China-US Relations, Taiwan, and ASEAN

China seen as most influential power in Southeast Asia: ASEAN Studies Centre

But survey respondents from the 10 ASEAN states also expressed concern about the country's expanding influence.

Lowy Institute's Asia Power Index 2023: (from first to tenth place) United States, China, Japan, India, Russia, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand.

Chew Hui Min

13 Feb 2023 


SINGAPORE: China is seen as the most influential economic and political power in Southeast Asia, but its expanding influence is not viewed favourably by a majority of respondents in a survey of Southeast Asians.

Commentary: Japan’s empty villages are a warning for China

Beijing should take note of the risks posed by a property bubble and demographic changes, says the Financial Times’ Leo Lewis.

In Japanese village Nagoro, life-sized dolls outnumber the living. Japan’s population is projected to shrink by almost a
third by 2065. (Photo: Mediacorp)

Leo Lewis

01 Nov 2022

TOKYO: Next year, according to a recent estimate, Japan will have roughly 11 million unoccupied residences — slightly more than the entire residential stock of Australia. By 2038, under one scenario in the same forecast, just under a third of Japan’s dwelling units could lie empty.

A gloomy prognosis for Japan, where spooky, semi-abandoned rural villages already abound, but a portent of much bigger trouble, potentially, for China.

Commentary: Japan’s baby bust should force a rethink about demanding jobs and never-ending growth

Efforts to boost Japan’s low fertility rate will not solve near term labour shortages and other pressing burdens without embracing a new mindset, says a professor.

Rapidly-greying Japan has one of the world's lowest birth rates (Photo: AFP/KAZUHIRO NOGI)


Chelsea Szendi Schieder

17 Oct 2021 


TOKYO: Japan has been declared the world’s first super-aged society and a pioneer shrinking society, rapidly inverting the demographic pyramid upon which the modern state has been built.

Since 1989, when the low fertility rate of 1.57 became a major social concern, numbers have continued to trend downward. In June 2020, the Japanese government announced the preliminary results of the 2020 census, revealing that the number of births in that year was the lowest on record.

Commentary: How a catchphase shaped Japan’s COVID-19 response - for the better

By Leo Lewis

28 Dec 2020 


TOKYO: Sometimes, when Japanese academics select the single written character that best captures the essence of the year gone by, there are surprises.

In 2020, there could only be one choice: Mitsu, meaning “close”, “intimate” or “dense”.

The selection attests to a word whose usage has been recast by COVID-19. Nearly a year into the pandemic, the process of that recasting has been vital.

It places Japan in a group with Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and China, as theories form about the societal factors that might have contributed to keeping their infection and death rates comparatively low.

Japan’s recluses already faced stigma. Then came 2 shocking acts of violence

Experts worry that a new wave of fearmongering will leave the recluses known as hikikomori even more vilified and painted falsely as prone to heinous crimes.

08 June, 2019

TOKYO — After the stabbing of 17 schoolgirls and two adultsat a bus stop near Tokyo last week, a shocked public has been grasping for answers as to what could possibly have driven someone to commit such a horrific act.

Investigators and the news media have zeroed in on the fact that the attacker, who killed himself after the assault, which left two dead, lived as an extreme recluse — or “hikikomori,” as the condition is known in Japan.

In a Tokyo neighbourhood's last sushi restaurant, a sense of loss

29 December, 2018

TOKYO — "I'll have a draft," says Mr Yasuo Fujinuma, heaving himself down at the sushi counter. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from a frayed pocket of his sweater. From the corner of the restaurant, a small TV hums the noon weather forecast. He never drinks at noon.

"I've just come from the hospital," he says, tapping the filter end of his cigarette on the bar. "My sister died."

The chef puts his knife down. Another customer peers over the top of his sports pages. After a pause, the chef returns to his cutting board.

"You took good care of her," he says, placing a sheaf of haran leaf on the chipped black counter. He lines the leaf with a dozen nigiri sushi and hands Mr Fujinuma a mug of beer.

Conversations roll on like this at the Eiraku sushi bar. They start mid-sentence with no hellos or how-are-yous and veer into private thoughts without much fanfare, punctuated by news of ordinary tragedies.

Japan considers refitting helicopter carrier for stealth fighters: government sources

27 December, 2017

TOKYO — Japan is considering refitting the Izumo helicopter carrier so that it can land US Marines F-35B stealth fighters, government sources said on Tuesday (Dec 26), as Tokyo faces China's maritime expansion and North Korea's missile and nuclear development.

