should be located elsewhere...

...Whether he will now actively urge a stronger role in supporting the U.S...

...There was even the apocryphal story, maybe it was true, that General de Gaulle on first meeting Ikeda asked one of his aides, 'Is that the transistor salesman?' I'm afraid we are the same salesman...

...Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer predicts, as the dominant shaping force in Asia...

...for its security, to show some gesture of economic assistance to its poorer neighbors as befits an advanced nation, and to remain, as the Asahi man put it...

...It had, after all, succeeded in restoring a country left a shattered wreck by the War...

...Manila is said to have won out after the Philippine delegation did some behind-the-scenes lobbying, reminding the participants of Japan's wartime atrocities...

...Will Sato assume a more active political role toward his neighbors on the Continent...

...And the ldp seemed to be the only party that looked after the interests of the farmers...

...They wanted to caucus with America and Western Europe...

...Japan probably has the capacity to be much more active diplomatically than it is, but it still lacks both the will and the confidence...

...it has no diplomatic relations with the mainland...

...So the first step, our leaders feel, is to help the Japanese people and the country to prosper...

...Suzuki himself had been able to buy his tractor, a refrigerator, washing machine, electric rice cooker, new bathtub, and tv...

...Ours will be a gradual process...

...policy in Vietnam...

...with Indonesia's Sukarno, who saw himself as head of the "new emerging forces," ousted from power...

...except for trade ties, we do not know clearly in which direction to move...

...They do not make a hue and cry about it...

...can't reach...

...Is Japan, in effect, suddenly succeeding to bring about economically what it once failed to achieve militarily, its prewar dream of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere...

...Yet the ambivalent feeling about Japan still held by such places as the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong (in contrast to Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, where the feeling is generally warm) is only one of the forces working against a greater political role for Japan...

...As Ambassador Reis-chauer pointed out, "The only meaningful business of this conference could be a promise by Japan, the one advanced nation in attendance, that it would give greater economic aid to the others present...

...Japan's slight, intelligent Minister of the Economic Planning Agency, Kiichi Miyazawa, one of Sato's brain trusts, agrees with the editor...

...Opinions ranged from the vitriolic one of Yoon Chai Sool, an opposition politician in Seoul, who called Japan "a political prostitute" which deals with any country, Communist or not, providing it can make money, to the slowly growing attitude in Asia that was expressed by a student in Malaysia: "The Japanese help us quietly...

...Perhaps we are moving at a snail's pace toward playing a greater role in the world, but for the moment the Japanese people still seek national identity...

...While avoiding specific action, Sato has come out strongly??despite public and press opposition??in support of U.S...

...Will it loom in the coming years, as former U.S...

...In 1964 it was .45 per cent...

...Most recently, Japan played host to the regional conference of the Association of Asian National Development Banks...

...Indeed, it was basically the steadily improving standard of living, as well as a protest against the pro-Peking stand taken by the opposition Socialists at a time when China's Cultural Revolution seemed rather insane to the Japanese compared to their own stability, that returned the Liberals to power despite the recent Black Mist scandals and disclosures of some Cabinet corruption...