THE world’s biggest nuclear power plant runs along nearly 4 kilometres (2½ miles) of the coast of the Sea of Japan. At full pelt it generates enough electricity to supply 2.7m households. But the seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa complex sit idle, along with the rest of Japan’s nuclear-power facilities. Four years after meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, all Japan’s 48 usable reactors are the focus of safety concerns. An industry that once produced nearly a third of Japan’s electricity remains paralysed.
The government badly wants some of the idle reactors put back to work to cut a huge bill for imported fuel. On April 22nd it got a shot in the arm when a court on Kyushu, the third-largest of Japan’s four main islands, rejected an attempt to block the restart of two reactors at the Sendai plant. It said the reactors were safe to operate, despite active earthquake faults and a volcano in the area. Kyushu Electric, the plant’s owner, believes it could be generating power again by July.
Yet the ruling contrasted with another one handed down a week earlier by a court in Fukui prefecture, down the coast from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. That decision blocked Kansai Electric Power from restarting two reactors at its Takahama site. It said stricter government-induced regulations after the Fukushima disaster were no guarantee that another disaster could be prevented. The court warned of “imminent danger” to local citizens if the reactors were restarted.
The decision surprised the government. It is formulating a new energy plan that calls for nuclear power to meet up to 20% of Japan’s electricity needs by 2030. The Fukui ruling will not derail that, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, insists. He says the new regulations are among the world’s strictest.
Such confidence in restarting the reactors may be misplaced. Every one of them is the subject of a lawsuit by locals trying to stop them from being fired up again. The government and the energy utilities will continue to argue that although they cannot completely rule out another accident, they have made nuclear power as safe as possible. By rejecting that argument, the Fukui court has set a precedent other courts may follow, says Mutsuyoshi Nishimura, a former climate-change negotiator.
Kansai Electric has challenged the Fukui ruling. Experts say the company will very likely get a higher court to overturn it. But the longer legal tussles drag on, the older the reactors become, putting their eventual operation in doubt. The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), Japan’s new watchdog, is reviewing about 20 reactors for compliance with its regulations. Luc Oursel, the late chief executive of Areva, a French nuclear giant, predicted in 2013 that two-thirds of Japan’s plants would eventually restart. Few believe that now.
For Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the operator of the ruined Fukushima plant, these issues are a matter of life and death. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is its only remaining viable nuclear facility. The company says it loses ¥100 billion ($835m) per reactor every year that the reactors are down. The plant’s chief, Tadayuki Yokomura, says that TEPCO has poured $2 billion into reinforcing the facility against earthquakes and tsunamis. There is, he insists, no reason why all seven reactors cannot be restarted immediately. The problem is that he has yet to convince the public of that.
THE date should have been one to celebrate: April 23rd was the hundredth day since Maithripala Sirisena formed a government after winning a fraught presidential election, in January, as the head of a broad coalition of parties. The surprising victory was rightly feted as a democratic triumph. It ended nearly ten years of authoritarian, nepotistic rule by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man who in 2009 inflicted a military defeat on Tamil Tiger rebels. Mr Sirisena had promised, however, to build a “new country” in his first hundred days. He has a long way to go.
The change of government offered a chance to face up to Sri Lanka’s bloody past, including atrocities during the war with the rebels. Optimists said that public institutions could again become accountable and that waste and corruption could be cut. But to achieve this, Mr Sirisena would have to wield real authority. He has not. Mr Rajapaksa’s previous ruling coalition boasted a two-thirds majority in the 225-seat Parliament. The new administration has only managed to cobble together diverse and disloyal groups.
Divisions within the coalition have prevented the government fulfilling its grand promises for its early months. Mr Sirisena has fallen short on pledges to pass a right-to-information bill, to amend the constitution to trim the powers of (on paper, in Mr Sirisena’s case) an overweening presidency, and to form independent commissions to run elections, appoint judges and oversee the police. A constitutional amendment was drafted, but the Supreme Court said changing the president’s powers required a two-thirds parliamentary majority, plus public support in the form of a referendum. Rather than attempt the impossible, the government diluted the bill. Even so, it has got nowhere.
