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Japan
OpinionComment
Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Opinion | Why Japan should focus on making friends and money, not interfering in Taiwan

  • Asia needs a progressive geo-economic evolution led by a friendlier, outward-looking Japan, not further remilitarisation
  • Japan does best and offers neighbours its best when it keeps its military on a leash while unleashing its impressive entrepreneurial powers

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Illustration: Stephen Case
Tom Plate

There are always concerns about Japan, with its background of brilliant accomplishments and unforgettable aggression. Now that Japan is in the foreground again with the cheerless Olympics, who can be sure what is next?

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East Asia began its major transformation in the mid-1960s, when Japan’s wildly successful 1964 Tokyo Olympics proved an early marker of its emergence as an economic powerhouse. At that time, Mao Zedong’s China was still reeling from the Great Leap Forward that triggered one of the greatest recorded mass famines in history.

By the 1980s, there were times when it seemed as if Japan could afford to buy almost anything anywhere. Across the East China Sea, not many Chinese seemed to have any money to buy much besides bags of rice.

Fast-forward to today’s Tokyo Olympics, eviscerated by a persistent pandemic into little more than an international TV event with Tokyo residents mostly off-camera in a new state of emergency. The nation’s economy is sagging under a mountain of debt, the product of inept government that since the 1990s seemed to lack what its business community once had in excess – ideas that worked.
Commuters at a train station in Tokyo on July 11. The fourth state of emergency for Tokyo took effect on July 12 and would last through August 22, despite the opening ceremony of Tokyo Olympics that’s scheduled to be held in less than two weeks. Photo: AP
Commuters at a train station in Tokyo on July 11. The fourth state of emergency for Tokyo took effect on July 12 and would last through August 22, despite the opening ceremony of Tokyo Olympics that’s scheduled to be held in less than two weeks. Photo: AP

Even though Japan’s economy is still the world’s third-largest, the sense of stasis is unsettling. Note the polished, centralised direction from Beijing and entrepreneurial decentralisation as China roars into the 21st century. In the economic regard, might Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party deserve less respect than China’s Communist Party?

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