Japanese Right 'Hijacking' Obama's Asia Pivot (Xinhua, China)
How damaging are the repeated visits of Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni
Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead - including men convicted of war crimes during
World War II? For China's state-run Xinhua,
columnist Zhu Dongyang provides an indication of the
tightrope President Obama will have to walk during his week-long visit to
America's Asian allies, warning that if he fails to criticize
Tokyo over such visits, it could derail Washington's larger strategy in the region.
BEIJING:
With outcries from Japan's neighbors barely fading over visits to a
controversial war shrine by two cabinet ministers, 146 Japanese lawmakers
turned up en masse to the Tokyo shrine on Tuesday, in a new act of provocation
that will further worsen the island's already tense relations with its
neighbors.
In
addition, the trip of nearly a fifth of Japan's lawmakers to the Yasukuni
Shrine puts U.S. President Barack Obama in an awkward position, as it comes
trickily on the eve of his three-day state visit to Japan.
Any
visit to the shrine by politicians, which honors 14 Class-A WWII war criminals along
with the rest of Japan's war dead, angers Tokyo's neighbors, which suffered
untold atrocities at the hands of imperial Japan.
The
United States itself fell victim to Japan's WWII aggression.
After
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's shrine visit last
December, Washington expressed "disappointment," and called on Tokyo
to engage in constructive dialogue with its neighbors over history and
territorial disputes.
Posted
By Worldmeets.US
Obama
may find his "pivot to Asia" strategy hijacked by Japan's right-wing
politicians, who care more about domestic politics than the country's overall
national interest in maintaining good relations with its neighbors and the
United States.
Although
having decided not to pay an in-person tribute to the shrine this time, Abe
dedicated a "masakaki"
tree, in an obvious attempt to play both sides by avoiding further diplomatic embarrassment
of Obama while at the same time, appeasing domestic right-leaning forces.
Given
this collective spring season worship at the Shrine just a day before his
arrival, Obama may find himself on a tightrope.
Silence
over the shrine visit will deprive Obama of the moral high ground, given that
he will later on travel to South Korea and the Philippines - two countries that
suffered greatly from Japan's WWII aggression. Yet by siding with Japan, which
behaves like a spoiled child of the United States, Obama will anger China,
which will run counter to the U.S. president's commitment to forging a
"new type of major-power relations" with Beijing.
The
U.S. president should keep a careful eye trained in his Asian ally, which has long
attempted to whitewash its history of aggression and boost its self-defense capabilities,
which poses a threat not only to its Asian neighbors, but to the peace of the
world at large. Neither is a militarist Japan in the interests of the
United States.
A
Japan which is reckless about dealing with other regional powers, including
China and South Korea, will eventually weigh negatively on Washington's
"rebalance in Asia."
