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http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUuTDmy8A-V1i7osvNZgHSJ8CpTuBOxl-45i9xnnMZ6AHqigIrVgThis is what Jun Eto, a professor of English literature, means when he says that the American Occupation destroyed the continuity of Japanese culture. It is what former Education Minister Fujio means when he calls the occupation period an act of ''racial revenge.'' It is the point of Takeshi Muramatsu, a professor of French literature, when he claims that ''spiritually, the postwar identity crisis is much more serious than the anti-Western allergy of the 1930's and 40's, because our postwar identity was created by foreigners.'' And it is why Nakasone appropriated 20 million yen (about $140,000 at current rates) to build a new Japanology Institute - for now, he said, ''is the time to establish the Japanese identity once again.''
Nakasone, the articulate and dapper former naval officer, has always had a strong following among Yamatoist intellectuals, including Mishima. There are signs of strain in this alliance, however, for Nakasone tries to play contradictory roles: the well-tailored, English-speaking international statesman abroad, and the tough Yamatoist at home. Like President Reagan, Nakasone reflects the anxieties and ambiguities of his intellectual backers, and, like Reagan, he has disappointed many of his more radical supporters by sacrificing idealism for the pragmatism demanded by international statesmanship. Nakasone feels strongly about the Japanology Institute, however. It is led by Prof. Takeshi Umehara, whose peregrinations through European philosophy have led him to conclude that Western civilization is like a disease threatening the modern world. The only cure, he contends, ''is to be found in Oriental culture, especially Japanese culture'' - in short, the Japanese soul. This he traces back to its pristine state, in the Jomon earthenware culture which began about 12,000 years ago, long before Chinese civilization changed the face of Japan. The pristine Jomon spirit, according to Umehara, still exists in its purest state among such minorities as Ainus and Okinawans. (To their intense annoyance, these minorities are often scrutinized by Yamatoist scholars seeking the primitive roots of the Japanese.) ''A re-evaluation of Jomon culture,'' says Umehara, ''is vital, not only for Japan, but for the rest of the world, indeed for the sake of mankind.'' In fact, more mundane reasons also lie behind this ''re-evaluation.'' In a reference to foreign criticism of Japanese trade surpluses, Umehara said that it is ''hard for foreigners to get to the heart of the Japanese identity. . . . Unless we explain to foreigners about our way of thinking, they might get the impression that we keep making gimmicks for profit only.''
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHqF7Vo6kn-TntojGV_EO9UQJXR91DLvXERn3BPj0NyebwQr11NQ Umehara's colleagues at the center include the biologist Kinji Imanishi, who claims to have found proof for the unique relationship between nature and the Japanese in their alleged facility to communicate with apes. Another eminent Japanese culture expert at the institute is Shunpei Ueyama, who advanced the theory that chimpanzees, whose natural habitat is nearer Europe, take a rational approach to problems, while Oriental primates prefer something closer to Zen meditation.
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSo9RcWG_yR--ASq42ZxYvNSDY7VuEUiEAbXAxgqxwsz8no3gilUmehara and his colleagues, known collectively as the Kyoto School, have regular discussions with Prime Minister Nakasone about national identity. Their intellectual heritage goes back to such prewar scholars as the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and the cultural historian Iwao Takayama. (Imagine, if you can, a Munich school of German scholars gathered around Helmut Kohl, inspired by the ideas of Julius Streicher or Alfred Rosenberg.) These highly respected academics propagated a mystical view of the Japanese state, in which the Japanese race congealed around the sacred Emperor into an entity known as the national polity. Individuals were mere extensions of the benevolent imperial will, hence the automatic sense of social harmony, communion with nature and so forth. Or, as Tetsuro Watsuji, a like-minded scholar who was also popular before the war and is often quoted with great approval by Nakasone, put it, ''in Him [ the Emperor ] was expressed the wholeness of the people.'' Nishida, like Umehara 40 years later, believed in exporting this idea: ''A principle for the whole world will be born from our historical spirit; the way of the Emperor must be applied to all countries.'' These theories strongly influenced such wartime leaders as Gen. Hideki Tojo.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QAMHRVT1L.jpgAlthough these ideas concerned the Japanese soul, few were originally Japanese. Nishida borrowed many of his thoughts from Hegel and Watsuji studied in Germany with Heidegger. Emperor worship, a mystical celebration of pure blood and unique spirituality, were reactions to the confusion wrought by industrial modernization, which, in Japan, meant Westernization. Japanese thinkers in the first half of this century recognized that Germany was struggling with similar problems of cultural and political identity, and they found German Romanticism a congenial source for their ideas; it was both ''modern'' - because it was European - and a justification for using tradition as a sop to national pride. http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQsptRzeRg0lz-36gieQzPhHoNdLDmuZZiFEnMdPCnd4Mu8mIHO8gThe revival of Yamatoism today is partly a product of success. ''After the war we grew up with a negative image of ourselves,'' said Tetsuya Chikushi, senior staff writer and former editor of the liberal weekly Asahi Journal, ''but now that Japan is an economic superpower, masochism has turned to narcissism.'' The Asahi newspaper, particularly its weekly journal, is to the Yamatoists what ''the liberal East Coast press'' is to American neoconservatives. For it is the Asahi, say its opponents, not entirely without reason, that fostered the negative self-image after the war. It is also the Asahi that, almost alone, warns the Japanese about the dangers of Yamatoism. But because these warnings only concern the dangers of militarism, and not of xenophobia or racism, they miss an important point. Yamatoism is fundamentally religious. In one of the many magazines given to analyzing the Japanese soul, Yuji Kishida, a Freudian psychologist, wrote that the Japanese were able to cope with modernization not because their identity was based on firm principles, but because of the illusion that all Japanese are connected by blood. ''Moslems stop being Moslems when they lose their faith in Allah. . . . The Japanese identity is threatened when foreigners are to be assimilated in our midst. . . . The core of this belief is the Emperor, the fact that all Japanese are related by blood to the Emperor . . . as long as we believe that, the Japanese identity won't be threatened.'' Yamatoists share with other fundamentalists, from Jerry Falwell's born-again Christians to Moslem revivalists in Pakistan or Malaysia, a vaguely idealistic rebellion against the modern consumer society and its lack of spiritual values. Lacking a universal religious tradition, Japanese fundamentalists turn inwards toward Yamatoism. To Yamatoists, the world without values is a direct result of, to use a current Japanese buzz word, kokusaika, or internationalization, a concept encouraged by Nakasone himself when he is playing his alternate role of modern statesman. That the Japanese must be more ''international'' - to cope with international competition -has been a cliche for some years. But nobody knows quite how to go about it or quite what it means. Most Japanese love international products - French clothes, British pop music, American ice cream - but are suspicious of international people. Japanese thinkers of the late 19th century coined the slogan Wakon Yosai (Japanese spirit, Western techniques) to describe the state of being modern and still Japanese. This ideal, never realistic, is now hopelessly confused. Just as the craze for Zen among some Japanese hippies in the 60's was imported from California, the recent fashion for things Japanese often mimics the Western taste for Japonaiserie. Thus one finds sushi restaurants in Tokyo called Sushi Baa (sushi bars), with high-tech decor and granite counters - ''just like in L.A.'' The cultural critic Hiroshi Unno calls modern Japanese culture ''Japonesque.'' |
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http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThBGAstxzmpi1HA5GMP9J-Edi5yZPUSXjnWB8uvNXKhDWEPAOKWAA NEW JAPANESE NATIONALISM
By IAN BURUMA; Ian Buruma is cultural editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review and the author of ''Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes.'' Published: April 12, 1987 IN A STUDENT AREA OF Tokyo called Takadanobaba, behind a peculiar sculpture showing a nude Marilyn Monroe about to pounce on a sumo wrestler, lies the office of Kunio Suzuki, leader of a ''spiritual movement'' called the Issuikai.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514QPRCPESL.jpgThe group produces a monthly paper called Reconquista, which aims to reconquer what Suzuki thinks has been lost: the pure Japanese spirit. On the wall of Suzuki's tiny office hang pictures of Emperor Hirohito in uniform, snapped sometime during the 1930's, and of Yukio Mishima, the ultranationalist writer who committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide, in 1970. Suzuki is a quiet man in his early 40's, casually dressed, more like a research fellow than a right-wing activist. He receives many fan letters from young women, who profess to admire his romantic spirit. He explained that ''because of biased textbooks'' many people of his generation felt guilty about the Japanese role in World War II, ''and people who did better than I did at school all joined the left-wing