Ever the Reluctant Debutante : Japan hits new prime minister with major political embarrassment

Japan seems determined to go on shunning the more activist role in global affairs that its status as an economic superpower warrants.

The upper house of Parliament this week failed to act on a measure, passed earlier by the lower house, to permit the Cabinet to send unarmed Japanese troops overseas to assist in U.N. peacekeeping missions or emergency relief efforts.

Current law, growing out of the American-influenced postwar constitution, prohibits sending members of the armed forces outside the country. The shelved legislation, done in mainly by extraneous factional political disputes, would have symbolized what many see as an overdue willingness to engage more committedly in international affairs. It could be revived early next year, but few Japanese political observers think there’s any chance it will be.

The failure of the measure is a major embarrassment for Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, who promised on taking office little more than a month ago that its passage would be his first legislative priority. Miyazawa wanted the bill to be law before President Bush arrives in Tokyo Jan. 7. Miyazawa has described the measure as concrete evidence of Japan’s readiness to play a more positive, visible role in world affairs.

China, Korea and other East Asian countries that were occupied and brutalized by Japan before and during World War II were not happy with the proposed change in law. The strict limits of the legislation should have helped calm their understandable anxieties. No Japanese forces would have been sent where they were unwelcome, and in every case they would have gone as part of a larger international effort.

And so Japan remains in the increasingly anomalous position it has occupied for so long. Although it is the world’s second most powerful economy, and aspires to a permanent U.N. Security Council seat, Japan nonetheless remains--apparently contentedly--only a marginal player in world political affairs.

Critics--there are plenty of them in Congress--who say that Japan doesn’t carry its fair burden where international security is concerned have something new to complain about.