 Thank you all and I appreciate how how valuable it is to have you all in this room at lunchtime. So thank you for coming I'm delighted as Bill said to come and talk a little bit about my new book So it's a point that it there But also I think we can talk about whatever else you are interested in in terms of the changes inside Japan I understand professor Samuels has already been here It's an incredible time to be looking not only at Japan, but the interactions in Northeast Asia broadly It's as Bill said that we are doing a project at CFR now that is a three-year project that looks at sort of the interactions the reactive nationalisms between Japan South Korea and China and of course This is the 70th anniversary of the end of World War two so in Northeast Asia history war memory and the nationalist politics surrounding those issues were an incredibly Continue to be an incredibly important topic on this anniversary but what I thought I'd do is talk a little bit about Intimate rivals about the Japan-China relationship Give you a sense of beyond the book where I think Japan-China relations are today and what we should expect and kind of what it means For the United States It's a very important policy challenge I think a policy challenge on the scale that I think Washington really hasn't had to deal with before in Asia We have our closest ally now in a fairly tense and potentially military Tense and antagonistic relationship with its largest neighbor the rising power I'm going to talk a little bit about that shorthand the rising power But for policy makers in Washington, which is where I sit the Council on Foreign Relations Washington office We spend a lot of time in what they call track to the discussions or track 1.5 if you're working with the Chinese Talking about what this really means for the Alliance and what it means for Washington's priorities not only to build deterrence For the US-Japan Alliance, but also what's our new role in crisis management in the region and particularly between Japan and China But let me tell you a little bit about intimate rivals and everybody everywhere I go everybody asked me why intimate rivals? Why the title it's not a I international relations theory kind of title normally You don't use the word intimate to talk about international relations But this is a relationship between Japan and China that goes back centuries. It's a cultural relationship. It's an economic relationship It has been in many ways as it was an imperial relationship in the 20th century, right? And it's a deep economically interdependent relationship today continues to be so despite the political tensions So when you when the Japanese, you know, I wrote a lot my PhD dissertation was on Japanese security planning in the US Japan Alliance But I I could feel in the early 2000s when I was going back and forth that something was fundamentally changing in terms of Japanese attitudes towards China about the kinds of issues that they were worried about in the in the bilateral relationship with Beijing issues that they Haven't had to worry about before you'll probably be familiar with most of them But in the 1990s, of course the Cold War came to an end Northeast Asia took on a slightly different tone You had the nuclear crisis with North Korea in 93 94 in which the Clinton administration actually had to consider Whether we were going to deploy force to deal with that on the Korean Peninsula We had in 1996 a Taiwan Straits crisis We hadn't had them since the 50s remember at the beginning of the Cold War, but we had a real problem in 1996 because Taiwan for the first time was going to have a government that did not buy into the to China Idea that had as its campaign platform in fact the idea that Taiwan ought to declare independence from mainland China So 1996 was a very tough time. The Chinese decided they were going to respond with missiles At least the threat of moving missiles closer to Taiwan in an effort to intimidate Taiwan So the United States and Japan were looking at Northeast Asia through a very different lens in the 1990s as the Cold War had Ended and this new Northeast Asia was emerging China's own military modernization its testing of nuclear weapons its decision to use force in the Taiwan Straits at least Coercively to shape Taiwanese electoral behavior all of this woke the Japanese up a little bit to the fact that this is a different China This is not a China that was necessarily a sanguine neighbor But also that clearly China was on a trajectory that was going to ultimately be antithetical to Japanese security interests Before that you largely had a relationship between Japan and China that was focused first and foremost on economic interdependence, right? When Deng Xiaoping announced his Market reforms in 1978 changing the trajectory of China Japan was negotiating its peace treaty The Nixon visit to China had happened in the early 70s, right? We had normalized our relationship with Beijing But in seven by the end of the 70s the Japanese were concluding their discussions their negotiations of their post-war peace treaty And it's exactly at this time Of course that Deng Xiaoping saw that having a close relationship with Japan would not only be good in terms of regional diplomacy But would also be good for the market reforms that he was trying to put forward So he went to Tokyo to ratify this bilateral treaty and in Tokyo he spent or in Japan rather He spent a long time going around looking at Japanese factories looking at Japan's own experience of modernization and held a press conference And these are the words that will come back It'll be more interesting later on when we talk about the island dispute But at that press conference he said you know we have a lot of differences But we have a bigger a larger aim in this relationship, which is to normalize ties and to re-embrace our economic partnership And also we have this little delicate issue of a territorial dispute But we'll leave this to future generations the wisdom of future generations to resolve so the Chinese at that time Much to the relief of the Japanese frankly Understood that it was not in their interest to push the territorial issue that the larger relationship with Japan was the prize And that the territory of these fault these these little tiny islands in the middle of the East China Sea Was not going to be a point of difference between the two countries This will come back as you know in 2010 and 2012 To be a different story in the relationship, but over time from the 78 treaty into the 1990s You have a Japan that is underwriting Japan's market reforms Japanese ODA overseas development assistance to China Was 50% of Japan's overseas development assistance and as you know the 1980s Japan was the world's economic superpower It was rich right it had a lot of money to offer It basically helped China build the infrastructure that it now has upon which its modernization was preceded Japanese companies went in and again it's detailed in the book But they went in in a major way in building helping the Chinese build steel shipbuilding Later manufacturing so Japanese corporate investment in China was very very high So you have a public investment in Chinese economic transformation and a private investment by Japanese companies as well So when you get into the 1990s, of course, this starts to change For the Japanese companies the China markets a little bit less predictable Some bad economic decision-making by the Chinese, but there's a little bit more risk for Japanese companies Nonetheless the Japanese foreign direct investment in China is the highest Sometimes it was second number number three to Hong Kong before Hong Kong returned to China And it was number second it's number two now to Taiwanese investment in China So Japanese investment capital was incredibly important to the Chinese But the Japanese were getting a little bit more hesitant about China's decision-making its own market decision-making By the 1990s in addition to the strategic threat and this change in the way the economies were interacting You also get a kind of rescinding of ODA China graduates from this notion that it needs development assistance from Japan And also it's also getting a lot of investment and assistance from other countries as well. Japan's no longer its major suitor It's a different country. It's