October 11, 2013

In his latest visit to Southeast Asia ending on October 10, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo again had no chance to hold talks with the heads of China or South Korea.

It has been more than a year since Japan held summit talks with the two nations under the cabinet led by former Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko.

While marking the completion of the Abe Cabinet’s one-year diplomatic activities since its inauguration last December, the latest tour failed to make any progress in addressing the biggest issue at hand: the worsened relations with China and South Korea.

Abe, who repeatedly claims that the door for dialogue is always open, needs to face the cause for the absence of any dialogue.

The territorial right over the Senkaku Islands lies as the biggest reason for the worsened relations with China. Japan has continued to claim the Senkakus as its territory and thus no territorial dispute exists with China.

The relationship with South Korea has been worsened by the Japanese government’s move to distort the understanding of the nation’s past colonial rule and the war of aggression, including the issue of the military sex slavery.

Visiting South Korea late September, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called for a better South Korea-Japan relationship. President Park Geun-hye, however, said in reply that her government cannot build trust with Japan’s leaders so long as they vocally distort the historical facts.

Concerning the Senkaku issue, China seems to have no intention to stop its intrusion of Japanese territorial air and waters although the Japanese and U.S. governments continuously state that the bilateral security treaty covers the area surrounding the Senkaku Islands.

Japan has used its alliance with the U.S. as a shield in aggressively dealing with its neighbors. The decline in U.S. influence, however, has made it increasingly ineffective in its ability to influence and control the unstable international relations in Northeast Asia.