Japan’s quiet diplomacy rises from donor to potential superpower in the Pacific.
It was all about the money. Just how much we’re only coming to know through the multimillion dollars funneled through the United Nations (U.N.).
As Japan rises to take its place as the world’s second largest donor to the U.N. – second to Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) – it is only a matter of time before ‘The Land of the Rising Sun’ assumes its place and the leader of the pack.
From its trajectory over the past seven years where its ranking hovered between third and sixth place on the donor list, it has now pushed past countries like the United States.
It’s anytime now for the real superpower to emerge.
An impressive record in garnering Pacific support since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami’s impact on the Fukushima nuclear plant, no one foresaw the public relations stunt it built up in the years leading to dumping rubbish into its backdoor.
The Fukushima nuclear wastewater dumping brings to 3000-and-something, the nuclear related activities – contaminants, radioactive or otherwise – in the broader Pacific.
The Big Ocean States must take a leaf out of Japan’s high level of quiet yet powerful diplomacy, on which the Pacific must build on for the next round of regional fall out.
Japan has set the tone and pace in which it wields its often-undermined global influence.
It sits in authority to pick and choose what to back in regional development.
Unlike its showy and often pompous Asian Neighbour’s, Japan does not set debt traps, nor does it make efforts to compete for influence, or attempt to change the status quo.
But Japan has a history of trying to rewrite history – a regressive habit it must curb – to fess up to its misdeeds the way Germany did.
Once they make attempts in that space, history will be rewritten for the better for Japan to earn its rightful place in the world, and the respect it so desires.
Even as it measures up a mere fraction of Japan’s 125 million population, the Pacific – 14 countries with a populous of more than 2.4 million, covering 15 per cent of Earth’s surface – it could have made a louder gong – science or no science.
At least for the record.
But Fiji does not bite the hand that feeds it. Not in this instance at least. Not as the highest populated Pacific Island country that gets the largest chunk of the U.N. donor pie at for the region.
Story By: Frederica Elbourne
Feedback: frederica.elbourne@fijisun.com.fj