By Tom Fowdy
The people of Japan were met with a rude awakening on Monday morning as North Korea proceeded to test an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), which proceeding 1000km into space, flew 2000km past their territory and landed in the Pacific Ocean. Despite the fact that the missile's trajectory was obvious, the Japanese government proceeded to immediately send out an emergency alert requiring citizens to "take shelter" and shut down the Shinkansen High Speed Railway System. It is the first time Pyongyang has initiated such a test since 2017, and has been decried as a major provocation by Tokyo, Seoul and the United States.
Whilst on first glance it may seem common sense for Japan to issue such emergency warnings. In reality, these alerts in face are a deliberate act of domestic propaganda by the country's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who intentionally weaponize the threat of North Korea, and China, in order to perpetually hold a grip on power. Such alerts demonstrate the saturation of the party's influence across the entire Japanese state, which is always overlooked by observers who are quick to praise it for being a de jure democracy, when in reality Tokyo is de-facto a hybrid regime whereby the opposition has few channels of political, economic and social capital to be meaningful.
The contemporary post-war Japanese state is a de-facto continuation of the old Imperial regime, who upon surrendering in World War II, were merely refashioned into a new political structure under the leadership of the United States, than being in any way a firm break from the past as what was seen in West Germany. The new Japan would not be a militaristic state under its new constitution, yet would retain its privileges through transferring what was its own political order and leadership in Asia, over to that of the United States. The former Imperial classes in turn, became the coalition which built up the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, and has dominated the country's politics in all but two occasions in the past seven decades.
Throughout that period of time, the LDP has weaponized the sentiment of Anti-Communism, through fear of both North Korea and China (as well as sometimes hostility to South Korea), to stay near perpetually in power, holding a monopoly over the apparatuses of state and the media of Japan. The only times it was not able to attain power were brief interludes from 1993 to 1994, and 2009 to 2012, as a result of difficulties facing Japan's economy in those respective recession periods. It is worth noting that in neither occasion did the "outsider" government survive for long, that is because the LDP have effectively articulated a system which on paper is democratic, but through the informal power it holds, has rigged the process of democracy to be permanently in its favour.
And Japan's hostile relations with North Korea are a defining case study of such. Although the DPRK is of course equally and intentionally provocative towards Japan, the authorities in Tokyo exploit this enmity and exaggerate the threat from Pyongyang for their own political gain. In 2017, at the peak of the North Korea crisis between Kim Jong un and Donald Trump, Abe Shinzo's government deliberately articulated scores of similar emergency alerts, shut down the Tokyo metro, placed missile defence systems in public parks and portrayed an attack by the DPRK as imminent. He then went and called an election and not surprisingly won by a supermajority, a textbook case of LDP political manipulation, which is also used to distract from anything that might be making them unpopular.
And that is precisely what is happening now. The LDP, under Fumio Kishida, is under fire again, from their own people that is, not Pyongyang. The assassination of Abe this summer took the government down a rabbit hole of controversies as it exposed the LDP's connections to the highly controversial Korean Cult the Unification Church, with Abe's killer being motivated in a revenge attack against the institution's political influence. This was then followed up by a highly expensive state funeral (even more so than Queen Elizabeth II's!) which was detested by at least half of Japanese people. This sunk the popularity of the LDP and crashed Kishida's approval ratings.
In this respect, the DPRK's decision to launch a missile was a gift to the LDP. Even though its trajectory was 1000km into outer space, not armed with a warhead and not intended to hit Japan, the LDP nonetheless rushed to deliberately incite public fear in the view to distracting from their own unpopularity, and sadly as such it is a magic formula which works every single time. The LDP doesn't need the support of 100% of Japanese people, they just need to mobilize and attain the support of a core electoral coalition that will put them over the line every single time.
In doing so, North Korea's weapons testing has been a fundamental driver of Japan's bid to remilitarize itself, revise its constitution and by extension, pursue a broader pushback against China under the guise of North Korea. This is probably one of the biggest downsides of Beijing's relationship with the DPRK, and it goes without saying they continue to exploit this geopolitical fracture point in order to create a loop that ultimately reinforces their own strategic importance to China itself. In this way, Japan and North Korea's relationship is truly "love-hate", two adversaries who in fact need each other's hostility, for their own domestic political standing.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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