Mr Rajapaksa, meanwhile, has not faded away. His morale is high, lifted by queues of fawning fans who visit his village home. Many are provided with transport to his increasingly frequent public events. The media give him plenty of attention. His extended family still wields clout, despite the arrest by financial police on April 22nd of Basil Rajapaksa, one of his brothers, who used to be in charge of the economy. On April 21st legislators handed a petition to Parliament’s Speaker. Signed by 113 of them, it demanded the resignation of an official from an anti-bribery commission who had dared to summon the former president to give evidence. The petition carried a symbolic message: it would take only as many MPs to bring an impeachment motion against Mr Sirisena, should they wish to. The Speaker would probably not object if they did so: he is another brother of Mr Rajapaksa. “Even though we are in government, it’s as if we are in the opposition,” a deputy minister says.
Aides say Mr Sirisena’s main concern has been to try to gain the trust of his own Sri Lanka Freedom Party, which was led until January by Mr Rajapaksa. Speculation is mounting that he may call fresh elections to try to strengthen his parliamentary support. He had promised to go to the polls once the first 100 days were up. That is one pledge on which he can deliver.
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AT THE time, the events in Indochina of April and May 1975 seemed to mark in the starkest way the end of a period of unchallenged American hegemony in Asia and the Pacific. Cambodia fell to the brutal Khmers Rouges, South Vietnam was absorbed by the North and communists took power in Laos. Famous pictures of an evacuation by helicopter from the American embassy roof in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) captured the apocalyptic mood: the humbling of the superpower, in bedraggled retreat from Asia. Yet, 40 years later, as Vietnam marks the anniversary of unification, America’s defeat in Vietnam looks in retrospect no more than a blip in a prolonged Pax Americana. Only now is the durability of the American-led regional order being seriously questioned.
Jonathan Schell, an American journalist who covered the Vietnam war, wrote that what had led America to enter and expand it was not over-optimism about its chances of victory, but “overly pessimistic assessments of the consequences of losing”. These entailed not just the tumbling of other Asian “dominoes” to the communist menace, but a catastrophic loss of American prestige and credibility. Indeed, for a while after the war America did seem in global retreat. Jimmy Carter, elected president the following year, oversaw what Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s late patriarch, called in his memoirs “four years of pious musings about America’s malaise”, during which Iran’s revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further dented America’s standing.
It soon turned out, however, that Mr Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, had been right in a speech he made on April 23rd 1975 in which he said that events in Indochina “tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.” Communism did not advance beyond Indochina to elsewhere in Asia. And by then, partly in response to the quagmire in Vietnam, America had already tilted towards China with Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972. This softened the strategic impact of the humiliations three years later.
A de facto alliance with China against the Soviet Union left America’s supremacy in Asia uncontested. After the war, the region boomed. American intervention in Vietnam no longer looked such an unmitigated disaster. Lee Kuan Yew portrayed it almost as a triumph: without it, South-East Asia would probably have fallen to the communists. America bought the region time and, by 1975, its countries were “in better shape” to stand up to them. The prosperous emerging-market economies they have become “were nurtured during the Vietnam war years”.
The greatest beneficiary of the new global alignment was China itself, which embarked in 1979 on its great economic transformation, against the backdrop of a stable region secured by America’s unchallenged primacy. China has done so well out of this arrangement that many Americans struggle to understand that it might want to challenge and to change it. But growing numbers of analysts now believe that it does: that its goal is to supplant America as the Asia-Pacific’s—and eventually the world’s—leading power. Hugh White, an Australian writer on strategic affairs, argues that China is achieving by totally different means under its current leader, Xi Jinping, what it failed to attain under Mao Zedong: wealth, power and a dominant role in its own region.
Most American strategic thinkers have tended until recently to argue that China can be accommodated in the existing world order; and that even if it harbours greater ambitions, it is so far behind America in economic and military terms that it will set them aside for the foreseeable future. A more alarmist school of thought is gaining strength, however. A new report for the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, by two analysts who have worked in government, Ashley Tellis and Robert Blackwill, calls for a new “grand strategy” for dealing with China, including strengthening America’s army and stepping up military co-operation with its allies. It argues that “the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to US primacy in Asia—and could eventually result in a consequential challenge to American power globally.” In a similar vein, Michael Pillsbury, another former American government official, has published a book with a self-explanatory title: “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”.
The American administration itself seems to be adopting a harder line towards China. It has always denied that its “pivot” or “rebalancing” towards Asia was aimed at China’s containment. But it was certainly intended to reassure its friends and allies in the region that it was not simply going to stage a strategic withdrawal to make way for a rising China. And it is becoming more open in its rivalry. Recently it tried in vain to persuade its allies to shun a Chinese-led development bank. To garner support for its ambitious trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it has stressed how the deal is essential if America is to prevent China from writing the rules for the region.
Full circle
China, for its part, constantly suspects America of trying to contain it; and it argues that the alliances that tie America to Asia, notably its defence treaty with Japan, are cold-war relics that should be dismantled. None of the allies wants that; and none wants to be forced to choose between its security ties with America and its links with China. But, if the pessimists are right, they may one day find they have to. As Mr White sees it, America’s experience in the Vietnam war is an “Aesop’s fable of the perils of statecraft”. America, having fought in Vietnam to stop China building a sphere of influence that excluded it, was driven by the war into opening to China and has since facilitated China’s rise—and that rise has been so successful that China now threatens to build a sphere of influence that excludes America.
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DEMONSTRATIONS in Japan are generally ultra-polite affairs, and those in the southern island prefecture of Okinawa contain more than their share of greying residents who would normally abhor physical confrontation. Yet since the start of the year protests to stop construction work on a new airstrip for American marines at Henoko, a pristine beach on Okinawa’s main island, have grown heated.
On land, scuffles have broken out as security personnel remove protesters ever more forcefully. On the water, coastguard crews in rigid inflatables keep away protesters in kayaks who are trying to stop the drilling for the airstrip’s foundations. The island’s governor, Takeshi Onaga, was swept to office in December vowing to oppose Henoko. He recently ordered construction to stop because of the environmental damage. In Tokyo the government of Shinzo Abe swiftly overruled him.
Okinawan concerns about Henoko are heartfelt. But Mr Abe and his colleagues will countenance neither discussion nor a change of course. When the prime minister travels to Washington, DC, at the end of this month, both the Americans and the Japanese will try to sweep the long-running irritant in their relationship out of view. Okinawa, with nearly one-fifth of its land taken up by American bases, is a powerful symbol of that relationship. Neither side wishes any weakening of their close military ties. In fact, both want the alliance to adapt to long-running challenges, such as North Korea, and to new ones, above all the rise of China. In Washington Mr Abe will find an eager audience for his vision of a Japan less shackled by its war-renouncing (and American-imposed) constitution.
America’s military presence in Okinawa is central to that vision. The island, says Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University, is the “war state” to complement Japan’s “peace state”. Okinawans have reason to grumble about that. Their main island has borne a disproportionate share of America’s security presence in Japan ever since the second world war. Perhaps 120,000 Okinawans, or over a quarter of the population, were killed in the “typhoon of steel”, as the Battle of Okinawa was called, many forced by Japanese commanders to commit suicide.