a different relationship and it has much more diversified sources of funding So the Japanese become one among many in the economic relationship with China Which wasn't the case for their first two decades. The other thing that changes in the 1990s of course is the Japanese themselves are changing In the 1990s Japan's politics go undergo significant Change in 1993 94 they move away from what we political scientists call a single-party dominant system The conservatives who had ruled Japan for decades after the post-war broke up And you had a kaleidoscope of political parties that were coming in to try to contend for power in Japan So the 1990s is an era of political change for the Japanese It's also an era of economic stagnation for those of you who study Japan the term lost decades is the term the Japanese used to talk about The 1990s their economic performance Stag was stagnated. They made bad decisions their banking sector was unregulated badly regulated, right? So there were a lot of problems the Japan incorporated model the economic superpower began to look a little bit more flawed and This also in some ways changed the appetite in Tokyo for the kind of relationship they'd had with Beijing So coming out of the 1990s you also have one final factor that I think is pretty important We had in the late 80s, of course a crisis with Beijing called the Tiananmen Square Incident in which the Western countries had decided that the treatment of the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square The use of force against Chinese nationals was a source of sanctions on human rights grounds of China with China The Japanese didn't follow the same path as us But by the end of the 1990s you begin to get Japanese governments that begin to point out human rights problems in China You begin to get Japanese citizens who begin to identify with the Uighurs or the Tibet problem So you start to see it not in a very systematic way But you start to see in Japan some concern about the type of government that you see in that was prevalent In China not that it was communist But that the citizen citizens the Chinese citizens themselves were being mistreated and that was a new aspect In the bilateral relationship. So when I was in Tokyo and I was looking at Japan's relationship with China in the early 2000s two things I didn't start out saying this is a story about China's rise But I could sense a couple of things going on one was in the trade Relationship between the two countries you were beginning to have trade disputes between Japan and China Now this is usual for Americans We had trade disputes throughout the 80s with the Japanese, but Japan had never really had trade disputes with the Chinese So it began with things like shiitake mushrooms or tatami But it then quickly escalated into a broad array of problems And they didn't have bilateral mechanisms with which to deal with the trade disputes they had to create them Another thing is that the security environment began to get even more Concerning to Tokyo because all the Chinese maritime behavior in and around the Japanese archipelago began to become much more conspicuous Both countries had ratified the UN law of the sea in the mid 1990s But it wasn't really until the 2000s that the Japanese understood that they needed a different way of thinking about their oceans policy Again, I write about that in the book, but they didn't really change their domestic Policy-making process to respond to their unclose The unclose dynamics that came with the ratification China also ratified around the same time So what you see in terms of maritime behavior is not necessarily naval behavior Although there was an aspect of that but survey ships were in Japanese waters surveying There was a lot of interaction between the what Lyle your your your experts of the Chinese Maritime Institute talk about the five dragons that once existed There was a lot of Kind of interactions between Japanese reconnaissance flights in the East China Sea and the beginnings of a Chinese response to that In large part it was a civilian problem. It was a law enforcement Survey geological fisheries patrols those kinds of problems in the early 2000s But as you know by the time you get to 2010 the territorial dispute erupted and the militaries themselves began to become engaged in the problem The one of the the 2000s the decade of the 2000s of course does have some bright spots President Hu Jintao visits Tokyo in 2008 and the Prime Minister at the time fukuda Concludes two agreements with him that were very important One was an agreement on energy joint energy development in the East China Sea and The second was an agreement on food safety and The reason those two are important is detailed in my book and I won't go through all the details of the food safety issue Because I don't think that's what you're concerned about really here, but if you are it's a fascinating story But the maritime boundary dispute became a serious point of contention in that decade for the first time Now in the book I go through a number of case studies of areas and problems that the Japanese were obviously having with China And I identified four case studies One is the old-fashioned. Yes, can you shrine issue? So for those of you issued an interest in war memory? That's a great chapter The second was on the maritime boundary dispute Which we didn't really talk about until the territorial issue arose in the in the late 2000s the food security issue is really about Food processed food that becomes from China imported into Japan that becomes a problem in Japanese consumers All of a sudden are aware that a large part of their food is not only grown in China But processed by Japanese companies in China, and then the last is the quite is a chapter about the island dispute or the territorial dispute So I thought what I do here is talk a little bit about two issues one is that the island dispute itself and also the maritime boundary dispute Largely because these are issues that are still going on today The larger picture before I get to that the specifics of the case though the larger question in my mind in the 2000s was just why was the relationship becoming so poisoned? Why was this bilateral relationship that Tokyo and Beijing had had their differences over war memory? I think they'd had their differences. They'd recognized they had a territorial dispute, but they'd never really fought over it In fact the two governments had managed to dispute quite quietly, but effectively all the way up until 2010 They had managed to come to terms in some cases with the some of the trade and economic disputes They had managed in some cases to deal with some of the more tender issues of war memory the Japanese Emperor Was invited to Beijing in 1992 and he was greeted there very warmly had spent six days in the country And so that was for many Japanese seen as the end in some ways of the difficult process of post-war reconciliation So again, what was that? What was the problem is the recurring question of war memory the recurring question of the territorial dispute? But there were these new issues of food safety and the maritime boundary dispute as well that had their roots in very contemporary issues And problem-solving so this is since I'm at the naval war college. This is all very familiar territory TV So I'll just flip through very fast Japan's not the only country that has territorial disputes with China and those are proliferated clearly For some time, but let's talk about the specifics of the Senkakus And again apologies if this is something you already know a lot about The Senkakus I think a lot of people unless you actually physically go there You know they exist in the middle of the East China Sea you can point them out in a map probably But what's not I was down doing research in Ishigaki, which you'll see down there Is one of the Okinawan Islands that has the administrative responsibility for the Senkakus In other words the Senkakus are part of the municipality that isn't Ishigaki That's as close as you can get in Okinawa to those islands, and if you're a fisherman You'll get in a very small boat probably 15 to 25 feet. They're not very big And you will go through one of the worst Currents the black current that runs between Ishigaki and the Senkakus. It's great for fishing Brings