Japan’s prime minister has seen her gamble on a snap election pay off with a landslide victory. But that may not be enough to persuade Beijing to end a damaging standoff over Taiwan.
A landslide in Japan
Sanae Takaichi’s breathtaking victory in Japan’s general election gives her 361 out of 465 seats in the house of representatives, more than the two thirds required for a supermajority. As our correspondent David McNeill reports from Tokyo, the scale of her win insulates the prime minister from pressure to compromise on the key issues of public spending and defence.
It means that if legislation is rejected by the upper house in Japan’s parliament, where her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lacks a majority, the lower house can push it through anyway. This will help Takaichi to implement her controversial plans for tax cuts and increased defence spending, despite the fact that Japan is the most indebted country in the developed world.
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The prime minister wants to accelerate an increase in defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and she is under pressure from Donald Trump to go further. He wants the United States’s allies to spend at least 5 per cent of their GDP on defence.
Takaichi would like to amend the provision in Japan’s postwar constitution which bans the country from maintaining a conventional army as opposed to defence forces that operate under strict constraints. But calling a referendum would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament and she is unlikely to secure the necessary support in the upper house.
Until 2014, Article 9 of the constitution was understood to allow the use of force only for the purpose of repelling an armed attack on Japan. But Takaichi’s mentor Shinzo Abe changed the official interpretation to allow for the limited and conditional use of force where “an armed attack against a foreign country that is in a close relationship with Japan occurs and as a result threatens Japan’s survival” even if Japan itself is not under attack.
The change was designed to provide a firm legal basis for Japanese forces to be deployed in support of the US, which has a large military presence in Japan. It has long been understood that, if Taiwan came under attack from the Chinese mainland, the US would come to the aid of the self-governing island and Japan would help too.
But Japan’s relationship with China is governed by a 1972 joint communiqué that deliberately avoided finalising Taiwan’s status and Tokyo has followed a policy of strategic ambiguity on the issue ever since. Last November, within days of taking office, Takaichi blew this ambiguity apart when she blurted out to a parliamentary committee that an attack on Taiwan would constitute a survival-threatening event that could trigger the deployment of Japanese forces.
Beijing regards Taiwan as an issue “at the very core of China’s core interests” of sovereignty, territory and national unity and it immediately demanded an apology. When Takaichi declined to withdraw her remarks, China imposed an unofficial ban on Japanese seafood and discouraged its citizens from travelling to Japan, where they account for a quarter of the tourists every year.
Some western commentary has suggested that Takaichi’s landslide after she held her ground will encourage Beijing to back off. But over the past decade, China has put relations with countries including Norway, Canada, Australia and Lithuania into the deep freeze for years for smaller perceived transgressions and its standoff with Tokyo is unlikely to end soon.
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