But having liberated Okinawa, the Americans stayed. Three-fifths of America’s 49,000 forces in Japan are stationed on the island, even though it accounts for just 0.6% of Japan’s land mass. There are accidents and crimes, including rapes. Some 80% of Okinawans surveyed say that the bases, and much else about their lives, are not understood by other Japanese, for many of whom the American presence is invisible. Mr Abe would leave them to grumble: massing the bases on Okinawa leaves the rest of the country untroubled by a debate about burden-sharing.
The deferential national press ignores the growing acrimony on the island. Officials in Tokyo are contemptuous of Okinawans: the islanders are grasping, because for decades they have pocketed government money in return for American forces being based on their island; and short-sighted, even downright treasonous, because opposition to America’s military presence in Okinawa endangers Japan’s security and its alliance with America at a time when North Korea is developing nuclear-tipped missiles and China is rapidly expanding its military capability.
In Washington both Mr Abe and President Barack Obama would prefer to celebrate the way in which an alliance lasting more than six decades—by far America’s most important military alliance in the region—has underwritten peace and prosperity in East Asia (see Banyan). And Mr Abe will emphasise how Japan’s trade and security policies are being overhauled and re-energised to face new challenges.
Japan appears to be finalising bilateral negotiations with America to join a new free-trade arrangement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves a dozen countries and a third of world trade. Mr Abe will be cheered by legislation introduced by Congress which, if passed, will give the president “fast-track” negotiating authority on such deals.
As for security, at the time of the Soviet threat Japan could freeride on America’s defence guarantees while pursuing economic development. Those days are long gone. Though constrained by a pacifist constitution and a defence budget of just 1% of GDP, Mr Abe will lay out his strategy for Japan to do much more to bolster its own defence, reinforce the bilateral alliance and build closer security ties in the region with, among others, Australia, India, the Philippines and Singapore. China will gripe, but America will be pleased. It is all part of Japan’s new “proactive contribution to peace”, as Mr Abe will emphasise when he addresses a joint session of Congress on April 29th.
That a Japanese prime minister is being granted such an honour for the first time is striking. Presidents of South Korea, America’s smaller ally in East Asia, have addressed a joint session six times. It is in part a reflection of past trade frictions with Japan—as well as initial distrust of Mr Abe for his dubious views on Japan’s wartime history. But these days the Washington establishment likes Mr Abe, the most confident Japanese leader in years—and one who, unlike Yukio Hatoyama when he held the job in 2009-10, does not question the key tenets of the alliance. Mr Hatoyama was ostracised in Washington after suggesting that the presence of American bases in Okinawa should be reconsidered; the discord ultimately led to his downfall. In Washington Mr Abe will blithely insist that the base relocation is on course. And with Mr Obama he will sign a new agreement on defence co-operation, the first update since 1997.
In Japan’s heavily dynastic politics, policy can be inherited. Mr Abe’s own desire to update the alliance has a family dimension. It was his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who pushed through a revised security treaty in 1960. That has defined the alliance ever since. Mr Abe recalls sitting on his grandfather’s knee when crowds of left-wing students laid siege to the prime minister’s residence in protest. But then the motives for updating the alliance did not stem from a desire to be seen to be pandering to America—often a default mode among Japanese prime ministers.
And neither do they today. Indeed Mr Abe is probably among those in Tokyo who do not always trust Mr Obama’s assurances of an American “pivot” or “rebalancing” (the administration’s preferred term) towards Asia. The American president’s own defence budget is under pressure, and he is distracted by the Middle East. Japanese officials see China upsetting the established regional order by, for example, challenging Japan’s control of the Senkaku islands (known as the Diaoyu islands in China) and building airstrips on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. They believe that America’s supremacy in East Asia can no longer be taken for granted—nor, perhaps, even its commitment to the region. That is why, in the words of one senior Japanese diplomat: “We need to play our own part in ensuring the pivot is not a sort of one-off, short-term policy.”
