Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, has just completed a diplomatic tour in Southeast Asia in order to try to gather around Japan in the countries of the region which adopted an attitude of neutrality with regard to The Ukrainian crisis.
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The war in Ukraine led Japan, the only Asian country of the G7, to get out of its customary reserve during international crises. After having strongly condemned the Russian invasion, he aims to appear as the federator of a “free and open” Asia, “rejecting any unilateral attempt to modify the status quo by force”. The journey that the Prime Minister has just made in Southeast Asia, Fumio Kishida, who successively visited Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand between April 29 and 1 May, illustrates Tokyo’s desire to try to bring together Asian countries around Japan with the often divergent positions of the West about the Ukrainian crisis.
Tokyo anticipates that the war in Ukraine risks being the beginning of a disruption of international standards which, from Europe, will not be without effect at the other end of the planet – if only ‘Due to the extension of the Russian territory to the Far East. While in Europe the danger is above all Russian, for Japan it is double: to a China with hegemonic ambitions is added a Russia which “has just shown that it can operate both to the west and to the ‘East, “said Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, after recent Russian fleet exercises at the Okhotsk Sea, located north of Hokkaido, the most northern island in Japan. Concentrated so far in the southwest of the archipelago, facing China, Japanese defense will have to strengthen its positions under these latitudes – as in the time of the USSR.
a Japanese public opinion circumspect
The alignment of Japan with the positions of other G7 members, in particular with regard to the adoption of economic sanctions, does not, however, be unanimous in Japanese public opinion: the latter condemns aggression, but Part of it remains circumspect regarding the real causes of the conflict.
The Japan position has earned him retaliatory measures of the Kremlin which ended negotiations on the peace treaty between the two countries. He has been working for more than half a century on the dispute concerning the sovereignty of four islands of the Kouriles archipelago, annexed by the USSR following the Japanese defeat of 1945. But the deterioration of relations with Moscow is not, for the moment, the major concern of Prime Minister Kishida: its priority is indeed to bring the positions of the countries of Southeast Asia closer to that of the G7 so as not to appear isolated in its own region. Tokyo thus argues with its neighbors that the aggression of which Ukraine is a victim can occur elsewhere and that the countries of the region must show cohesion in the conviction of Russia. Convincing them is difficult because they are reluctant.
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