student movement.'' He concluded that there was something wrong with Japanese education. He also worries about the spiritual state of most Japanese, ''who spend their time reading comics and watching TV,'' but he conceded they were probably quite content. A young member of the group, who had been engrossed in a book on terrorism, suddenly broke his silence to exclaim that it was all America's doing: ''They want us to be weak. That is why they rigged our education system. To stop Japan from being a major power.'' http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlyGYub8OS3k8ayKqokh_1zHaHWk61AwDbJsrLWTifO6Sxw2KIzwSome call it neonationalism. It is manifested in many of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's speeches extolling the virtues of the ''monoracial state'' - including the one last September in which he suggested that the presence of racial minorities in the United States drags educational standards down. It was behind the dismissal, around the same time, of Education Minister Masayuki Fujio, who believes that Japanese textbooks are not sufficiently patriotic, that Nakasone is soft on foreigners, that Japan did ''nothing to be ashamed of'' during the war and that ''the core of our education should be to make our children Japanese again.''
When national soul becomes a tool of political propaganda in Japan, it is time for the rest of the world to take note, especially when steadily worsening trade conflicts and American threats of protectionism could easily provoke an emotional swing of the old Japanese pendulum, from emulation to rejection of the West. The more extremist ideals of right-wing nationalists may not be widespread, but the notion of Japanese uniqueness and the feeling of Japan being misunderstood and unfairly treated by the rest of the world are widely held and already impinge on international trade. Almost no rice can be imported in Japan, for example, because, in the words of a prominent Liberal Democratic Party politician, ''rice is the core of our spiritual civilization.'' Japanese ski manufacturers tried to make the Government declare European-made skis - one of the few European successes in Japan - unsuitable for the Japanese market, because of the uniqueness of Japanese snow. Harsh protective legislation simply confirms all the paranoid feeling of ''us against them'' disseminated through the Japanese media. If the Reagan Administration's new tariffs on imports of Japanese electronic products - imposed in retaliation for alleged Japanese ''dumping'' of semiconductors in the United States - go into effect as scheduled later this week, that paranoia will undoubtedly increase. And it will, in turn, increase Prime Minister Nakasone's domestic political difficulties as he tries to comply with American pressure to open Japanese markets, which will be high on the agenda when Nakasone arrives in Washington for a state visit on April 29. JAPAN'S AMBIVALENCE TOWARD the West did not begin with the recent ''economic miracle.'' Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a young writer called Ango Sakaguchi wrote a startling essay entitled ''A Personal View of Japanese Culture.'' It began by quoting foreigners extolling the beauty of ''traditional'' http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gB7pS20kL.jpgJapan, and lamenting modern vulgarity. Jean Cocteau, on a visit to Japan, had asked why Japanese no longer wore kimonos. ''What is tradition?'' countered Ango. ''What is national character? Is there something inherent in our character that gave the Japanese a definite predisposition to invent the kimono and wear it? . . . What the hell is the kimono? We came across Western clothes a thousand years late, that is all.'' Ango further observed that he was not the only one in Japan who favored modern change. ''Most Japanese, when they see the old look of their native places destroyed and new Western-style buildings appear, are happy, not sad. . . . We wouldn't mind if all the temples in Kyoto and all the Buddhas in Nara were utterly destroyed, as long as the streetcars keep running. . . . As long as there is life, our distinctive character will remain in good shape.'' Perhaps most Japanese feel that way, but when Ango wrote this essay, in 1942, the cult of the unique and ancient national soul had reached its hysterical peak. Western influence, officially regarded as spiritual pollution, was proscribed. And far from being in good shape, the distinctive character of the Japanese had been the focus of anguished debate and soul-searching among intellectuals for at least a century. Japan had been so quickly and successfully modernized that she could match many Western powers in military might. But the price was a kind of permanent crisis of identity manifested in wild swings between worshipful emulation and violent rejection of the West. One wonders what Ango would think of Tokyo today. The Japanese have got more than streetcars. They have the world's fastest trains, the largest department stores, an average of two television sets per family, artificial