Rising Sun and Dark Continent: Japan’s Courtship of Africa

On May 28, forty African heads of state and government trooped into the Pacifico Conference Centre in the Japanese port city of Yokohama to join their host, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukada, in kicking off the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). First held in 1993 in collaboration with the United Nations, the quinquennial TICAD meetings are officially intended to “promote high-level policy dialogue between African leaders and development partners” and “provide fundamental and comprehensive policy and guideline on African development.” More to the point perhaps, the recently-concluded TICAD IV was another indication of the global recognition of the increasing strategic significance of Africa – in this case to the economic and political ambitions of the land of the rising sun.

In his opening address, Prime Fukada was effusive, declaring that “there is no higher honor … and indeed no greater pleasure” than to be welcoming his guests, who included representatives from fifty-two African nations as well as assorted other diplomats. He went on to tell the audience that:

    If I were to liken the history of African development to a great narrative, then what we are about to do now is to open to a new page, titled the “century of African growth.” In the future, Africa will become a powerful engine driving the growth of the world … This new African history that we will create together will be a history of growth.

To reach this point, Fukada advised Africans to “adopt as their own a model that led to success in post-war Japan and many other Asian countries,” that is to say, investment that provides “the momentum for further new investment, and thus encourages self-sustaining growth.” Assuring their leaders that “Japan wants to walk alongside the African people, shoulder to shoulder,” Fukada announced that Tokyo would be doubling its total official development assistance over the next five years to $3.4 billion (of which approximately $2 billion will be destined for Africa, up from the current $962 million) as well as offering $4 billion in soft loans to African countries for infrastructure improvement:

    In order to boost the momentum for African growth, the most important thing is the development of infrastructure. In particular, the experiences of Japan and other Asian countries tell us that improvements in transportation infrastructure play a critical role in attracting private investment. While there is progress now underway in Africa's road network, there are still many missing links, and this is one of the reasons why it has not yet reached a point where it sufficiently performs the functions of a full-fledged network. The Government of Japan wishes to engage in efforts to diligently join these unconnected road networks. Japan also wishes to combine these efforts with improvements to ports in order to form a network – a network that will enable Africa as a whole to move forward with greater dynamism.

Moreover, unlike the last “doubling of aid” announced by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, in 2005, the figures in Fukada's package were not inflated by debt relief. The Japanese prime minister also pledged $100 million in emergency food assistance to help Africans cope with the recent increases in agricultural prices; a new $2.5 billion “Facility for African Investment” fund to boost private investment in Africa through the Japan Bank for International Cooperation; a $560 million contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (60 percent of whose funding goes to Sub-Saharan Africa); a program to train 100,000 African health workers over the next five years; $10 billion dollars in funding over five years through Japan's “Cool Earth Partnership” to help developing countries, including those in Africa, to reconcile economic growth with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; and additional, unspecified “assistance measures, including relief measures for groups that have newly fallen into poverty as well as measures to support crop planting for next year and the year after.”

Japan, which is hosting the G8 summit next month in Toyako, on the northern island of Hokkaido, also intends to use the meeting to highlight African development concerns. In his capacity as organizer of this year's G8 summit, Prime Minister Fukada has invited an African group of eight – the leaders of Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania as well as the chair of the African Union Commission – to attend the event as guests and meet with the their G8 counterparts.

It is not hard to discern the factors motivating Japan's wooing Africa at this time. First, as a high-tech manufacturing economy with limited natural resource endowments of its own, Japan is dependent on overseas suppliers for a wide range of materials – including cooper and cobalt (for computers), nickel (for batteries), and tungsten (for machine tools and other industrial applications) – many of which are found in abundance on the African continent. Thus total trade between Japan and Africa amounted to more than $26 billion last year – a significant figure for Africa, even though it amounts to just 2 percent of Japan's overall trade. Second, Japanese leaders have come to recognize that they are lagging behind two other leading Asian powers, People's Republic of China (PRC) and India, in engaging Africa (see my most recent articles on the activities in Africa of Beijing and New Delhi). The newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, Yomiuri Shimbun, quite explicitly reported that Japan's hosting of the TICAD IV summit was fueled by “its rivalry with China over Africa” and quoted on government official as saying Tokyo “wanted to be more competitive than China,” citing specifically the 2006 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in Beijing. April's Africa-India Forum Summit in New Delhi, which resulted in the promise of $5 billion in credit and $500 million in development grants, undoubtedly likewise helped focus the attention of Japanese leaders on Africa. Third, Africa holds more than one-quarter of the votes in the United Nations and other international organizations and Japan has long been seeking a diplomatic prominence commensurate with its economic strength. Tokyo's overtures were not without some success: President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana, for one, left Yokohama promising that his country would “support Japan becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council.”

What is one to make of all the vigorous diplomatic and aid offensive launched by Tokyo?

