SHINTARO ISHIHARA – A DANGEROUS INCENDIARY in the JAPAN-CHINA ISLANDS DISPUTE

 

 


If we look back to March 2010 we see a much more hopeful scenario developing between Japan and China. Clearly, this was not perceived to be in the interests of rightwing forces in the Anglosphere (‘Anglo-sfear’)
 
So a certain question emerges, looking very similar to scaremongering arguments in the West over 100 years ago about whether Germany was trying to “drive a wedge” between Britain and the Franco-Russian Alliance. Look who is raising this question today!
See:
“Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has been vocal over the importance of improving Sino-Japanese relations in the context of Asia as a whole, but there has been speculation, including in The Economist, for example, that there may be an ulterior motive, namely to drive a wedge between Japan and the United States. Is China’s Japan policy still focused on the erosion of the US-Japan Security Alliance?”
This is the same stupid alliance systems thinking today in the West as was common 100 years before World War One.
 
Ishihara announced his April 12-19 Washington visit at a press conference on 23rd March (23.3) where he made clear that the Director of the Heritage Foundation and two top officials had approached him and asked him to speak there.  “Rather than” the cherry blossom festival”  he says, he’s going to see for himself and to confirm the state of US-Japan relations, and to give the lecture at the Heritage Foundation and to meet members of the US government and to meet the President of Georgetown University to discuss a student exchange scheme for Tokyo. In the present difficult situation in the world, he thinks US-Japan relations must change and that Japan must be more forthright in its views and that in the US he will stir up some controversy. He uses the ambiguous term “butsugi” which can mean ‘public discussion’ but usually implies controversy. An Englishman might say “I’m going to ruffle some feathers”. So he avoids giving any clear intention of the controversy he’s going to raise.
 
In May 2010 Foreign Affairs magazine Neo-Con hawk Robert Kaplan discussed how the US should contain China’s naval ambitions by means of over the horizon containment using rings of Pacific islands. It would seem that Ishihara’s ‘desires’ fit in with this American rightist geostrategic intention and may be being used for that purpose, while Ishihara himself is an egotist whose nationalism is based on his egotism. Deep down, he’s uninterested in anyone but himself and any nation or culture other than Japan. He therefore objects to what he sees as bullying, pressure or ‘influence’ from either China or the US, but he’s prepared to work with the US because he evidently fears China more.

“I do what I do because I want to,” Shintaro Ishihara wrote in his 1956 novel The Punishment Room. “Do what you please, and sooner or later you’ll find out where you are.”

Ishihara put those words in the mouth of Katsumi, one of the angry young protagonists who made the author a Jack Kerouac-style cult hero to a sullen generation of youth in postwar Japan and that year’s winner of the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize.

Fifty-six years later, Ishihara — now 79 and in his fourth term as the outspoken governor of Tokyo — is still following Katsumi’s mantra: doing what he wants, in this case pushing Japan toward a confrontation with neighboring China that he believes is inevitable. Ishihara warned in May that “Japan could become the sixth star on China’s national flag” if it appeases Beijing. In his public speeches, he refers to the People’s Republic as “Shina,” a derogatory term associated with Japan’s 1937-1945 occupation.


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