(2 of 9)
Pragmatism came easily at war's end. Adaptability has always been a Japanese virtue, just as violence is a Japanese vice. Over its history, Japan has absorbed religions and ideologies, art forms and technologies more readily than any other nation in the world; yet it has at the same time retained a tough inner core of national identity. Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, who believes that Japan in the last year has taken over from China as the dominant shaping force of Asia, last week assessed Japan's new role in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Not so much because it is a Pacific land, but because it is a thoroughly modernized country, Japan is as much a natural partner and ally of the U.S. as any country in Europe."
Growing Investment. As the world's fifth-ranking industrial power (behind the U.S., Russia, West Germany and Britain), Japan is far and away the richest nation in Asia. Its 1966 gross national product of $100 billion represented a steady 10% annual growth that has varied little since 1950. Japanese businessmen have worn their own commercial path throughout Southeast Asia. Hong Kong at sundown becomes a Japanese city, its harbor dappled with the neon reflections of pink, blue, red and green signs that announce Sony and Daimaru, Minolta and Canon. In Djakarta, the grey-white slabs of Japanese-financed hotels and office buildings thrust with ultramodern exuberance from the scabbed red roofs of Dutch colonial slums. Since the signing of the Korean-Japanese Normalization Treaty in 1965, the Japanese presence in South Korea has redoubled: Japanese tourists swarm through Seoul, businessmen enjoy the gamy delights of the Walker Hill sex complex, and Japanese Corona taxi-cabs—now assembled in Korea—throng the streets. In Taipei's elegant hostelries, pin-striped Japanese papa-sans and their kimono-clad ladies queue up for bus tours to the Japanese-style inns that dot Taiwan's craggy green coast.
The Japanese government has nevertheless been unwilling to allow the full impact of its national prosperity to permeate the rest of Asia. Fearful of evoking the specter of Japan's wartime "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," conservative Premiers have shied away from government involvement in the aid and development of the region. But over the past year, Premier Sato has moved quietly and in typical "low posture" to take Japan into a more active Asian role.
"We are trying to develop a soft cushion of economic development around China," says one Japanese Foreign Office expert. This "encirclement by prosperity" resulted last April in the largest all-Asian conference that Tokyo had witnessed since General Hideki Tojo's original Co-Prosperity Sphere conclave ia 1943. Six Asian nations attended—Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos and South Viet Nam, while Cambodia and Indonesia sent observers. The consequent exchange of information about economic aid needs and Sato's reminder that Southeast Asia receives only $2.50 per capita in foreign aid from all sources (v. $5 for Africa and $6 for Latin America) led the Singapore Straits Times to suggest that "a miniature Asian Marshall Plan" might emerge from the conference. Japan could conceivably be the sponsor.