Indo-Japanese Relations - A Historical Background

Grand themes of arcs and crescents, with India and Japan at either end of the curve, have never been far from strategic assessments of Indo-Japanese relations in Asia.

In his January 1950 Senate testimony, Dean Acheson noted the U.S.’ “real center of interest” in Asia needed shifting to that “crescent or semi-circle” of nations situated between Japan at one end and India at the other. On his state visit to India in 1961, Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda observed that Tokyo and New Delhi were the natural pegs of a security system in Asia.

Forty years later, Prime Minister Koizumi unveiled an “arc of advantage and prosperity” to complement his Japan-India Global Partnership. Not to be outdone, Foreign Minister Taro Aso, in a November 2006 speech aimed at laying out an expansive “values oriented” vision of the Abe government’s diplomatic strategy, revealed an “arc of freedom and prosperity” that spanned India and beyond.

Yet the reality of Indo-Japanese relations has been rather more mundane and mutual interests rather less congruent – particularly in regards to that large continental entity situated within the geo-political arc of Asia.

Even as Mao’s China was inflicting a lightening-quick defeat on Indian border positions in the early-1960s, the Japanese Defense Agency (JDA) formally continued to declare China as incapable of posing a threat to Japan. Indeed representatives of the Ikeda government even went so far as to initial a ground-breaking memorandum on trade relations with the PRC – the so-called L-T trade channel - precisely between the two phases of armed confrontation on the Sino-Indian border, in November 1962. 

Coming almost full circle four decades later, even as the JDA’s decennial National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) broke precedent by explicitly identifying China as a security concern, the visiting Indian Defense Minister, standing beside his Japanese counterpart at the latter’s headquarters in May 2006, was adamant in distancing himself from any ‘China threat�Etheory.

Indeed as variations of the China threat description have issued forth in Tokyo (be it as a “considerable threat,” “realistic threat” or a “potential threat”), the Indian foreign and defense policy establishment has, in equal measure, eliminated the language of ‘threat’ from its formal vocabulary of China policy. 

Beyond the China factor though, a considerably wider gulf separates the guiding strategic precepts of modern Japanese and Indian foreign policies. Given this divide in foreign policy worldviews, efforts by Indian and Japanese statecraft to factor in their counterpart within its scheme of vital interests has perennially tended to fade away into a conceptual and geographic obscurity.

Disappointing Past, Promising Future?

Historical false starts notwithstanding both Japan and India stand poised at a significant moment to robustly push forward their bilateral relationship. This window of opportunity is unlikely to remain open for long though.

Perhaps more than any Japanese prime minister in recent memory, Shinzo Abe remains unusually well disposed towards India, going even so far as to suggest that in a decade’s-time Japan-India relations could overtake U.S.-Japan relations.

In Manmohan Singh, New Delhi shares an equally reciprocative premier, grateful to Japan for its early supportive role during India’s 1991 economic crisis at which time he was the Indian Finance Minister, and attracted personally – like Abe – to the idea of a U.S.-Japan-India-Australia quadrilateral dialogue of liberal democracies that engender peaceful regional outcomes.

Second, at the heart of the expansion of Japanese investment in Asia following the appreciation of the yen in the mid-1980s was a process sometimes described as keiretsu-ization. Under this model, the core of the parts supply and assembly system for overseas Asian subsidiaries of Japanese multi-national enterprises (MNEs) consisted of ‘in-group’ local firms that had close joint venture ties to Japanese capital and technology.

With the Manmohan Singh initiated economic reforms beginning to bear fruit in the area of inward investment in low and medium capital intensive manufacturing, the scope for cost-driven transfer of such vertically integrated Japanese MNE-controlled production networks to India finally looks particularly promising. A robust investment chapter in the prospective bilateral comprehensive economic partnership agreement would no doubt further facilitate such FDI transfer.

Third, both countries share – independently with the United States - recently signed defense arrangements that authorize their respective participation in trilateral and multi-national cooperative defense endeavors.

Fourth, important ground was broken by the Japanese government in two recently-issued policy documents. The 2003 revision of the ODA Charter calls for the disbursal of aid from, among other angles, a strategic perspective too. The JDA’s Defense Guidelines issued in December 2004, meantime, for the first time refers to sea lanes of communication in the context of “international peace cooperation activities.”

Together, the two afford a unique opportunity to route ODA towards India’s ports, maritime infrastructure and shipyards, much of which is geared towards dual commercial and military servicing. With India committed to an ambitious ocean security program, and with Indo-U.S. naval cooperation making rapid strides forward, strategically-oriented ODA channeled towards functional areas such as marine transport, oceanographic surveys, sea bed exploration, ship-lift capabilities, etc. would lend additional focus to what is already the single, largest ODA country disbursal.

Such strategic cooperation need not fall afoul of Japan’s arms export principles. Indeed earlier this year, Japan expressly provided three patrol boats to the Indonesian Coast Guard for limited anti-terrorism and piracy purposes from within ODA funds – though as an exception to its “Three Principles on Arms Exports.”

A structured dialogue on non-lethal military and dual-use technologies between both countries defense-industrial bases offers a fifth - though somewhat unlikely - area of possible cooperation. In its final report in 2004, Prime Minister Koizumi’s Council on Security and Defense Capabilities (Araki Commission) had called for a “case-by-case consideration” for relaxing Japan’s long-standing arms export principles vis-à-vis third countries, over and beyond the explicit authorization for missile defense and other joint projects with the U.S.

Given the yet rudimentary state of India’s defense industrial base, and likewise, the extremely low military-to-civilian production ratio for Japanese businesses engaged in its own defense sector, such one-off ventures could be profitable at both ends.

It bears noting though that a previous Prime Ministerial-commissioned report a decade back (Higuchi Report) too had urged joint R&D in weaponry and sub-systems within a multilateral context, yet the recommendation was unable to gain domestic political traction due to prevailing pacifist sentiment. Such sentiment continues to prevail even today, as can be gauged from the discomfort with which the U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement continues to be received in Tokyo.