Economic Dominance, Old Aggression Are Factors : Japanese Still Have Few Friends in Asia

Standing at attention on Aug. 15, 1945, a glitteringly hot day, Tamio Kawakami, a 20-year-old soldier in an Imperial Army unit deployed on the coast of Japan in anticipation of an American invasion, listened to the first broadcast that Emperor Hirohito had ever made to the Japanese people.

“He said a mumble-jumble of words, but it was clear that the meaning was, ‘We are defeated,’ ” Kawakami recalled.

After the troops were dismissed, Kawakami’s commander called him aside.

“You are happy, aren’t you?” the commander said, accusingly.

“I thought he was going to punch me if I said yes. But when I said, ‘The future is going to be very difficult,’ he let me walk away.”

Much Different Beliefs

Today, Kawakami, the slightly built son of a former chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, is chief of the party’s international bureau and a member of Parliament.

His beliefs have little in common with the foreign policy of the governing Liberal Democratic Party. But Kawakami and many conservatives share an awareness that Japan has few friends in Asia 40 years after its invasions and colonial rule of neighboring nations ended.

“Even now, I still have that feeling of 40 years ago--that the future will be difficult,” he said. “We still haven’t found a path for Japan” to replace the one that came to a dead end on that hot August day, he said, adding that “Asians are still suffering because of Japan’s actions.”

While economies throughout Asia have received a boost from Japan’s postwar growth, the gains have been an accidental byproduct of Japan’s trade and aid policies, Kawakami said. Japan’s economic presence is “immense,” but Japan’s success itself has caused friction because “human relations” between Japanese and other Asians are not what they should be, he said.

Chinese Deficit

Just last month, China issued its first complaint about its trade imbalance with Japan. It had been the only Asian and Pacific nation that had not previously expressed some kind of economic gripe against Japan.

Memories of the havoc that Japan wreaked upon Asia, if not of the suffering that the Japanese themselves experienced, have faded here. Those that remain often produce mixed feelings.

“There is a Japanese saying that ‘Even a thief has 30% justification in logic,’ ” a 64-year-old Japanese taxi driver who fought in Manchuria said. “It was not good that Japan wanted to make itself richer at its neighbors’ expense, but it is understandable that Japan felt the temptation to do so. Japan was so poor that fathers had to sell their daughters to feed their families.

“I disagree with young people today who believe that everything from that (prewar and wartime) period was bad,” he went on. “We fought the United States--a country with all that land and riches--for four years. I am proud of that.”

Other Asians Remember

But as the Japanese rediscover every once in a while, the old days are not forgotten in other Asian capitals.

Three years ago, when the Education Ministry ordered revisions in textbooks to minimize Japanese atrocities in China and the brutality of Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of Korea, both foreign nations erupted in popular and official protests.

Under pressure, Japan promised through official diplomatic channels that it would rescind the revisions. And in both South Korea and China, the governments launched projects to erect memorial halls commemorating Japan’s abuses so that future generations would not forget.

In 1981, South Korea cited the colonial past in demanding that Japan give it $6 billion in government loans, despite South Korea’s ability to obtain funds through commercial sources. Japan finally struck a compromise in January, 1983, by agreeing to give the Seoul authorities $4 billion in loans over a seven-year period.

“It is not a happy situation to have a neighbor of ours cling forever to a defiant attitude,” said Takashi Hosomi, 65, head of the government’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund. “The attitude was, ‘If that can be corrected with money, let’s help them.’. . . . Four billion dollars is--well, I wouldn’t say cheap--but at least acceptable.”

He added, “I won’t say there is no guilty consciousness (on the part of government leaders).” But “ordinary Japanese don’t have a guilty conscience (about the colonial rule of Korea). It’s a matter they don’t concern themselves with. But we have now come to understand that with the great gap in perception (between Japanese and Koreans), we cannot get along with South Korea.

“No victimizer ever perceives (himself as) having been a victimizer, but all victims always perceive having been victimized. . . . The strong never understand the suffering of the weak. . . . We are teaching ourselves now that we were probably the victimizer.

“The Japanese people now are digesting (that idea) intellectually, but they do not have an emotional feeling that it was bad,” he said.

‘Bad Things’ Done

Nearly all Japanese accept the idea that Japan did “bad things” to the rest of Asia, said Prof. Masashi Nishihara, 48, of Japan’s Defense Academy. But the feeling of guilt is tempered by a sense that Japan was not alone to blame.

