SEMINARS

Training and education in international affairs:
Japan, Palestine and the Middle East (1999)

 Palitical Relations between Japan and the Middle East

Japanese policy in the Middle East, especially in regard to Palestine, has had relatively little to do with politics up until very recently. Nearly a decade ago, I had an opportunity to speak very closely with one of our prominent ambassadors who served in various places including the United States and the Middle East. He was once our ambassador to Saudi Arabia and he was telling me about how he had been called back to Japan from Riyadh to lead the trade negotiations with the United States, which were certainly no fun for Japan. In fact, the Ambassador said that it was one of the worst assignments that he ever had, but he added that at least it got him out of Saudi Arabia. Knowing what I did about the Middle East, I was very sympathetic. The Mid­dle East was at the time no fun for anyone and in many ways living there was likely to become more difficult, which is why many people would prefer to live somewhere else.

There is some good and some bad news. The bad news is that Japan is not particularly fond of this part of the world, but the good news is that it still feels tremendous concern in regard to what is going on in the region. What makes the sub­ject so complicated? As with most places, there are two obvious answers. One is geography - in this case post-strategic and economic - and the other is history, with the two being closely con­nected. If the Middle East were closer to Japan, its history and impact on it would be different. Europe and America are situated farther away in terms of purely geographic distance, but they are the source of the modern civilizations, whereas the Middle East, the cradle of some of the world’s oldest civilizations, neither threatened Japan nor provided it with models. China, an­other ancient civilization, was a threat to Japan as well as a model, but the West gradually re­placed it over the past 150 years, during which Japan’s record of contact with the Middle East was marginal.

The Japanese image of the Middle East was neither bad nor good. In general, there was a vague sense that something mysterious was hap­pening in this part of the distant world because the Middle East is the point of con­tact of three of the world’s greatest religions, that is to say Juda­ism, Christianity and Islam, which all emerged in the region. However, all those monotheistic religions were alien to the Japa­nese, their relig­ious traditions and their way of thinking. Japa­nese people tend not to accept what are called absolute values or absolute teach­ings, and they are accustomed to thinking according to a com­mon Japanese expression that means ‘In a fight, both parties share the prey’. Some even argue that the era of monotheism had been replaced by the era of polytheism and that what Japan could contribute to the world was, like the case of computer science, this idea about religion.

In those post-Cold War years, there was a de­cline of Western prestige and ideological influ­ence, which resulted in the rise of multicultural­ism. While in the West people talked about the end of history or clash of civilizations, Japanese scholars were arguing that Japan had become a major economic power because of Shintoism and the spirit of tolerance and polytheism cou­pled with respect for labor. Now that the eco­nomic land­scape has turned out dramatically black and the economies are being torpedoed one by one, some people are saying that the ‘American Cen­tury’ is likely to go on well into the next century. It is extremely difficult for the Japanese to be­come familiar with the Middle East. Of course, some Japanese accepted Christi­anity after en­counter­ing the West and deciding to follow its path in the process of our moderni­zation, but this was mainly because the Christian West had con­veniently separated the scientific knowledge from the idea of a whole. With re­gard to com­munication with other Japanese, the one million Christians in Japan are faced with a great handi­cap in their attempt to establish a dialogue, and the problem is how to find a common ground in the fundamentals of their respective religions.

In most ways, the Middle East differs from all parts of the world. In Japan, the same people have been settled where they are for thousands of years. In the Middle East, on the other hand, all kinds of different people have been coming and going throughout history, not only people native to the region but also people such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Crusaders, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc; eventually, all the great conquerors of history left their marks here. In some cases they found or recruited local sup­porters, and in others, local supporters invited them in. The Middle East has been a theater for other people’s wars, which is another reason why Japan has tended to shun it. In short, the very odd political landscape of the Middle East is so confusing and troublesome that the Japa­nese prefer not to even think about it.

