Authors: Henry Kissinger
Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to
that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793 (discussed in the next chapter). China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China’s distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power—albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination. After a new faction came to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member. The new Meiji Emperor’s coronation was marked with the Charter Oath signed by the nobility, promising a sweeping program of reform, which included provisions that all social classes should be encouraged to participate. It provided for deliberative assemblies in all provinces, an affirmation of due process, and a commitment to fulfill the aspirations of the population. It relied on the national consensus, which has been one of the principal strengths—perhaps the most distinctive feature—of Japanese society:
Japan would henceforth embark on the systematic construction of railways, modern industry, an export-oriented economy, and a modern military. Amidst all these transformations, the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society would preserve Japanese identity.
The results of this dramatic change of course would, within a few decades, vault Japan into the ranks of global powers. In 1886, after a brawl between Chinese sailors and Nagasaki police, a modern German-built Chinese warship sailed toward Japan, compelling a resolution. By the next decade, intensive naval construction and training had given Japan the upper hand. When an 1894 dispute over relative Japanese and Chinese influence in Korea culminated in war, Japan prevailed decisively. The peace terms included an end of Chinese suzerainty over Korea (giving way to new contests between Japan and Russia) and the cession of Taiwan, which Japan governed as a colony.
Japan’s reforms were pursued with such vigor that the Western powers were soon obliged to abandon the model of “extraterritoriality”—their “right” to try their own citizens in Japan by their own, not local, laws—which they had first applied in China. In a landmark trade treaty Britain, the preeminent Western power, committed British subjects in Japan to abide by Japanese jurisdiction. In 1902, the British treaty was transformed into a military alliance, the first formal strategic alignment between an Asian and a Western power. Britain sought the alliance to balance Russian pressures on India. Japan’s goal was to defeat Russian aspirations to dominate Korea and Manchuria and to establish its own freedom of maneuver for later designs there. Three years later, Japan stunned the world by defeating the Russian Empire in a war, the first defeat of a Western country by an Asian
country in the modern period. In World War I, Japan joined the Entente powers and seized German bases in China and the South Pacific.
Japan had “arrived” as the first non-Western great power in the contemporary age, accepted as a military, economic, and diplomatic equal by the countries that had heretofore shaped the international order. There was one important difference: on the Japanese side, the alliances with Western countries were not based on common strategic objectives but to expel its European allies from Asia.
After the exhaustion of Europe in World War I, Japan’s leaders concluded that a world beset by conflict, financial crisis, and American isolationism favored imperial expansion aimed at imposing hegemony on Asia. Imperial Japan detached Manchuria from China in 1931 and established it as a Japanese satellite state under the exiled Chinese Emperor. In 1937, Japan declared war on China in order to subjugate additional Chinese territory. In the name of a “
New Order in Asia
” and then an “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” Japan strove to organize its own anti-Westphalian sphere of influence—a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers,” arranged hierarchically to “thereby enable all nations to find each its proper place in the world.” In this new order, other Asian states’ sovereignty would be elided into a form of Japanese tutelage.
The members of the established international order were too exhausted by World War I and too preoccupied with the mounting European crisis to resist. Only one Western country remained in the way of this design: the United States, the country that had forcibly opened up Japan less than a century earlier. As though history contained a narrative, the first bombs of a war between the two countries fell on American territory in 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American mobilization in the Pacific eventually culminated in the use of two nuclear weapons (the sole military use of these weapons to date), bringing about Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Japan adjusted to the debacle by methods similar to its response to Commodore Perry: resilience sustained by an indomitable national spirit based on a distinctive national culture. To restore the Japanese nation, Japan’s postwar leaders (almost all of whom had been in the public service in the 1930s and 1940s) portrayed surrender as adaptation to American priorities; indeed, Japan used the authority of the American occupation regime to modernize more fully and to recover more rapidly than it could have by purely national efforts. It renounced war as an instrument of national policy, affirmed principles of constitutional democracy, and reentered the international state system as an American ally—though a low-key one more visibly concerned with economic revival than with participation in grand strategy. For nearly seven decades, this new orientation has proved an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.
Japan’s postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of Japan’s survival and long-term success. Japan’s postwar governing class accepted the constitution drafted by American occupying authorities—with its stringent prohibitions on military action—as a necessity of their immediate circumstances. They avowed its liberal-democratic orientation as their own; they affirmed principles of democracy and international community akin to those embraced in Western capitals.
