Japan does not use its foreign policy as political fiction

Tokyo. Foreign policy is equivalent to having a lifeline, at least that is what it represents for most countries that want to develop.

Last Wednesday I had an interesting talk in Tokyo with Akita Hiroyuki, a member of the editorial board and editorial writer for the Nikkei newspaper.

The first words that Hiroyuki told me turned out to be a kind of release of stress accumulated by the game that Japan lost in a series of penalties against Croatia in the World Cup in Qatar, precisely on Wednesday morning, Japan time.

Akita Hiroyuki reflected on one of the possible reasons why Japan was eliminated after having beaten two world champions: Germany and Spain. “The soccer team has been trained to compete as a team, penalty kicks are the exception because it is a personal objective,” said the security analyst.

Hiroyuki is right, and something more than I conjecture: Japanese ethical behavior is also observed on soccer fields and any other type of sport. The so-called blue samurai of the Japan team do not lend themselves to dramatizing on the pitch; they do not hide faults; they do not exhibit cunning behind their behavior.

It is impossible to forget Neymar’s grotesque fantasies at the World Cup in Russia four years ago. The Brazilian star looked like an extra from a war movie.

The civic behavior of the Japanese is one of the most advanced in the world, but in soccer guerrillas it is an unvalued trait. Fair play has become an impossible dream within FIFA.

For Japan, foreign policy is not an optional subject; it is one of the most sensitive subjects in the country.

Japan maintains the most important commercial relationship in its economy with China, but in terms of security, the United States is its main ally. The balances of both variables, international trade and security, have to be worked on in an intelligent way. Japan’s is not a mutually exclusive foreign policy when it comes to its ties to China.

The Japan Times published last Thursday that Japan will describe this week as a “challenge” to the international order the military movements that the Xi Jinping government is carrying out recently in the Indo-Pacific region. This means that Japan’s national security strategy will have to be recast.

Defy is a much softer term than threaten, they may be synonymous, but Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers supported Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a member of the same party, in his reformulation proposal, however, to the act of launching ballistic missiles from China against Japan’s economic zone last August, was seen by Japanese politicians, at least publicly, as a threat.

In 2008 Beijing and Tokyo signed an agreement in which both nations agree to cooperate with each other and not challenge each other.

Japan requires an active foreign policy due to its location on the planet: a deterministic component that can only be reconfigured with diplomatic material. Something similar in the relationship between Mexico and the United States.

China, Russia, North Korea and South Korea are determining variables in Japan’s geopolitics.

Neither Prime Minister Fumio Kishida nor any other Japanese politician could say that the best foreign policy is domestic.

The two traits that Japan shows to the world are its civility and its technology, but from Japan, one reads its press in a geopolitical key and not in an ethnocentric way.

Foreign policy is discussed in the streets of Tokyo. It does not happen in Mexico unfortunately.

@faustopretelin