This lack of interest in the region is facilitated by Japanese ideas concerning Islam and the Mos­lems. Even in Southeast Asia, Japan, after occu­pying Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which have a large Moslem population, did not develop a positive attitude vis-à-vis Islam. Since then, the Japanese have turned their attention to economic growth and their contacts with the Southeast Asian countries were predominantly seen in economic and technological not religious and cultural terms. With the exception of the par­ticular interests of area specialists, artists and historians, Islam and Moslems were not an ob­ject of attention for the Japanese. Although the oil shock of 1973 resulted in a lot of sudden at­tention being directed towards the Moslem World by the Japanese press, this was for eco­nomic and not military or other reasons. Since then, there have been a few international events during which Islam and the Moslems drew the attention of the Japanese, one of which was the report on the terrorist military and political ac­tivities of the so-called Moslem fundamentalists. This was of great importance to certain intellec­tual circles, as were the reports on various cul­tural conflicts; for example, the destruction of the great Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban, or the positions taken by the Moslem countries on issues related to the feminist move­ment. However, generally speaking, the com­plexities of the situation within which these fun­damentalists operate and within which women’s rights are discussed are not well re­ported to the Japanese public.

Another important reality that drew the attention of Japanese public opinion relates to the direct contact with Moslem visitors in different parts of Japan, especially the Moslems from Turkestan who sought political asylum and settled in Japan during the Japanese intervention in Siberia fol­lowing the Russian Revolution. There are other things as well, such as the mosque built by Moslems in Tokyo, which was the first of its kind in Japan. The main thing, however, is the migration waves from different parts of the Mos­lem World, mainly from Iran and South Asia. At first, the Moslem refugees were not numerous enough to create a clear image of the Moslems, but the recent inflow of migrant labors in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the forming of some negative images in the eyes of conserva­tive Japa­nese. This is not only because some of those workers came to be involved in criminal activi­ties such as telephone card forgery or drug traf­ficking, but also because there prevailed a dis­torted image idea that the Moslem workers were religiously handicapped when it came to com­peting with Japanese workers in the work­place. The fact that they stopped working in or­der to pray was difficult for the Japanese manag­ers, for whom hard work for the company was the only religious activity, to understand. One could say that the exposure to Moslem workers did not improve the lack of interest on the part of the Japanese towards Moslems and the Middle East.

However, the presence of the Moslem workers led to a realization that the Middle East as well as South Asia are not far away places with no direct links to Japan. There is even a large park close to the major shrine in the center of Tokyo where one could find signs in Persian indicating that the park closes at 8:00 p.m., the reason be­ing that several hundreds of Iranian workers used to gather there to meet friends and ex­change information. However insignificant this appears, it shows that those workers are now a part of the Japanese society and Japanese back­ground. The problem is to make the Japanese fabric realize what this means in terms of human contact. Unfortunately, there are very few exam­ples of contacts between the Japanese and the Moslem World, although they are bound to in­crease in a world where inter-dependence in­creases day after day. The question is how to make increased contact a basis for friendship and cooperation and not to fall victim to the racist anti-Moslem attitude that is frequently found in the West.

Here it should be pointed out that there exists a gap between the perceptional incongruity to­wards the region and actual concern regarding what is happening here. In recent years, Japan has become politically more and more visible in the region. Thus, in the last decade or so people have become used to the idea of Japan as a visi­ble, if not active, political player in the region. Foreign policy is a complicated process in most countries, but the Japanese Constitution makes things even more difficult.

Today, very few Japanese are interested for ex­ample in Bosnia and Kosovo or Rwanda, al­though a few years ago, certain people in Tokyo took them very seriously. The Middle East is different. It is a part of the world that many Japanese take seriously for many different rea­sons in spite of the lack of familiarity and affini­ties I have already described. It is also a region where several different agencies make policy: for example, the Prime Minister’s Office fol­lowed by the Foreign Ministry Office and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry known as MITI, etc. The Federation of Eco­nomic Organizations is also implicated in this. Of course, Japan is not the United States and therefore does not have to bother about the Pen­tagon, the CIA, the media, American Jews, American Arabs, etc. Yet, there are Japanese with an interest in war, peace, human rights, the global threat, the defense budget, the price of oil, the price of the yen, the price of the dollar, etc.

