RISING SUN IN ECLIPSE

(ZATMENIYE VOSKHODYASHCHEGO SOLNTSA)

(My original Russian title of this entry, Zatmeniye Voskhodyashchego Solntsa, is a better title, because it is a play on the two meanings of the Russian word Zatmeniye: eclipse and confusion, which play is pertinent to the making of my point. But because the English version is also effective, even though not to the extent of the Russian one, I am doing something unprecedented, which is retaining them both together, so that the English title would ring the first bell for those who do not know Russian.)

Twenty-five years ago another big loser of World War II, Japan, seemed unstoppably rising on a fast track to economic superpowerdom. Today, somewhat eclipsed and considerably confused, the land of the Rising Sun badly needs to do some soul searching, and that, in a hurry. It would be disingenuous for Japan to ask herself, who are my friends and who are my enemies, as historically she has been so isolated from everybody else and so estranged, to the point of bitter hostility, from the other oriental races, such as the Chinese and the Koreans, both of whom had suffered from the Japanese Imperial oppression, that there has never been any love lost between the world of the Orient and the Empire of the Rising Sun.

There was a rather strange long stretch of time after 1853, when Japan, having just been discovered by the American Commodore Matthew Perry, seemed to be in love with the West, just like Madama Butterfly fell in love with Captain Pinkerton. Stalin was one of the few world statesmen in the first half of the twentieth century who was able to apply the tragic outcome of Puccini’s Chio Chio-san’s love to the large context of history and draw the necessary conclusions. Indeed, as soon as the Japanese realized that the price of their escape out of isolation was to be taken advantage of by the Americans and the Europeans, the euphoria of the first date gave way to resentment and a brooding contemplation of revenge.

The Russians under the last Tsar Nicholas II, had acted as no angels toward Japan either, but their clumsy and thoughtless Far Eastern adventure ended so swiftly and decisively in Japan’s favor, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, that Japan could not possibly bear a long-standing grudge against a great power which lost her bid for a piece of the Japanese pie to begin with, but also bolstered the Japanese nationalistic pride with the laurels of a dramatic military victory.

The story of the Russo-Japanese-American triangle prior to and during World War II is told in the History section, and I refer my reader who, for some reason, may not have read it, to it, but I can still add a little to that story here, suggesting that Japan’s wary and eventually dismissive treatment of Hitler, despite the fact of her joining the Axis Powers, can be explained (only in part, of course) by her general mistrust and even antipathy for the West.

At the end of World War II, the Russians took control of Manchuria, but Japan herself predictably fell into America’s hands. Having been bombed with atomic weapons, Japan surrendered to the mercy of the victor whom she had previously attacked without provocation, so it was natural for the Japanese psyche to accept the justice of their loss, and to yield to it.

Thus Japan solidly fell into the American sphere of influence in the Cold War world, and, being so close to Russia geographically, this situation could in no way please the Russians, who, however, always believed in Japan’s latent hatred for the United States, both for the scorns of the now distant past, and, more recently, for the double tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of these days the chicken will come home to roost, the Russian analysts were comforting themselves and their leadership, but Japan’s predicted divorce from the United States was too slow in coming, to put it nicely.

Now, more than sixty years have passed, and Japan is still in the American corner, while her relationship with Russia leaves much to be desired. Will that radical change, so optimistically predicted by the Russian analysts, ever come to pass?

All change always starts with a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo. The unsettling economic woes (what a dramatic economic retreat from the previously radiant glow of a phenomenal success!), the trouble in the highest echelons of political leadership, which seems to have become a permanent feature of Japan’s politics, the perpetual public restlessness over the American military presence on Okinawa, and elsewhere, combined with an extreme national worry over the meteoric political, economic, and military rise of China and the solidifying Sino-Russian ties,--- all this is a bellwether of the coming radical change in the nation’s general course, which I foresee as Japan distancing herself from the United States and entering into a very close relationship with Russia.

Today’s Russia holds all the cards. The world has become anti-American, and Russia, still remembered as the other superpower, looks ever more attractive as a counterbalance to Washington’s hegemonic posture, now that the fiction of the Russian world domination has been discarded, at least in the military sphere. In the sphere of energy it is of course a different story, but most of it becoming today’s reality, everybody has been rushing to get into Russia’s better graces, and eventually Japan will do it with no lesser zeal than the rest of them. The specific question of the Russo-Japanese territorial dispute is just another ace in Russia’s hand. The Russians have little use for the disputed islands, and they may easily offer them into a joint use, or even give them back to Japan altogether, at the right time, and only as a sign of radical improvement in their bilateral ties. I suspect that the overarching condition sine qua non will be the closing of the American military bases in Japan, which even by itself should be a perfectly reasonable trade off. And finally (even though there must be a few other things which I have presently omitted here), their rapprochement will be a great opportunity for Japan to come out of her current isolation and to be reasonably hopeful that she would not be left the odd "man" out in the otherwise anti-Japanese alliance of Russia and China, knowing full well that Russia would love to use Japan against China, as her perpetual bargaining chip, which will allow Japan to reap some benefits from such a role… And then, perhaps, the Rising Sun of Japan will escape out of its current eclipse and shine again, although with a far greater modesty and a sense of proportion than before, compensating for the lack of intense heat by the benefit of solid stability.

Summarizing my point (which some fifteen years ago was one of the key subjects of an article I had written for the Marin Independent Journal, that selfsame article which got heavily edited, cutting out all references to Japan), I expect that the current lopsided situation within the American-Russian-Japanese triangle will be changing fairly soon in favor of a different kind of lopsidedness, thus vindicating the opinion of Soviet (and later Russian) geopolitical analysts who had been kept wondering all these years whether this blessed event would ever take place in their lifetime. Well, a human lifetime is a lot of time to one human being, but not to a nation that is used to count time in centuries.