Angel Jaramillo Torres
Throughout its history, Japan has had moments of opening up to the world and occasions when it has looked inwards. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his book The Clash of Civilizations that Japan was a civilization in itself.
This has been the product of the capacity of Japanese genius to engage in dialogue with the world while at the same time conserving and enhancing its own culture. After receiving its first great influence from China, which consolidated the Ritsuryo State, the Japan of the Heian period – with its aristocratic culture, the hegemony of the powerful Fujiwara clan, and its capital in Kyoto – recreated an initial form of Japanese identity. Murasaki Shikibu’s novel, known as Genji Monogatari, portrays the gentle and intimate ways of life at Court, which could be considered the best description of Japan before the apogee of the Shoguns. The battle between two powerful families (the Taira and the Minamoto) culminated in the Genpei Wars. The result of this was the imposition of a military-led government that did not end until the Meiji reform that ended the Japan of the Tokugawa, the last military dynasty. By then, Japan needed to stop being so self-absorbed.
With the Meiji, the land of the rising sun reopened to the world and did so with such success that it quickly closed the technological gap with the West. The impetus of Japan’s opening up led its leaders to embrace two of the three political regimes of European modernity: liberalism and fascism. The former was adopted – or attempted – during the Taisho period (1912-1926) and the latter during the first part of the Showa period (1926-1989).
After the great catastrophe known as the Second World War – with its dystopia of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Japan turned the samurai of arms into the samurai of commerce. For three decades (the 60s, 70s, and 80s), Japan was the world’s greatest economic dynamo and even entered into commercial competition with the United States, with whom, on the other hand, it signed a security agreement which, with various transformations, is still in force.
Due to a major crisis – both financial and real estate on a large scale – in the 1990s, Japan entered a trance of economic and spiritual disorder. Out of this kind of stagnation, the smiling and charismatic Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, seemed to pull Japan out. This ended with two assassin’s bullets on July 2, 2022, although it is true that Abe had already resigned due to ulcerative colitis.
Today, the new leader, Shigeru Ishiba, is trying to navigate the Japanese ship through the stormy waters of the Trump era.
So far, he has met with him in the White House, where a series of agreements have been reached. First, Ishiba promised Trump that Japan would increase its investments to one trillion dollars. Secondly, the Japanese prime minister assured Trump his country would buy significant quantities of liquefied natural gas from Alaska. Thirdly, Ishiba tried to convince the US president that the ambition of the Japanese company Nippon Steel to acquire majority ownership of the U.S. steel company was not a purchase but an investment. For now, Trump seems to have accepted this idea. Fourthly, there is the question of Taiwan. For now, Ishiba has managed to twist Trump’s arm into accepting that Taiwan’s security and independence are fundamental to maintaining the balance in the Indo-Pacific. It is clear that the autonomy of the island of Formosa prevents Beijing from establishing strategic bases along the South China Sea all the way to the Middle East, a region that is fundamental for China’s energy supply.
The future of the region will depend, to a large extent, on the ability of Japanese politicians and their advisors – led by Yoshimasa Hayashi – to convince Trump that Japan’s security is key to a stable Indo-Pacific.
Otherwise, the country of the Chrysanthemum could reconsider its pacifist Constitution and be tempted to rearm. A new version of Imperial Japan of the 1930s and 1940s would be bad news for the world.
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