Japan is preparing for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s spring 2020 state visit, which will serve as a litmus test of the historically fraught bilateral relationship. The meeting could produce a signed “fifth political document” defining the relationship. While Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is known as a China hawk, he has been taking a pragmatic approach toward Japan’s neighbor since the nadir in the relationship in 2012. Over the past two years, China and Japan have established a superficial “tactical detente” or “new start” to hedge against the uncertainty from the U.S. trade war with China. Oddly, President Donald Trump’s unpredictability has worked to reduce some tensions in Asia as big rivals seek to reduce risk. Meanwhile, Japan and the United States have switched their positions on China with the United States growing more hawkish, creating anxiety in Japan about being out of sync with its ally. Long-standing tensions between China and Japan thus could reemerge and threaten the current detente. One area of risk that gets less attention is China’s influence operations, which can spark a backlash in Japan and throw relations back off track.

Unlike some rich democracies, Japan has generally resisted overt, sharp political influence from its massive neighbor China due to strict campaign finance rules, regulations favoring domestic industry, a homogenous population, and bias of suspicion toward China. Yet, Chinese influence in Japan is like air: it’s everywhere and nowhere in particular. Chinese cultural influence is Japan is ubiquitous: it’s in the language, art, cuisine, literature, architecture, music, law, and philosophy. But after about two thousand years of intense China-Japan relations (documentation of the bilateral relationship dates back to the year 57AD), including wars, invasions, and rivalries, Japanese society has become accustomed to living side-by-side with China yet not necessarily together, and the country has proved to be relatively impenetrable against Chinese political warfare. But there are risks to the relationship. That’s one of the main takeaways of more than forty interviews in Japan I have conducted over the past two years on this topic.

Public Sentiment as Political Influence 

One quantifiable way to measure political influence is to look at public sentiment, and in this regard, Japan stands apart as one of the most negatively disposed countries in the world toward China. According to a spring 2019 Pew Research poll, Japan had the most negative views of China among all thirty-four countries surveyed at 85 percent negative. Since Japan’s official opening to China in 1972, when Japanese public sentiment according to Japan’s Cabinet Office polls toward China was significantly more positive—coinciding with the nation’s “panda boom”—public sentiment has fallen consistently ever since, while Japanese sentiment toward the United States has remained consistently the most positive. 

In stark contrast, the Chinese public opinion of Japan has enjoyed a marked improvement since the countries embarked on the bilateral detente, and the Chinese people view Xi’s upcoming spring visit to Japan as a positive, decisive event in the relationship. Opinions in China and Japan are so asymmetrical that the situation elicited a complaint from Xi, who noted on Nov. 22, 2019, that the Japanese opinion of China is plagued by bias and prejudice. The Bloomberg report astutely noted that Xi’s complaint would probably only make things worse. “The fact that Chinese people have a more favorable view of Japan shows that China is following the right path,” Xi said, adding, “we are encouraging people to visit Japan.” The Abe administration has relaxed tourist visas from China, and, indeed, from 2013 to 2018, Chinese visits to Japan increased 600 percent to a record high of more than eight million in 2018. (About 2.5 million Japanese visit China each year.) By contrast, Japanese television news featured stories about U.S.-China economic conflict “almost every day” during the polling period of September 2019. When media is profit-driven, it caters to the audience’s bias, and the Japanese public appears to thirst for China-bashing stories. Chinese state media serves the interest of the state.

Japan enjoys a positive image not only in bilateral China-Japan polls but also in regional and global ones. In the broader region, for example, polls indicate that while China is becoming much more influential, it is seen as an untrustworthy, revisionist power that might not do “the right thing,” according to a well-known 2019 ISEAS study of attitudes among 1,008 elites in Southeast Asia. In that same study, Japan is seen as the most trusted and benevolent country among great powers. Globally, the situation is much the same. A 2019 U.S. News & World Report study in partnership with the BAV Group and the Wharton School ranks Japan as the number two best overall country and number six for cultural influence in the world, while China places number sixteen. In terms of political power, the same U.S. News & World Report study ranks China at number three and Japan at number seven. International publications call Tokyo the safest, most livable, and most reputable city in the world. Similarly, Conde Nast Traveler in 2019 includes three Japanese cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka) among its list of best big cities, while no Chinese city made the list. 