Japan is clearly playing catch-up. While the scale and scope of the relationships being forged across Africa by China and India are unprecedented, both countries have longstanding ties with their African partners, many dating back to the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast, an incumbent Japanese foreign minister did not even set foot on African soil until 1974 when Toshio Kimura toured Ghana, Nigeria, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Tanzania, and Egypt. Higher-level diplomacy lagged even further behind: a sitting Japanese prime minister did not call on an African capital until Yoshiro Mori's state visits to South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria in early 2001. And, unlike his Chinese counterparts who, during their forays to Africa, have been wont to shower largesse on their hosts (see, for example, my report on PRC President Hu Jintao's 12-day, eight-nation tour of Africa in 2007), Mori offered no major diplomatic “gifts.” Professor Hideo Oda, president emeritus of Tokyo's prestigious Keio University, Japan's oldest post-secondary institution, and former president of the Japan Association for African Studies, has lamented his countrymen's longstanding perception of Africa as a far-off continent, writing several years ago in an essay published by Gaiko Forum, a international affairs journal supported by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that:

    There is simply no precedent for focused, active contact. From the Meiji Restoration (1868) to World War II, Japanese never had a distinct perception of Africa even at the government level, and that situation changed little during the postwar period. Opportunity arose after the late 1950s and early 60s, when many African states achieved independence from European colonial rule, but the prevailing attitude in the Japanese government was that it was up to the advanced nations of the West to promote African development. The idea that those countries should bear the bulk of responsibility was not deeply questioned in Japan, and as a result, the paucity of contact between it and the countries of Africa seemed only natural to most Japanese, if they thought about it at all.

Needless to say, that indifference is changing as – whatever the motivations behind the evolving understanding of what is “natural” or not about its foreign relations – successive Japanese governments have increasingly shown an active interest and willingness to engage with African countries and to help confront the problems which they face.

African countries, certainly, stand to benefit from Japan's newfound willingness to engage with them, and not just from the availability of additional handouts. Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa has been rather low relatively to the volume of trade. According to the World Bank, for example, between 2002 and 2004, just 0.4 percent of Japan's $108.5 billion FDI went to Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the $2.5 billion private investment fund alone would represent a more than fivefold increase in investment, an injection that is sorely needed as Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, current chair of the African Union and a participant at the summit, noted, adding that Africa needed more Japanese investment, and “more involvement and active presence and participation of the Japanese private sector on the continent.” Furthermore, if fully implemented, the TICAD Follow-up Mechanism, which would involve Japanese government agencies, African partners, as well as African regional organizations in monitoring the fulfillment of the promises made at the summit, would represent an extraordinary advance in transparency and accountability within the international development assistance system. The emphasis in TICAD IV's final communiqué, the “Yokohama Declaration” (which was subtitled “Towards a Vibrant Africa”), on the need for Africa “to take responsibility for and to assert ownership over its own destiny,” including its development agenda, was also welcome progress.

The United States, which, as I argued last week in this column space, has its own reasons to be engaging Africa, also has reason to welcome Japan's newfound interest in becoming more involved with the countries of the continent. Not only has Washington's postwar alliance with Tokyo has not only been the cornerstone of U.S. security interests in the Asia-Pacific theater, but as one of Asia's most successful democracies and its largest economy, Japan is a natural partner in American efforts to strengthen Africans' capacity to confront the economic, political, security, and humanitarian challenges they face. Prime Minister Fukada's statement that Japan intended “to focus more on the consolidation of peace and peacebuilding in Africa,” read alongside his acknowledgment that “both growth and development can be realized only through peace and security,” is especially promising. It certainly would be helpful if our Japanese friends used some of their diplomatic credibility (they has a long history of working through multilateral organizations) as well as their non-threatening posture (the Self-Defense Forces pose no military threat to African countries) to communicate security messages which, quite frankly, the United States often has difficulty delivering in Africa for a variety of historical and geopolitical reasons. Moreover, like India and unlike China, Japan will not present a direct challenge to core U.S. interests in the geostrategically vital subregions of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, as it plays commercial catch-up in Africa, Japan's economic interests are more likely than not to clash with those of the Middle Kingdom – an development that the United States will hardly not be elated over given the serious challenge that communist China's approach to Africa has poses not just to American companies, but also to the African reform agenda and, indeed, to U.S. strategic interests.

Outlining his foreign policy vision in an essay for Foreign Affairs last year, Senator John McCain declared his support for Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council by noting: “I welcome Japan's international leadership and emergence as a global power, encourage its admirable ‘values-based diplomacy.'” (In his essay, Senator Barack Obama only makes passing mention of Japan just once, in the context of it and South Korea “assert[ing] themselves,” without even specifying how they are doing so.) Of course, strategic partnerships like the one between the United States and Japan require constant nurturing across multiple arenas. And places like Africa, where the two allies – both as fellow democracies and as the world's two greatest economies – not only have important interests but, share common ideals, are an excellent starting point.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.