The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Japan Prepares for a Changing World || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

As Japan prepares for the G7 Summit, the topic on everyone's mind is the Ukraine War. By providing aid to the Ukrainians, the Japanese have given us a glimpse into how far the country has come and how they strategically positioned themselves for the years to come.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/japan-prepares-for-a-changing-world

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here, coming to you from Harris Saddle on New Zealand's famous Roodburn track. A little chilly today. Oh, stupid helicopters. Anyway, we're going to talk about Japan. While I'm out here, the G7 is getting ready for their annual summit. And of course, the topic of the moment is Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. And the Japanese have decided to belly up the bar with a significant amount of cash to support the Poles who are in turn supporting the Ukrainians. Now, historically speaking, unless you're talking about pure humanitarian relief for things like hunger, the Japanese have really had a really small footprint in international relations, and it has to do with their geography.

So it's a series of volcanic islands that have a little enclaves where people can live. So relatively weak infrastructure linking the sections, historically speaking, it's really only in the modern age that's changed. But what that does mean is that the Japanese have always had to have a significant, Navy, which means they've always been technologically advanced. And when that is kind of how you knit your homeland together, you can imagine how advanced you feel when you go out and you interact with countries that don't have the infrastructure and don't have the Navy and don't have the technology. So the Japanese have always had a bit of a superiority complex. And that led them to

basically colonize and conquer a number of countries, including China and Korea and Taiwan over the ages, and led them in World War II to try to knock the U.S. out of the war by destroying the fleet of Pearl Harbor. Now, obviously, history went a different direction, and the United States showed that even when it was fighting a land battle in Europe, that it was still able to float and sail a superior navy to the Japanese, both in terms of technical acumen and tonnage. And so the Japanese were crushed in the war, and then, of course, that was punctuated with the two atomic blast in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Now, with that kind of in the back of your mind, you have to look forward. The Japanese know in their bones, as much as they know anything, that they will never be superior to the United States in terms of economic strength,

naval power, and even now technology. Their first world power, that is no joke. It's the second most powerful Navy in the world of not trying to talk them down. But they realize that there's a limit that they can't go past number two as long as the United States is in the game. And through the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 80s and the 80s, you had this strain of nationalism in Japan that would talk about trying for it anyway, doing another chunk of World War II, a former Tokyo mayor Ishihara.

I hope I got that name right. Apologies if I didn't. Can't fact check out here. Advocated breaking the alliance and going its own way. Now, this was never viable. China is a naval power and its economy is based on the import of raw materials, especially energy, and the export of finished goods. Sounds a little bit like China does it? and the United States was the power that was capable of patrolling the sea lands and keeping safe, keeping commerce safe for the Japanese. But by the time we got to the 90s, a couple things had changed. Number one, Japan entered into a protracted financial crisis that I would argue they will never

recover from. In kind of a weaker version, a less intense version of the way that the Chinese do it, they'd print currency, that issue loans to everyone, they'd confiscate the savings of their population in order to make sure that there were sufficiently investment in jobs so that no one would rebel. They didn't do this to the same just ridiculous stage that the Chinese have done, but it did build up trillions of dollars of equivalent of bad debt, and they have been trying to get out from under that since the 1990s. So really, since things broke back in 1989, roughly, the Japanese economy has barely grown at all. In fact, I think it's today less than 10% larger than it was 30 years ago.

I think 1993 was the last year they had any meaningful growth. So they know that the United States is on a continued growth spurt. It's not rapid by first world standards, but it's faster than anything the Japanese can manage. So that the delta between the Americans and the Japanese keeps widening. The second big thing is demographics. Because of that enclaveic geography, this is a very urbanized country. Pretty much everybody lives in high rises. And in high rises, it's hard to tell the kids to go play in the yard.

So you just don't have them. And so Japan has had one of the world's lowest birth rates, not just for years, but for decades. And by the time we got into the 1990s, it was pushing towards retirement that even the nationalists in Japan realized that the dream was really dead. And so throughout the 90s and the 2010s, you had this increasing pragmatism in Japanese foreign policy versus the United States, versus Taiwan, versus China, versus Korea, where a lot of the more iconoclast positions kind of faded away and the positions where the Japanese would try to be neutral because they didn't want to repeat of World War II or really how it ended,

kind of turn into bit by bit a little bit more proactivity. And this culminated under Donald Trump of all presidents when the Japanese came calling looking for a trade deal. And in the end, knowing that the United States was the demographic and the military superpower, they decided that they needed to seek a permanent alliance. with the United States under Donald Trump, figuring if they could do it with Trump,

they could do it with anyone. And they proved that they could. And they signed a humiliating trade deal with Washington, which is enforced today. And unlike a lot of the other countries, I'm thinking here, Korea, Mexico, Canada, who signed trade deals with the Trump administration, and then in the first month of the Biden administration

tried to back away from some of the more crushing details, the Japanese made it very clear that they were fine as it is, meaning that the Japanese are the only country that really sees where all of this is going with China and broader conflict in the world, especially in terms of commerce, in terms of demographics, and in terms of realizing that if you can't get along with all stripes of Americans, you risk being left on the outside. So for the Japanese to step forward and say they're going to be taking direct economic activity to directly buttress the European effort in Ukraine, Ukraine itself, that's a big deal

because they are completely out of region, and if this had happened just 10 years ago, the Japanese would be trying to find a middle ground that would not offend anyone, but in for a penny, in for a pound, and the Japanese are in for a time. Okay, that's it for me. Until the next Visto.