Japan's efforts at balancing act forget historic fears

So Abe has rescheduled his first overseas trip. He will visit Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia from Jan. 16 to 19 with the aim of “deepening strategic cooperative ties” with the Southeast Asian countries. His trip will take place as Japan marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and at a time when tensions between China and its neighbors have grown over Beijing's South China Sea sallies.

Abe's Southeast Asian trip is ill-considered. As Beijing sees it, Abe is wooing the three ASEAN member states into the Tokyo-Washington security partnership, which is a post-Cold War containment of China. True it is that all ASEAN countries are wary of the People's Republic, but they are even warier of Japan. Perhaps Abe is a little too young to know Imperial Japan's Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe who proclaimed it to justify Japan's invasion of China and Southeast Asia, where the Japanese set up puppet regimes to serve their purposes of imperialistic military expansion. The people of Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation suffered. They have a lingering fear that Japan may intend to revive the sphere to force them to enjoy “peace and prosperity” without any Chinese threat in partnership with the United States this time around.

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