There are two basic components that have con­stantly played a major role in Japan’s policy towards the Middle East. To put it bluntly, there is the American factor on the one hand and the oil factor on the other. When the international conditions were rigidly set by the Cold War struc­ture, Japan was so heavily dependent on the Pax-Americana that people believed it was only natu­ral for Japan to either take its lead unques­tion­ingly from the United States or remain as incon­spicuous as possible. In a way, the Japa­nese had no urge to change the existing frame­work in the Middle East or anywhere in the world for that matter, being content to merely follow American policy. In this sense, Japan was far more passive than the allies of the United States in Western Europe and it did not even try to lay the ground­work that was necessary in or­der to establish it­self in the region. What hap­pens in the Middle East has a way of affecting America and what affects Americans has a way of affecting other people, including the Japanese, and it is for this reason that the American factor came to repre­sent a predominant political ele­ment of the Japa­nese attitude towards the Middle East.

Securing a stable energy inflow is a necessity of the utmost priority for Japan. This energy factor formulated the dominant economic element of the Japanese approach to the Middle East and up to a certain point in the history, the two factors mentioned above meant the same thing. The world oil market was controlled by major oil companies, which are predominantly American. Japan preferred the cheap oil provided by them rather than to invest in overseas or exploration ventures. There were, of course, exceptions like the case of the Arabian Oil Company, which was established in the late 1950s to produce crude oil in the neutral zone between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Japan’s oil was perceived as being sup­plied by the Americans or Euro-American com­panies to be more precise and not by the Middle East itself. Therefore, Japan did not have to for­mulate its own stance with regard to the region. Washington expresses its demands and Tokyo complies - the same old pattern repeated itself over and again - and historically this was a rea­son for Japan to stay away from the Middle East.

What changed all this in a rather complicated way were the two wars in the region, mainly the October War (or Yom Kippur War) of 1973 and the Gulf War of 1991. The October War brought about the oil shock, which resulted in Japan having to face the oil embargo by the producing countries of the Arab World and becoming more than a little aware of its strategic vulnerability. One can argue that at this point Japan started to formulate more conscious policies towards the Middle East as the direct result of the American failure to assure the Japanese share. In fact, the shock led to the most rapid major diplomatic part­nering between Japan and the United States since the establishment of their alliance relation­ship. For the first time, circumstances forced Japan to deal strictly on its own with a signifi­cant portion of the developing world, i.e., the Arab bloc. In other words, this was the begin­ning of Japanese awareness concerning the fact that it cannot distance itself from world politics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestin­ian problem.

One can easily see that the Japanese interests here were already very complicated. Japan fa­vored national independence for both Jews and Arabs. On the other hand, it wanted to maintain its strong ties with its single partner, the United States, which found it particularly easy to iden­tify with Israel, not only because it is a democ­racy, but also because it is pioneer country, a country of immigrants. On the other hand, Ja­pan’s support for the American policy in the region had never been checked and Japan wanted to assure the flow of Middle Eastern oil for its own economy. The net result of this com­plication was the policy of the economic high profile combined with the political low profile in the region. Japan learned the lesson and was determined to become a major business player in the region, having realized that it could no longer be taken for granted that oil was some­thing that could be obtained anytime from any­where and that Japan has to deal with the reality and be more sensitive to the demands of the Middle East and the oil producing countries. Furthermore, the Middle East came to be a large promising market as well as a supplier of energy, so Japan had to decide what to do in order to become economically visible in the region. To find favor with the Arabs, Japan resorted to some sneakiness; official development assis­tance to Middle Eastern countries rocketed in the years that followed: from US$10.6 million in 1970 to US$89.2 million in 1975 and then to US$339.8 million by 1978. Japan also gave de facto recognition to the Palestine Liberation Or­ganization (PLO), which opened offices in To­kyo in 1976, and in 1981, Mr. Yasser Arafat vis­ited Tokyo for the first time. Japan’s policy was to consider the maintenance of a balance so as not to hurt the American position nor cause offense. Obviously, Japan attached enormous importance to ensuring that America remained its principal export market and alliance partner. Thus, Japa­nese policy has gone in some very different directions. In short, the more economi­cally ac­tive it has become in the region, the more effort it has made to maintain a low political profile.