all kinds of great big fat fish at certain times of the year But it's a very treacherous current if you're a fisherman in a small boat It'll take you anywhere from five to ten hours to reach those islands in good weather If the weather is bad, you may never get there So it's also another story for the fishermen of Ishigaki They have for a long time advocated to Tokyo that they build a port on The largest of the Senkaku Islands, which is Uotsuri right up there on the this side That's the island that had been inhabited prior to World War two by a very small Factory owner and about 200 very impoverished Japanese and they had bonito they made bonito flakes and they collected seagull guano is the polite word for it and They exported it all the way to Europe, right? It was a great fertilizer in the pre-war period apparently But it was inhabited up until about 1937 But that's where the the fishermen of Okinawa wanted their government to build a small harbor A port so that they if they got all the way out to the Senkaku's to fish if the weather turned bad Which it often did they would have some place to shelter That didn't happen largely because then again it's detailed in the book But it's largely because the negotiations with China over the peace treaty the Japanese government decided to pull back From inhabiting the island at that time So there was a implicit compromise not an explicit agreement But there was an implicit compromise made in conjunction with that 78 treaty that many of the people in Ishigaki and other parts of Okinawa felt Was really not in their interest Nonetheless most of the mainland Japanese had very little interest or perhaps even knowledge about what went on out in the Senkaku's The interests were really the fishermen the other interest down there in the East China Sea And of course again, I should say that Taiwan has a very deep interest in fishing in the waters around those islands Which is why the the Taiwanese themselves are also a Main actor in this story the Chinese sorry the Taiwanese fishermen from northern fishermen's ports presented themselves when the Japanese and Chinese were having difficulties in 2010 and again in 2012 they the Taiwanese coast guard also got in the mix when the tensions Got high in the fall of 2012, but we won't talk too much about Taiwan at this point The other interest that was very important here, of course is oil and gas In the late 1960s United Nations had a survey of geological survey of the East China Sea and that report you can find it online It made everybody in East Asia very excited because it reported the geologists were Korean Taiwanese American and Japanese and others no mainland Chinese by the way But they basically reported that the East China Sea had hydrocarbon resources Perhaps on the scale of the Middle East So they were very ambitious in their report. It made all the countries of Northeast Asia Very excited about potential resource seabed resources and oil and gas in particular So all of a sudden at the late 1960s before the Senkaku's returned to Japanese control There was a great interest in potentially exploring this for petroleum resources today. That is still part of the unspoken Interests of the Chinese Taiwanese and Japanese in and around those islands So two basic sets of interests that are engaged here on the Japanese side Fisheries and oil and gas but again to go back to who has control over these islands Physically asserting control over these islands is a hard thing to do. You can't sustain human life There's no fresh running water So if you were going to populate these islands again You'd have to have regular shipments of food and water and supply But these are the islands that the Chinese and Japanese are now contending over All right We all know that the Chinese have a lot of sovereignty claims Senkaku or Diabida and not the only islands that they have Interests in so we don't need to talk to you about this and that's just we can come back to that The maritime boundary dispute I think was the lesser known of the disputes between Japan and China Especially now that we get very focused on the territorial dispute This is a new dispute relatively speaking It's a dispute that emerged and erupted alongside the ratification of Unclos So it really became a problem in the late 1990s when again both countries had ratified Both countries needed to do the survey work to try to determine and support their claims You may know that the Japanese have there is not 400 nautical miles between Japan and China across the East China Sea So they have to negotiate their maritime boundary and that's pretty common practice under Unclos, right? The Japanese suggested that dark line up the middle, which is what they call the median line The Chinese instead want the dotted line Not sure where to point But that dotted line that goes right through the Senkaku Islands corresponds to the continental shelf And so the Chinese make an argument that the continental shelf is the proper Dividing line between EEZ claims for China and Japan they have not resolved this they haven't negotiated their differences And therefore it this is the claim that continues to this is the dispute that continues the ADIZ the Air Defense Identification Zone for those of you who follow that that was announced by the Chinese in November of 2013 also Corresponds pretty much geographically along the same continental shelf Longitude latitude so there's consistency here Peter Dutton, and I were just talking about it He talks about jurisdictional claims Overlapping jurisdictional claims that the Chinese are putting forward and this is very consistent with his argument is displayed here a little bit So the maritime border issue really became an issue in the early 2000s The Chinese and Japanese decided to try to negotiate their their differences They were not successful The Chinese in the meantime began to build gas rigs off of one part of the Across well on their side of the Japanese median line, but I'll just point it to because I don't have a pointer But they are right in here And the gas field the Japanese called the Shirakaba and the Chinese called the Shenzhao I think I my Chinese pronunciation is very bad So don't trust my pronunciation, but they're named differently by the Japanese and the Chinese so they began to build rigs The Japanese didn't like the idea that they were building rigs before they had decided on the boundary The Chinese were on the Japanese on their own side of Japan's median boundary By night by 2005 the frustration was mounting and you started to hear the Japanese government say fine If you're gonna go ahead Then we're gonna go ahead and issue permits for our oil and gas industry to also Build rigs now in my interviews. It was interesting It took me a long time to get to talk to the oil and gas interests and it's one of these sort of things It's not very academic and social science But I finally got somebody to talk to me on the condition of anonymity Because it's a very it's a very sensitive topic in Japan But the oil and gas interests were really not not interested in the gas field that was that section I just showed you it wasn't commercially viable. They really didn't want to fuss and they really didn't want to build rigs They also told me that they didn't want to go out there with rigs without proper defenses And they didn't feel that their government was really ready to deploy You know maritime self-defense force destroyers to defend those rigs in which case they were not going to go out there themselves But there was a second area in the 2008 agreement that was interesting And that was a much more profitable enterprise for the Japanese and I'll come on this map this time And so there's an area up here Which is just south of the japan south korea joint development zone And then japan south korea Joint development zone had not produced any good outcome for oil or gas So it was it was a bust But the section just below it hadn't not been exploited had not been explored It was deep water drilling so the technology was just coming online for exploitation or at least exploration That's where the japanese felt that the chinese and japanese had a potential to really have something that was commercially viable So that's where the industry side on the japan side was most interested in having both