Japan has not had fully fledged aircraft carriers since its World War Two defeat in 1945.

Any refit of the Izumo would be aimed at preparing for a scenario in which runways in Japan had been destroyed by missile attacks, and at bolstering defence around Japan's southwestern islands, where China's maritime activity has increased.

Three government sources close to the matter said the Japanese government was keeping in sight the possible future procurement of F-35B fighter jets, which can take off and land vertically, as it looks into the remodelling of the Izumo.

The 248-metre (814-feet) Izumo, Japan's largest warship equipped with a flat flight deck, was designed with an eye to hosting F-35B fighters. Its elevator connecting the deck with the hangar can carry the aircraft, the sources said.

China’s fear of becoming Japan is said to drive deal crackdown

August 3, 2017

SINGAPORE — Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser commissioned a study earlier this year to see how China could avoid the fate of Japan’s epic bust in the 1990s and decades of stagnation that followed.

The report covered a wide range of topics, from the Plaza Accord on currency to a real-estate bubble to demographics that made Japan the oldest population in Asia, according to a person familiar with the matter who has seen the report. While details are scarce, the person revealed one key recommendation that policy makers have since implemented: The need to curtail a global buying spree by some of the nation’s biggest private companies.

World War II started in 1937 in Asia, not 1939 in Europe, says Oxford historian

Professor Rana Mitter tells Conversation With why the war began with Japan’s conflict with China, not when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the date most history books use. 
By Lin Xueling

16 Mar 2017

OXFORD - Many history texts use 1939 as the date marking the start of the Second World War. More America-centric accounts use 1941, the year Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

However, using recently-released documentation, Oxford University professor of history Rana Mitter argues that the real start of the global conflict was 1937 - when Japan attacked China in what has been called the Marco Polo Bridge incident, outside of Beijing.

Prof Mitter’s book, The Forgotten Ally, points out that the terrible eight-year-long conflict took a massive toll on China, with more than 14 million Chinese dead.

By comparison, military and civilian casualties for the US and United Kingdom combined totaled around 900,000.

How Japan resists the populist tide

JOHN PLENDER

JANUARY 3, 2017

After December’s No vote in the Italian referendum, the rise of Mr Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union, it appears that the political landscape of the developed world is being redesigned by the victims of globalisation and technological change.

Anger towards political elites is pervasive. Yet a few rage-free zones remain, of which Japan is the most conspicuous. How come this country, whose economy has been in the doldrums for two decades and where the suicide rate is vastly higher than the global average, is not in the grip of anti-establishment populism?

The docility of the Japanese certainly appears counter-intuitive. This is, after all, a country that has suffered from debilitating deflation since the late 1990s, and where wages have lagged behind productivity growth for years.

Since the bursting of Japan’s notorious bubble in the 1990s, the loss of wealth has been huge. Nomura Research Institute’s chief economist Richard Koo has estimated the cumulative loss of wealth on shares and real estate between 1990 and 2015 at ¥1,500 trillion (S$18.5 billion) — three times America’s loss measured in relation to gross domestic product in the 1930s depression.

China should heed the lessons of Pearl Harbour

KUNI MIYAKE

DECEMBER 8, 2016

The anniversary of Pearl Harbour is commemorated on Dec 8 in Japan — the time locally when, thousands of miles away, its ships and warplanes sank much of the United States Pacific Fleet and launched war against America.

For 75 years now, many Japanese have reflected on that moment with great remorse, appalled by the hubris and miscalculation that led to the attack. Later this month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will travel to Pearl Harbour to commemorate the tragedy. Sadly, though, the leaders and citizens of another Asian power appear to have forgotten those lessons.

For all the differences between Imperial Japan in the 1930s and Communist China today, I cannot help but see parallels between the two. Like Japan then, China is a rising Asian nation whose thinking is informed by patriotism, suspicion of outsiders and the remnants of an inferiority complex toward the West. Its military seems not entirely constrained by civilian control. And just as Japan did in the 1930s, China is defying international opinion and challenging the maritime status quo in the western Pacific, where the US defends vital sea lines of communication for all nations.

