Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank

     The idea of the AIIB (Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank) was first floated by China when she talked to Indonesia in 2013.  She is inviting membership since then, and today, 31 March 2015, is the deadline, in the sense that the countries which have applied by today will be participating in the management of the Bank as the founding members.  41 countries, including India, have applied so far, but not the US and Japan.

     Japan thinks that there is already the ADB (Asian Development Bank), based at Manila but practically under the Japanese leadership, with each and every Governor since its inception in 1960 has been from Japan.  China says that it is not enough, in view of the huge demand of fund in the infrastructural sector.

     It is interesting that China says they need an institution for the infrastructural sector because the ADB is mostly for the purpose of poverty alleviation.  It is interesting as Japan's development pattern has been to build large-scale modern infrastructure, leaving the solution of the poverty problem in the hands of the market mechanism, to the trickling-down effects.  I do not think the ADB has gone out of that way very far.  It is the out-dated development pattern of the last century.  But if China says that she will go this way, is she going to leave the solution of the poverty and the growing disparities to the market?  Is such a solution possible at all in this century?  Is it not all the more difficult for India?

     Will Japan, then, almost alone in Asia, remain aloof from the AIIB, which is now almost a movement?  It does not seem to be a wise policy.  Japan should join it.  She is again, once again, looking at the US, and only the US.  But the US Treasury Secretary must be visiting Beijing today, presumably to get to know China's AIIB policy first-hand.  Suppose, just suppose, the US makes up her mind to join it? By the end of today, but by the US time?  That would be the second edition of Henry Kissinger's surprise China visit in 1971, and would be disastrous to Japan.  If at all that happens, Japan should never join the AIIB to protect her honour!       

Nanjing

     On 14 March, about a fortnight ago, I saw two films on Nanjing (Nanking), China, at the time when it was occupied by the Japanese troops.  It was in December 1937.  Even the Pal (Radha Vinod Pal) Judgment at the Tokyo Tribunal, which declared all the defendants not guilty and was as such never read at the Tribunal itself, discussed the three weeks of cruelties which followed the occupation.  So it is well-known, so notorious.

     The first film, Nanking-Nanking, was directed by a young Chinese, and, I am told, was faithful to the historical fact.  But the second one, John Rabe, by a young German director, was, though based on Rabe's own diary and was in the main truthful, a little dramatized here and there.  There was a little difference between what Rabe wrote and what was edited and got published, and the film was based on the latter.  Rabe was the Siemens representative at Nanjing at the time, with a long experience with China.  As is suggested by the title, he is the central figure in the second one.  The second one therefore has got a consistent story centred around him.  He, however, appeared a lot in the first film also.  Both were made in 2009.

     The first one, on the other hand, has got no such central, consistent story.  In fact, it is difficult to talk about it in separation from the second.  So I will write on these two in a mixed way.  It will do since it is not my purpose to compare the two.  They are basically on the same theme, why the Japanese troops did what they did there and then.

     Both the films start from the Japanese assault on the Wall of the city.  In the second, Prince Asaka, a relative of the then Emperor and a Division Commander, was unhappy that his men took as many as 4,000 POWs, and ordered they should be shot, saying he did not want to see them alive the next morning.  There were some conscientious voices from among the invading army in both of the films, and some officer was courageous enough to tell Asaka that it would be against the international law, but was dismissed.  In the first, by the way, a non-commissioned MP officer even committed suicide at the very end, presumably from trauma out of the massacre.

     In the face of the occupation, the European community at Nanjing drew a non-armed Safety Zone in the central part of the city, and elected Rabe the Chairman to manage it, although he was about to go home as his term came to an end.  His election was to a large extent because he was a member of the Nazi, though not a fanatic one.  It was estimated that 100,000 people was the limit the Safety Zone could maintain, but someone said twice that number could be in the case of the Chinese, and the idea was approved. Most of the second and a considerable part of the first are on the activities of Rabe and his associates trying to protect these people in the Zone, and not outright on the massacre itself, as I had expected.  But there is no dearth of those scenes also, especially in the first one.

     Do the films answer the question mentioned above?  

           

Views of Mr. Magosaki Ukeru

     Mr. Magosaki (surname) Ukeru, born in 1943, is a retired diplomat of Japan.  He is very critical of Japan's politics, particularly of diplomacy.  In recent years he wrote one book after another very rapidly to express these views to give a warning to our people.  It is very rare that a bureaucrat of his standing, a former ambassador to several countries, entertains, let alone expresses, such critical views.  They are, moreover, logical, well-based, and worth listening to.

     I have read three of these books, one of them by himself and the other two the record of his dialogue with one of the leaders of Japan's non-governmental Right Wing and a New York Times correspondent with a long experience in Japan, respectively.  What follows is an excerpt of his salient views expressed in these books.

     He says, together with the American correspondent, Mr. Martin Fackler, that the Japanese establishment do not represent the Japanese public opinion to their US counterpart, nor do they seriously try to ascertain the latter's view.  They are dealing only with a handful of the 'Japan Handlers', people like Armitage and Nye, who are often out of the US government and are not in a position to represent the US views.  Sometimes they are making money out of this particular contact.  Fackler has even gone to the extent of listing 28 American names, with annotation, Senators and others, as an appendix to their dialogue whom Japan may well establish contact to their profit. Koreans and the Chinese are making a much wider contact there on their own.  But Japan is taking what a narrow circle of these several people say almost as an order, and trying to please them.  This has greatly distorted the Japan-US relations.

