US President Donald Trump’s hopes for a grand deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping are being undercut by American allies’ self-interested amplification of the “China threat”.
This year’s Nanking massacre memorial was particularly poignant in light of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s controversial remarks on Taiwan. Beijing warned that any attempt to challenge the post-war international order or undermine established historical truths would be “doomed to failure”.
Meanwhile, Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has suggested that Southeast Asia offers a path for the two Asian neighbours to move beyond the shadows of the second world war, saying that the region “has done that with Japan”.
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However, for many, the brutality of the imperial Japanese army is not history; it remains an open wound. On the sidelines of the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur, Takaichi’s visit to a Japanese cemetery sparked controversy, with critics seeing it as a troubling downplaying of Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The concern is more than symbolic. Takaichi, an arch-conservative, represents a right-wing vision that seeks to restore Japan to the imperial strength it held before 1945.
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Japan has been central to Southeast Asia’s post-war prosperity. Yet that stability rests on a Japan that is economically powerful but politically restrained. A remilitarised Japan, particularly one with nuclear capabilities, would not just rewrite its own role, it could unravel the very foundation of regional stability.