Harsh criticism, severe sanctions against Russia: this is a reversal for Japanese diplomacy. Fumio Kishida’s government immediately condemned “aggression” of Ukraine by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and taken unprecedented coercive measures going crescendo. “In order to further express our solidarity with the Ukrainian people, we will also promote the arrival in Japan of people evacuated from Ukraine to third countries such as Poland”, even declared the Prime Minister of the archipelago generally reluctant to welcome refugees. “A half-measure stance would have been untenable, no matter who the Prime Minister, given the strong reaction of Western governments, but also of world and Japanese opinions in the face of such a horrible invasion”, analysis for Release political scientist Koichi Nakano of Sophia University.
“Firm and effective actions”
Freezing the assets of President Putin and other Russian personalities, stopping transactions with the Russian central bank, suspending exports to Russian companies and organizations: Japan has, according to a Japanese official, “wanted firm and effective actions”, close to the main punishments inflicted on Moscow by the European Union or the United States. Tokyo also provides clear support (verbal and financial) to Ukraine.
Slow and timorous in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea, the Japanese executive perceived this time the risk of a response that would have been too soft with regard to Putin, who has long been in the odor of sanctity with of certain Japanese political clans. It is not so far the day when Shinzo Abe, when he was Prime Minister (2012 to 2020), called Vladimir Putin by his only first name and recited a poem to him saying that he shared the same vision of the future.
Anti-nuclear principles
The two have met no less than 27 times. It was then a question of coaxing the tenant of the Kremlin in order to resolve the territorial dispute of the four Kuril islands of the south (held by Russia, claimed by Japan which names them Northern Territories), quarrel which prevented Japan and Russia to sign a peace treaty after 1945. What was then “the new approach” initiated by Abe is now obsolete judging by the Russian Embassy’s response to Kishida: “Japan comes for the second time in less than a hundred years to support a Nazi regime. Before, it was the Hitler regime, and this time, the Ukrainian regime.
Hailed by the United States, Kishida must however face a controversy within his own party: the question revived by Shinzo Abe of the installation of American nuclear equipment on Japanese soil. For Abe and other right-wing lawmakers, discussing it shouldn’t be taboo. “Since leaving office, Abe has been freewheeling,” and others are gearing up, continues Koichi Nakano for whom this kind of declaration is pure political malice towards the Kishida government. Elected from Hiroshima, the latter rejected any discussion on this point, sticking to the “three anti-nuclear principles” of 1967: “Not to possess nuclear weapons, not to manufacture them, not to welcome them on Japanese soil.”
Ironically, Shinzo Abe’s brother, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, was forced to stick with the government and support Kishida’s position. Japanese public opinion, for its part, would not accept that the government open the debate on the questioning of the antinuclear doctrine in the current circumstances any more than the United States, ally and protector of Japan, in order not to point more China at the worst time.