governments come to some kind of terms on this So who didn't tell comes to tokyo in may of 2008 he comes with an with a joint development agreement for the east china sea They sign it It's a great accomplishment for the two governments And six months later it's dead in the water And stories differ about why but largely the implementation agreement with the step that comes next That the chinese felt that they couldn't go forward with the implementation agreement So you'll have to talk to your china scholars about why that may have been the case But it falls apart by the end of 2008 The important part about the joint energy development agreement is that it ignored their differences over Who had the rights to those resources right? This was the compromised position that was going to bring japan and china together To cooperate in across these different ideas of where their boundaries were in the east china sea The other aspect of course, this is probably where there's some expertise in the room Is the defense side Underneath the senkaku islands, you'll see in that little circle up there Is some fairly interesting water for submarines and other kinds of behaviors, of course, right? So the oil and gas development was one political way of managing the maritime boundary differences But the security concerns of the japanese were highlighted Basically given the the defenses and their needs in the in okinawa the okinawa trough is a fairly populated space Japanese themselves have a fairly sophisticated conventional submarine force They were concerned largely because of chinese activities in and around that were going to compromise Some of their submarine activities, but as you know, the united states also is very active in that region as well So what was going on above? Ground and what was going on underwater were two different things and by the end of the With the end of the east china sea joint development agreement I think it became pretty much a strategic Concern for the japanese that there wasn't going to be a way for japan and china to share the east china sea Other than to talk about their strategic impact on each other All right, we can talk about this later if you'd like during the q&a I think you know what two things happened On the territorial dispute that I think are important So jumping from maritime boundaries to the specifics of the eruption of tensions right in 2010 and again in 2012 2010 you had a government in power That was new to governing japan you'd had an election in 2009 That brought for the first time in the post war period A new party into into power in japan You'd had a single party conservative government all the way from 1955 until 2009 And all of a sudden in 2009 you have this brand new party the democratic party of japan That didn't have a lot of experience in foreign policy or security It was a liberal left party that was somewhat antagonistic to the u.s military presence in japan It wanted to renegotiate the status of forces agreement with the united states But it didn't have a concerted opinion on china policy It had An interest in improving relations with beijing It wanted to improve relations both with both south korea and beijing and wanted to find A new kind of east asian community within which japan could find a better relationship in the region um This is the party that was in power when a fairly inebriated inebriated drunken Trawler captain right ran into two japanese coast guard ships off of the senkaku islands. Let me go back Sorry So the fishing the fishing trawler was there. It was in japanese territorial 12 nautical mile waters off the islands It refused he refused to get out. He was confronted by one japan coast guard vessel Much larger than him and he took flight But then came back into the nautical into the 12 mile nautical waters And then the second coast guard ship came to assist and in the end he rammed both of the ships Creating a huge dilemma for the japanese government. He was arrested. He was boarded and arrested eventually His crew detained the ship detained. He was taken to ishiaki island, which is where the coast guard ships were from He was detained. His crew was let let go to the chinese government and the ship was allowed to return to the chinese government But the captain himself was detained. He was indicted or he was being prosecuted to be potentially indicted under japanese law for obstructing the japanese coast guards In the line of duty so basically getting getting in the way of their law enforcement activities This was the first time that a chinese national had ever been Detained and threatened to be prosecuted under japanese law In the book i chronicle a whole bunch of other incidents in and around these islands Some by fishermen some by activists And they are arrested detained and transferred back to the chinese government within a week or so This time was different and there's a lot of debate over whether or not they ought to have done that But it was a departure from the way the japanese and chinese governments had handled these incidents in the past He was detained the prosecutor's office in nahad said that they they would extend his detention Until they could put him forward for indictment and that's the moment when the chinese government becomes Very enraged and that's at that point you've got two things that had happened one that china Imposed an informal embargo on rare earth materials Not a formal embargo, but all of a sudden customs houses weren't allowing these rare earth materials to come out to japanese companies and corporations that needed them The second was at the moment that the naha prosecutor's office announced the intent to prosecute and indict The chinese government arrested for japanese businessmen in china They were there ironically to help Diffuse chemical weapons bombs that had been left by the japanese imperial army It was a it was a reconciliation project that had been in the works for years They worked for fujitsu company. They were detained and arrested for spying on chinese military installations The man with the video camera said we had no idea that it was a military installation So I think largely the japanese government understood that this was a tit for tat kind of hostage situation I can go into all the details of the escalatory path But by the end of this escalation secretary of state clinton had reminded the chinese publicly That the islands are protected under article five of the u.s. Japan security treaty And wen jiao bao had gone to the u.m. General assembly and in the evening before met with the committee of 100 Which is a leading chinese american group in the united states and threatened to go to know to go to any length It took to get that captain back and so The escalator escalation into this third party realm into the united nations and into the alliance Was the first time for japan and china to have that kind of Diplomatic tension long in the short the captain was released Three of the fujitsu guys were released The fourth fujitsu man in china detained in china wasn't released for another month But he eventually came home By this time the chinese fishing trawler captain was safely in china um that experience on the japanese side As i argue in the book really transformed a lot of the domestic debate in japan About how the crisis was handled, but also whether or not japan was really ready to deal with this new china Part of this is party politics. Of course, you've got a ruling party in power That's the long time ruling party is in opposition So they knew where to push the buttons in terms of the diet parliamentary debate Somebody in the coast guard Decided that the video of the encounter between the fishing trawler captain and the two jcg ships ought to go on to youtube So he leaked the video on to youtube in flaming the domestic debate even further So there was a lot of in the political party in antagonism, but there was also a real sense within the japanese public That their government was really not well prepared to deal with this kind of a china um And so the thing would the the reference in japan was the senkaku shock, which is the senkaku shock Uh, and it was a real shock I think to the idea that japan may have in china a neighbor that was antagonistic or a neighbor with which they couldn't fix These problems with you know quietly um The