Mick Hartley

Japan's PM Shinzo Abe is a nationalist who has no time for hand-wringing over his country's militarist past. He's visited the Yasakuni shrine, where the spirits of convicted Japanese war criminals are enshrined as Shinto deities. He's called these war criminals, executed for the atrocities committed during the Second World War, “martyrs who staked their souls to become the foundation of their nation”. His government continues to deny wartime atrocities, most notably the Rape of Nanjing. He's even been photographed in a fighter plane number 731, in a move which few observers doubt was a direct and unsubtle reference to Japan's notorious Unit 731, a biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army which was responsible for some of the most appalling war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel, where patients, including infants and the elderly, were infected with diseases and subjected to vivisection without anaesthetic, amongst other unspeakable cruelties. And his country's move back to a more aggressive foreign policy, after decades of pacifism under the US umbrella, continues apace. S0 – how worried should we be? 

Not so much, argues Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times (£). It's China we should be more concerned about:

In an election on Sunday supporters of the nationalist prime minister, Shinzo Abe, gained control of two thirds of seats in the upper house of the Diet, giving the Japanese government the power to change the country’s postwar constitution for the first time. Mr Abe has often spoken of his “long-cherished wish” for constitutional reform, above all of Article 9, the famous “peace clause” in which Japan renounces war and the right to maintain fully fledged armed forces.

The prime minister has already “reinterpreted” the constitution, awarding himself the right to dispatch Japan’s self defence forces overseas and to order them to fight alongside their allies. He has made it clear that he will no longer proffer the government’s annual apology for Japan’s wartime brutality….

“Mr Abe . . . has raised the spectre of militarism rising again in Japan,” China’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, wrote. “The international community should be on high alert.” But to blame Mr Abe for the rising tension in Asia is to misunderstand the direction that history and power are flowing in the world’s fastest-changing region.

Without doubt Mr Abe is the most right-wing and nationalistic Japanese prime minister since 1945, a man whose dogmatic delusions about Japan’s wartime history stifle his modest intellectual gifts.

Japan did nothing wrong during the war — or nothing that western colonial powers were not also doing. The “atrocities” committed by the Imperial Army are gross exaggerations conjured up by Japan’s enemies. The so-called war criminals at Yasukuni are heroes who deserve our respect: apologies for them are shameful masochism, which slur a proud nation.

You can tell Mr Abe believes these things by scrutinising his utterances over a lifetime. But these days the prime minister himself doesn’t say any of this directly and doesn’t even go to Yasukuni any more, not because he doesn’t want to, but because the political cost is too high.

The idea of Japan as a nation in lock step “lurching to the right” like a swarm of locusts is a racist delusion of its own. Japan consists of 127 million people, many of them deeply sceptical about a prime minister whose nationalism goes far beyond mainstream public opinion. Equivocation in politicians is generally accounted a bad thing. But it is entirely desirable that Mr Abe should be constrained in his public utterances by the disapproval of those who have, in many cases reluctantly, elected him.

Even his relatively modest constitutional reinterpretation united against him a leftwing protest movement such as Japan has not seen for more than 40 years. An effort to change Article 9 would divide the country with Brexit-like intensity — and it is far from clear whether Mr Abe will even attempt it. If the commonsense centrism of ordinary Japanese discourages their prime minister from saying offensive things about wartime history, it is inconceivable that it will permit anything as self-destructively stupid as a return to the politics of the 1930s.

Asia does, in fact, face grave danger from the rise of militarism — but not in Japan. There is one country in the region that is increasing its annual defence spending by double-digit percentages, acquiring an aircraft carrier, building military bases on islands claimed by its neighbours and which yesterday spurned the judgment of an international tribunal rejecting its claims in the South China Sea. You don’t have to like Japan’s prime minister to bridle at the hypocrisy of China, an oppressive, nuclear-armed, one-party dictatorship, browbeating for alleged “militarism” one of the postwar world’s most successful democracies.

The danger is that Mr Abe’s nationalism justifies the rearmament pursued by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, which further encourages Japan to abandon its constitutional constraints in a spiral of self-righteousness and mistrust. Such conditions increase the risk that emotion will overcome reason and pride eclipse self-interest. If that happens between Japan and China, we will all be in need of a stiff drink.

Can we not be concerned about both Japan and China? And that's before we consider North Korea, lurking like an unexploded bomb on the sidelines…

It's not only here in the UK where we live in interesting times.