In sum, China’s positives, such as its economic growth, military power, and political influence paradoxically manifest as threats in the global and Japanese imaginations, while its negatives, such as human-rights violations, handling of the Hong Kong democracy protests and Uighurs in Xinjiang, or territorial ambitions in the East and South China Seas, serve to add to the list of negatives. Either way, China can’t seem to win. Nevertheless, sharp episodes of influence do present a risk to sustaining relative peace.

The China Connection in Recent Scandals

A political scandal involving China is pretty rare in Japan. It is so rare that a 2018 book on the history of Japanese political scandals only mentions China twice and the country’s name does not even make it into the index. Yet, a Chinese government connection with a recent bribery scandal involving Japanese politician Tsukasa Akimoto of the ruling LDP has threatened to harm the Japan-China relationship. It also taints the image of an already-controversial Japanese economic growth strategy—the promotion of casino properties or so-called integrated resorts. The Japanese public is wary of the spread of gambling as it is about the country’s big neighbor China. 

Akimoto is a part of the LDP’s powerful Nikai faction, which is the most pro-China arm of the ruling party and is named after the LDP Secretary General Toshihiko Nikai from Wakayama Prefecture. Literally a panda-hugger, Nikai helped to bring five giant pandas from China to a zoo in Wakayama, which now has more pandas than Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. Nikai's efforts to return the favor by erecting a statue of Jiang Zemin was unsuccessful, however. In November, Secretary General Nikai advocated for Xi Jinping’s upcoming state visit. Serving as the prime minister’s special envoy to China, Nikai has met Xi Jinping in Beijing in April 2019 and he has advocated for Japanese cooperation with China, on its Belt and Road Initiative, for example, regardless of what the United States thinks. Nikai’s relationship with China goes back decades to his advocacy for sending Japanese foreign aid, which it provided to China from 1979 to 2018, becoming China’s largest donor. 

On Dec. 24, 2019, Abe expressed his enthusiasm to prepare for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s upcoming state visit in spring 2020. He made the statement during his visit to Chengdu, China, after attending the Japan-China-South Korea trilateral summit held there. A month earlier, some of Abe’s conservative members of the ruling LDP announced their opposition to Xi’s visit, and delivered the message personally to Abe at his office on November 19. Those conservatives have established a group called the Conference to Japan’s Dignity and National Interest (JDI) in June 2019; the association has forty-eight members as of November 2019.

On the following day, on December 25, Akimoto, a parliament member who has been a key figure in crafting Japan’s new integrated resorts development strategy was arrested for allegedly receiving a total of 3.7 million yen ($33,000) in bribes from China’s leading online sports gambling service provider 500.com. He is accused of receiving a 3-million-yen election gift (above the 1.5 million yen legal limit) in cash placed in a paper bag with Japanese sweets from 500.com’s advisor Masahiro Konno on September 28, 2017—the same day that Abe dissolved the lower house of parliament. The practice of delivering bribes in bags with sweets is such a familiar trope in Japanese TV dramas that it is almost comical. He is also accused of receiving seven hundred thousand yen to cover his trip to Hokkaido in February 2018 while he was the senior vice minister in charge of overseeing the government’s integrated resorts strategy. He served in that post from August 2017 to October 2018.

Shenzhen-based 500.com has Chinese government-backed chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup as a major shareholder. Tsinghua Unigroup’s stake in 500.com has increased since it invested in June 2015 after its founder, Man San Law (Luo Zhaoxing in Mandarin), resigned as CEO (but remained chairman) a month earlier when the company reported its first quarterly loss after listing on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2013. The Chinese government had banned online lottery sales in March 2015, thus harming the company’s business model. Tsinghua Unigroup’s stake in the company amounted to 31.89 percent as of the end of 2018, although it only has 14.87 percent of voting shares, lower than 30.19 percent owned by its founder, Law, according to its latest annual report. As the company’s losses continued, 500.com has tried to find alternative revenue sources including branching out outside of China, including to Japan. It has replaced its chairman four times since January 2017, when Law resigned as chairman, all from Tsinghua Unigroup, according to previous annual reports.