At the same time, Japan’s leaders adapted their country’s unique demilitarized role to Japanese long-term strategic purposes. They transformed the pacifist aspects of the postwar order from a prohibition against military action to an imperative to focus on other key elements of national strategy, including economic revitalization. American forces were invited to remain deployed in Japan in substantial numbers, and the defense commitment was solidified into a mutual security treaty, deterring potentially antagonistic powers (including a Soviet Union
expanding its Pacific presence) from viewing Japan as a target for strategic action.
Having established
the framework of the relationship, Japan’s Cold War leaders proceeded to reinforce their country’s capacities by developing an independent military capability.
The effect of the first stage of Japan’s postwar evolution was to take its strategic orientation out of Cold War contests, freeing it to focus on a transformative program of economic development. Japan placed itself legally in the camp of the developed democracies but—citing its pacifist orientation and commitment to world community—declined to join the ideological struggles of the age. The result of this subtle strategy was a period of concerted economic growth paralleled only by that following the 1868 Meiji Revolution. Within two decades of its wartime devastation, Japan had rebuilt itself as a major global economic power. The Japanese miracle was soon after invoked as a potential challenge to American economic preeminence, though it began to level off in the last decade of the twentieth century.
The social cohesion and sense of national commitment that enabled this remarkable transformation has been called forth in response to contemporary challenges. It enabled the Japanese people to respond to a devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan’s northeast—by World Bank estimates, the costliest natural disaster in world history—with an astonishing display of mutual assistance and national solidarity. Financial and demographic challenges have been the subject of searching internal assessment and, in some aspects, equally bold measures. In each endeavor, Japan has called forth its resources with its traditional confidence that its national essence and culture could be maintained through almost any adjustments.
Dramatic changes in the balance of power will inevitably be translated by Japan’s establishment into a new adaptation of Japanese foreign policy. The return of strong national leadership under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gives Tokyo new latitude to act on its
assessments. A December 2013 Japanese government white paper concluded that “
as Japan’s security environment
becomes ever more severe … it has become indispensable for Japan to make more proactive efforts in line with the principle of international cooperation,” including strengthening Japan’s capacity to “deter” and, if needed, “defeat” threats. Surveying a changing Asian landscape, Japan increasingly articulates a desire to become a “normal country” with a military not constitutionally barred from war and an active alliance policy. The issue for Asian regional order will be the definition of “normality.”
As at other pivotal moments in its history, Japan is moving toward a redefinition of its broader role in international order, sure to have far-reaching consequences in its region and beyond. Searching for a new role, it will assess once again, carefully, unsentimentally, and unobtrusively, the balance of material and psychological forces in light of the rise of China, Korean developments, and their impact on Japan’s security. It will examine the utility and record of the American alliance and its considerable success in serving wide-ranging mutual interests; it will also consider America’s withdrawal from three military conflicts. Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy. Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them, depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments. The outcome therefore depends on how credible the Japanese establishment judges American policy in Asia to be and how they assess the overall balance of forces. The long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy is as much at issue as Japan’s analysis.
In Japan, the impetus of Western intrusion changed the course of a historic nation; in India it reshaped a great civilization into a modern state. India has long developed its qualities at the intersection of world orders, shaping and being shaped by their rhythms. It has been defined less by its political borders than by a shared spectrum of cultural traditions. No mythic founder has been credited with promulgating the Hindu tradition, India’s majority faith and the wellspring of several others. History has traced its evolution, dimly and incompletely, through a synthesis of traditional hymns, legends, and rituals from cultures along the Indus and Ganges rivers and plateaus and uplands north and west. In the Hindu tradition, however, these specific forms were the diverse articulations of underlying principles that predated any written text. In its diversity and resistance to definition—encompassing distinct gods and philosophical traditions, the analogues of which would likely have been defined as separate religions in Europe—Hinduism was said to approximate and prove the ultimate oneness of manifold creation, reflecting “
the long and diversified history
of man’s quest for reality … at once all-embracing and infinite.”
When united—as during the fourth through second centuries
B.C.
and the fourth through seventh centuries
A.D.
—India generated currents of vast cultural influence: Buddhism spread from India to Burma, Ceylon, China, and Indonesia, and Hindu art and statecraft influenced Thailand, Indochina, and beyond. When divided—as it often was—into competing kingdoms, India was a lure for invaders, traders, and spiritual seekers (some fulfilling multiple roles at once, such as the Portuguese, who arrived in 1498 “
in search of Christians and spices
”), whose depredations it endured and whose cultures it eventually absorbed and mixed with its own.
China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew
indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them. Invaders might raise extraordinary monuments to their own importance, as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in the face of so much aloofness, but the Indian peoples endured by a core culture defiantly impervious to alien influence. India’s foundational religions are inspired not by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment; rather, they bear witness to the fragility of human existence. They offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inextricable destiny.