Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 31
Okazaki didn’t go out of his way to disguise his resentment at America and its post-war domination of Japan. But, like many on the right, he believed Tokyo had little option but to cling more tightly to Washington. ‘You know Japan’s international relations only started in 1853,’ he said, referring to the year of the Black Ships when America tried to force Japan open. ‘Before that we were simply isolated with no international relations. For 150 years since then, apart from the fifteen years between 1930 and 1945, we were allied with either Britain or the Americans. During that time we were absolutely safe and prosperous.’ So long as Japan was allied with a western power, he was saying – not left alone in its cut-throat neighbourhood with China – everything would be fine. The fifteen years from 1930 to 1945, when Japan struck out on its own, were a disastrous ‘aberration’, he said. It was a variation on the ‘leaving Asia’ theme. Japan was better off as a ‘western power’, or at least closely allied with one. I asked why he thought Japan and China were unable to live alone together without a foreign power to keep them apart. After all, historically their cultures had been very similar. ‘I don’t accept that argument. We are different countries. Your neighbour is always a competitor,’ he said. ‘All neighbours are like that: the Romans and the Persians, the Germans and French. Why should neighbours be friendly? Are there any examples in history?’
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I had witnessed for myself just how ‘abnormal’ a country Japan still was a couple of years before when I went to see a contingent of Japan’s Self Defence Forces. Dressed in military fatigues and wearing tin hats, they were digging ice and snow. Their mission: to produce exquisite, shimmering ice sculptures of palaces, fairy grottoes and a fifteen-foot high replica of the Parthenon. Their theatre of operations: Sapporo’s world-famous Snow Festival. Carving ice sculptures was a job these men had done for decades. That told you a lot about post-war Japan. So pathologically militaristic was its society deemed to be by the Americans that, at the end of the war, it was forced to adopt a constitution for ever renouncing its right to wage war. Article 9 of a document scrambled together by young American idealists working for General Douglas MacArthur stated that: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.’ As a result, ‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’.
Almost as soon as the ink was dry, the Americans regretted having put Japan in its constitutional straitjacket. With the outbreak of the Korean War and the subsequent onset of the Cold War, it ill-suited Washington to have an emasculated Asian ally entirely dependent on the US for military protection. The Self Defence Forces were formed in 1950. At first, they were called the National Police Reserve. And so, the fiction of an army that was not an army gradually came into being, creating a body of men – some quarter of a million strong at its peak – that looked and felt like a military, but didn’t generally behave like one. The ability to deploy this formidable force was heavily circumscribed. Only in the past decade has a series of laws been passed that, among other things, relieves tanks of their requirement to stop at traffic lights in the event that Japan comes under attack. As we saw, as recently as 1995, when the Kobe earthquake destroyed huge sections of one of Japan’s biggest cities, authorities were reluctant to send in a force that, for some people at least, still retained echoes of Japan’s Imperial Army. The warm reception to the massive deployment of the Self Defence Forces after the March 2011 tsunami was a revealing contrast – and may yet prove something of a turning point in public attitudes towards its own military.
One of the schemes the top brass dreamed up to improve its image – and presumably give it something to do – was to lend a hand at the Sapporo Snow Festival. From 1955, recruits from a nearby base in Hokkaido began to build the massive, yet exquisite, ice sculptures for which the festival gained fame. Over the years, the glistening creations of Japan’s military grew in popularity. By 2004, the year I attended, the Sapporo festival, held in February, was attracting 2.5 million visitors. The soldiers took their duties seriously. The commanding general of the 11th Division had given the troops explicit instructions, Captain Hisashi Matsumoto told me. ‘He told us we should carve spellbinding ice statues for the people,’ the captain said, in a clipped voice and with no trace of irony. Matsumoto, who had joined up aged fifteen, said the nearest he had come to action in his twenty years of service was when he participated in the search for an old lady who had got lost picking mushrooms in the mountains. When he posed for a photograph in front of one of the ice sculptures, Matsumoto initially made the two-fingered peace sign beloved of Japanese when confronted with a camera. Only when he recomposed himself for a second shot did he assume a stiff-backed stance more befitting a military man.
That year, the government had ordered several hundred members of the Self Defence Forces, including some from the 11th Division, to report for duty in Iraq, where Japan was about to embark on its most controversial mission since the Second World War. Tokyo had been determined Japan should shake off some of the inhibitions – constitutional, legalistic and, after sixty years of pacifism, now socially ingrained – that had restricted its international actions throughout the post-war period. Japanese troops would go to Iraq to take part in rebuilding efforts, specifically to help fix water and electricity supplies. Part of the reasoning was tactical. Japan wanted to please its most important ally, the US, which sought a show of solidarity for its controversial war in Iraq. Part of it, though, was an effort to shake off a post-war taboo that had limited Japan’s military to carving ice sculptures but had deemed its soldiers too untrustworthy to be deployed abroad.
