U.S. Interest in Japan at Rock Bottom

This weekend, Japan--the country with the second-largest economy and one of the largest military budgets in the world--will hold its first parliamentary election in four years.

Wake me when it’s over.

It’s hard to get excited about Japan these days. Its politics are predictable and soporific, its economy can’t shake off stagnation and its leadership seems moribund.

Asia offers many truly compelling stories, but they are all elsewhere. When trying to foresee the future, we wonder first about China and India. When we look for dramatic elections, Taiwan beckons. When we seek visionary leaders, our eyes turn to South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung.

At the moment, in fact, American interest in Japan is the lowest it has been in two decades. Consider:

* Only eight years ago, this country’s bookstores and magazine racks were filled with ominous tracts like “The Coming War With Japan,” which wrongly predicted that the transpacific enemies of World War II were headed toward military conflict once again.

Now, by contrast, remarkably little is written about Japan--and the few articles that get published carry wistful titles like “Japan, the Forgotten Player,” by Michael Green in the current issue of the National Interest.

* Over the next few days, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will rush through Asia, stopping in China and South Korea but not Japan--a fair indication of America’s current priorities and concerns in the region.

President Clinton will visit Japan next month but only because the annual summit of the world’s leading industrialized countries will be held in Okinawa. Japan is still smarting from Clinton’s decision to bypass the country during his 10-day trip to China in 1998. Clinton stopped in Japan later that year, but the trip had the atmosphere of a dutiful visit to a mother-in-law.

* In 1988 and 1992, presidential candidates like Richard A. Gephardt, Bob Kerry and Ross Perot made Japan a contentious campaign issue. This year, the candidates mention Japan only slightly more often than Uzbekistan.

Even Patrick J. Buchanan doesn’t rail against Japan in his speeches anymore. In one press conference last March, Buchanan said he would tell Chinese leaders, “Look, if you want to be treated like Japan and Great Britain . . . you’ve got to start behaving in your foreign policy more like that.” When Buchanan equates Japan with Britain, you know times have changed.

How should we account for this national epidemic of indifference toward our closest Asian ally?

Part of the fault lies in ourselves. We seem more interested in those countries we perceive as threatening to us. And so U.S. interest in Japan peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Japan was seen as a formidable economic competitor and a potential threat to America’s well-being.

Back then, America’s preoccupation with Japan was the trade deficit. It stood at $49 billion a year in 1992, and when Clinton took office, he demanded “results” from Japan in getting the figure down.

“Let’s not paper this over,” the new president warned then-Japanese Premier Kiichi Miyazawa in April 1993. As it turns out, over the last seven years, Clinton has done precisely that. America’s trade imbalance with Japan was $74 billion last year.

Yet, when the U.S. economy is growing far faster than Japan’s and when unemployment in this country is down to 4%, Americans find it hard to get worked up about Japan as an economic superpower. And so Clinton never makes a public issue of the trade deficit anymore.

“There isn’t any sense of [American] vulnerability toward Japan these days,” observes Steven C. Clemons, a Japan specialist at the New America Foundation.

To this extent, Japan is no doubt happy for America’s lack of interest. But the other factor behind the American ennui is the stultifying Japanese political system.

Since Clinton took office, there have been seven Japanese prime ministers. None has had the dynamism of South Korea’s Kim, or Taiwan’s last two leaders, President Chen Shui-bian and former President Lee Teng-hui.

The prime minister of the moment, Yoshiro Mori--selected in secret by party bosses when his predecessor, Keizo Obuchi, suffered a stroke--has distinguished himself so far mostly by paying obeisance to the past, just when Japan needs to be thinking of the future. Mori opined that Japan is “a divine nation with the emperor at its core.”

In any other democracy where the economy has been in deep freeze for nearly a decade, voters would throw the ruling party out of office.

But in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party--the perennial apostle of the status quo, whose leaders were funded by the CIA during the early decades of the Cold War--continues its cautious, conservative reign. The LDP fell from power temporarily in 1993 but then climbed back and hangs on, mostly because the country can’t seem to develop any coherent, lasting alternative.

Perhaps, under the surface, Japan is opening up to new ideas. But you’d never know that from Japan’s leadership.

If Japan is, for now, a “forgotten player” in Washington, one reason is that, as the current campaign shows, the people who govern it are so easy to forget.

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Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday