Japan in Search of a Foreign Policy : Recent moves have been tentative, but welcome

In a new test of diplomacy, Japanese officials will travel to Pyongyang this week for a historic meeting with North Koreans. The visit--the first semi-official contact between the two countries in 45 years--poses a new challenge and opportunity for Tokyo.

If ever there was a time for Japan to display a coming of age as a world leader, it should be now. As a rich country, Japan is expected to engage in diplomacy commensurate with its economic clout. Instead, Tokyo’s proclivity for diplomatic snafus and delay, demonstrated most recently by its unsure touch in the Persian Gulf crisis, raises questions about its ability to craft a global role in the post-Cold War era.

The protracted domestic debate on its part in containing Saddam Hussein ultimately cost Tokyo far more than the $4 billion in nonmilitary aid that it pledged to support the military effort in Saudi Arabia--and to Turkey, Jordan and Egypt, countries hardest hit by economic sanctions against Iraq. Tokyo lost face.

“Japan is an economic superpower, (but a) political pygmy,” observes Chalmers Johnson, a professor at UC San Diego’s graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. “When the chips are down, Japan does not act like a nation-state. It is behaving like a monstrous trading company.”

Harsh words for a proud country that, compelled after World War II by its U.S.- sponsored constitution to forgo military forces, began a single-minded pursuit of economic growth and development. But that approach did work to rebuild Japan as it ducked the contentious ideological and political issues abroad.

Diplomatically, Tokyo has been a reluctant ally, retreating to the sidelines and avoiding the high profile when possible. When uncertain of its role, it retreats. Too often, Tokyo moves no faster than its consensus-driven bureaucracy, which typically responds only when goaded and harshly criticized. Then it returns to the status quo.

But a glimmer of new assertiveness surfaced briefly this summer at the Houston economic summit. Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu successfully secured support from the six other industrialized countries for Tokyo’s move to restore loans to China and to press the Soviet Union for the return of the Kuril Islands.

Tokyo is beginning to exhibit, albeit reluctantly, some of the pragmatic flexibility with which it so deftly shapes its economic policy. Japan’s Diet currently is debating a U.N. Peace Cooperation bill, which would allow Japan to send self-defense personnel overseas.

Tokyo soon may face another opportunity to commit troops if Cambodia accepts a U.N.-administered cease-fire proposal and Tokyo is asked to participate in a peacekeeping force.

Tokyo has long coveted a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. It is hard to imagine a new world order in which Japan doesn’t have a place at the head table, where it belongs.

But it must first demonstrate firmly that it is no longer a world economic leader in search of its political self.