singing birds in underground shopping malls, nouvelle cuisine, giant video screens blasting rock music over broad avenues lined with so-called fashion buildings; they have high-tech restaurants, Colonel Sanders, Haagen-Dazs and Maxim's. They have Disneyland. According to a poll published last year in the Japanese magazine Economist, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants of two Tokyo neighborhoods (one middle- and one working-class) thought the Japanese were ''one of the greatest races in the world.'' More than 70 percent thought that Japanese society was among the best in the world. Echoing Ango's words, the cultural critic Shuichi Kato once wrote: ''The mass of people accept our hybrid culture just as it is. . . . They never think of purifying this hybrid culture. . . . It is only the intellectuals who have that ambition.'' Problems begin when these purifying efforts are politicized, when politicians join the thinkers in their quest for national identity. This has been the case during the Nakasone era. Japan's national soul - how it must be nurtured, defended, even held up as a model to the outside world - is being endlessly debated by politicians, scholars and journalists. Defining Japaneseness has grown into a huge intellectual industry, responsible for hundreds of books, thousands of articles, television programs and radio shows. There is a radio station, Radio Nippon, which does little else but discuss the issues of the Japanese soul. A neurologist made a name for himself by writing a best seller about the uniqueness of the Japanese brain. This obsessive self-analysis is like a national neurosis - and like most neuroses, it is frequently irrational. And the trade disputes so much in the news raise a larger, and deeper, question: How long can an increasingly interdependent world live with a developed nation that still clings to 19th-century ideals of national purity?  THE PROPONENTS OF NATIONAL soul are called the Minzokuha, the National Soul School. Minzoku, unlike minshu (masses), or kokumin (national populace), is somewhat akin to the Nazi use of the word Volk. It implies blood purity and spiritual unity. It is the kind of national mysticism that appeals to people who are still deeply anxious about their place in the world, and who, periodically, seek to retreat from modern confusion into the security of the ''monoracial state.'' A Japanese playwright once likened his country to a glass dome, transparent but impenetrable to outsiders. The glass wall is the mystique that envelops the Japanese Volk, or, as the Minzokuha prefers to call it, the Yamato minzoku, after the ancient clan that unified Japan as a kingdom around the fifth century, a period associated with pristine Japanese values.The cult of national soul, or Yamatoism, is not the same thing as militarism, though the connection was there in the past. Indeed, even pacifism can be part of the cult. Many Japanese are convinced that Japan is a nation blessed with a uniquely peaceful disposition, threatened only by belligerent foreigners. What is disturbing about this type of chauvinism is that it is racist. What is more disturbing is that only a very few Japanese are conscious of this. When I wrote about this phenomenon previously, a few Japanese agreed, but many appeared utterly baffled. ''We are not Nazis,'' said one diplomat. Of course not, but some of the nationalist ideas are awfully close. Hiroshima offers an interesting example. Many Koreans - estimates go as high as 20,000 - died in the bombing, yet none are commemorated along with the Japanese victims. Only after endless agitation by Korean groups in Japan were Koreans allowed to have a monument of their own, outside the fence of Peace Park. Second-class status in the monoracial state persists after death. When, some years ago, the Mayor of Hiroshima suggested building an Auschwitz Museum in his city, implying that the Japanese and the Jews were the main victims of World War II, nobody thought it inappropriate, or even in bad taste. Just as nobody seems to care about the recent Japanese best sellers explaining how the world is dominated by a Jewish conspiracy - probably an idea carried over from prewar education, which was heavily influenced by Germany. Not, I hasten to add, that the Japanese are anti-Semitic; the point is rather that racism is only understood to be an issue when Japanese are the victims. This is precisely the case in much of the writings by Japan's new Yamatoists; the loss of Japanese soul, national identity, Yamato spirit, or whatever one wishes to call it, is blamed on foreigners, specifically Americans, who occupied Japan after the war, imposed the ''Peace Constitution,'' a new educational system and, through the Tokyo trials, a view of the recent past which condemned Japan's military adventures in Asia and the Pacific. |
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Japan's Resurgent Far Right Tinkers With History