With the outbreak of the Gulf Crisis and the wars of 1990 and 1991, the landscape changed again. The Americans probably did the right thing when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait nine years ago - I was in Iraq before the Crisis and I can therefore say, based on personal experience and reliable information, that Iraq at the time was home to one of the most ruthless regimes on earth and probably is much more worse by now. It was a real danger to its neighbors, and the invasion of Kuwait was a clear act of aggression and was likely to lead to more aggression that could have resulted in a direct confrontation with Israel and possibly non-conventional warfare in the region. I, like many other people, would be happier were an Iraqi opposition to get rid of the current re­gime, but there are real dilemmas be­cause the concomitant sanctions against Iraq require inter­national support and domestic con­sensus. Hav­ing said that, the mandate was to get Iraq out of Kuwait and make sure it stops threat­ening its neighbors, not to dismantle the country or over­throw the government. In other words, there is a line between any use of force as a sanc­tion and forceful imposition of the will of one state. It is not easy to distinguish one from the other when it comes to a real situation such as Anglo-American bombing of Iraq, but at the very least, one should be aware that the line exists.

Despite contributing a total of US$11 billion for logistical support for the coalition forces and an additional US$2 billion in aid to the neighboring states and being one of the first countries to vol­untarily decide to impose general economic sanc­tions against Iraq, Japan ended up being accused of doing too little too late. The govern­ment of Kuwait even failed to put the name of Japan on the list of the nations to which it feels obliged. This was indeed the trauma for Japa­nese policy-makers that eventually resulted in change. Such a lack of recognition was put down to Japan’s traditional low profile policy in the region and it was decided that perhaps the con­ventional wis­dom of keeping our heads down did not pay.

However, this disappointment was followed by a real opportunity for Japan to emerge politically as a visible player in the region. The Americans succeeded in persuading Israel, the Palestinians and other Arab states to come to Madrid in the late autumn of 1991. The same Americans came to ask the Japanese to take part in this Madrid formula and they responded in an uncharacteristic way. Since they had to pay a good part of the bill for the Gulf War, why not get the thanks and respect they deserved? Moreover, why should their financial contribution not be reflected by playing a more responsible role?

The traumatic frustration on the one hand and the modest ambition on the other are two sides of the same coin. Japan became the gavel holder of the Environment Working Groups as well as co-organizer of the working groups on regional economic development, water resources and the refugee problem in the multilateral talks of the Madrid formula. Japan is also a member of the steering committee that supervises the working groups and it takes part in all five.

When Japan paid US$200 million to the Pales­tinians over two years following the signing of the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles (DoP) in September 1993, it did so in a dignified man­ner to satisfy its ego and be recognized as one of the agents promoting peace in the Middle East. The fact that Japan is no longer regarded as a bystander vis-à-vis the dispute is in itself an achieve­ment, and of course, if the peace process results in success, a sizeable financial burden will be lifted from its shoulders. Nevertheless, Japa­nese policy-makers still face a puzzle, namely, how to achieve a balance in dealing with two basic aspects of Japan’s Middle East policy which have the potential to constantly clash with each other - the American factor and the oil factor.

The Oslo process has in a way absolved the Ar­abs of responsibility, essentially in the case of the Palestinian problem. The decision of the PLO not only to conclude a separate under­standing with Israel, but also to do so as a result of a secret process designed to exclude other inter­ested Arab parties led to its breaking away from the Arab countries - for the first time it became legitimate to strike a separate deal with Israel. Consequently, Jordan was able to con­clude its bilateral peace agreement with Israel in October 1994. Apart from Egypt, which has full diplo­matic relations with Israel, the process of nor­mali­zation of relations was at the time un­derway between Israel on the one hand and Mo­rocco, Tunisia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE on the other. Negotiations between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon were at the time under the direct auspices of the Americans. When this American venture to bring about a peaceful and stable Middle East is realized, Ja­pan will not have to worry about its supply of energy because it can deal with the countries in the region one by one, separating one issue from another just us as it does with its neighboring Asian countries or members of the European Union (EU). In other words, Japan will be re­lieved of its longstanding obsession with the idea that in the Middle East everything is so politicized and in­terlocked that anything could lead to another oil crisis.

