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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attends a memorial service for atomic bombing victims at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Aug. 6.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has taken the extreme step of imposing punitive economic measures on South Korea in retaliation for a ruling by the South Korean Supreme Court about forced labor, has been moving steadily forward with his plan to rewrite the geopolitics of Northeast Asia.

Under Abe’s lead, the Japanese government seeks to free Japan from the postwar arrangement and enable its emergence as a militarily strong country capable of waging war. The goal is for Japan to regain its position as a world power, standing alongside the global superpower of the US. After upgrading its Defense Agency, which had been under the influence of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the cabinet-level Defense Ministry and expanding the defense budget, these figures are pushing to amend Japan’s “peace constitution” in order to turn Japan into a “normal country.” A long-term initiative that’s being pursued in parallel with this is the Indo-Pacific Strategy, which is designed to contain China. This strategy encompasses the US, India, Australia, Africa, and even the UK. Increasing military cooperation with other countries — Japan recently conducted joint exercises with France and the UK — is part of this plan.

Although Japan achieved swift economic growth after World War II under the protection of its alliance with the US, friction with China during its rapid rise as a hegemonic power has persuaded Japan of the need to devise its own security strategy and has impelled it to continue developing a containment strategy vis-à-vis China. Since Abe began his first stint as prime minister in 2006, the Japanese government has forged a strategic global partnership with India, unveiling a plan for the “confluence of the two seas,” signifying a linkup between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, in 2007.

Following his return to power in December 2012, Abe has promoted a more sophisticated version of this plan called the “democratic security diamond,” envisioning a strategic space in which Australia and the Indian Ocean, India, Japan, and the US are connected as the points of the diamond. That was after Japan experienced a row with China over the Senkaku Islands (which China calls the Diaoyu Islands). In 2016, Japan unveiled a strategy that it calls the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, in concert with the US, India, and Australia. The US government, under President Donald Trump, has adopted Japan’s plan as an American national strategy. While this strategy is supposedly designed to guarantee the freedom of flight and navigation in the region and to protect the usage of the seas according to international law, its obvious goal is to prevent China’s oceanic expansion.

Where exactly does South Korea fit into the Abe administration’s geopolitical calculus? It’s basically nowhere to be seen, several experts say. “South Korea has even less priority than the ASEAN states in Japan’s plans for the Indo-Pacific,” argued Nam Ki-jeong, a professor at the Institute for Japanese Studies at Seoul National University. South Korea is Japan’s neighbor, a country that shares the values of a market economy, democracy, and human rights; furthermore, maintaining amicable relations between South Korea and Japan is necessary from the perspective of trilateral strategic cooperation with the US. Nevertheless, the Abe administration taken retaliatory economic measures against South Korea and removed it from Japan’s white list of trusted trading partners on the grounds that it can’t be trusted on matters of security. This apparently reflects the Abe administration’s belief that South Korea’s rejection of the comfort women agreement with Japan and the South Korean Supreme Court’s ruling that victims of forced labor must be paid compensation are anathema to Japan’s attempts to reinterpret history, under the banner of wrapping up the postwar order.

Under these circumstances, experts say, South Korea needs to devise a long-term global strategy of its own. “In the past, Japan sought to expand into the continent via the Korean Peninsula. But South Korea isn’t a major factor for Japan any longer, since it now seeks to expand its global presence via the Pacific Ocean. We need to devise our own global vision while only participating in other country’s plans — whether the US and Japan’s Indo-Pacific Strategy or China’s Belt and Road Initiative — when it serves our needs,” said Kim Suk-hyeon, a foreign strategy analyst at the Institute for National Security Strategy.

By Noh Ji-won, staff reporter

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