Why the world is stuck with persistent stagnation

STEPHEN ROACH

MARCH 8, 2016

Concerns over global growth were at the top of the agenda at the recent Group of Twenty (G20) meeting in Shanghai — and with good reason. Seven years after the Great Recession, the world economy continues to struggle. After a wrenching financial crisis morphed quickly into a severe downturn in the global business cycle, the subsequent recovery has been unusually weak, lacking the vigour that normally insulates the world from subsequent shocks. With a multitude of shocks continuing to batter today’s troubled world — from Islamic State and a European refugee crisis, to a collapse in energy and other commodity markets — the probability of a relapse remains high.

To a large extent, the world is mired in a Japanese-like secular stagnation.

Economic policy turned inside out

Stephen Roach

May 4, 2015


The world economy is in the grips of a dangerous delusion. As the great boom that began in the 1990s gave way to an even greater bust, policymakers resorted to the timeworn tricks of financial engineering in an effort to recapture the magic. In doing so, they turned an unbalanced global economy into the Petri dish of the greatest experiment in the modern history of economic policy. They were convinced that it was a controlled experiment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The rise and fall of post-World War II Japan heralded what was to come. The growth miracle of an ascendant Japanese economy was premised on an unsustainable suppression of the yen. When Europe and the United States challenged this mercantilist approach with the 1985 Plaza Accord, the Bank of Japan countered with aggressive monetary easing that fuelled massive asset and credit bubbles.

The rest is history. The bubbles burst, quickly bringing down Japan’s unbalanced economy. With productivity having deteriorated considerably — a symptom that had been obscured by the bubbles — Japan was unable to engineer a meaningful recovery. In fact, it still struggles with imbalances today, owing to its inability or unwillingness to embrace badly needed structural reforms — the so-called third arrow of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic recovery strategy, known as Abenomics.

Despite the abject failure of Japan’s approach, the rest of the world remains committed to using monetary policy to cure structural ailments. The die was cast in the form of a seminal 2002 paper by US Federal Reserve staff economists, which became the blueprint for America’s macroeconomic stabilisation policy under Fed chairs Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.

Japan should be worried

April 24, 2015

Here's what China may be up to in the South China Sea

TETSURO KOSAKA, Nikkei senior staff writer


TOKYO -- China is pushing ahead with its artificial island building in the South China Sea, where it plans airstrips and other facilities.

     Reports in Japan say the U.S. military is feeling a growing sense of urgency over China's aggresive island-making projects. But Japan should be feeling even more anxiety.

     Many analysts say China is moving to secure seabed resources from around its artificial islets. But it could easily go further and even one day drive a military wedge between Japan and the U.S.

     Lying at the very heart of the issue is the balance of nuclear power between the U.S. and China.

Japan ups the stakes to draw ASEAN closer

ALBERT WAI

MARCH 10, 2015

Together with 19 other journalists from member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), I recently participated in a journalist visit programme hosted by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA).

Over eight days, we took part in briefings and discussions on various strategic issues, including Japanese foreign policy, China-Japan relations and ASEAN-Japan relations. What struck me in these meetings is how keen Japan is to draw ASEAN closer to Tokyo in its tussle with China for influence in Asia. Notably, Japanese officials painted the contest almost as a zero-sum game.

Its game plan to engage ASEAN is a mix of economic diplomacy — which it is adept in — and signalling for the first time that it is prepared to patrol the South China Sea to counter Beijing’s assertiveness there.

In pressing the bloc to speak in one voice against China, Japanese officials warned against Beijing’s growing military strength and assertiveness in the region. The officials highlighted that its defence spending had been stable in the past decade, while China has been ramping up defence spending. In terms of troops, China has more than 10 times those of Japan. Conscious about how Japan was overtaken by China in terms of the size of its economy, Japan External Trade Organization officials noted how ASEAN was becoming increasingly dependent on China for machinery vis-a-vis Japan.

Addressing inequality, Japanese-style

MARCH 5

Six months after Mr Thomas Piketty’s book Capital In The Twenty-First Century generated so much buzz in the United States and Europe, it has become a bestseller in Japan. But vast differences between Japan and its developed counterparts in the West mean that, similar to so many other Western exports, Mr Piketty’s argument has taken on unique characteristics.

His main assertion is that the leading driver of increased inequality in the developed world is the accumulation of wealth by those who are already wealthy, driven by a rate of return on capital that consistently exceeds the rate of gross domestic product growth. Japan, however, has lower levels of inequality than almost every other developed country. Indeed, though it has long been an industrial powerhouse, Japan is frequently called the world’s most successful communist country.

