COMMENT A few days ago, a seminar was organised by the Perdana Leadership Foundation (PLF) to pay tribute to Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s “thoughts” on the West. Was it not a bit like the Halliburton Foundation hosting a dinner “in honour of” both George W Bush and Dick Cheney for a war that went horribly wrong in Iraq?
Anyway, Mahathir’s Japan-oriented policy was a prime model of success, according to one Ahmad Murad Merican. But what success was this Universiti Teknologi Petronas lecturer talking about?
After a quarter of a century, Proton is still practically a jaguh kampung (village hero), not to mention all the Umno-linked conglomerates single-handedly created by Mahathir along the lines of the zaibatsu, the Japanese counterparts, that succumbed to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
Most of the so-called Look East Policy graduates are absorbed by various government agencies or government-linked companies (GLCs), as Japanese companies in Malaysia prefer to hire those who have pursued tertiary education on their own in Japan.
Ahmad Murad, however, was right to say that the former prime minister has great admiration for the Japanese, especially when one considers how Malaysia under Mahathir was thrown into a never-ending nation-building process and a state under construction.
New buildings were mushrooming regardless of their eventual occupancy, while contracts were constantly being churned out by Umno to plaster the country with roads, highways and bridges to nowhere. Perhaps I should also mention bus stops that no buses pass by.
This was exactly how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been ruling Japan until it was routed in the general election last September.
Route to modernity
For years, Mahathir was fascinated by the LDP’s firm hold on power, and secretly hoped to replant the model in Malaysia. His party ended up exactly where the LDP has been over the last few decades: plagued with cronyism and factionalism.
Those who shared their observations at the seminar might have attempted at being apologists for Mahathir, but there is no disguising the fact that the man’s eyes were fixated on the West, his consistent pleas for Malaysians to learn from Japan notwithstanding.
Owing to his humble origins and rejection by the British colonial government to study in London, Mahathir would become so egoistic that he would use Japan as a route to modernity.
But his ultimate destination has always been clear: a modern, prosperous and powerful Malaysia just like the United States, not Japan.
To Mahathir, Japan was merely a means to an end, hence his shallow understanding of Japanese culture. He also appears to be least interested in Japanese history, let alone the important Meiji Restoration that propelled the island state to modern nationhood.
Mahathir's perception of Japan
Hishammuddin Rais, the fun-loving and prolific Malay writer, wrote recently that people have two perceptions of Japan: a ruthless pre-war militarist and a smart post-war businessman.
As far as Mahathir is concerned, he only sees the latter for obvious reasons. He may go around the world deriding western countries for erstwhile colonialism and imperialism, but would fall strangely silent when it comes to Japanese war crimes during World War II.
The sheer quantity of eyewitness evidence that the Imperial Japanese Army did commit war crimes deliberately and systematically always escapes Mahathir.
Given his anti-western rhetoric, his indifference to American, British, Australian and New Zealand prisoners of war (POWs) is expected (such as the Parit Sulong Massacre in Johor in which close to 200 Australian, British and Indian POWs were brutally killed).
But why would he have chosen to gloss over the Nanking Massacre and the insane shootings of dozens of Gurkha guards at Alexandria Hospital in Singapore? Was it because the victims happened to be Chinese and Gurkhas, and the crime scene China and Singapore?
Most unfathomable is Mahathir’s efforts in the past to defend Japan by arguing that the country has repented of its war atrocities, although much of the world knows the contrary is true.
At the end of World War II, nearly 4,000 Javanese labourers had been tortured to death while being forced to work to build an airfield in Sandakan, Sabah, for the Japanese army. Not a word of this shocking episode was mentioned in Japanese textbooks.
Meanwhile, there is now strong evidence of Malay women forcibly recruited by Japanese soldiers to serve as sex slaves in Malaya. How could a vocal Malay nationalist have overlooked this?
He even went on to co-author a book, 'The Voice of Asia', with Shintaro Ishihara, a nationalist, revisionist and racist. Ishihara was eager to reclaim the pride of Japan by orienting Japan’s foreign policy away from the US, and Mahathir indulged in the dream of himself standing tall among the world’s great leaders.
At one time, Mahathir’s anti-American sentiments were boosted by a prospect of Tokyo-centric Asia, but geopolitical realities bound Japan so tightly with the US that military decoupling was virtually impossible – former prime minister Fukio Hatoyama became the latest victim the moment he moved on the US bases in Okinawa.
It again exposed how naïve Mahathir had been to envisage an independent-minded Japan, a result of his lack of insight into the country’s chequered past since the visit by Commodore Perry in 1852.
Then came the financial crisis that brought both countries to their knees. These days, Mahathir can only reminisce the good old days when he was a darling of the business and political elites in Tokyo.
For all the overtures that he made to the Japanese, it is rather pathetic that none of the institutes or universities in Japan sees it fit to acknowledge and study his “ideas and thoughts”.
Which is perhaps a reason why such a task is now left in the hands of the PLF. But would someone at the PLF remind its honorary president that Japan, too, was once an imperial and colonial power?
Josh Hong enjoys the peculiar habit of being perpetually sceptical of public figures. While he agrees with Friedrich Dürrenmatt that nobody is more inclined to become a murderer than a fatherland, he also believes those addicted to race, religion and ideology are perfidious instigators.
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