Analysis : Japan’s Role Changing in Asia, Pacific : Tokyo’s New Diplomatic Assertiveness Has Washington’s Blessing

Only a few weeks before Secretary of State George P. Shultz stopped in Jakarta last month, the Indonesian regime had received another visitor from a less likely place: Tsutomo Kawara, the director general of the Japan Defense Agency.

“The Indonesian press noted that it was the first time any leading Japanese defense official had visited Jakarta in 45 years,” one senior U.S. diplomat in Asia reported afterward. “They didn’t mention that the last visit was by (Japanese Prime Minister Hideki) Tojo during World War II.”

Kawara’s visit symbolized how relationships are changing among the leading countries in Asia and the Pacific.

During Shultz’s recent 18-day tour of the region, he emphasized repeatedly that the United States intends to remain the dominant political and military power in the region--”the fundamental guarantor of the balance of power,” as he once put it.

Yet increasingly, the United States finds itself relying upon a partnership with Japan to buttress the American role in Asia.

U.S. officials are turning to Japan to help contribute much of the financial aid necessary to support the Philippine government of President Corazon Aquino and, indirectly, the continued American military presence in that island nation. The United States is working together with Japan to help South Korea protect the Summer Olympics from terrorism or a North Korean attack.

To neighboring countries in Asia, where the memories of World War II have not yet died, the prospect of an ever-more-powerful Japan remains as unsettling as ever.

Last year Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping told Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers that it was all right for Japan to become an economic power, but not a political or military one. According to a participant in the meeting, Lubbers answered that by his reading of history, it was unrealistic to hope a nation’s aspirations for power would stop at matters of finance.

This year there are more signs than ever that Japan is already taking the first step that Deng had feared.

With the assent and encouragement of the United States, Japan is planning its most assertive role since World War II in political and diplomatic affairs. According to a senior State Department official who traveled with Shultz in Asia, Japan has recently been undertaking “things that you wouldn’t have expected before.”

He cited several examples: Japan’s willingness to provide money to protect international navigation in the Persian Gulf; its support for multinational forces in the Sinai Peninsula; its pledge of financial aid for both Iran and Iraq if they end their eight-year war; its willingness to provide aid to Jordan.

“What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is a tremendous psychological change on the part of the Japanese,” said one Asian diplomat based in Tokyo. “It’s in the way they look at the world. The inhibitions, the timidity, have gone.”

U.S. Encouraging Japan

U.S. officials seem inclined to encourage Japan’s emergence as a political and diplomatic power, so long as Japan exerts its power in support of the United States and does not take the second step feared by Deng--rapidly developing its military capabilities.

Asked whether Japan’s recent efforts to assert greater influence should be considered a positive or negative development, a senior U.S. official who traveled with Shultz replied: “I personally think it’s positive. The negative side would be that there’s another actor on the block. . . . It just adds another voice to the things that we’re trying to do.”

One of the most important functions the United States serves in Asia is as a restraint on the development of Japanese military power at a time when China, Southeast Asia and most Japanese themselves do not want rapid increases in Japan’s defense spending.

Denies Military Ambitions

Japan itself is careful to emphasize regularly and publicly that it has no military ambitions.

“Japan is taking a course without precedent in the history of mankind,” Japanese Foreign Minister Sosuke Uno told a recent meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). “Although it has the second-largest economic capability in the free world, Japan refuses to become a military power, and maintains an exclusively defensive posture.”

For now, Japan seems content to let the U.S. military power keep the peace in the Pacific, while the United States is turning increasingly to Japanese economic power to help pay the bills.

Yet the United States is not ready to regard Japan as the world’s pre-eminent financial power. At virtually every stop in Asia, Shultz took great pains to dispel the notion that the United States was beset by economic problems.

In fact, perceptions of American power vary widely in Asia.

“This ‘United States in decline’ business, I don’t think anybody really believes,” said one Asian diplomat in Beijing. “In Asia, you can’t even talk about strategic balance between the two superpowers. If you talk about ground forces, the Soviet Union is holed up in a little corner of the region. If you look at sea lanes, lines of communication, the United States is in as sound a position as it was at the beginning of the decade.”

By contrast, another Asian official, based in Tokyo, argued that both the United States and the Soviet Union have entered a period of “relative decline.”

“There is some relative decline for the United States,” he said, “but most people in Asia are concerned about the pace of that decline and about what will take America’s place as its role diminishes.”

Even Shultz acknowledged that in at least one important respect, the United States will be less important for Asians in the future than it has been. Repeatedly, he warned Asian officials that they should develop other markets and should stop relying on the United States to be the primary consumer of their goods.

Some Asian officials voice the fear that their countries may be left behind as global trading patterns are reorganized. They worry what will happen if the U.S.-Canadian free trade agreement takes effect next year and the European Communities achieves full integration in 1992. They are encouraged that Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita emerged during the June economic summit in Toronto as a spokesman for much of Asia.

“Japan is now trying to lead some kind of Asia-Pacific grouping,” one Asian diplomat said. “They have realized that the way to great-power status is through Asia.”