Japan struggles to draw up a national strategy because it outsourced its security to the United States after the war, a former ambassador to China has argued, leaving the part of the national brain that thinks about defense and diplomacy to wither.
Tate Hidehisa, now a professor at Ritsumeikan University, makes the case in a new book, Strategic Thinking: Surviving the Age of Power, published by Bungeishunju. He discussed it in an interview with JBpress.
Japan's economy has lost presence after the "lost 30 years," and military threats from neighboring countries are rising. At home, an aging population and shrinking workforce leave the rebuilding of the social security system among problems that cannot be solved without a long view.
China, by contrast, has set national goals and spent decades nurturing advanced technology and building up its military.
An island, conformity and churn at the top
Tate lists several reasons Japan cannot hold a long-term national vision: it is an island country, its culture puts a premium on conformity, and prime ministers and central ministry officials turn over in quick succession.
The larger reason, he argues, is the security treaty with the US, under which Japan outsourced its security. "As a result, the part of the brain that thinks about security and diplomacy weakened," he said.
China's strategic culture, by his account, took shape in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, roughly 550 years from 770 BC to 221 BC, the era of the ancient military thinker Sun Tzu.
“A hundred battles, a hundred victories, is not the best of the best. To bend the enemy's army without fighting is the best of the best.”Sun Tzu, as cited by Tate Hidehisa
Tate reads the passage to mean that winning every battle is not necessarily the best way to fight. The best way is to make an opponent conclude before fighting that it cannot win, and give up.
Sun Tzu valued things that cannot be seen, such as perception and time, Tate said. Chinese Communist Party leaders from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping have pursued different strategic goals in different eras, but each conducted cognitive operations with time in mind.
Japan's last strategic era
Japanese are poor at thinking and planning over a long horizon, Tate said, but there was a stretch from the end of the Tokugawa shogunate through the Meiji Restoration when the country built itself with a strategy.
Under the tension of possible colonization by the Western powers, Japan set goals such as "industrial promotion" and "enrich the country, strengthen the military," and set out to build a modern state able to stand alongside the powers.
"I think Japan at that time was a strategic state," Tate said. Strategic goals in the broad sense did not change even when the country's leader changed.
Asked to assess how Japan handles its basic stance, or sense of distance, toward the US and China, Tate's answer was not included in the published portion of the interview.