By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Apr 30 2005 (IPS)

Hounded by China over its imperial record during World War II, Japan is rediscovering India as a ”strategic partner” and one which it can also do business with.

”Japan and India need each other more than ever in order to grow and prosper,” said visiting Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi after releasing a forward-looking joint statement with his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on Friday.

The title of the joint-statement ”India-Japan Partnership in the New Asian Era: Strategic Orientation of India-Japan Global Partnership,” seemed to say it all.

Koizumi’s two-day trip that ended on Saturday was on the heels of the Apr. 9-12 visit by China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who used the occasion to declare Beijing’s opposition to Japan’s candidature for permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council while simultaneously backing India’s case.

Along with Brazil and Germany, India and Japan are part of the ‘G-4’ group of countries that aspire permanent membership with veto powers in the Security Council, as part of the proposed United Nations reforms.

On Friday, Japan and India agreed to help each other’s bids for a place on the U.N. Security Council

”I recognize that India is stridently emerging as a global power aided by robust economic growth and that it has become a major country essential for peace, stability and prosperity of Asia and beyond,” said Koizumi in an interview to the ‘The Hindu’ daily.

In the joint statement both Tokyo and New Delhi said they ”reiterated their support for each other’s candidature, based on the firmly shared recognition that Japan and India are legitimate candidates for permanent membership in an expanded Security Council.”

Leading experts in international affairs indicate that it is easy for Koizumi to heap glowing praises on India because Japan does not carry its heavy colonial baggage in the sub-continent, unlike China and South Korea where Japanese World War II atrocities still evoke bitter memories.

”If anything there is an enormous amount of goodwill for Japan in India although this is only now beginning to be appreciated by policy makers in Tokyo,” Prof. Matin Zuberi, a leading commentator on international studies and author of several books on disarmament, told IPS in an interview.

”Koizumi and his team must be finding their trip to India an enormous relief especially as he is under pressure at home to do something about popular displays of anger in China over attempts by Japan to whitewash its military record, in school textbooks, the subject of its 1931 -45 occupation of China,” said Zuberi.

A plus point in exonerating the Japanese for their past atrocities is that most Indians believe that Japan’s World War II imperialism helped dislodge more than two centuries of British colonial rule in India.

Venerated alongside Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘apostle of non-violence’, is Subhash Chandra Bose, founder of the Indian National Army, composed of irregulars and deserters from the British Indian Army who fought on the side of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

But it took more than half-a-century after the end of the war and unending opprobrium from countries in its immediate backyard for Japan to rediscover India as a strategic partner. Tokyo soon began to make overtures to break the trade deadlock between the two nations, which seemed stagnated at four billion U.S. dollars for the past six years.

During Premier Wen’s visit, much was made of the fact that India’s annual trade with China has been growing rapidly over the last decade. It now stands at 14 billion dollars in spite of the fact that the two countries have serious unresolved territorial disputes along their long and rugged Himalayan border.

To be fair to Tokyo, one of the reasons for the stagnation in Indo-Japanese economic ties has been Japan’s discomfort at nuclear tests carried out by India in 1988. Also, India’s broad pronouncement that it was in the nuclear league, while thumbing its nose at the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, made Tokyo view New Delhi with strong suspicion.

Japan was among the few countries that joined the United States in imposing sanctions against India for carrying out the nuclear tests.

To the delight of both sides, that unpleasant episode seems to have been put behind and Koizumi in his interview with ‘The Hindu’ said that after all, Japan and India did ”share the ultimate goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons.”

According to Zuberi, it is highly probable that Japan, a long-term U.S. ally is cooperating with Washington in a new initiative to build closer ties with India in response to China’s growing influence.

”Japan’s new partnership with India may have been prompted by Washington’s policy of containing China’s growing clout as an economic and strategic power by bolstering up India as a counter,” Zuberi pointed out.

Friday’s joint-statement provided for annual prime minister-level meetings between the two countries and regular ministerial exchanges with the emphasis on improving energy security and increasing investment in Asian energy markets.

Japan would now provide assistance to large-scale infrastructure projects in India including a high-speed, computerised freight train that would connect port cities of Mumbai on the west coast with Kolkata in the Bay of Bengal.

The two countries also agreed on a maritime security accord where Japan would help India modernize its navy in return for protection of its merchant vessels plying through the Straits of Malacca.

Jasjit Singh, director of the independent Centre for Strategic and International Studies, observed that nearly all of Japan’s petroleum imports passed through the Indian Ocean and both countries had a stake in ensuring that sea-lanes in the region stayed open, safe and secure.

Excerpt: