A Friend in Jakarta: Personal Diplomacy and Third World Engagement in Japan’s 1965 Mediation of Konfrontasi

This paper examines Japan’s intervention in a crucial event of the post-1945 international relations of Southeast Asia: the 1963-66 Konfrontasi (‘confrontation’) between Indonesia and the newly independent Malaysia. In early 1965, as President Sukarno of Indonesia withdrew from the UN and embraced the ‘Jakarta-Phnom Penh-Hanoi-Peking-Pyongyang Axis’, Japan emerged as the only member of the ‘West’ seemingly capable of managing this brewing Cold War crisis in the name of Asian solidarity. The diplomatic strategy chosen by Prime Minister Satō Eisaku was an unorthodox one: appointing a personal emissary to directly appeal to Sukarno. Kawashima Shōjirō, the Vice-President of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a key political ally of former premier Kishi Nobusuke, was thus dispatched to Southeast Asia twice, in April and August 1965, to try and deal with Indonesia’s ‘problem child’ (as a Japanese diplomat described Sukarno at the time).

This paper re-examines Kawashima’s mediatory endeavor as part of a wider Japanese conservative understanding of post-colonial Southeast Asia as first and foremost a nationalist political space that, with the right material incentives (chiefly in the form of development assistance), could be steered into a ‘right path’ (zendō) away from Communism. Leveraging personal rapport and pragmatism, Kawashima’s mission as a special envoy played out by over-relying on ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ and deliberately side-lining the Foreign Ministry, ultimately failing to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough. Notwithstanding Kawashima’s underwhelming performance as a mediator, this little-known episode of Japanese diplomacy sheds new light onto Premier Satō’s unflinching belief in Japan’s effectiveness as a ‘bridge’ (kakehashi) between the First and the Third World – a role that, in Kawashima’s view, was to be best achieved through a bipartisan ‘non-factional foreign policy’ that would mark Japan’s first step towards strategic autonomy and regional leadership in Asia during the Cold War.