The German foreign minister’s failure to attend the G7 plenary session due to a delay in Beijing highlights the harsh reality of international politics, where strategy outweighs moral posturing.

2016-04-12

The night before last, I happened to watch news coverage of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting being held in Hiroshima.
It was then that an unbelievable report appeared: the German foreign minister was delayed at Beijing airport due to what was described as an aircraft maintenance problem and was unable to attend the plenary session.
It was added, almost as an afterthought, that he did manage to make it to the post-dinner meeting.
Why would a foreign minister traveling from Germany to Japan for a meeting as important as the G7 need to transit through China in the first place?
Does Lufthansa not operate direct flights between Japan and Germany?
To state the conclusion first, those superficial moralists in Japan who have spoken about international society and international politics with the understanding of kindergarten children must engrave this reality deeply in their minds.
One of the main agenda items of this meeting was, as everyone knows, for the G7 to issue a strong collective “NO” to China’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea.
I have never had a conversation with a German in my life, and likely neither have 99 percent of Japanese people.
Germany is that distant, and Japan harbors no ill feelings toward it.
Yet since August the year before last, I learned for the first time that there are correspondents from influential German newspapers who read the Asahi Shimbun and The Japan Times and write article after article attacking Japan.
I suspect such journalists shaped this perception.
Last year, I was astonished to learn of a German opinion poll showing that roughly half of Germans hold negative feelings toward Japan.
In recent years, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe—truly an outstanding statesman—correctly identified deflation as Japan’s greatest illness and launched policies to address it.
Yet Angela Merkel, who in hindsight may well have been speaking as a proxy for China, found fault with those policies.
At the time, I criticized her mercilessly, writing in anger that she was a small-minded politician and should watch her words.
Merkel has visited Japan only about twice, while she has gone to China eight or nine times.
Apart from a handful of satellite states that support China out of necessity, Beijing has found itself isolated internationally over its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, and it desperately wanted to keep Germany on its side.
At the same time, China likely sought to woo Germany in order to divide the G7.
The question then becomes: what did Germany gain from China in return?
Lately, my feelings toward Germany have been steadily declining.
I have begun to feel that Germans can be remarkably base—superficial moralism on par with the Asahi Shimbun, yet with a level of intellectual maturity that at times resembles that of kindergarten children.