On the brink in NE Asia

Two stories dominate the news in the U.S. There’s the “fiscal cliff” over which civilization-as-we-know-it is doomed to tumble on New Year’s Day unless President Barack Obama talks some common sense into his intransigent foes in Congress.

You get so tired of hearing the grating voices of the Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner battling against higher taxes on the super-rich that news from anywhere else is almost welcome. Then comes the other tedious story, conflict in the Middle East, and all that footage of violence and threats of violence across northern Africa through Syria and on to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

In the confusion of unending bad news, one story gets lost, at least to American readers. That’s the looming cliff of leadership change in Northeast Asia from China to Korea to Japan. Xi Jinping is already general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the party central commission. Next year he’ll become president, which is a much easier title for foreigners to remember even if they’re never going to be able to spell his name, much less pronounce it.

Looking the other way from Seoul, Japanese vote on Sunday in back-to-the-future elections that are sure to add to the uncertainties of the region.

It’s been little more than three years since a major opposition force ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from its grip over the Japanese power structure, but in that period the record of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) appears as living proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The DPJ, after enduring the disaster of the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear energy plant, has abandoned whatever visions its leaders had of kicking U.S. forces out of Okinawa while coping ineffectually with economic malaise and worsening hassles with China over the Senkakus.

The net result is the LDP seems pretty certain to win a majority in Sunday’s elections for the diet, meaning that its leader Shinzo Abe will succeed Yoshihiko Noda as prime minister. That’s an incredible turn of events that portends trouble for Korea as well as China.

Abe has been there before. He was prime minister for a year, from 2006 to 2007, before resigning as a result of acute stomach problems – a claim that some Japanese believe was a cover for mental issues. He loves to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, and he’s a hard-liner on the Senkakus, the island cluster claimed by both Chinas, the one in Beijing and the other one on Taiwan. He won’t budge on Japan’s refusal to compensate the diminishing band of “comfort women,” and he’s not in the least interested in revising textbook accounts of the Pacific War. As for Japan’s claim to Dokdo, the best anyone can hope for is that he won’t annoy Korea by constantly repeating it.

All that does not mean, of course, that Abe, now seemingly in good health, is likely to engage in serious saber-rattling. The good news about him is that he was fairly moderate in foreign policy during his one previous year as prime minister. He’ll make a show of wanting to talk to his new colleagues-in-power, from Seoul to Beijing. At the same time, he’ll focus on the economy, pressing for “quantitative easing,” the fancy term for printing more currency. With more money around, the theory is Japan will recover from the economic abyss in which it’s been wallowing for the past two decades or so. We’ll soon see.

The greatest imponderable may be the impact of leadership change here in Korea. Regardless of who is elected on Wednesday, the incoming president is going to have a tough time figuring out North Korea. Nor will Abe help by his likely refusal to back down on all the issues that plague Korea-Japan relations. Just imagine the ruckus when he goes to the Yasukuni Shrine again to pray for the spirits of the soldiers who died fighting for Japan’s “co-prosperity sphere” from Korea and much of China through Southeast Asia.

The Northeast Asian drama is all the more intense in view of leadership shifts in North Korea and the United States. No one is sure who’s calling the shots in the North since Kim Jong-un succeeded his father a year ago Monday.

At a talk that I attended recently in Japan, chef Kenji Fujimoto, author of a tell-all book about his years dishing up sushi for Kim Jong-il from 1988 to 2001, described how effusively Jong-un received him in Pyongyang last summer. Then, when he expected to return again in September, he was denied a visa. Who’s making these decisions and why? Who’s orchestrated the North Korean rocket launch? Who’s getting rid of the aging generals?

The future of the United States is almost as mysterious. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia may portend sharper confrontation with China while the U.S. honors its alliance with Japan on the Senkakus. Obama, with a new foreign policy team, may want to revive dialogue with North Korea. That will be tough though, while China hardens tensions by claims to surrounding seas and fails to rein in North Korea.

The rise of new regimes in this region evokes the image of new leaders on a precipice as steep as the fiscal cliff in the U.S. The fear is that of drowning in the swirling currents below.

Columnist Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, spent the past few weeks in the U.S. and Japan before returning to Seoul. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com. <The Korea Times/Donald Kirk>