GENEVA — The outcome of the World Trade Organization ministerial midterm review in Cancun, Mexico (Sept. 12-14), was an unmitigated disaster. The United States, European Union and Japan share equal responsibility for failing to stand by the commitments they had made in the Doha Declaration of November 2001. As the rich countries seem determined to continue discriminating against developing countries — mainly, but not exclusively, in agriculture — not surprisingly a number of developing countries, led by Brazil, China, India and South Africa, formed their own alliance, the Group of 21.

The failure at Cancun has certainly set back the global trade agenda and diminished prospects for reducing global poverty as set out in the Millennium Development Goals. In Cancun, Japan was both massively present and conspicuously absent — with one important exception. Let me explain this apparent contradiction.

Japan had a huge delegation of officials — 235 — by far the biggest, as far as I could tell. This compares with 53 officials from China, 59 from India and 132 from the U.S. As most of the time nothing was happening in Cancun — since the agenda could not be moved forward — taxpayers in Japan may want to ask themselves what all of these 235 officials were doing?

The breakdown of the official delegation is quite revealing. It included 44 officials from the Foreign Ministry, 11 from the Finance Ministry, 39 from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and 72 from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries!

The delegation included a handful of officials from other ministries such as posts and telecommunications, health and welfare, land and transport, etc. From the Japanese Permanent Mission to the WTO in Geneva there were 10 people, which makes sense, while from the Japanese Embassy in Mexico there were 45 people, which does not make sense, unless you operate under the old Tokugawa Period principle of sankin kotai (the system of alternate attendance by feudal lords in Edo, or Tokyo) — in which importance is calculated by the size of your retinue. The 45, therefore, were presumably there principally as kaban mochi (briefcase carriers for "important" officials).

Almost as massively present as the Japanese official delegation were Japanese nongovernment organizations, or NGOs, representing farming and fishery interests. So far as I could judge, that was it!

Keidanren, or the Japan Business Federation, was said to have a delegation, but although I participated in a daily business briefing with the International Chamber of Commerce, no representative of Keidanren ever showed up.

Furthermore, while many meetings were held on issues such as trade and poverty reduction, trade and environment, trade and migration, trade and human rights, etc., in the sessions that I or my colleagues from the Evian Group attended, Japanese participants were either few or nonexistent.

This confirms a point I have often made: namely, that although the U.S., the EU and Japan are all equally to be condemned for their discriminatory trade policies against developing countries, in the U.S. and the EU there are strong dissenting voices, ranging from big business to civil society. Japan, by contrast, appears much more like a monolith.

It is especially disappointing that global export-oriented companies such as Canon, Honda, Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi Corp., etc., do not make their voices heard. It is also disappointing that leading Japanese academics or NGOs are not bringing their intellectual and moral weight to bear in these matters.

The cause and consequence of the collapse of Cancun is the growing alienation, indeed antagonism, between the North and the South. Future historians may well marvel in dismay at how we managed to turn the end of the East-West confrontation of the 20th century into the South-North confrontation of the 21st. If this trend persists, we will be entering a zero-sum game where we will all be losers. While this has significant implications for all of us, I wonder whether some of the 235 Japanese officials in Cancun paused to think of what the long-term consequences might be for Japan.

Though the argument about whether Japan is part of Asia or part of the West has been going on since Fukuzawa Yukichi published his famous "Datsu-A" ("Quitting Asia") treatise some 130 years ago, at Cancun, Japan resolutely, indeed unambiguously, declared itself to be in the Western camp. Whatever happens, it is certain that acrimony between the G21 and the EU-U.S.-Japan will persist for some time. Is this really in Japan's long-term interests?

Japan, like a number of European countries, especially Germany, is suffering from social, economic and political arterial sclerosis, and the situation will continue to deteriorate as the population continues to age. One thing that the negotiators presumably failed to appreciate is how much interdependence between the North, especially the EU and Japan, and the South will become increasingly crucial for both over the coming decades. We will badly need the markets and the human resources of the dynamic and demographically growing developing countries. Alienating them today will forfeit our future well-being.

This is especially the case with Japan. European countries have the EU, while Japan — the alliance with the U.S. notwithstanding — is alone. It can also hardly claim that current relations with its neighbors are friction-less — as the online petition with over 1 million Chinese signatories protesting abandoned World War II chemical weapons presented to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Sept. 18 starkly illustrates.

The G21 against which Japan chose to stand in alliance with the U.S. and the EU, includes among its members a number of Japan's most important neighbors: China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Given Japan's increasingly precarious economic, demographic and geopolitical position, is it really wise for Tokyo to be setting the country up in opposition to its younger, more dynamic and increasingly vocal neighbors?

We should all be ashamed and think deeply about the collapse at Cancun. Japan should reflect on whether it is in the interests of its own people to continue obstructing the open trade global agenda and the legitimate export aspirations of developing countries, especially in Asia, to continue protecting a handful of pampered old farmers and their bloated lobbies?

The reflection on whether Japan belongs to the Western camp or the Asian camp should not be answered, as it was in the 1930s, by swinging to the other extreme of the pendulum and engaging in belligerent Pan-Asianism. Japan should think globally and, through its position as both an Asian and a "Western" power, contribute positively to bringing the two camps together. How to achieve this could perhaps be an exam question posed to the 235 returnees from Cancun.