For example, he said, many Japanese believe that their country was forced to attack Pearl Harbor and invade Southeast Asia to secure resources against an American, British, Canadian and Dutch embargo on oil shipments to Japan.

The reason the Western powers gave for the embargo--retaliation for Japan’s invasion of China proper after its seizure of Manchuria in 1931--is equated in the Japanese mind with European nations’ carving up China into spheres of influence.

The continuing reign of Emperor Hirohito, 84, the man in whose name the Japanese fought, also has served to soften the few official apologies that Japan has made for the war.

To the United States, during a visit in 1975, Hirohito expressed regret for “the most unfortunate war.” To China, he regretted “an unhappy incident in the long history of Japan-China relations.” And to South Korea, he said he regretted “an unfortunate past during a period in this century.”

Hiroshi Takeuchi, 54, research director of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan Ltd., said: “To admit that Japan did bad things or that the war was a mistake would be to admit that 2 1/2 million Japanese--people whom many Japanese today consider a part of their own (psychological) ‘self’--died for nothing. . . . In 50 years or so, when no Japanese is alive who had relatives killed in the war, maybe the emperor (at that time) will be able to say the war was a mistake.”

‘Their Heart Is White’

The problem, however, runs deeper than how to deal with the past.

“Japan is very isolated in Asia in ethics,” Takeuchi said. “Asians say Japanese are like a banana: Their face is yellow but their heart is white.

“An Indonesian complained to me that when the NHK Philharmonic came to Indonesia and played Beethoven--yes, it did give the impression that standards are high in Japan. But he told me that when Indonesians want to hear Beethoven, they will invite an orchestra from the Netherlands. ‘If the NHK Philharmonic visits, naturally it would play Japanese, Korean or Chinese music, we think,’ he said. ‘But you Japanese are white at heart,’ the banker told him.

“They think we are siding with the United States and Europe and neglecting Asia,” Takeuchi added.

Peter Hazelhurst, a correspondent here for a Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, once responded to a query from a friend in the Japanese Foreign Ministry as to why he hadn’t seen Hazelhurst for several weeks.

“I just got back from a trip to Asia,” the official said.

The Japanese diplomat, Hazelhurst recalled, was taken aback but needed no explanation.

Only a handful of Japanese scholars have accumulated expertise on the rest of Asia, and very few Japanese students are studying Asian history and culture, the Socialists’ Kawakami complained. Other Asians, however, still put more emphasis on the study of Western nations than on Japan, he said.

Even Malaysia, which has proclaimed a “look east” policy (to Japan and South Korea), sends only several hundred students to study here, compared with thousands sent to the United States and England, he said.

Opening Doors to China

Kawakami said establishment of friendly relations between Japan and China has been the saving grace in Japan’s relations with Asian neighbors--the one exception to what he called a traditional policy of using Asia for Japan’s own benefit. Even that, however, took too long, he complained. (Diplomatic ties with Peking were not established until 1972.)

Japan’s present commitment to help China in its modernization, he said, “holds great political and cultural merit. But without further efforts, another period of instability in Japan-China relations could occur. And behind the shining light of Japan-China relations is the shadow that Southeast Asia fears growing cooperation between the two giants of Asia.”

He defined Japan’s dilemma as part of an old debate over whether it should act as a “big nation” or as a “small nation.”

Before World War II, “big nation” advocates here insisted that Japan had to wield influence beyond its borders--a theory that led to the colonization of Taiwan and Korea and Japan’s adventures in Manchuria and the main parts of China, Kawakami said. Defeat discredited “big nation” advocates, and the postwar American occupation imposed a “small nation” constitution, which bans military adventures.

“But economically, Japan is big. Therefore, the problem (of finding a path for Japan) is very difficult,” the Socialist official noted.

The late Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, while serving as foreign minister from 1972 to 1974, commented that the Japanese “are trying to decide whether they want Japan to become a big nation or a small nation--whether they want to assume a role of leadership in the world or just be left alone to enjoy themselves.”

He added, “It’s very difficult to be foreign minister with such conditions.”

Which ‘Club’ to Join?

Nowadays, the big nation-vs.-small nation dilemma takes the form of tearing Japan between its ties with the Western industrial democracies, the “Big Nation Club,” and its roots in Asia, which to many Japanese represent the “Small Nation Club.”