the nodal government at the time however did get back to discussions with beijing beijing and the tokyo government Negotiated a crisis communications agreement. It was announced in june of 2012 They also announced the initiative of a new maritime talks across government So coast guard education ministry all the people doing the surveying right the geologists and others, right? That never actually came to fruition because By september of 2012 they were yet again in a second iteration of this kind of crisis I won't go too far into the details of it if you're interested you can certainly read the book But this is where the nationalism topic is probably It's worthwhile. We spent a couple minutes talking about what's happening in japanese domestic politics over this issue 2010 again, you had a party in power people were very critical right by 2012 you have a japanese election Already the second crisis had emerged The ldp the conservative party was putting candidates up for leadership They were waiting for the opportunity for a lower house election Which was imminent by the end of the year and that's the election that elected Mr. Abe the current prime minister back into power in japan So the conservatives come back at the end of 2012 largely campaigning not on an anti china stance But on a we need a government that's competent enough to deal with the rising china All five candidates with the one notable exception Advocated that they should stand tough on senkaku sovereignty The man who is currently japan's prime minister went furthest. He said that it is time to put government officials On the senkaku islands So by this time you all the domestic politics that had led up to the national purchase of these islands by the previous government All of the excitement by the right and the conservative right in particular became very active in Raising the issue of senkaku sovereignty in claiming that the defense of the senkakus equaled the defense of japan right This was not a A platform that many conservatives would stand on prior to this But this became the the kind of call for action by the central government The other thing that happened is that ishihara shintaro who was one of the major advocates of senkaku nationalism He decided that his tokyo government could purchase these islands If the central government wouldn't do it And so he got a little pushback from his city assembly who said you can't use our taxpayer dollars to purchase those islands And do something nationalistic like that. So he created a senk what's called the senkaku fund And he basically within a couple of weeks had millions of dollars in his senkaku fund so Fundraising on behalf of the defense of the senkaku is right advocacy and the leadership race of the major parties The politics around this issue transformed in large part of the way that the japanese saw the relationship with china But also elevated the island dispute itself into this is the china we have to deal with And we need to take steps to make sure that we're willing and adequate to the defenses of our territory It's a very different tone on japanese politics and you would have heard even two or three years ago Nationalism in and of itself I look at this question of nationalism in the book again It didn't start out as a book about nationalism didn't even start out as a book about rising china It started out a book about bilateral tensions in the japan-china relationship But by the time i was done doing research It was pretty clear to me that one of the tasks i had to think about in my case studies was To what extent were the interests and advocates in one policy issue Bleeding over and affecting other policy issues in other words Did you have any evidence that across the board in japan? You were finding a kind of anti-china movement or a at least a concern about china Making its way into the national debate in japan where people behaving and voting on the basis of this new china I didn't find it. So that's the good news. I did find it in two issue areas where you would expect it Obviously one was the yaskini shrine visits, which of course we can talk about Which is a nationalist symbol for the japanese And we did find it again in this issue of the island disputes in the maritime boundary you have almost zero domestic activism in japan Because you don't really have a lot of interest groups that are sufficient to advocate on behalf of a different position by the Japanese government Ishii gaki has a small group of fishermen They're elderly Their voices are really not heard that much in tokyo And the oil and gas industry keeps its head down and is pretty low in the politics On the food security you had all kinds of politics, but they had nothing to do with anti-china politics They ended up actually being consumer advocacy and other kinds of issues So there's some issues that the japanese and chinese are Confronting that are actually new issues to them. They have to do with the interdependence between the two countries They have to do with ironically the introduction of a new maritime regime globally That helps create the tension between japan and china or at least the competition over how to resolve this east chinese sea problem But in the traditional issues where the japanese and chinese had long sort of quietly tried to keep War memory or the territorial dispute keep it quiet and keep it well managed by the political leadership on both sides Neither of these issues are containable today By either government i would suggest but again my book deals primarily with the japanese side of the case So is japan uh turning to the right is japan more nationalistic? Well, I think it's an issue-based nationalism I think there are certain issues that will get people on the street And that may even provide opportunity for the people who are loud and vocal Nationalists the right groups that were very silent for a long time during the post-war period in japan They have a lot more political play today than they've had in the past So again, if you're a political scientist you talk in terms of political entrepreneurship There's opportunity there for nationalist advocacy in japan that wasn't there before Chinese behavior creates even more opportunity Today though, I think we have a little bit of better news On the japan china side of things and i'm going to stop with this so we can open it up for questions We have abe and shi meeting last november at the apek meeting in beijing It was kind of hard to avoid a meeting because china was hosting the apek meeting The biggest economic leadership meeting in the asia pacific He couldn't not invite the prime minister of japan, right? And he couldn't not meet with the head of state that was coming to china So in a way, um the apek hosting by china kind of forced his hand a little bit For those of you who follow this relationship You may know that the picture that was taken when they finally met was kind of shijin ping holding his hand holding his nose, right? And abe looking a little bit more cheerful But the optics optics aside the two governments had a basic understanding that came only a couple days before that meeting happened There were four points of agreement negotiated between the national security advisor in japan and the the minister of the state council And basically the two important points were that japan would be sensitive to chinese opinion on history There was no mention of yaskini shrine by name But basically it was an ask that the chinese that the japanese leadership not Visit the yaskini shrine The second was over this east chinese sea territorial issue, right? And they didn't address they didn't say territorial dispute This is what they said Although we see we we assign different causes To our tensions in the east chinese sea We both agree on the need to reduce risk So therein opened the doors to what is now happening and almost concluded Is a risk reduction agreement between the japanese and chinese a military risk reduction a set of agreements, right? But they didn't talk about territorial dispute They didn't say it was a dispute or it wasn't a dispute They simply acknowledged that the situation the east chinese sea was dangerous and they needed to address it That's the first time that i know of that china has publicly Acknowledged the need for risk reduction in the east chinese sea