The Maple Leaf and the Chrysanthemum

Abstract

This year marks the 8oth anniversary of Canada-Japan diplomatic relations, although the first Japanese immigrants came to Canada at least 50 years earlier. Eighty years ago, Canada was a small country emerging from its status as a British colony, the first in the British empire to achieve independence through the statute of Westminster in 1931. Slowly but steadily, Canada built a bureaucratic and foreign service machinery to start a very successful diplomatic corps, well beyond its embassies in London, Washington, and Paris. The initiative to have close diplomatic ties with Japan was the start of a long friendship with this vital Pacific country.1In that early period, the tasks were anything but easy. Like its American neighbour to the south, Canada was isolated from the momentous events taking place in Europe, largely preoccupied with the troublesome legacy of the great depression, and struggling with the need to build an industrial base to compete against the economic colossus in the great republic. Trade with the US was resource-based and US branch plants, in the era before free trade, dominated the manufacturing sectors in central Canada. It would take the Second World War to accelerate Canada's manufacturing base, and advanced sectors like shipbuilding, aerospace, telecommunications, steel, and energy took their modern form during this period.At the same time, Japan, faced with its own economic downturn, was caught in a whirlwind of complicated forces within its own complex political system. One group preferred an isolationist stance, ready to confine Japan to its traditional agricultural base, alienated from the rise of giant industrial groups and industrialism in general. A small but significantly influential group, soon to be led by the Japanese army, understood that industrialism, with its natural expansionist needs for raw materials and markets, required Japan to play a significant international role, if the big players like Britain, Holland, and the US would allow it. China became the target. And a third group, playing off the deep resentment of past injustices and the high unemployment, sought an aggressive international role in Asia. Indeed, if Britain, the European powers, and the United States could be members of the colonial expansion club near Japan, why couldn't Japan itself play this role? The Washington naval treaty of 1922, with its 5:5:3 ratio of naval strength, forced a subordinate role on Japan, led to bitter resentment of Anglo-American condescension in government circles, and started the march to militarism and ultimately war with the United States.2In the postwar period, Japan's industrial growth was the fastest wealth-creation economy in world history, shifting a second-world industrial structure to one of the world's richest economies. Many will recall the plaudits of writers like Herman Kahn's The Emerging Japanese Superstate or Ezra's Vogel' s polemic, Japan as No. One. It was all great reading and the Japanese appreciated it, but few Japanese really believed it. Serious analysis of the Japanese economy did, however, illuminate the many strengths of Japanese society, its history and culture, and how its combination of western industrial values, Asian and Japanese Confucian culture, and respect for education and the long term could be a role model for other Asian societies, now including China. This article addresses an overview of current CanadaJapan relations, present shortcomings, and possible proactive strategies for the future.THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWNThe financial downturn in the global economy portends a dramatic reversal of postwar global economic growth. In the final quarter of 2008, GNP declined at a tremendous rate, an annualized 20.8 percent in South Korea, 12.7 percent in Japan, 8.2 percent in Germany, 5.9 percent in the UK, and 3.8 percent in the US. In China, which needs about seven or eight percent growth to absorb rural workers into its urban factory-based economy, industrial output stagnated for the first time in a decade. …