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The Economist January 1st 2022
Asia
East Asian relations
The view from Tokyo
TO KYO
What Japan makes of China
T
he first reliable records of an offi cial mission from Japan to China date to 238ad, when Himiko, a Japanese queen, dispatched a delegation to China’s Wei kingdom, off ering as tribute ten slaves and two 20footlong textiles. By the 7th centu ry the Yamato, a clan that ruled much of Ja pan at the time, was regularly sending en voys with tributes to the Sui and Tang courts. Japan adopted China’s system of writing; Japanese monks and scholars ab sorbed China’s religions. Japan has remained a close, if wary, ob server of its bigger neighbour over the cen turies. In the late 1970s and 1980s, motivat ed in part by guilt over wartime atrocities, Japan helped China modernise. Japanese fi rms were among the fi rst to tap into its growing market. Japanese leaders also raised early alarms over Chinese expan sionism, especially after the two clashed between 2010 and 2012 over some uninhab ited rocks in the East China Sea, which Ja pan calls the Senkaku Islands and China calls Diaoyu. “We warned the us: this is not a small compartmentalised issue between Japan and China, but a sign of a growing
power in the region,” says Sasae Kenichiro, a former Japanese ambassador to America. Such views fell on deaf ears in America and Europe, where leaders were focused on the benefi ts of integrating China into the global economy. Yet in recent years Chi nese aggression in Hong Kong, repression in Xinjiang and sabrerattling around Tai wan have made many Western govern ments more suspicious, too. As they enter an era of competition with China, Japan’s perspective is being sought anew. Some prominent American and British offi cials have begun to talk of bringing Japan (and others in the region, including South Ko rea) into the Five Eyes, an Anglophone in telligencesharing network, in the hopes of improving their understanding of Chi → Also in this section 39 Cooking with cannabis in Thailand 40 Extreme weather in South-East Asia 40 Moon Jae-in pardons his predecessor 41 Banyan: India’s business castes
na. “Fifteen years ago, if I talked to [West ern colleagues] about the negative aspects of China, I was treated as a rightwing, Chi nahating, Japanese scholar,” says Matsuda Yasuhiro, a China specialist at the Univer sity of Tokyo. “Now people listen to us.” Japanese observers of China now speak of three worrying trends. The fi rst is Chi nese overconfi dence. “They truly believe that the West is in decline,” says Kanehara Nobukatsu, a former Japanese deputy na tionalsecurity adviser. Japanese scholars reckon that Chinese leaders are not postur ing when they claim their political system is superior to America’s messy democracy. Some notice worrying parallels with Ja pan’s own cocksure stance in the runup to the second world war. “We are always re minding them of our past mistakes before the war,” says one former senior Japanese diplomat. “They say, ‘Are you joking, we are totally diff erent.’ But in our eyes there are increasing similarities.” The second is a shift from collective to individual leadership under Xi Jinping, China’s president. Japanese offi cials fret that in its dependence on the decisions of one man, China is becoming more like North Korea. Indeed, Mr Xi, in this view, may be even more isolated than the Swiss educated Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dicta tor. “Xi doesn’t know the free world at all— I’m sure that Kim knows our world better,” says Mr Kanehara. Lastly, there is the state of the Chinese economy. Mr Xi’s recent crackdown on large private companies amid a push for