up until that point They were quite willing to push a little bit Against to to see what kind of response they would get both by japan and frankly by the u.s. japan alliance But that opened the way to several other summits We're going to have we're going to see another one this fall when the japanese chinese and south korean leaders meet And again she and abe are supposed to have a bilateral attach to that Popular opinion in japan hasn't really changed on china If you look at the trajectory over time of public opinion polling You see probably about 90 of the japanese public are very skeptical About the government of china and its intentions And this is i would argue and i argue in the book this public element to the relationship is new The skepticism of the japanese public about china and about their own government's ability to deal with that china is very high For the first time in last year's public opinion polling and these polls have been taken by the same organization Along with the china daily on the chinese side for over a decade now and last year's poll Revealed that about 30 of japanese think that their country is inevitably going to be in a military conflict with china Again for those of you who have studied post war japan's almost unthinkable That the japanese public would imagine themselves in a war with anyone right So don't underestimate the depth of popular anxiety about this relationship And it's not necessarily translating into an anti china movement politically in japan But it's also deep skepticism about their own government's ability to Defend japanese interests in the face of this new china I'm going to stop here with one last comment about so what for the united states And i think i've been sitting in washington dc throughout the 2010 2012 crisis i wrote about it There's a piece i wrote in april of 2013 It's like what's called a contingency planning memo It's a kind of thought piece that we all have to do about what happens if right and how are us interests engage So i've watched our government deal with this Excuse me, and i've watched the united states and japanese governments negotiate the latest in the u.s Japan bilateral defense cooperation guidelines that really tries to address this what the japanese call this gray zone Contingency in the east china sea By which of course they mean white holes and not gray holes But the worry is of course the japanese the chinese are going to pressure japan Not a direct level of military engagement, but just underneath it and that there's a certain incrementalism and opportunism in the way The chinese are putting pressure across east china sea The u.s. Japan now have a common understanding of what those anxieties are We have for the first time in the relationship stood up a 24 seven crisis management mechanism for the u.s. Japan alliance again It's important to remember the u.s. And japan didn't have don't have a joint command Right, they don't have joint war planning. We don't have war plans with the japanese right. We exercise We do tabletop exercise, but we're not like it's not like the us are okay alliance or like nato We we have largely in the japanese have largely seen themselves as a support base For an american forward deployed strike force In other words the conflict would be the korean peninsula Perhaps taiwan straits perhaps elsewhere japan provides bases supplies logistics But japan is not on the receiving end Of a first use of force That has changed That's the new perception in tokyo that for the first time they they could imagine themselves potentially Be it inadvertent or miscalculation at the root cause, but they could potentially find themselves receiving Some kind of attack or some kind of escalatory dynamic with the chinese And now the dilemma is to make sure the united states is involved Up until this time we have in washington over the decades largely been making sure the japanese Were attached to work with us on regional issues Now i think the alliance dilemma has shifted and for the japanese It's not in fear of entrapment anymore. That's the problem. It's the fear of abandonment And so when you go to tokyo, which i'm sure many of you will I just be sensitive to the fact that there is a new you'll be asked a lot about The american commitment to tokyo whether we're really going to be there if there's a contingency Are we going to really defend the senkaku islands? So you'll hear it from the public. I hear it all the time from the public But the alliance has now a qualitatively different feel for tokyo and for washington for that matter Than it has in the past. So let me stop there. Thank you I can handle the questions if there are any yes Yes Uh loosening the restrictions by the favor of a build-up Greater use or it could seem like there's a fairly decent opposition So I think probably dick dick samuels was here I'm probably talking about this a little while ago. Um my sense is and I wrote a piece about this I can share it with bill if you're interested but From looking at japanese public opinion polling over time you see two things one That the self-defense force gradually becomes accepted as a legitimate post-war military force They don't use the word military. They say self-defense force to be consistent with article nine, right? And they largely did that domestically over the 60s and 70s with humanitarian disaster relief It didn't do it out of any war fighting kind of role for themselves The latest disaster of course up in kushima in tohoku area The self-defense forces became the most highly regarded Institution in japan in response to that national crisis right beyond the elected elites beyond the local governments It was the self-defense forces that performed well and the japanese public recognized that But even with the skepticism and this anxiety about the rise of china You don't see the japanese public embracing a military option in response Not not like you would expect if it was an american audience worried about our defense You would immediately go to the military response, right? You would expect them to be supportive of it and this is for their nation's own self-defense, right? So it's it's a bit mixed when it comes to senkakus When you do when you find polling data should we defend should we use force? Absolutely in defense of japanese territory There's not much doubt Should we Change the constitution or should we as mr. Abe has done reinterpret the constitution? Then you start to get a bifurcation And so last july the prime minister announced that he would reinterpret the cabinet announced reinterpretation of article nine to allow the military to work with us And to work in pko and a more you know a more fulsome manner put it that way And to support us by provision of ammunition and supplies, right? So if we are fighting somewhere our u.s. Forces are fighting from japan somewhere else They can supply us right they can help us, but they don't have to fight with us, right? That you get the the polling data basically comes down to about 30 30. Yes, it's a good thing. You know, it's not a good thing But the other 60 50 to 60 depending on which polling data you're using They don't know the answer to it. So there's a lot of i'm not sure out there in the japanese public polling data 30 percent. Yes, we ought to beef up our military We ought to be doing more alongside the united states and others in the region 30 percent are adamantly against it But that 60 p percent I don't know answer is a pretty telling comment. I think about where public opinion is right now And I think the big challenge given this summer. We had this very contentious people that demonstrating in the streets That the legislation was in the parliament The the response of the abe cabinet by his critics is harsh. These are war bills We don't want anything to do with it, right? But if you again look at the polling data 80 some percent from the conservative newspaper or the liberal right 80 some percent of respondents say he hasn't explained it well enough. I don't know what he's trying to do So again, I think there's a little bit of responsibility on the government's part to be a little bit more Engaged in messaging what their intent is and what they're trying to do I think it'll take a lot to persuade the japanese people that sending their forces abroad Or actually using force on