500.com’s new CEO, Pan Zhengming, who replaced the company’s founder, joined the company in 2011 first as CFO to help bring the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. He also heads its Japanese subsidiary, which was established in July 2017. 500.com hosted a symposium in Naha, Okinawa, on Aug. 4, 2017, to discuss casino business opportunities with the help of Masahiko Konno and Katsunori Nakazato, who were consultants to 500.com and among the three arrested on suspicion of providing bribes to the politician Akimoto. The two consultants admitted to the charges. Both CEO Pan and Akimoto (who would go on to be appointed as senior vice minister for integrated resorts three days later) spoke as keynote speakers at the symposium to a crowd of about three hundred attendees from Okinawa’s policy and business circles. Akimoto received an enhanced speaker’s fee of two million yen thanks to his government appointment. At the symposium, Pan announced the company’s plan to invest between 150 and 300 billion yen in Okinawa. Akimoto then visited 500.com in Shenzhen in Dec. 2017 by using 500.com’s private jet. 

Konno, the key broker serving as a self-employed consultant, cultivated his business ties in Okinawa by being Koichiro Kokuba’s secretary for four years. Kokuba is the former Chairman of Kokuba-gumi, Okinawa’s largest and most politically-influential construction conglomerate, and died of cancer in April 2019. Konno claims he helped orchestrate the creation of an Okinawan Japan-China friendship association and a party held in Naha on Feb. 3, 2017, where then-Chinese Ambassador to Japan Cheng Yonghua and chairman of the United Front-supported Japan-China Friendship Association, Uichiro Niwa, attended. Katsunori Nakazato, another consultant to 500.com, was an elected parliament member of Okinawa’s Urasoe City since 2013 until he lost for re-election in February 2017.

In 2008, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs founded a nonprofit called Relay China to promote young Chinese business elites and support the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. Konno published a blog post on Nov. 5, 2019, in which he declared that he had helped organize Relay China’s visit to Japan from Oct. 28 to Nov. 2, 2019, with the help of a dozen LDP members. The blog post features a photo of the group’s visit to Japan’s Diet office that he said was arranged thanks to those twelve LDP members. (The post misspells the group’s name, rendering it as “Really China.”) The blog post’s link to Relay China’s website that included pictures of the twelve members was removed but the tabloid Nikkan Gendai published the photo. Among them were politicians Takaki Shirasuka and Shigeaki Katsunuma, whose offices were raided by prosecutors in connection with Akimoto’s arrest. Those two have also visited 500.com in Shenzhen with Akimoto during the same trip in December 2017. Interestingly, Konno has also posted a photo with Nobuo Kishi, Abe’s brother in his February 2019 Instagram post.

The legalization of casinos as part of integrated resorts has been a key part of the “Abenomics” economic policy by Abe, who took office in December 2012 and has become the longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s post–World War II history. Abe initially proposed legalizing casinos in his updated growth strategy “Third Arrow,” which was approved by the Cabinet in June 2014. He said his ruling party sought to pass a law in the extraordinary Diet session in autumn 2014 to legalize casinos to boost tourism before the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The government aimed to open casinos in three cities by 2020. The legislation kept getting postponed, however, due to a snap election in November 2014, and the Diet session in 2015 focused on passing successful milestone legislation to allow pacifist Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defense. Also, LDP’s coalition partner and a Buddhist political party, Komeito, had been a strong opponent of casino gambling although Komeito is also pro-China.

Public opinion continues to be divided on the issue, with the most recent survey by Jiji in October 2019 showing 60 percent opposing it. It took until December 2016 for the Diet to pass the legislation to lift the ban on casino operations when Akimoto was chairing the lower house Cabinet Committee. The following year, Akimoto was appointed as a senior vice minister at the Cabinet Office to oversee the casino policy from August 2017 to October 2018. Another snap election in September 2017 delayed the Diet to pass the integrated resorts implementation bill until July 2018. Komeito changed its stance to support the bill and explained that they had an obligation to implement a bill that was passed by the democratic process. At the time, Komeito member Keiichi Ishii was the Minister of Land, which is the central regulator of integrated resorts.

The Osaka Prefectural Government, ahead of other local governments, on Dec. 24, 2019, began soliciting applications for casino resort operators with a plan to open them between 2025 to the end of March 2027 except when Osaka hosts Expo 2025 from April to October 2025 as the world expo body asked the government not to open casinos during the expo. The Japanese government plans to issue three casino licenses. Outside of Osaka, Yokohama, Wakayama, and Nagasaki have officially shown interest in soliciting a casino operator. In addition, Hokkaido, Chiba, Tokyo, and Nagoya have shown interest in the government’s survey in September 2019. Japan’s popular tabloid Shukan Bunshun and Nikkan Gendai reported Konno is an illegitimate son of a parliament member of Japan’s Innovation Party Kunihiko Muroi. Japan Innovation Party leader Ichiro Matsui is the current mayor of Osaka.

