Prime Minister Abe Tries It Latin Style

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has arrived in Trinidad and Tobago (Link - J) for a two day visit (Link), a part of his 11 day summer smash tour of five Latin American and Caribbean countries (Link). Tomorrow, he will be meeting with 14 heads of state attending the CARICOM conference, adding a big chunk to his already impressive list of meetings with heads of states. He then heads on to stops in Colombia, Chile and Brazil.

While the first visit of a prime minister of Japan to Latin America in a decade -- yes, the last Japanese premier to survive in office long enough to make such a trip was Koizumi Jun'ichiro -- should be significant in its own right, the leisurely (for Abe Shinzo) jaunt is being treated as an echo of Xi Jinping's July 15-22 visit to the region. (Link).

To be brutal but fair, the Abe visit does pale beside the Xi tour. Xi came to the region as a collaborator in the establishment of a new world order (the BRICS summit in Brazil - Link), as a big time customer of a national champions (Link), as a banking hyperpower (Link) and as a potential savior of limping, pariah economies ( Link and Link). Abe comes as a supplicant (groveling for votes for a UN Security Council non-permanent seat, which permanent member China never has to do - Link), as a top salesman of Japanese goods and services (with 70 Japanese corporate executives in tow, including the head of the Nippon Keidanren Link - J), as a celebrant of his blood ties to better, bolder times in Japan's diplomatic history (Link - J) and as a guarantor that Japan is not dilly-dallying on the Trans Pacific Partnership. (Link)

Not an impressive comparison. Just in terms of striking business deals, a customer is usually far more welcome than a salesman.

However, Abe will come away from his long summer trip with his reputation for incessant activity intact. He has in 18 months in office made 23 trips abroad. Admittedly, 10 of those trips abroad were for international conferences. Still, he has touched down in at least 3 countries on a single trip 11 different times since he became premier in December 2012. By September he will set a new record for all postwar prime ministers in terms of number of foreign countries visited -- and this only from his current term, not counting the countries he visited his first 2006-07 term. (Link - J)

Maybe he should take on "The Blur" as a nickname...

Later - Clint Richards of The Diplomat delivers a more positive review of Abe's Latin Swing. (Link)

Later still - Peter Ford of The Christian Science Monitor talks to Japan-based experts regarding the Xi vs. Abe comparison, among them the prime minister's most important message sculptor. (Link)

As for the psychological underpinnings of the trip, The Japan Times offers a compilation article with yes, more Taniguchi. (Link)


Original image courtesy: Abe Shinzo official Facebook page.

Thank You, Aurelia George Mulgan

With clarity, erudition and thoroughness, Aurelia George Mulgan attacks the thicket of nonsense flung about by the forces both within and without Japan in support/defense of constitutional revision:

Abe rocks Japan’s constitutional boat

For those whose inquiry begins and end at "Japan has proven itself capable of self-control. What could be wrong with normalization?" -- the essay's crucial paragraph:

The price of formally amending Article 9 will be high, particularly in terms of Japan's foreign relations. China and South Korea will 'over-interpret' the move as signifying a dramatic change in the status quo and the rise of a potential Japanese military threat. Moreover, Japan will no longer be able to lay a strong claim to being a 'peace state', which has been an important source of its soft power. The proposal to revise Article 9 could, therefore, have a destabilising effect in the region and come at the cost of Japan's international standing and soft power.

Due to the absence of regional economic and security structures, due to Japan's being in a bad geo-political neighborhood (think of when Japan exited from the Occupation: no other industrialized states nearby, no other democracy in the region except the chaotic Philippines) -- and due the halt in the program of purging the government of totalitarianism, post-Occupation Japan faced unleapable hurdles to integration (some China-sodden commentators might say "re-integration") into East Asia. The latter half of the 20th century would then most likely have been much like the first half: constant warfare, with an armed Japan in contestation with the Soviet Union and a fragmented China, the dogs of war unleashed by a breakdown, after a decade or so, of Japan's alliance with the world's premier maritime power.

[As to the implications of a martial post-1945 Japan on the process of decolonization in this alternate universe East Asia, the mind boggles.]

Article 9 had a purpose and effect of breaking the chain of inevitability. Japan could integrate into East Asia at minimal cost, both in terms of its own sovereignty and social structure. A de jure shackled Japan had a chance of living at peace with the military dictatorships and expansionist communist states of the region. A demilitarized Japan could be given free rein to permit the rehabilitation of its pre-war elites.

Someone needs to look the PM in the eye and tell him, "Look, your enthusiasm for constitutional revisionism is misguided. The Meiji State was a miserable one for the common people. But forget about them. The only reason your grandfather could walk out of Sugamo Prison alive and hearty to take up where he left off, becoming Prime Minister less than eight years later -- was Article 9. Article 9 made it possible for your grandfather's younger brother to, eventually, succeed him, your great uncle Eisaku becoming the longest serving post-war prime minister. It has allowed you, who have been steeped in a culture of unscientific, ahistorical, backward-looking authoritarian fantabulism, to become Prime Minister not once but twice.

Forget about what Article 9 has done for the average citizen; think about the tremendous service it has done for your family."

The attempt to encourage a reconsideration of a commitment to constitution revision out of simple self-interest would likely fail. However, that does not mean it would be wrong to at least try it.