About a year ago, I was in the office of Albert del Rosario, the foreign minister of the Philippines. What, I asked, would Manila say if Shinzo Abe, then running for prime minister of Japan, carried out his pledge to amend the pacifist constitution and “rearm”? (In fact, Japan is already fully armed, but its constitution bars use of force except in self-defence.) I fully expected him to reply that this would be a regrettable move. Not only would it be enormously provocative to China but memories of the country’s invasion of the Philippines, in which rape and civilian slaughter were common, were surely just as raw in Manila as they were in Beijing and Seoul. Not a bit of it, he said. “We would welcome that very much. We are looking for balancing factors in the region and Japan could be a significant balancing factor.”
大約一年前，我曾坐在菲律賓外長阿爾伯特?德爾羅薩里奧(Albert del Rosario)的辦公室里。當時我問他，如果正在競選日本首相的安倍晉三(Shinzo Abe)履行他的承諾，修改和平憲法和“重新武裝”日本，菲律賓將作何評價？（實際上，日本已全面武裝，但該國憲法禁止使用武力，除非用于自衛。）我信心十足地期待他會這樣回答：這將是一種令人遺憾的舉動。這不僅僅是因為此舉對中國是一種嚴重的挑釁，而且日本侵略菲律賓的歷史（當時強奸和平民屠殺相當普遍）肯定還活生生地印在菲律賓人的腦海里，就像在中國和韓國那樣。然而他表示，這沒什么。“我們將對此非常歡迎。我們正在這個地區尋找平衡因素，日本可能就是一個重大的平衡因素。”