Japan is revising its joint-defence guidelines with America to foster “seamless and effective” co-ordination between the two countries’ armed forces in areas such as logistics, intelligence, missile defence and cyber-warfare. This summer it is also pushing legislation through the Diet (parliament) that will radically change what its army, known as the Self-Defence Force, is allowed to do. The new rules would legitimise collective self-defence, allowing the armed forces to come to the aid of allies, America in particular, in situations that have nothing to do with rebuffing direct attacks on its own territory.
At present, if an American naval ship comes under attack in international waters a Japanese maritime self-defence vessel may not help it by opening fire on the aggressor. Japan and America want that to change, and want to abandon the idea of narrowly defined “non-combat” zones to which Japanese forces have to restrict operations if they are deployed outside Japan. (Japanese policymakers still smart at Australian troops having had to defend unarmed Japanese ones in Iraq in 2004.)
Debate rages within the ruling coalition over how far such changes should go. Komeito, the pacifist coalition partner of Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), is cautious about overseas deployments. Some in the LDP want the Japanese navy to patrol with South-East Asian countries, Australia and India to counter Chinese assertiveness and guard sea lanes as far as the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Abe, at the time of the beheading of two Japanese nationals by Islamic State in Syria earlier this year, seemed openly to regret that Japan did not have a military mandate to retaliate.
An infantilised embrace
Mr Abe’s passions, however, go beyond bolstering security. He is fervent about Japan becoming what some call a more “normal” country—that is, one shorn of externally imposed constraints on autonomy in foreign and even domestic spheres. Although hardly anti-American (not even the protesting Okinawans are that), he often speaks of wanting to overturn what he calls the “post-war regime” and of bringing about the “rebirth of Japan”.
By this he does not mean weakening the American embrace. He is suggesting frustration with the supposed domination for much of the post-war era of left-wingers (teachers, in particular) who have, as he sees it, played up Japan’s war guilt and undermined any sense of national pride. Japan, Mr Abe insists, must project a strong image, in part by boosting patriotism and even harking back to an imperial idyll. His fondness for the militaristic Yasukuni shrine should be seen in this context. On April 21st he sent it a gift of a potted tree, angering China and South Korea. The Americans wish Mr Abe would avoid such gestures, but do not berate him much for them. He will be careful to say the right things in Congress about Japan’s mistreatment of American prisoners-of-war and even the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
There is much that is odd about Mr Abe’s views of the post-war era, above all the notion of a left-wing conspiracy. American tutelage gave rise to a right-wing political and bureaucratic establishment, with the LDP at its heart, that has dominated Japan almost without a break since. Mr Abe himself is a chief product of that. Yet his obsessions point to underlying realities both sides have been reluctant to acknowledge.
The first is that the alliance with America has always been an odd and unequal one, with a proudly pacifist state sheltering under America’s nuclear umbrella. America has always insisted on strategic control of Japan, mainly through Okinawa. Even after it handed control of Japan back to the Japanese in 1952, it made an exception of Okinawa, which it kept under military control for another two decades. Then it insisted on keeping the bases.
During the cold war, the alliance was a comfort blanket for Japan’s leaders. But today heightened regional uncertainties, especially the rise of China, are fuelling the resurgence of nationalism, including Mr Abe’s. It is unhelpful that the protective nature of the alliance has given Japan too little cause to form deep and constructive relationships with neighbours and former enemies—one reason for its difficulty in dealing with China and South Korea today. “Cocooned by our big brother,” says an Abe adviser, “the Japanese ceased thinking strategically about their own future.”
Another consequence—a domestic politics that is unresponsive to people’s wishes—is nowhere more evident than in the fate of Okinawa. Once an island kingdom balanced precariously between Japan and China, it has drawn the short straw ever since Japan’s annexation of it in the 1870s. Okinawans, says Kurayoshi Takara, a historian and recent vice-governor of Okinawa, suffer from a double occupation: both America’s and Japan’s. But, though “talk of neocolonialism describes the situation, it doesn’t promise the solution.”
23:39
Tieng Anh Vui