Arresting a parliament member is rare as Akimoto’s case is the first arrest of a parliament member in ten years since Tomohiro Ishikawa, Ichiro Ozawa’s associate, was arrested on suspicion of violating political-funds rules in January 2010. Since his arrest, Akimoto has left the LDP and has denied the charges. As a bribery case, it is the first arrest in seventeen years since the powerful politician Muneo Suzuki was arrested for receiving bribes ($40,000) from a Hokkaido lumber company in June 2002 during the Junichiro Koizumi administration. Akimoto’s arrest came shortly after Japan’s Diet on November 29 approved the nominations for the country’s new regulatory body Casino Management Committee, which is scheduled to launch on January 7, 2020, as an independent arm of the Cabinet Office. The five board members of the committee is headed by the former inspector general of legal compliance at the Defense Ministry, Michio Kitamura.

The Akimoto casino scandal will continue to unfold and has emerged amid other concerns about China from a case earlier in 2019. In September 2019, respected China scholar Nobu Iwatani, a professor at Hokkaido University, one of Japan’s top national schools, was detained while attending a conference in Beijing. Iwatani was released in November after reportedly confessing to collecting a large amount of “classified information,” but the arrest had already done damage to the China-Japan relationship. A group of 130 Japanese academics specializing in China has signed an open letter, drafted by the normally-sympathetic Japanese Association of Scholars Advocating Renewal of the Japan-China Relationship, demanding that China explain its actions and arguing that the arrest damaged trust between the two nations and was a shock “beyond words.” Since the arrest, many Japanese scholars have canceled research trips to China.

Since 2015, at least thirteen Japanese citizens have been detained in China on various charges, including espionage. But this case was particularly acute for several reasons. First, Iwatani was in Beijing on the invitation of the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a research institution affiliated with China’s State Council, and staying at the facilities provided to him from the institute, raising questions about how it came to be known that he was collecting information and what exactly constitutes “state secrets,” since he was a historian who did research. Given the arbitrariness of the charges and capriciousness of the Chinese legal system, China experts in Japan, who are often naturally fond of China or at least try to remain neutral, have become deeply worried about the implications of Iwatani’s arrest. Also, since Iwatani was from a national university and had previously worked for the Japanese foreign ministry and the defense ministry’s National Institute of Defense Studies and had a reputation for high-quality research and friends in Japanese academia, his arrest carried particular weight. It was seen as an official slap at elite Japan, according to my interviews.

Every China expert I met in Tokyo in December 2019 mentioned Iwatani’s case as a source of concern about the China-Japan relationship, and several experts described the episode as a Chinese “influence operation” that is, again, having a negative effect on Japanese sentiment. The message China is sending to Japan, they told me, was, “We may have a bilateral detente, but we can still do whatever we want,” with some labeling it as “hostage diplomacy.” Citing this case, along with China’s mistreatment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang and democracy protestors in Hong Kong, some Japanese wonder if China and Japan are just fundamentally and permanently incompatible, suffering from a “values gap:” Japan is a country with the rule of law and access to legal counsel, while China is a country of rule “by” law where the state is always right; Japan has free speech and free press, while China is a surveillance state with tightly controlled media and no freedom of speech. When Chinese officials speak to their counterparts in Japan, they are speaking different languages, literally and metaphorically. They talk past one another. The backlash among the academic community has been so severe that scholars are calling for Abe to either cancel or scale-back Xi’s state visit in spring 2020.

Together, the casino-bribery scandal and the arrest of Iwatani are negative China stories that touch on Japanese politics, business, academics, government, and society, turning the already-fragile truce between China and Japan even more vulnerable. As many reports have noted, Japan has stood out as a rich, important democracy that has avoided big political scandals involving China, but these recent episodes illustrate the divide between the Japanese and Chinese systems, which could easily clash once again. These are some of the interim findings of a project I am conducting in partnership with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC; a full report will be published later this year that will assess Chinese and Russian influence campaigns in four democracies.

Stewart is a senior fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation and Carnegie Council and would like to thank Ayano Tsunoda, Erika Bulach, and Gray Gaertner for their research assistance. This commentary was made possible by the Information Access Fund (IAF) administered by the Democracy Council of California. The opinions, conclusions, or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either express or implied, of the IAF or the U.S. government.​

Image: Reuters