GC: Because the public hasn’t been convinced that he knows what he wants to do about Japan’s domestic issues and how to do it. The public is concerned about things like healthcare, pensions, taxes, education of their children. What are his policies? It’s not clear. Plus, there’s the sense that after Koizumi’s radical approach, Abe is going back to politics as normal, the bad old ways. He doesn’t really have much leadership ability, to manage his own cabinet, etc. All of those things are contributing to this continuing decline in his support ratings. It doesn’t seem to have leveled off yet.
FP: How does the comfort women issue play into that?
GC: I’m sure this issue with the comfort women is hurting him a lot, because there isn’t much sympathy among the Japanese public for his position. I think there’s some concern that it’s leading to a deterioration in relations with the United States, the most important relationship Japan has. As for Abe’s statements, I think he said what he believed without thinking very hard about either playing to his conservative base or what the consequences would be abroad. Before he became prime minister, he was one of the leaders of the group that wanted to revise the so-called Kono statement about Japan’s culpability for forcing those women into sex slavery. So he said what he believed. Yeah, it plays to his narrow base of hard-core right-wing support, but I think it cost him more broadly, both domestically and internationally. The Japanese conservative leadership has not come to grips with World War II, so there’s a politics of denial here. This is not majority sentiment in Japan, but it happens to be a very strong sentiment among the group that’s in power in Japan.
FP: Japan has a history of baffling foreign observers. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for instance, once described the country as having “intangibles of culture that America is ill-prepared to understand fully.” What do you think most outsiders still don’t get about Japan?
GC: It’s hard to find Japanese who can explain what Japan is thinking in a way that foreigners can understand. It’s very different when you interact with Chinese elites. They’re very articulate. They have a global vision. They have a worldview. They know what they think and they tell you. But the Japanese cultural tradition is quite different, so you have to be able to read between the lines. You have to be able to hear it in the Japanese language, and there aren’t very many people who can do that. So they’re not very good at articulating their views, and that leads to all kinds of guesswork about what they’re up to. The fact is, even with all the changes going on, and this right-wing leadership in power now, the Japanese defense budget is not increasing. They’re reaching out for a bigger role abroad, but in a pretty tentative and limited manner. They’ll probably continue to muddle through—take some tough positions like they have on the abductee issue with North Korea—but the idea that they’re on the march to become a great military power with power projection capabilities and challenge the Chinese and so on? I don’t buy it.
Gerald L. Curtis is professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books on politics in Japan and U.S.-East Asian relations.