Deeply gratified by Japan’s inclusion in the annual seven-power economic summit meetings of the leaders of non-Communist industrial nations, Japanese diplomats in recent years have started talking about Japan as “a member of the Western camp.” Yet, they also stress that Japan must fulfill its international responsibilities primarily in Asia.

Hosomi said Japan needs to find a goal for itself but cannot.

Possessing a sense of mission “is rather simple for countries like the United States and the Soviet Union, for whom national goals are preordained,” he said. But for “second-grade countries like Japan and West Germany,” he said, it is not so easy.

More and more, Japanese realize that many of their problems, not only with Asia but with the rest of the world, stem from the self-centered nature of their culture.

Last month, the Foreign Ministry, in an annual summary of foreign policy, declared that Japan must make sacrifices to “internationalize” itself. Almost simultaneously, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced that it was launching a study on how to internationalize Japanese life style and consciousness.

Although a consensus in favor of internationalization appears to be emerging, definitions of what it is supposed to mean vary wildly.

To some, it simply means speaking English. To others, it involves opening up hearts and minds to embrace international concerns.

“I’m really embarrassed as to how few refugees we have taken from Indochina,” said Nishihara of the Defense Agency.”But we have never been brought up with non-Japanese. So it is difficult for us to think of living together with people who don’t speak our language.”

At the time of the 1979 Tokyo summit, when President Jimmy Carter forced the leaders of the six other industrial democracies to discuss the non-agenda item of Indochinese refugees, Japan had granted permanent residence to only two refugees. In response to Carter’s appeal, the government agreed to allow as many as 500 Indochina refugees to live in Japan. Now, Japan has raised the limit to 10,000.

‘Racism, Provincialism’

Japan’s coolness toward foreigners, Nishihara said, “may be a symbol of racialism, provincialism and a lack of confidence. It’s really a lack of our international experience. We were able to be an island nation and live in isolation (for centuries).”

Culture often clashes in two directions. Just as Japanese children frequently gawk at foreigners, particularly Westerners, and shout, “Gaijin! Gaijin! (Foreigner! Foreigner!),” Japanese traveling abroad are frequently irritated by being treated the same way.

The proprietor of a school that teaches how to make artificial flowers was disturbed this summer when she took a group of her students on a tour to Europe and noticed adults pointing at her group and saying to each other, “Japan! Japan!”

“We felt like we were being looked at like animals in a zoo,” she recalled. “At least, in Japan, it’s usually just children who do that.”

So far, a consensus within the Liberal Democratic Party that Japan should become a “big nation”-style donor of foreign aid has emerged as the only global role on which ruling circles have reached agreement.

Takashi Ishihara, chairman of the Nissan Motor Co., said Japan should double--to about 5% of its gross national product--the combination of its spending on economic aid and defense, with the bulk of it going to aid.

The government is now moving toward doubling its development aid in the next seven years, which would raise official assistance from last year’s $4.3 billion--second only to the United States, which is giving about twice as much--to nearly $9 billion by 1992.

On the private level, too, Tokyo is emerging as a major source of financing for foreign countries. On July 12, the Bank of Tokyo, as lead manager of a syndicate of 66 Japanese financial institutions, announced a $2-billion loan to the Foreign Exchange Bank of China. It was the largest single loan ever put together in Japan.

Domestic Emphasis

The fundamental trouble, however, remains Japan’s inward-looking nature, Hosomi said.

“All politicians want to become vice ministers. But none of them want to become vice minister of the Foreign Ministry. If they do, they get defeated in the next election,” he said. What is important to Japanese voters “is the pork barrel.”

“Instead of talking about how to deal with the United States or the Soviet Union, politicians declare, ‘If you elect me, I will work hard for all of you. I will carry out pork-barrel politics. I absolutely will not allow agricultural imports to be liberalized. Please give me your vote.’ And the people think that kind of politician is good,” Hosomi said.

“Japan is not likely to exercise strong international leadership in the foreseeable future,” Harvard Prof. Ezra F. Vogel, author of “Japan as No. 1,” said in May.

“It it not just that Japan prefers to take a low posture to keep the world open for its exports. It is that Japan has little basis of positive appeal to other countries.”

Within Japan, Vogel said, Japanese share great mutual concern for each other “and are moved by spiritual appeal.” But such idealism, he said, is blocked at the seacoast from embracing the considerations of other countries by “the narrow pursuit of national self-interest.”

Japan urges its people to develop will to defend themselves. China urges superpowers to work toward disarmament. Stories, Page 16.