Japan's Asia card.

• Author: Hall, Ivan P.

IS JAPAN, HAVING drawn its last drop of cultural strength from the West, about to turn its back and abscond with Asia, adding a new intellectual and ideological dimension to the economic co-prosperity sphere it has so dramatically resurrected? Those in the West who attend to geocultural matters have long predicted the "return" of Japan to its "Asian" roots, and we now find the Japanese themselves proclaiming the "Re-Asianization" of their country.

The old, bifurcated political map drawn in 1955, with both conservative and socialist camps outwardly hitched to foreign lodestars--to American security ties and anti-communism on one hand, and to a U.S.-sponsored "peace" constitution and European Marxism on the other--has been torn to shreds. In its place we may possibly see an implosion of formerly antagonistic ideological forces around a new "consensus" nationalism, and that could easily take as its first task the switching of Japanese national purpose and cultural orientation away from the West toward Asia.

As Japanese enthusiasts for a warmed-over pan-Asianism tug at the tillers of national self-definition and cultural diplomacy, we can at least expect some high swells of touchiness and disdain for the now overtaken West, and a froth of magisterial vade mecums for Asians still bobbing in the wake. One can only hope that with the new strength and self-esteem of the other Asian peoples, and Japan's own position in an increasingly transnational post-industrial civilization, Tokyo may eventually find its way to a mode of cultural dialogue that is less fixated on hierarchical power relationships, less dichotomous about East versus West, and more in keeping with its genuinely global needs and responsibilities.

Regrettably, we are now witnessing the latest replay of an unproductive, six-part cycle that it has yet to break out of. In the opening bars, Tokyo's leaders dissociate themselves from a "backward Asia," seeking to emulate and join the "advanced West;" next, this exercise in impersonation provokes a nationalistic reaction and Western condescension; in the third movement Japan's intellectuals and statesmen then expound the singularity of their country and its divergence from the West; fourth, their Western counterparts avidly concur that, indeed, Japan is different; fifth, Japan then turns emotionally and ideologically to a condescending and largely unsolicited "leadership" of Asia and to a resentful anti-Westernism; finally, that runs into a dead end, so it's da capo, all over again.

One macro-cycle ran from the forced-march Westernization of the 1870s to the traditionalist counter-thrusts of the 1880s and 1890s and then through a series of perceived rejections by the West in the 1920s--Britain dropping its alliance in 1922, and America slamming the door on Japanese immigration in 1924--to the dalliance with Greater East Asia during the 1930s and World War II. We are today approaching stage five in a micro-cycle of trade liberalization spanning the past quarter century. This cycle began with Tokyo promising Western-style standards but pleading for time. As the United States and Europe began to lose patience and as domestic resistance built up in Japan in the 1970s, Japanese intellectuals built a cottage industry dedicated to the manufacturing of theories of "uniqueness" to justify special treatment for their country. But when European and American revisionist writers of the late 1980s joined this exploration of Japanese dissimilarity, Tokyo cried "Foul!" and complained of Western cultural absolutism. The upshot, from the early part of this decade, has been a Japan turning to the notion of "Asian values"--an expansion of the earlier "uniqueness" gambit--as a common regional shield against further U.S. trade-related pressures.

In a recent Japanese poll, 60 percent thought their country should place equal emphasis on Asia and the West (the United States and Europe), with only 6 percent favoring a tilt toward the West and 28 percent opting for a tilt toward Asia.(1) This nearly two-thirds vote for equidistance, with "Asia First" supporters approaching one third, already represents a major shift away from the Westward-looking postwar orthodoxy. It is also a trend that is likely to continue. Indeed, as Japan's media tout an alleged clash between Asian and Western values--and dwell with some relish on the Clinton administration's failed pressures for human rights in China and numerical targets for Japan trade--cooler heads have had to warn that the security, trade, and environmental challenges in the region can hardly be met without a continued U.S. presence, and that a fairer break on economic access would be the chief incentive for that. Furthermore, over two-thirds of the Japanese between the ages of twenty and forty in the survey judged their country to be "disliked" by other Asians--an implicit admission of the long, steep road ahead.

Old Reflexes...

JAPAN'S PERIODS OF identification with Asia have typically expressed themselves in grandiose, holistic, pan-Asianist terms--more reminiscent of America's post-war appointment of itself as defender of "Western Civilization" against the Stalinist menace than of the quiet, steady flows that defined our earlier view of cultural relations across the Atlantic.

Japan's recurrent pan-Asianist paradigm, simply expressed, is that of two posts and a lintel. On one side a solidified Asia, much put upon and brimming with resentment; on the other an equally monistic but predatory West; and between the two a cultural gap spanned only by Japan, which towers above the Orient and serves as its cultural spokesman to the Occident. The Japanese sense of draconian alternatives was first honed by the early Meiji Period slogans of "Escape from Asia" (datsu-A) and "Joining Europe [the West]" (nyu-O)--terms that are still very much in use along with their increasingly fashionable inversions, datsu-O and nyu-A--while the visual finality of their Chinese ideograms, like red or green traffic lights, further impedes the conceptualization of more nuanced, intermediate choices.

Geographically speaking, although Japan's economic power is now felt throughout the Asian continent, the psychologically intimate "Asia" of the Japanese mind encompasses mainly China, Korea and Southeast Asia, closely fitting the area marked in prewar ideology for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Leaving out the "white" nations of Australia and New Zealand (despite strong economic links), as well as the Indian and other peoples of South Asia (despite ancient cultural ties), these boundaries reflect a natural but powerful fellow-Mongolian racial consciousness.

Historically, Japan's past flings with pan-Asianism have been marred by failure to assume a more egalitarian posture toward the rest of Asia, by hyperbolic rejections of the West, and by the sterility of a strictly intra-Japanese monologue. Although certain Japanese liberals over the decades have envisioned the non-exploitative nurturing of an Asian comity of nations, Japanese nationalism has always intruded to provoke its counterpart elsewhere...