Thus, even before Abe came to power following Koizumi’s retirement, Japan had taken some important steps towards ‘normalization’. Soon after al-Qaeda’s attack on the US in September 2001, the Diet had passed a special law authorizing ships from the Maritime Self Defence Forces – Japan’s navy by another name – to supply America’s fleet in the Indian Ocean. The law restricted Japan’s cooperation to refuelling and logistics, but symbolically, at least, Tokyo was providing rear support for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Subsequent bills passed in the summer of 2003 broadened the government’s powers in case Japan’s territory was invaded. Japan was also in the initial stages of installing missile-defence systems. To deploy such equipment would require overturning the restrictions on collective self-defence so disliked by Abe.6
Much of the Japanese public remained staunchly pacifist and wary about becoming entangled in a messy foreign adventure of Washington’s making. Although the government insisted the dispatch of members of the Self Defence Forces to Iraq was not unconstitutional, those on the left opposed watering down Japan’s pacifist charter. Naoto Kan, then opposition leader, denounced the dispatch as a ‘gross violation of the principles of the constitution’. Only sixty years previously, he reminded parliamentarians, ‘our government couldn’t control the Japanese army and we did a lot of damage in China and in Asia’.
The deployment of 550 ground troops began in January 2004. It turned out to be a largely symbolic affair. The Japanese, though lightly armed, were strictly forbidden from fighting even if soldiers from allied countries came under fire. In fact, they had to be guarded by soldiers from Holland, Australia and the UK, rendering their participation, from a purely military perspective, something of a nuisance. The mission was not without its incidents. In the run-up to the dispatch, two Japanese diplomats were shot and killed in Iraq. On several occasions, mortars were lobbed into the well-fortified Japanese encampment in southern Iraq where, it was said, troops had fresh supplies of sushi flown in regularly. Yet, as the constitution dictated, there was nothing in the way of real combat. The Japanese forces did a bit of routine repair work and then left. At the end of their mission, in the summer of 2006, all 550 returned to Japan without so much as a scratch.
Even after their withdr
awal from Iraq, Japanese Air Self Defence Forces stationed in Kuwait continued missions flying equipment and US and UN personnel into Iraq. I was part of the travelling press corps in April 2007 when Abe visited the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait, twenty-three miles from the Iraqi border, to review his troops. Abe swept in like some feudal clan leader, his retinue marching behind a purple flag decorated with cherry blossoms, a treasured national symbol especially beloved of the right. Standing behind a makeshift podium inside an aircraft hangar, he spoke to about a hundred Japanese personnel lined up in front of a bulbous C-130 transport aircraft. ‘You will be the ones who will turn the Iraqi reconstruction work into a glorious chapter in the history of Japan,’ he said hopefully.7 ‘As your commander-in-chief, I want to thank you from my heart.’ In my notebook, I wrote, ‘Japan is forbidden by its constitution from maintaining land, sea and air forces. But no one said anything about a commander-in-chief.’
Abe’s mission to further normalize Japan didn’t get very far. There was little sign the public shared his urgency about the need to revamp the constitution. Those on the left, including many in the teachers’ union, saw any attempt to jettison Article 9 as betrayal of post-war pacifism. One often came across small groups of earnest campaigners outside subway stations. They handed out pamphlets, often illustrated with cartoon characters, about Japan’s responsibility in the vanguard of global peace. Others could see the logic of drafting a new constitution that was actually written by the Japanese themselves. What self-respecting nation had a constitution drafted by an occupying force? They differed, however, on what any new constitution would say. After sixty years of peace, pacifism – or, more correctly, aversion to the idea of Japanese dying in conflict – ran surprisingly deep among ordinary Japanese. Many felt a strong attachment to a constitution that had kept Japan safe from the tragedy of war for so long. Mariko Hayashi, a popular essayist, summed up people’s anxiousness about any attempt to change the 1946 document. ‘It’s like having your clothes taken off suddenly. We are used to them, and because we are used to them, we can live comfortably.’8
Abe pressed on with his agenda regardless. He succeeded in revising the Fundamental Law of Education, among other things, striking out a clause from the 1947 law ‘on respecting the value of the individual’. Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose article of faith was the rights and responsibilities of the individual, would not have approved. Abe upgraded the Defence Agency to the Defence Ministry, a symbolic gesture that edged the country closer to normalization.9
Abe also got mired in the issue of so-called ‘comfort women’, those women who were dragooned into working in brothels used by the Japanese military throughout the empire. Many of the women, abused for years, died during the war of disease or enemy fire. In the 1980s, some Korean women who had survived took their case to Japan in search of compensation and an apology. Japan did eventually say sorry in 1993 when chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono stated that the Japanese military had directly or indirectly been involved in the establishment of sexual ‘comfort stations’ and that those who worked there were in many cases ‘recruited against their will, through coaxing, coercion etc’. They lived, he said, ‘in misery’. Compensation was paid through a private fund though not, as the South Korean government complained, directly from the Japanese government.