behalf of other militaries that they're comfortable with it So that's the polling data answer Um, I again, I think the prime minister is and the cabinet are aware that they've got more work to do So I wouldn't expect any quick behavioral changes On the horizon Um, is that a negotiating piece or is that Another step on a march by the chinese to have the corner on strategic material I think it's the latter but um, the chinese have advocated since I think it's 2004 2005, but don't quote me. I'm not quite sure which where it was somewhere around the mid 2000s They began to say we want to Restrain our exports of rare earths for two reasons one is the extractive They wanted to develop their own extractive capability to the environment mental impact. They they claimed environmental impact concerns And three they needed themselves, right? So they identified rare earth exports as a somewhere they wanted to pull back and they they introduced a quota system And so the japanese had annually been having talks with the chinese government over that quota What was the right amount of quota how quickly they were going to reduce japanese share and things like that? So that was ongoing before the 2010 crisis, right? But the japanese always felt that they were cutting too much that the quota was unacceptable and under under the wto In fact, it's a monopoly exercise and so it violates wto laws But until 2010 The you know the united states and the europeans took the chinese to the wto They had a case that they had put forward and I can't remember which year I think it was 2008 that they put it forward japanese wouldn't join the case until the 2010 Issue and their experience with the informal embargo and in response they joined the wto case against the chinese for the quota system itself They've also diversified so they're in conversations with india They have an agreement now with india. There's been some talk with vietnam, although I don't know the extent of the agreement, but they've been seeking diversified sourcing I think up until 2010 80 percent of their rare earth Came from china so they were heavily heavily dependent which again goes to show you how unprepared they were For the shift in the relationship. They didn't think strategically that this is a vulnerability They had a decent enough relationship. There was a win-win economic bargain. They hadn't diversified now. They are Some of you who are more expert on the unlaw of the sea will also know that seabed Rare earth exploration and rights to seabed resources including the rare earth are currently being discussed Under what I think is called the jamaica round or the jamaica protocol So the seabed unclose has another aspect of this to introduce which is there's new places to explore For a rare earth and all countries that have high tech industries are going to have to think about this because Rare earths are integral to any kind of consumer goods cell phones Everything that we use all the time has rare earth minerals in it. So it's a serious problem Not only for the japanese but for all of us China I don't know what the full proportion of china today what their supply is globally, but it's a large It's over 50 60 or something I didn't realize it was that high, but yeah, yeah, so there you go But japan had not thought it possible and again I think the europeans and the americans had tried to change chinese behavior through the wto But that doesn't reduce the dependency. It just adjudicates. It's an attempt to adjudicate the differences, right? The coda system The u.s. Military At a calm apple swift emerald harris basically signaling that the u.s. Is is signaling Intensive ramp up a more muscular sovereignty Troll reaction to the island building. So i'm just wondering is there sort of a Common cause here or is it sort of well, that's different. That's their problem No So no to both of those that's not their problem two two pieces of the puzzle which is japanese interpretations of our behavior and It would probably surprise not surprise you that they're quite critical of our Unability or lack of action on this issue on the south chinese sea so That's one piece so the alliance again good getting back to the alliance dynamic between the united states and japan It has shifted considerably now They have a huge stake in having us be a much more assertive maritime power and defender of the maritime status quo You will if you go and visit your naval counterparts in the the in tokyo They will without fail tell you that are in our lack of ratification of unclose is a huge mistake And so whether whether it's because of lawfare You know the chinese responding to chinese lawfare is what they the words they use of course Or whether it's just because the united states is not well positioned to to work alongside their allies in the un law of the sea It doesn't matter they want us in unclose and they want it ratified as soon as possible. So that's one On the south chinese sea specific issue of the land reclamation They of course have access to isr capabilities that that's if you look on a map It's not that far away from okinawa I mean it is but it isn't Where am I See if I can get a good map I think that last oopsie. Sorry I'm supposed to point that way. Did it go away? There we go So It's not really really close But that little piece of land right up there is taiwan Right the one's unidentified up there Okinawa is really not very far away from taiwan So where all of their isr most of their isr capability right now is concentrated in in Not all of it, but a lot of it is concentrated in okinawa So some of the isr that you're seeing photographs of I suspect it's not coming from the united states. It's coming from japan, but I don't quote me on that one Oh, we're on youtube never mind I suspect that there's not only one source of isr in the public domain Um You know the chinese and The behavior in the south china sea I think it's the chinese that separate east china sea from south china sea They see it very differently and in a lot of the track 1.5s that i'm engaged in they'll say they're different problems South china sea excuse me, of course, it's the nine dash line and the historical that's china's it was taken away under imperialism It's ours. We're gonna you know, this is a historical issue for them Go to the east china sea The language is something like the japanese robbed us of those islands the japanese took it and they need to give it back So they view it differently. I think in behavioral terms, of course, there's two very Strong and sturdy us alliances in the east china sea Our alliance with japan our alliance with south korea So the united states has a stake in what happens in the east china sea. It may have a stake in terms of Freedom of navigation in terms of supporting lawful peaceful dispute resolution, but it doesn't have boots on the ground Presence in that region So there's differences right the chinese see it differently and they talk about it differently And I think you can see in the interaction With the land reclamation now that some of those differences are causing some policy dilemmas for us Um, I think the freedom of navigation issue is I suspect you you have had some pretty strong Conspicuous statements in the last couple of days. I suspect you're going to see a freedom of navigation Activity sometime soon. I suspect that our australian allies may be with us. Japanese could be with us too So I wouldn't I wouldn't Say that the japanese are uninterested in what happens in the south china sea The head of the joint staff admiral kawano Two and a half months ago has an interview in the wall street journal In which he says that chinese behavior in the south china sea should it continue That that the japan would find it Important to consider isr in the china in south china sea. So he basically Said if this keeps going our interests are going to be Affected he only talked about isr. He didn't talk about any kind of surface action or anything like that But just isr Um, he was then in the united states at the invitation of general dempsi So he has had adequate Opportunity to consult with the united states government on a variety of issues. I suspect south china sea may have been one of them But I wouldn't there's two things about the chinese Intentions in the south china sea, of course, there's two ways to think