Michael Richardson: Hardliners cause regional jitters

Political relations between China and Japan look likely to remain strained for the long term, following a cabinet revamp in Tokyo and moves by the Government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to tighten military ties with the United States and revise Japan's pacifist constitution to give the armed forces a more active role in international security.

This worries other Asian countries. They see the spectre of increasingly sharp division between China on the one side and Japan and its US ally on the other - an axis that may put them under growing pressure to choose sides in a high stakes struggle for dominance, instead of being able to play one power off against another to gain benefits from all.

Japan's hardline policy is playing into the hands of China by making it easier for Beijing to cultivate closer ties with Asian countries worried by Tokyo's increasing intransigence and the easing of restraints on the Japanese military.

Reflecting those concerns, Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper published last weekend that Japan's failure to close the chapter on its militarist past had cost the country the support of many Asian nations over its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

"Unless Japan recognises what has happened in the past, it is difficult for many countries to support Japan," he said. "Many countries here were victims of Japanese invasion during World War II. So the element of distrust is there."

Koizumi, who has said that he will step down next September, put the three men considered most likely to succeed him in prominent cabinet posts in the recent political reshuffle.

Two of the three are widely seen as hardliners, wary of China's military modernisation and openly supportive of the Japanese leader's repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine despite strong objections from Beijing and other Asian neighbours of Japan, including South Korea. Yasukuni enshrines 14 convicted World War II criminals as well as nearly 2.5 million other Japanese war dead.

The two hawks are Shinzo Abe, the new chief cabinet secretary, and Taro Aso, who was appointed foreign minister. Abe has been pressing for Japan to impose economic sanctions on North Korea, in contrast to South Korea's policy of engagement, although he appeared last week to be softening his stance.

For his part, Aso angered South Koreans in 2003 when, as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's policy research body, he claimed that Koreans changed their names to Japanese ones voluntarily during Japan's harsh colonial rule on the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

Following the cabinet reshuffle, the Chinese foreign ministry called on Japanese leaders to show political will to improve bilateral ties. The official Xinhua news agency was blunter. It noted that Koizumi's Yasukuni visits had prevented a summit meeting with Chinese leaders from being held, adding that "should the premier and his hardline aides stick to the current stance, bilateral relations will have little chance to rebound".

Beijing will also be uneasy over the LDP proposal to advance revisions to the constitution that would drop a clause outlawing war and expand the role of the self-defence force, even though the changes are unlikely to be approved for several years. Of more immediate concern to China, however, is the agreement on October 29 by Japan and the US to reshape their alliance to take account of new challenges, including the ballistic missile threat from North Korea and China's acquisition of new weapons that will enable it not just to seize Taiwan but to project power and strike targets over increasingly long ranges.

The accord on realigning the US-Japan alliance stressed the need for joint planning, training and operations, and information-sharing.

While 7000 US Marines, with their command and training centres, are to be withdrawn from the strategically located southern Japanese island of Okinawa to the US island of Guam in the western Pacific, some 30,000 American service personnel will remain based in Japan.

The US and Japan said that close defence co-operation "is essential to dissuade destabilising military buildups, to deter aggression and to respond to diverse security challenges." To help strengthen the bilateral alliance, the US will deploy an X-band radar system to Japan as part of an integrated ballistic missile defence system, which China has long opposed. The US also announced that it would, for the first time, base a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Japan from 2008.

China will, of course, watch how these political and military developments in Japan play out. But the Xinhua commentary warned that the fallout was "spilling over" into Sino-Japanese economic relations.

These trade and investment ties are of vital importance to both countries. If they are undermined by the fraying of other strands in the relationship it will be a sure sign of how serious the rancour has become.

* The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.