Between 1860 and 1938, when Japan was beginning to assert itself as contender for dominance of at least half the world, most Japanese military personnel still carried swords and spears. By December 1940 Japan was designing, building, and deploying some of the most modern battleships and fighter aircrafts in the world.

The Meiji elite adopted the western technology and political institutions that served the purpose of rapidly modernising the imperial army and navy, making them a formidable force. They wreaked havoc at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even earlier, the Japanese, inspired by the Shinto monument Yasukuni shrine founded by Emperor Meiji in 1869 — had, to their credit, other great military feats, such as the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, when for the first time an Asian country routed a European power.

But after courting humiliating defeat in 1945, Japan was forced to accommodate the US occupation and a new US-dominated international order. However, the country’s conservative elite opted to maintain Japan’s core values while effecting necessary adjustments to maximise the country’s relative strength. The architect of this post-war strategy, Prime Minister Shigero Yoshida believed that the pre-war leadership had not been sufficiently alternative for international power relations and had mismanaged Japan’s source of national strength.

Yoshida closely aligned Tokyo to Washington and ensured Japan’s post-war focus on economic rebuilding and not militarisation even after the Eisenhower administration began to regret the imposition of pacifist Article no 9 in Japan’s US-drafted 1947 constitution until the country had recovered. His successors also ensured that Japan instilutionalised Article 9 in domestic law as a break against entrapment in US Cold War policy. Yoshida was particularly concerned that Japan retained a relatively freehand to pursue commercial relations with China which, he was certain, would eventually wean itself from government influence.

Later in his life, Yoshida expressed regret that Article 9 had become an excuse for Japanese passivity, including for banning collective defence efforts with the United States beyond the narrow purpose of defending Japan. With the end of the Cold War, Japan’s political elite was again forced to adjust to yet another international order. However, after five decades of strong economic growth, the nation seemed to possess the tools necessary to enhance its position while remaining aligned to the world’s sole superpower.

Much of Japan’s elite subscribed to the country’s famous assertion that Japanese economy had ‘surpassed capitalism’, and that, according to Tokyo, would be able to shape its strategic environment from a position of leadership within Asia without having to re-militarise.

Yet 1990 saw a Japan paralysed by inaction during the Gulf War. It was then bereft of a credible economic model. After the collapse of the bubble it was unable to use economic interdependence to shape China’s rapidly expanding strategic reach and threatened by a North Korea bent on developing nuclear weapons. Only after the drift of a decade did Japan find its bearing again under a charismatic Junichiro Koizumi and a staid pragmatist Shinzo Abe — both scions of anti-Yoshida Families.

Although major reforms to Japan’s economy had begun years prior to Koizumi’s election in 2001, he greatly advanced the process in part through specific achievement but more important, by catalysing public demand for change and by giving reform an aura of inevitability. Shinzo Abe, his hand-picked successor, tried to live up to the expectations Koizumi created.

Koizumi attacked the power base of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and fostered the restructuring needed to get the economy back on the track. He also broke new ground by despatching the self-defense force to Indian Ocean and Iraq as part of more robust security policy and a closer relationship with the United States. When Koizumi retired as Japan’s prime minister, he left big shoes to fill. His successors have been, with difficulty, doing exactly that.

It appears that Japan will continue to recalibrate its national power to accommodate a changing international environment. Even if the collapse of Soviet Union has removed some of the Japanese concerns, fresh ones have been added by the emergence of a more assertive China and a nuclear armed North Korea.

But one thing is clear that Japan still has not come to terms with the legacy of World War II or made the hard choices necessary to sustain economic growth over the long haul. But the bottom line is not unclear: Japan has begun tapping into new sources of strength in order to remain a key player in Asia.

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Brig (retd) M Abdul Hafiz is a former DG of BIISS.