Japan has a high income-tax rate for the rich (45 per cent), and the inheritance tax rate recently was raised to 55 per cent. This makes it difficult to accumulate capital over generations — a trend that Mr Piketty cites as a significant driver of inequality.

Japan's re-emergence and South-east Asia

FEB 12, 2015

[A "rebuttal" of sorts to the previous article.]

BY RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN,
FOR THE STRAITS TIMES

JAPANESE Prime Minister Shinzo Abe kicked off the year with a bang, endorsing a US$42 billion (S$56 billion) defence budget, which is set to cover state-of-the-art military acquisitions, featuring F-35 stealth fighter jets, P-1 maritime patrol aircraft as well as components of Northrop Grumman RQ-4 drones and Aegis combat systems, among others.

The newly endorsed budget marks a 2 per cent year-on-year increase, bringing Japan's defence spending closer to 1 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP). Despite the landmark increase in the Japanese Self-Defence Forces' budget, the country is still spending considerably less than other Pacific powers such as China, Russia and the United States, which have allocated between 2 per cent and 4 per cent of their GDP to augmenting their military muscle.

Yet, Japan's imperial past - this week marks the 73rd anniversary of Japan's occupation of Singapore - and what are seen as "historically revisionist" statements by ultra-conservative elements in Tokyo have, in the view of certain neighbouring countries, cast a negative light on the Abe administration's efforts to beef up Japan's deterrence capabilities.

Japan, Singapore, and 70 years of post-war ties

Ties between Singapore and Japan will move forward, even as both remember what happened in February 1942.


FEB 11, 2015


BY NARUSHIGE MICHISHITA,

FOR THE STRAITS TIMES

AS THE world prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in August, ties between Singapore and Japan are positive and mutually beneficial.

Among Singaporeans, aspects of Japanese culture have won favour, especially its food.

A poll last year by Borders Asia Market Insight and AsiaX found that Japanese food is the most popular foreign cuisine among Singaporeans.

And Japan ranks third, after Australia and New Zealand, when it comes to foreign countries that Singaporeans are interested to live in.

These good impressions flow from many decades of cooperation and cultural exchange, following the end of the war in 1945 and, with that, the end of Japan's occupation of Singapore, then a British colony.

In the 1970s, after Singapore became independent, Japan became its largest foreign investor and trading partner.

Japan's govt looking at $467b revenue shortfall

Feb 11, 2015


TOKYO - The Japanese government is on target to post a US$345 billion (S$467 billion) revenue shortfall in the fiscal year to March 2021, the target year for returning to a primary budget surplus, according to Finance Ministry forecasts.

The calculations, presented to a panel of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling party yesterday and seen by Reuters, underscore Mr Abe's difficulty in reducing Japan's debt burden - the heaviest in the industrial world - despite growth policies that have boosted tax revenues.

The ministry forecasts that even with more robust annual economic growth of 3 per cent, general budget spending will exceed tax and other revenues by 40.8 trillion yen (S$465 billion) in the target year, widening from a 36.9 trillion yen shortfall forecast for the coming fiscal year.

Territorial disputes can be set aside: PM Lee

Feb 06, 2015

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke on the rise of China, rivalries in South-east Asia and the pragmatism with which a small country secures its influence in an interview with German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung during his visit to Berlin this week. Here is an edited translation.

By Stefan Kornelius


MR LEE HSIEN LOONG is Prime Minister of a small country with a big name and influence that should not be underestimated. The city-state Singapore with its 5.4 million inhabitants might seem tiny next to the major Asian powers. But as a traditional trade and transfer hub with excellent relations to all regions in the world and with Western thinking prevalent among its political elite, Singapore has always been arbiter, interpreter, and a microcosm for European and American projections of South-east Asia.

Mr Lee, 62 years old and Prime Minister for 101/2 years, went to school in the West and rose to the state's pinnacle after a long military and political career. It was certainly no obstacle that his father and Singapore's founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew turned the city-state into what it is today: A multi-ethnic small state with a good track record for integration, led with a firm hand, governed de facto by one party, strictly geared towards increasing prosperity, and friends with both China and the United States.

During his visit to Berlin, Mr Lee emphasises in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung that this traditional role of balancing between major players is not just part of Singapore's central political understanding but also of most other South-east Asian states. "Everyone in the region wants to make friends with China and gain from the opportunities from its rise," says Mr Lee. "But at the same time, they would like the region to be open, to be stable and to maintain the relationship with Europe, America and the rest of the world."