     Concerning the territorial issues Japan is facing, the Kurils, Magosaki says, should be returned to Russia as a whole in accordance to the letters of the Peace Treaty, although this writer is not convinced as these Islands had not be taken as the result of any war by Japan in the past and had been peacefully exchanged with Sakhalin by a treaty of 1875 with Russia, and Russia had no reason to claim that they are their territory.  Did not the Allied countries declare that, although Japan should be deprived of those portions of her territory which she took from her neighbours by aggression, the War itself was not a war for their own territorial expansion?

     He warns that the Senkaku issue should be peacefully solved with China, as, contrary to what is widely believed in Japan, it would be easy for China to inactivate Japan's Self-Defence Forces by their far superior(numerically) force of bombers and missiles capable of destroying the airfields in Japan, and the US forces would not come to the rescue of Japan, as they are not looking at China as their enemy.  He stresses that the record of dialogue has been kept secret by Japan government with China on the Senkaku and with Russia on the Kurils.  He also says that, as there is a treaty with China on fishing, Japan should not have captured their fishing boats invoking Japan's domestic law.

     On the general political situation, he says that those elements within the Conservative forces, particularly the LDP, which had stood for a relatively less armament and more economic growth, have disappeared by now, and those which stand for more armament and more rightest policies even at the expense of socio-economic equality have now centred around Prime Minister Abe and they are the almost only significant elements in the LDP.  He is not satisfied.  Particularly he is very unhappy with the present situation in which the mass media functions under an already strong restraint on the freedom of expression.  The media has become an entrenched vested interest itself. He also feels that under the circumstances there will be a stronger voice in Okinawa for independence, at least for separation from Japan

     Magosaki, Fackler, and the rightest Suzuki Kunio all have got something interesting to say about the imperial household, but we will discuss it some other time.. ,   

Mr. F. Sionil Jose from the Philippines interviewed on Japan

     Sionil Jose, a National Artist of the Philippines, a Magsaysay awardee, is 90 years old.  He was born in 1924.  His interview was published on 27 February on the daily Asahi newspaper in Japanese.  The occasion was the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Manila about this time in 1945.

     He fought the Japanese troops in Luzon in the last months of the War.  The Battle of Manila was fought during that time.  Manila, by the way, was one of the most destructed cities during the Second World War together with Stalingrad and Warsaw, by the land battle.  Sionil was determined at that time to come to Japan and kill as many Japanese as possible by his gun.

     His first visit to Japan was in 1955.  Since then he visited it almost every year.  As he sees it, Japan is safe and comfortable, with a lot of things to see.  Some of his books were written there.  He forgot some stuff in the Metro from time to time, but they were all returned to him.

     He seems to be telling the young generation of his country to learn from the Meiji Restoration in the second half of 19th Century Japan.  He says that it was a great event opening up a closed country.  Then the victory in the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of 20th Century was not only Japan's but also of the whole of Asia in that it showed that an Asian country isolated for centuries under feudalism was able to modernize itself.  Even the Second World War showed what a small country with a dedicated people could do.

     This writer, however, would not agree.  Japan modernized itself under the motto of the Rich Country, Strong Military.  Many Asian leaders, including Sun Yat-sen of China, looked up to Japan in those days, but they got ultimately disillusioned.  If there was some one who was not interested in this way of modernization, it was Gandhi of India.

     But when Sionil Jose says that in Japan today there is not much of open debate on the questions facing her, the media is hesitant in criticizing the ruling elites, and it is possible that the country is led to some ultra-nationalistic goal, I heartily agree with him.  A person like him is a real friend of us.  Let me conclude by saying that I look forward to meeting him sooner rather than later.    

     

     

Prime Minister Abe Speaks

      Mr. Abe spoke on the main features of his policies in the both Houses of the Japanese Parliament (known as the Diet) on 12 February.  Here are some of these policies, together with my critical comments wherever relevant.

     At the very beginning, he said before going into the details that Japan will perform her responsibility in the international community in fighting terrorism.  He thus put Japan on the side of the willing, effectively though not formally.  He did not elaborate what was terrorism, whom he wanted to fight, and how it came into being in a large measure in the present world.  Terrorism is a word very vague and dangerous to use in the international context.  I have raised five questions on Abe's behaviour, including his language, in connection with the Japanese hostages who were murdered by the ISIL.

     Then, Abe made it clear that he wants to see the TPP negotiations to come to an early conclusion, to lower the corporation tax by 2.5 %, to reopen the nuclear plants which are considered safe, to let the company profit to be related to the rise in wages, and to raise the consumption tax from the present 8 % to ten from April 2017.

     It is clear from them that he is firmly standing on the trickling-down theory which is now labelled out of date, even by the OECD, the alliance of the rich countries, in its recent report. The lower corporation tax and the successive hike in the consumption tax, heavier on the poor people, will assure the income tax in general to be on the high level.  The average monthly wage has come down from its highest in 1997 by as much as \ 55, 000 by now, showing the bankruptcy of the trickling-down theory.  On the reopening of the nuclear plants, Abe is apparently taking the side of the nuclear business industry, as the Fukushima plant is still not able to deal with its contaminated water.

     On the diplomacy and security, Abe sticks to the Japan-US alliance, and says that he will go ahead with the construction of the new US air base at Henoko, Okinawa, in spite of the overwhelming opposition of the residents of Okinawa Prefecture, as represented in several elections toward the end of 2014.

     In the last minute or two of his speech Abe referred to the issue of the Constitutional amendment, without getting into any details.  It did not look nice.  Worse still, he did not say a word on the talk he is supposed to give around 15 August this year in commemoration of the 70 years of the end of the War.