CruddyLeper
Unworshipped Deity
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2361311_2,00.html
Japan flexes its military muscles
Michael Sheridan, Tokyo
Strongman Abe rekindles pride
JAPAN is about to get its most nationalistic prime minister since the 1950s and ardent patriots are celebrating in advance, sensing that their sun is rising after decades of shame.
The resurgence of pride alarms Japans principal wartime victims, China and the two Koreas, but it is winning quiet applause from the United States, which foresees an enduring change in Japanese military policy.
The man in waiting is Shinzo Abe, 51, the chief cabinet secretary. He has struck a chord among voters by taking a hard line on North Korea, saying he would strike at missile sites before Kim Jong-il could fire off any weapons against Japan.
Abe has angered China, but pleased many Japanese, by defending his nations stance on its wartime record and the way it commemorates its war dead.
He has come forward as a new kind of Japanese leader as he prepares to claim victory in a leadership contest of the Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which controls the premiers post, this Wednesday.
He will take over from Junichiro Koizumi, a charismatic maverick with a lions mane of grey hair, who broke with the LDPs traditional factions, revived the worlds second biggest economy and sent Japanese forces to Iraq in support of the United States and Britain.
Abe wants to go further. His priority is to change Japans constitution, written by the Americans after 1945, to allow its armed forces to act in collective self-defence alongside the US.
The rise of China and the threat from North Korea, Abe believes, have changed Japanese psychology from its pacifism after the shattering defeat of the second world war. He is the champion of the neoconservative cause, said an Abe adviser over seafood in a French bistro in Tokyo full of creamy blossoms in delicate green porcelain.
The sophisticated Japanese right, which has long hungered to assert again the nations leading place in the world through its diplomacy and armed forces, senses that the hour and the man have come.
In a land where lineage counts for a lot witness the patriotic joy at the birth of a male heir, Prince Hisahito, to the Chrysanthemum throne Abes credentials are impeccable. In fact, they are distinctly old Japan.
Abe is descended from a powerful family on the southern island of Honshu, whose rival Choshu and Satsuma clans provided most of the military leaders to the Japanese empire.
His father Shintaro Abe served as foreign minister in the highly nationalist government of Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1980s. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi had a career that raises eyebrows in the West and still stirs passions in China.
Kishi ran the wartime economy in the cabinet of the military dictator Hideki Tojo, who was later hanged by the allies. Before that he helped the Japanese army to plunder Manchuria. But after the war Kishi reinvented himself as a founder of the LDP and became the prime minister who cemented Japans alliance with the United States.
His grandson has already received a warm welcome at the White House. The Bush administration is delighted at Abes initiative in far-reaching, and as yet unpublicised, plans to reshape the Japanese military.
According to Richard Halloran, an authority on the US-Japanese alliance, Japan is on the brink of sweeping changes in its security policy to rebalance its forces away from the vanished Soviet threat and towards the perceived Chinese one.
The top American officer in Japan, Lieutenant-General Bruce Wright, told Halloran that a monumental change has taken place in Japanese attitudes. Tokyo has established a joint command centre with the Americans, which captured data when North Korea fired missiles into the Sea of Japan last July. The Japanese have upgraded their air defence technology and updated their navy.
All this seems remote from the funky streets of Tokyo, where fashion, football, anime videos and mobile phone fads grip the nations youth.
Yet old Japan and new Japan are frequently mixed up in the bafflingly flexible way that the country has adapted to its contradictions since it opened up to the world in the 19th century.
Take two events on the same day last week. New Japan made a dazzling debut with the explosion onto the Tokyo stock exchanges start-up market of Mixi, a hot online cyber-community that links 5m chatty young Japanese to their peers.
Mixis shares soared to an astonishing £14,400 each and made its floppy-haired 30-year-old founder, Kenji Kasahara, an instant millionaire.
At the same time, Abe joined two rival politicians on a white campaign van to woo listless old folk and commuters trudging out of a suburban railway station on a wet and windy afternoon. Superficially, it was an old Japan occasion. Abe spoke about renewal and pride but, in his grey suit, looked like a weary Japanese everyman.
His rivals the hawk-faced foreign minister, Taro Aso, and the long-winded finance minister, Sadakazu Tanigaki recited their own claims to office in dreary language.
Yet the Abe message resonates among Japanese of all ages. Japan is a peaceful democracy, said a young male onlooker in the excellent English that is the internet generations calling card. So why should we be pushed around by bad countries? Abe alone drew applause from the audience, pausing to beam and shake hands as his vigilant bodyguards scanned the crowd.
To China, and even to Japans uneasy neighbour South Korea, the ascent of Abe symbolises a menacing revival of Japanese ultra-nationalism. In their minds loom the brooding pines of Yasukuni shrine, where Japanese leaders go to honour the spirits of 2.5m dead in Japans wars since the Meiji restoration of 1868.
Koizumi enraged the Chinese by keeping up this longstanding tradition, pointing out that Japan has formally apologised on at least 35 occasions for its wartime conduct.
Will Abe, a past worshipper, go to Yasukuni once he is premier? His grandfathers old mentor, Tojo, is among 14 class A war criminals commemorated there.
His advisers, though, hint he will go first to Beijing to mend fences with the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, both sides bowing to the reality that they enjoy enormous reciprocal benefits from Japanese technology and Chinese labour.
But there is no doubt that Abes course is set. Last week Japan said it would impose financial sanctions on North Korea and the government prepared the public for its next military expedition a proposed dispatch of ground forces to Lebanon.
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