Posted on: Thursday, July 8, 2004

COMMENTARY
Japan's slow passages to India

By Tom Plate

NEW DELHI — Things rarely move quickly between India and Japan, but when they do, they tend to happen for good. Call it the Buddha Syndrome.

Buddhism didn't crop up in Japan until more than 1,000 years after Buddha's death in India. But once planted, it grew quickly, spread widely and, before too long, became Japan's dominant religion, which it remains today.

Japan's passages to India — and vice versa — always seem to take their good time. But with a reawakened foreign policy in the region, especially under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Japan has been reaching out to India as if making up for diplomatic lost time. This important effort, largely unnoticed, could prove invaluable not only to India's economic development and Japan's sense of diplomatic self-assurance, but also to South Asian stability.

For decades, the bilateral relationship was a prisoner of the Cold War. Japan was a firm ally of the United States in the struggle against the "Evil Empire," and so Tokyo frankly regarded New Delhi's policy of "nonalignment" as effectively pro-Soviet. Even after the Cold War's end, Tokyo had to hold India at arm's length, in part because of the latter's 1998 nuclear tests, which offended anti-nuclear Japanese public opinion — an enormous chunk of the electorate.

But lately, Tokyo has been rethinking its relations with the world's largest democracy: For if Japan is to become the major world-stage player politically and militarily that it already is economically, it must forge a more nuanced Indian diplomacy than simply rechanting ancient Buddhist mantras.

And so suddenly it is all action. For starters, savvy strategists in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) worked hard to convince members of the Diet (parliament) to drop their anti-nuclear grudge against India. For another, MOFA has been making the quiet and increasingly effective point that, while Japan has been routinely sending "overseas development aid" to China, which is not a democracy and with which its relations are "correct" at best, it has been sending out peanuts to India, with which it has no major direct outstanding issues and with which all quarrels are relatively par for any bilateral course.

To be sure, the Japanese complain about India's maddening red tape (which would have ruffled even Buddha's legendary equanimity), about Byzantine customs rules and fees that make importing a single automobile harder than cracking the Da Vinci Code, and about the country's wobbly (this is being polite) infrastructure.

But these are not just Japan's issues: U.S. Embassy officials and others make the same points. The Japanese style, of course, is often a delightful-irritating combination of the low-profile discreet and the high-profile blunt. In a speech at a major university in India, a Japanese official surprised his audience by describing India as "very hot ... very dirty ... a country of too many people." You won't find direct language like that coming from a Western diplomat, at least publicly.

But the fact is that many Indians would completely (if quietly) agree. This is one reason that a solidifying relationship between Japan and India has considerable upside potential. In fact, public opinion polls show Japan to be the second most popular place of interest to Indians, after the United States.

At the same time, Japanese diplomacy appears to be gaining credibility here by the day. The same diplomat who complained about Indian dirt and heat has also made a public point of admiring India's "spiritual atmosphere." This was not just diplo-nicety. The Buddhist connection between the two countries should over the long run deepen their mutual trust.

Energy-thirsty Japan needs continued unfettered access to oil via tanker shipments through the Indian Ocean. This is even more important to Japan than to the United States, for which it is a matter of vital security.

Frankly, faced with the Kashmir conflict and uncertainty over Pakistani stability, India can use all the friends it can get. Thus India and Japan are friends in need.

India is generally viewed with sympathy in Japan. The attack on the Indian Parliament two years ago was well reported to the Japanese public in its many highly literate newspapers and thus made a considerable impact on public opinion.

This is why the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is smart to give Indian relations a higher priority. And Prime Minister Koizumi is right to have been encouraging that effort.

Not to be irreverent, Buddha would surely smile, however enigmatically.

UCLA professor Tom Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International Affairs.