Abe disliked the apology and maintained that most of the women were regular prostitutes who had gone to work in the brothels of their own free will. ‘There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it,’ he told reporters in 2007, sparking fresh anger in South Korea and disquiet in the US. Nariaki Nakayama, a lawmaker who like Abe wanted to overturn the Kono apology, said the idea of coercion impugned Japanese honour. ‘Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices,’ was how he preferred to characterize what had been sexual exploitation on an industrial scale.10
Abe’s efforts to overturn the apology and to amend the constitution ran out of time. He lasted as prime minister only eleven months, brought down by plummeting popularity and a chronic intestinal illness. His administration, out of touch with popular sentiment, became embroiled in successive scandals. Four of his cabinet ministers resigned and one committed suicide. Abe’s government had also been forced to admit the loss of 50 million pension records, no joke in a nation with a rising share of elderly. The final straw came when he led his party to a humiliating defeat in Upper House elections. Two days later, in September 2007, he resigned. Few thought Japan had become more beautiful under his watch.
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Yukio Hatoyama’s view of a ‘normal’ Japan was quite different from that of Abe. A centre-left politician from the Democratic Party of Japan, Hatoyama became prime minister two years after Abe resigned – only the second leader to break the Liberal Democrats’ hold on power in half a century. He felt more guilt than Abe over Japan’s wartime conduct and wanted to build better relations with Asian neighbours, particularly China. For him, a ‘normal’ Japan was not one constitutionally unshackled to wage war but one less reliant on the US and more accepted in its own region. He had opposed prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni shrine, arguing instead for a secular memorial where Japan’s war dead could be properly mourned. Yasukuni, he reminded those who had forgotten, was a fount of ‘the creed used to justify Japanese wartime militarism’, and spiritual resting place of those who orchestrated the war. ‘For a Japanese prime minister to pay homage to war criminals who were found guilty of acts of brutality throughout Asia, some of whom bear responsibility for filling the Yasukuni shrine with war dead in the first place, should be seen as an act of profound insensitivity and arrogance towards the victims of Japan’s wartime aggression,’ he had said.11
In the weeks before his victory was sealed, Hatoyama had already alarmed officials in Washington by penning an unusual essay in the monthly journal Voice. More abstruse pontification than clear-eyed policy proposal, it suggested that Japan should pursue the ideal of yuai, or ‘fraternity’. Like Abe, Hatoyama was deeply influenced by his grandfather, who had also been prime minister (1954–6) and who had adopted the word yuai. His grandson said it meant steering a middle course between competing ideologies. After criticizing what he called the pernicious influence of American-led ‘market fundamentalism’ – a philosophy that Hatoyama contended was ‘void of morals’ – he wrote: ‘As a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of US globalism is coming to an end and . . . we are moving away from a unipolar world led by the US towards an era of multi-polarity.’ Japan, he said, was stuck between an America that was fighting to maintain its position as a dominant power and a China that was striving to become one. The upshot of Japan’s delicate geographic and diplomatic position, he suggested, was that, as time went on, Japan would have to distance itself a little from the US and draw closer to Asia. ‘We must not forget our identity as a nation located in Asia. I believe that the East Asian region . . . must be recognised as Japan’s basic sphere of being.’ Asia should work towards the goal of a single currency, he said, adding that the experience of the European Union showed how such projects could defuse territorial disputes and historical rancour. Through such means, he suggested, Japan could help in the goal of ‘overcoming nationalism’. It was quite a change from Abe.
The fact that two prime ministers, serving within a couple of years of each other, could have such diametrically opposed views about what ‘normalization’ meant showed just how diplomatically adrift Japan still was. After all these years, it was still no nearer to solving a basic conundrum: how to reconcile its geographical reality as an Asian nation with its history as a defeated regional aggressor and a would-be power in the European imperial mould.
Hatoyama’s was an interesting essay. It grappled with the trauma Japan had suffered as a consequence of its ‘abandonment’ of Asia in the late nineteenth century and its embrace of western G
reat Power logic. As Okazaki had said, Japan had done fine so long as it was allied to either Britain or America. What it had never learned was how to live comfortably in its own neighbourhood alone. For Hatoyama, to be ‘normal’ meant rectifying that anomaly. Japan, he said, should work towards forming an ‘East Asian Community’ with China and other neighbours.
There were, however, serious problems with his academic ruminations. Hatoyama had done no groundwork with either Washington or Beijing to prepare for what amounted to a radical shift in foreign policy. Neither could be expected to have much faith in a vision of Japanese diplomacy based on his grandfather’s favourite word. In public, Washington was polite. Inevitably there would be teething problems as both Tokyo and Washington adjusted to having a new party in office after half a century of almost uninterrupted Liberal Democratic rule, it said. In private, however, alarm bells were going off. In a cable dated October 2009, Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, voiced concern at Hatoyama’s recent visit to Beijing. During that trip, the Japanese prime minister had repeated his view that Japan needed to end what he deemed its ‘overdependence’ on America. Those remarks ‘drew surprise from the highest levels of the US government,’ Campbell said. ‘Imagine the Japanese response if the US government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than to Japan,’ the cable quoted him as saying. Such a posture ‘would create a crisis in US–Japan relations’.12 As Campbell said, for many years, Tokyo had been paranoid at what it called ‘Japan passing’. Worse even than ‘Japan bashing’ – which at least meant Japan was still a country worth getting angry about – ‘Japan passing’ referred to the fact that Washington’s attention, too, was being drawn ever more towards Beijing.