Japan’s Conciliatory Policy Toward Myanmar Is Red Flag for Washington

Japan is pressing ahead with a troubling idea of how it and America should deal with the rest of Asia.

Let’s divide up our roles, Tokyo in effect tells Washington. You play the bad cops, and we’ll be the good cops. You Americans make the threats, and we Japanese will distribute the rewards. You be the tough-guy superpower, and we’ll run around as the sympathetic sugar daddy.

Americans seem to be too naive or too inattentive to have thought about the implications of this curious division of labor Tokyo apparently is suggesting. But they should. For in effect, if not intent, Japan is moving in the direction of undermining American policy toward Asia.

In the process, Tokyo is also giving credence to some of its severest critics, such as Japan scholar Chalmers Johnson, who says the Japanese government expects the United States to retreat from Asia over the next decade and is quietly, gradually preparing for what happens in the region after the Americans fade away.

The best case study of Japan’s approach is its policy toward Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, and the military junta called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Military officials in Myanmar massacred thousands of civilians during demonstrations in 1988. The junta reluctantly agreed to hold parliamentary elections in 1990, but then refused to honor the results or leave office after opposition forces led by Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory at the polls.

Threatened by her popularity, the junta ordered Suu Kyi detained for “endangering the state” and held her under house arrest for six years. She was finally released in July amid talk of new efforts toward political reconciliation in Myanmar.

Since then, however, it has become increasingly clear that Myanmar’s generals viewed the release of the Nobel Peace laureate as the end, not the beginning, of its steps toward an easing of repression. They have refused to make compromises with Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, which after all won more than 60% of the votes in the 1990 election.

The junta has stationed soldiers outside the homes of opposition officials. Last month, state-run newspapers in Myanmar suggested Suu Kyi was a traitor and said she and her pro-democracy colleagues would be “annihilated” if they made the country “unstable.”

Within Washington, there have been some internal divisions about policy toward Myanmar. But on the whole, the U.S. policy has been relatively firm: The Clinton administration has tried to exert as much pressure as possible on the military junta to give up the power it seized six years ago.

Japan is another story. It has shown a disturbing willingness to give recognition, legitimacy and benefits to the junta.

Last summer, soon after the release of Suu Kyi, the Japanese government announced it was opening the way for Myanmar to begin receiving foreign aid from Tokyo once again. So-called Overseas Development Assistance funds from Japan to Myanmar, which had been cut off in 1988, began flowing this fall when Tokyo approved a $16-million grant for a nursing school in Yangon (formerly Rangoon).

When asked, Japanese officials defend their more conciliatory policy as merely another way of doing what the United States wants: encouraging the military to open up to democracy. One of Tokyo’s top officials for Myanmar, Shigeo Matsutomi, director of the First Southeast Asia Division within Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the rounds in Washington last week, visiting the White House, the State Department, Congress and some journalists to talk about Japan’s dealings with the military junta.

Matsutomi’s pitch was sophisticated. He did not challenge American policy toward Myanmar. Indeed, he seemed to praise and encourage it: You Americans approach Myanmar with a clenched fist, and there are advantages to that tough approach, he said. At the same time, he went on, Japan wants to persuade the generals through “dialogue” and to use its development funds as a “carrot” to persuade the generals to change their ways. America should use its clout as a military superpower, and Japan will use its economic leverage.

Japanese officials seem to be executing their new Myanmar policy in a fairly slow and careful way. This fall, Japan was talking about giving Myanmar a second infusion of foreign aid with a $48-million project to improve electric power in Yangon. But Tokyo held up the loan after the junta toughened its policies toward Suu Kyi and her allies in the National League for Democracy.

“In the current situation [in Myanmar], it is extremely difficult [to give more foreign aid],” explained Matsutomi, who has visited Myanmar four times in the past year.

However, you can see the pressures at work in Tokyo from a recent statement issued by the Keidanren, Japan’s most powerful business lobby. Last month, the Keidanren urged the government to resume lending to Myanmar immediately. It said holding up on foreign aid was one of the most important roadblocks to better business ties between Japan and Myanmar.

For the United States, the problem is not in how well or badly Japan carries out its resumption of foreign aid to Myanmar. It is much more fundamental: The whole concept of Japan playing good cop to America’s bad cop in Asia is flawed in the first place.

The conciliatory policy allows Japan to have it both ways. Japan can tell the junta that it is working to moderate America’s tough policy on Myanmar, while telling Washington that it is attempting to ease the Myanmar regime’s hard-line opposition to democracy. Tokyo’s policy permits it to give the foreign aid which, as the Keidanren knows, Japan has historically used as a spur to trade and other business activity.

Japan’s approach conveniently opens the way for it to curry favor with the rest of Southeast Asia, while leaving the United States as the odd man out. Other countries in the region, like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, have long favored a policy of “constructive engagement” toward the Myanmar junta. Japan now seems to be lining up more closely with these countries and breaking ranks with the Americans.

It may have the ring of plausibility for Tokyo to talk about a division of roles on Myanmar, with the United States wielding clout as a military superpower and Japan using its leverage as an economic superpower. But the argument doesn’t stand up to critical analysis. After all, Myanmar isn’t Iraq, and the United States has never thought of sending in the troops. The whole American approach to the generals has been based not upon military threats but on economic sanctions and political isolation. Japan’s aid to Myanmar undercuts the American policy and helps the generals remain in power.

One of America’s top scholars on Myanmar, Rutgers University professor Josef Silverstein, recently suggested a creative way in which Japan could use its economic clout to advance the cause of democracy. Silverstein proposed that Japan could give the representatives of the people of Myanmar--that is, those individuals or groups who won Myanmar’s last elections--the authority to approve any foreign aid project that goes to the country.

Such an approach would give Suu Kyi and her party at least a small share of the power they won at the polls six years ago. And it would create a strong incentive for Myanmar’s generals, who are trying to attract foreign aid, loans and investment, to start dealing with Suu Kyi and her allies.

In some ways, America’s differences with Japan over Myanmar are similar to Washington’s disputes with other allies. The United States squabbles with France when Paris tries to ease the economic sanctions against Iraq. Washington groans when Chancellor Helmut Kohl shows up in Beijing with a planeload of German business executives, undermining American efforts to bring about some change in China’s human rights policies.

But at least these are open disagreements. France and Germany don’t try to claim they are working hand-in-hand with America when they aren’t.

On Myanmar, Japan is showing that its policy toward Asia, and its interest in democracy, is quite different from that of the United States. President Clinton might keep that fact in mind when he makes his long-delayed trip to Tokyo this spring.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.