about it. One is they want to defend the islands In other words, they want to they they see this as their sovereignty and they're going to Defend it one um The second is and this is a language that the chinese PLA will use in their interactions at times with some of us In the track two world or track 1.5 world and that is force projection Power and if it's force projection, of course, then you're really talking about sea lanes and the vulnerability of sea lanes and other kinds of things that of course would Worry the maritime powers of east asia not just the japanese but the australians and Everybody else in east asia who depends on a stable use of the malacca straits or any kind of stable sea lane Maintenance of stable sea lanes, right? So if the chinese begin to talk about their land reclamation and their activities on these islands in the south china sea as part of a grander You know power projection Intent Then I think you'll find that the japanese will take it a very it's not just about islands Or about dispute resolution peaceful dispute resolution. It becomes a fundamental shift. I think in the maritime management, let's put it that way of east asia Yes, sir I believe in malabar right now this week isn't isn't the malabar exercise this week So the japan and the united states and india are conducting exercises now as we speak I was in delhi in 2012 Discussing this with some of your form policy and maritime experts Japan has long seen A positive for japan-india strategic dialogue and again maritime first and foremost, right? So that your navy and the japanese navy have a long-standing now a set of exercises and a conversation What was happening by the time I got there in in 2012 was your air forces were talking to each other and even the ground Self-defense force the japanese army and the indian army were having a bilat in discussion So I think the prime minister modi when he went to tokyo Was it last last year, right? He upped the strategic consultations Important I forget the they added one more word to make it an even more strategic important strategic dialogue But I think the dialogue between the two countries are very very important for the united states Um, I think the exercises this week are incredibly vital for the us understanding the way in which and where the opportunities are for us Uh, I think at some point you might expect the australians would like to participate as well because I don't have a big extended map, but maybe we can but the indopacific You know making sure that we have maritime stability or at least maritime management Practices in place that go all the way from east asia around to the gulf reform whose is important for all of our countries When the united states what I heard when I went to deadly which I was fascinated by because I'm not I'm not a south asia expert But was the argument that kept being made by your government was that the united states doesn't quite understand the implications of its withdrawal from afghanistan And that withdrawal from afghanistan then leaves a section a maritime section A little bit less populated by us forces and then then would be Comfortable, so I think we have a lot to think about frankly In the way that we we tend to see this all about east asia, but in fact, it's a indopacific stretch The japanese already are very active in the gulf of aidan in the anti piracy the multilateral Antipiracy in large part that they have managed to help Gain some capacities through that participation in that exercise I think they're looking for other alternatives and in ways in which the the india connection can help add to the multilateralism Multilateralization of that part of their engagement So I think the united states is very positive about it And I think you know at some point maybe having a conversation with australia would be an important part Of the puzzle but again, I don't have a readout from the malibar because I think it's ongoing this week And I'm very curious to see what the experiences are I'll be in tokyo I'll be in beijing in tokyo next week, and I'm hoping to talk to some of the japanese maritime self-defense forces about that experience But I know for a fact that tokyo welcomes it It's incredibly It's incredibly important for them Any other questions? Okay, there's a gentleman behind you waving at me I'm sorry, I thought you had left But he reappeared My meeting goes very quick I don't know if people have asked this, but I'm curious about the demographic dimension of japan and how the japan is an eijing country It is As a result that cannot help but influence its military calculations It's The reliance of the u.s alliance So All of what mr. Abe is trying to do in the economic realm Abinomics for those of you who follow it, which is really trying to revitalize and make more competitive the japanese economy Monetary fiscal stimulus is the short run, but the real serious focal point for him is the structural reforms And largely this is to address the aging society and Driven by the demographics, right? So I Somewhere on the realm by 2040 Somewhere on the realm of about 60 percent of japanese will be at or in retirement I mean, it's pretty dramatic huge So public policy at the moment it focuses on first of all What he calls womenomics, which is getting women into the workforce in a much more supported way To encourage japanese women 50 of the population To be fully engaged economically they they're going to need to have their women frankly engaged fully in the economy Second is you don't see it on the surface quite so much and nobody advocates it in quite the way I'm about to explain it But is immigration and I think they're going to have targeted immigration in particular sectors of their economy But clearly you can't get Higher productivity out of japan given the demographics unless you have a more women working and be The assistance of immigration they are going to have to import labor It's just a fact how they do it remains to be seen and what the political cost of that is remains to be seen The long-term impact on the self-defense force is pretty obvious, right? They have a small military to begin with in terms of population their ground self-defense force I think is about I think the ceiling is about 140,000 And they never meet it so some of that will be reserved I think what they actually meet in terms of recruitment is somewhere like 115 or 110 something like that, right? So and that's with a lot of a lot of strenuous effort They don't pay their kid their their Their military goes to four years of college. They don't pay for it and there's no commitment to serve although they've begun to change that Right, so incentivizing coming into the ground self-defense to the self-defense forces I should say The the navy the maritime self-defense force and the air self-defense force actually have a much smaller number They're about 20,000 each But they also get the high the technical guys The the fighter pilots the radar guys. They have a higher level of engineering and technical expertise I suspect that's the same for us They don't have any problems filling their quota in those two services But again, there are limits or just recruitment limits on how big an army the japanese or military At large the japanese can field The dependence on the united states question I think the demographic is just one more layer of that cake frankly I think the the big problem for them is going to be to make sure the united states is still engaged fully In their defenses that were fully present in the region that we're not cutting back our forces There's a lot of worry about the impact of sequestration There's a lot of worry about the flare-up in syria and everything redirecting the asia pivot or rebalance however you want to call it away from what Several defense secretaries now have articulated is we are sending our Most modern weaponry to the asia pacific We are sending We are ensuring that we're our maritime presence continues to be at the site the level if not Higher than it is there's a lot of statements being made about future projections That the asia pacific is the theater of the future for the u.s military Um, but the the proof will be in the pudding for the japanese. They want to make sure we stay And we stay present in a very conspicuous way All right, thank you very much. Thank you