Japan and its Mainland Neighbours: An End to Equidistance?

Abstract

T | 1HE speed with which Japan has normalised its relations with the People's Republic of China and the rapid expansion of Soviet-Japanese economic relations, coming in the wake of the troubles between Japan and the United States in the early 1970s, raise a series of questions as to whether a basic shift in Japan's foreign policy is occurring. Is Japan moving away from close ties with the United States and towards closer links with its giant mainland neighbours, the Soviet Union and China? If so, might geographic and cultural proximity lead Japan to move much closer to Peking than to Moscow, and how would Soviet leaders react to such a development? To what extent have recent developments been the result of Japanese initiatives, and to what extent the result of ad hoc Japanese responses to the moves of other powers? The answers to these questions, and thus the resulting pattern of relations between Tokyo, Peking and Moscow, will depend upon the interaction of four major factors. The first is the general trend in the political situation in East Asia, and especially the evolution of Soviet and Chinese policies towards the major issues and powers involved. More particularly, what will be the basic character of Chinese and Soviet policies towards Japan? Will one or both countries attempt to expand their influence in Japan by seeking areas of co-operation and accommodation with Tokyo, or will they try to put pressure on it, or threaten it, to achieve their aims? They probably will do some of each, but the particular combination of means employed by each communist capital, and how the tactics of one compare with those of the other, will have much to do with the Japanese response. A second factor influencing Japanese foreign policy will be the country's economic problems. The era in which Japan could simultaneously depend upon cheap raw materials and expanding markets for industrial exports has at least temporarily ended. The advent of the oil crisis, which occurred when Japan was already undergoing increasing inflationary pressures, forced the government to take such severe deflationary measures as to bring about in 1974 the first absolute decline in GNP for over two decades. Although Japan gradually brought the rate of inflation down from over 20 per cent. in 1974 to about 10 per cent. in 1975, the economy remains stagnant. In the past Japan