Paucity of Japan hands vexes Japan-U.S. ties

Satoshi Ikeuchi / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

WASHINGTON--In my capacity as visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, I am carrying out research on U.S. President Barack Obama's policy toward the Muslim nations and taking advantage of direct access to the latest U.S. studies of Middle East affairs.

My ultimate goal is to seek ways through which both Japan and the United States can engage themselves in a significant and cooperative way to tackle international issues involving the Middle East and the Islamic world.

What concerns me here in Washington is that the channels for political communication between Japan and the United States are excessively limited to a handful of U.S. experts on the bilateral relationship who are referred to as "Japan hands."

Prior to Obama's trip to Japan in November, many of them made threatening remarks with respect to Japan, saying that Washington had reached its patience threshold, while at the same time trying to show off to the White House their ability to influence the Japanese government. Such arguments left a sense of deep displeasure among Japanese.

Reliance on English-language info

This small number of Japan hands has an excessively large voice in these matters because there is relatively little interest in Japan-U.S. relations in the United States. Only a few U.S. experts can understand and analyze Japanese public opinion, decision-making and the way policies are implemented by reading Japanese-language media reports.

On this side of the Pacific, elegantly constructed argumentation based on a limited amount of English-language information is typically evaluated as expert foreign policy analysis.

Japan is not an elite-led society, so the public opinion of the middle class masses lays the foundation for politics. Policies are decided in the higher echelon of politicians and ministry officials, but their implementation cannot move ahead without public support. Japanese politics moves forward when the flow of policy debate and political conflict among the elite merges with the tide of public opinion to find a point of compromise and consensus.

But Japan policy experts in the United States, who are unable to predict the path Japanese politics will follow, tend to fall easily into the habit of denouncing the Japanese decision-making process as irrational and labeling Japan as a bankrupt state whose policy-implementing institutions have broken down.

'Enemy nation' aftereffect

In the United States, political research into non-Western regions is conducted mainly by scholars hailing from those regions or descendants of immigrants from those regions. But this is not the case in regard to Japanese politics. Scholars from Japan and Japanese-Americans do not form the core of the Japan hands.

The fact that Japan was an enemy nation in World War II still has significance today. The United States' history as an immigrant nation has been marked by a series of movements seeking to empower new immigrants who organized themselves into groups and then demanded and obtained various rights.

However, in the case of Japanese-Americans, who suffered hardships during the war such as being forced into internment camps or having their assets forfeited, they refrained from asserting themselves as Americans of Japanese ancestry while at the same time keeping a distance from Japan during and after the war since they were trying to show maximum allegiance to the United States, thereby losing an opportunity to call for political empowerment as an ethnic group.

In addition to this unfortunate past, the high growth of Japan's postwar economy resulted in a sharp fall in immigration to the United States, contributing to a further weakening of the potential for political influence among Japanese-Americans. The number of Japanese students at U.S. universities has been declining steadily, and in most cases students return home with the aim of finding jobs in Japan after finishing their studies without settling in the United States.

As far as Japanology is concerned, Japanese universities provide higher levels of education than their U.S. counterparts. The Japanese case represents a striking contrast with that of students from other non-Western countries in which they tend to study about their own countries at U.S. universities and seek to find jobs and obtain green cards or citizenship in the United States.

Japanese model as nation-state

But the Japanese model represents the way a nation-state should be. If living conditions in Japan were not comfortable, public safety problematic, the education system fragile and suitable jobs lacking, the best students from Japan would swarm to the United States. They would seek to settle there permanently and ascend the U.S. social ladder by taking advantage of their command and knowledge of Japanese language and Japanology. They might then try to exert an influence on their motherland by working on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Japan.

The U.S. administration often makes light of Japan in its foreign policy initiatives because Japan does not pose any threat to the United States. If opinion grew louder in favor of nuclear armament, and conflicts and terrorist attacks became rampant in Japan, policy toward Japan would become a major agenda item for U.S. diplomacy and thorough efforts would be made to understand the Japanese language, society and politics.

Needless to say, such a development would not be a desirable one for Japan-U.S. relations.

Ikeuchi is an associate professor of Islamic political thought at Tokyo University. His book "Isuramu Sekai no Ronjikata" (Methods of Discussing Islam) published by Chuokoron-Shinsha, Inc. earned him the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities for this year.