Today, even with all the setbacks in the peace process, it is too difficult for Japan to imagine a return to deep-seated enmity between the Arabs as a block and the State of Israel. Even Syria seems to have no interest in the resumption of military confrontation with Israel and in the long run, Syria’s Turkish interests seem to be best protected by maintaining good working ties with the Americans. Therefore, the Japanese think that the course towards peace in the region has already been fixed and that although it is occa­sionally blocked by a stupid leader of a certain country, it shall never be successfully torpedoed because it has crossed the point of no return.

Thus, as far as the Middle East Peace Process is concerned, the Japanese feel quite comfortable to find themselves in the same boat as the Ameri­cans. This does not mean of course that they are happy with the situation as it is now. The Pales­tinian dimension of the problem is still outstand­ing and Israel is apparently unable to decide what precisely it is willing to offer to the longsuffer­ing Palestinians. The collapse of the Oslo process would represent a shameless squan­dering of the best opportunity to date to end the Arab-Israeli problem. The end of the current process would, of course, affect both Lebanon and Jordan, which would destabilize the whole regional game, par­ticularly in Jordan with its large Palestinian popu­lation, a young king who has just acceded to the throne and its vul­nerable economy. Cer­tainly, Jordan will be the key to containing the regional threat of a decline in the fortunes of the Israeli-Palestinian track of the peace process.

Japan is determined to demonstrate its resolution to promote and consolidate the ongoing peace process, being aware that the success of the pro­cess will serve its own interests. However, there are still many problems, including that posed by Iraq. Iran, meanwhile, has been accused of seek­ing to disrupt the American-sponsored peace process, it has been criticized for insisting that Jerusalem must be Moslem, and the Americans have labeled Iran a prime sponsor of interna­tional state terrorism and accused it of seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction as well as conventional weaponry. The Japanese are aware of those accusations, and agree, in most cases, with the Americans, yet they tend to differ on what should be done concerning Iran. Washing­ton has imposed economic sanctions on Iran, but these are only partly responsible for Iran’s cur­rent economic difficulties, which are due mainly to the Iranian bureaucratic mismanagement and the depressed global price of oil. Japan, together with the European Union (EU) has rejected the American-imposed economic embargo on Iran and remains sharply critical of what it regards as a congressional ef­fort to extend the sovereignty of the United States.

Moreover, Japan needs to plan its own long-term energy security policy with particular emphasis on Iran as it currently depends for more than 60 percent of the total energy consumption upon oil, 80 percent of which comes from the Persian Gulf. In addition, many of the Japanese compa­nies have become multinationals and moved their production bases all over the region. It is time for Japan to face the fact that the American and Japanese strategies each have their own in­terests with regards to Iran or the Persian Gulf. Admit­tedly, American policy towards Iran seems to have been changing, although any US-Iranian dialogue is still in its early stages and in spite of the fact that informal means of com­munication have been established between the two govern­ments, each is waiting for concrete action by the other. At least both countries are trying to ex­plore the possibilities for a new rela­tionship.

The impact of the firing of a new long-range missile by North Korea late last summer caused everyone to panic. Iran’s suspected combat ef­fort to acquire those missiles provided a pathway for the argument that there is a secret axis in­volving Iran, North Korea and possibly Pakistan, and Japan has realized that assistance to Iran might indirectly help it and its allies to gain the technologies that will eventually threaten Ja­pan’s own security. Therefore, in this respect, Japan comes closer to the American position. Nev­ertheless, it seems unlikely that the potential collision of interests between Japan and the United States will emerge for some time to come, but it is important to bear in mind that differ­ences exist.