By HOWARD W. FRENCH Published: March 25, 2001 Hironobu Kaneko, a 21-year-old college student, remembers the powerful emotions stirred in him three years ago when he read a best-selling book of cartoons that extolled, rather than denigrated, the history of Japan's former Imperial Army. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51D0YPA7TWL.jpgThe thick cartoon book, or manga, is called ''On War'' and celebrates the old army as a noble Asian liberation force rather than a brutal colonizer. It lauds Japan's civilization as the oldest and most refined. And it dismisses as fictions well-documented atrocities, from the 1937 Nanjing massacre to the sexual enslavement of 200,000 so-called comfort women in World War II. ''This cartoon was saying exactly what we were all feeling back then,'' said Mr. Kaneko, an eager and articulate student who is spending his winter break working as an intern in the Japanese Parliament. ''The manga was addressing matters that many Japanese people have simply been avoiding, like we've been putting a lid over something smelly. I just felt it said things that needed to be said.'' Asked exactly what that message was, he said, ''That we should not be so masochistic about our history.'' Unlike such countries as Austria and France, Japan has not had a prominent political party that has been aggressively nationalistic since World War II. Ultraconservatives from right-wing intellectuals to criminal syndicates have always maintained discreet contacts with the conservative governing party, the Liberal Democrats.
For decades after Japan's defeat in the war, the most visible sign of the survival of hard-core nationalists here was just as powerful a reminder of their fringe group status: the black sound trucks, mostly regarded as public nuisances, that blasted imperial hymns and xenophobic speeches on crowded streets. But as attested by the huge sales of the nationalistic manga -- drawn and written by a best-selling author, Yoshinori Kobayashi -- Japan's far right has been elbowing its way into the mainstream, at a time when the country is increasingly distressed about its political and economic decline. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517QVYEHJAL.jpgMr. Kobayashi's latest manga, ''On Taiwan,'' has sold more than 250,000 copies since it was published in November and has created sharp tensions with Japan's neighbors for its depiction of the war. One frame, for example, says that Taiwanese women volunteered to become the sexual servants of Japanese soldiers and that the role even offered the women social advancement. The government has remained silent. But the ambitions of Japan's new right-wing activists go beyond incendiary characterizations of the war, or mere provocation. Although their movement is still somewhat amorphous, its wide-ranging agenda includes returning to the stricter, more conservative values of the past, rewriting the Constitution to allow Japan to make war, and re-arming so that Japan would be prepared to go it alone in a world they depict as full of threats to its survival. ''We have become like a timid monkey that cannot even raise the possibility of war,'' Mr. Kobayashi wrote in ''On War,'' which has sold nearly a million copies. Later, he picked up on the same theme: ''Only Japan refuses to recognize its own justness. Is this because its people have turned into mice with electrodes stuck into their head? Remove the electrodes, Japan! There was justice in Japan's war! We must protect our grand fathers' legacy!'' Mr. Kobayashi, who is a young-looking 47, has become an omnipresent media star here. He wears his hair in a feathery, parted style reminiscent of Oscar Wilde; he dresses in dark, stylish European suits -- no ties -- and wears designer glasses. In a lengthy interview, he spoke softly, but in much the same unapologetic vein. ''Whenever history is discussed, Nanjing massacre, comfort women and Unit 731 are always raised as if Japanese history consists of only these things,'' he said. ''Everyone focuses only on these points to the extent I feel like bringing forth a counterargument, asking them why.'' Unit 731 of the Japanese Army experimented with chemical weapons on live prisoners. ''These issues have become the fumie for our historical perceptions,'' Mr. Kobayashi said. Fumie were brass tablets, typically bearing a cross, on which suspected followers of outlawed Christianity were ordered to walk under the assumption that a Christian would refuse to trample a sacred image. ''But there are a vast number of historical facts that make up Japan,'' he went on. ''We are just thinking of what to choose out of them in order to explain the present.'' Akimasa Miyake, a historian at Chiba University, disagrees, and has helped organize seminars for students to address what opponents of Mr. Kobayashi say are misperceptions that the students have picked up from his work. ''Since the mid-1990's, revisionism, or some would say nationalism, has been surging in Japan,'' he said. ''There is a feeling of emergency here, and we are very worried. But fortunately, so far this sort of reactionary movement hasn't reached the core of the society.'' Many of these themes have already been picked up by mainstream politicians, however, particularly those in the Liberal Democratic Party. The last two prime ministers, both Liberal Democrats, have enacted measures aimed at pleasing this constituency, from making the Japanese flag and anthem legally recognized symbols of the nation for the first time, to creating a national youth service, which critics complain is really aimed at preaching traditional conservative values. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31nbUQatQKL.jpgShintaro Ishihara, the strongly conservative governor of Tokyo, has become one of the country's most popular politicians in part by sounding a xenophobic alarm about crime by foreigners, and by proposing that the United States surrender control over a major air base it maintains here under a bilateral defense treaty. The new nationalists' most ringing success, though, has been at rewriting history, taking advantage of a textbook reform won by liberal intellectuals in the 1980's after two decades of hard battle. The reforms limit the staunchly conservative Education Ministry to screening books for factual accuracy instead of writing history. But now the far right is rushing to put out histories that many academics say will whitewash the past. A nationalist group known as the Association to Create New History Textbooks has written a secondary school book that is in the final stages of government screening. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Cy32SzadL.jpg''Why should Japan be the only country that should teach kids -- 12- to 15-year-old kids -- bad things about itself?'' said Kanji Nishio, a leader of the Create New History group. ''I think it is ridiculous, and very sad and tragic that Japan cannot write its own patriotic history. We lost the war, and a fantasy was born that by talking bad about yourself, you can strengthen your position. I call that masochistic.'' Mr. Nishio, a professor of history at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, has long been active in right-wing intellectual circles, but he never had much impact until his movement associated itself with Mr. Kobayashi and younger popular authors and celebrities. Now he has become their guru, saying for example that China fabricated the Nanjing massacre to stir nationalist sentiment and that the United States deliberately snared Japan into war. The efforts to rewrite Japanese history have seriously heightened tensions with Japan's neighbors. South Korea, which only recently reconciled with Japan after years of hatred for its harsh imperial occupation, has sent numerous officials here to warn of serious consequences if the whitewashed histories are approved. ''Despite Japan's claim that Korea's and China's protests were amply taken into consideration, the next history text, whose entirety will come to light at the end of this month, will be like a time bomb in Korean-Japanese relations,'' said a recent editorial in Joong Ang Ilbo, a leading South Korean newspaper. In a Japan where the last embers of major social activism seem to have died out a generation ago, leading intellectuals and other public figures have slowly begun to rally over the textbook issue. One group, led by the 1994 Nobel literature laureate, Kenzaboro Oe, denounced what it called ''watering down the infliction of damage on other nations and the justification of Japan's invasion and colonial rule.'' ''The voice of criticism has been raised from Korea and China, but of course the textbook issue is our own problem,'' the group said in statement. ''Can we raise the Japanese of the future who must live in international society by such textbooks?'' Photos: A cartoon by Yoshinori Kobayashi, below, hails the Japanese Army, which, the artist says, ''sent a shock to the eyes of white people from racist Western powers who only regarded colored people as monkeys.'' (Kaku Kurita for The New York Times) |
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Tea Party Politics in Japan
Japan’s Rising Nationalism http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/opinion/tea-party-politics-in-japan.html SEPT. 12, 2014 By Norihiro Kato
A U.S. Congressional report on Japan-U.S. relations from early this year mentioned Nippon Kaigi as one of several organizations to which Mr. Abe has ties that believe that “Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 ‘Nanjing massacre’ were exaggerated or fabricated.” This is standard fare in the noxious world of Japanese ultra-nationalism. So, too, are the goals of Nippon Kaigi. On its webpage the group calls for preserving Japan’s “beautiful traditional national character,” which centers on the imperial household; adopting “a new constitution suited to a new age,” which would presumably allow Japan to maintain a full-fledged military; and instilling patriotism and morality in Japanese schoolchildren by revising our “masochistic” history curriculum and “the rampant spread of gender-free education.” The group also staunchly opposes the notion that a woman could be emperor — even though there have been female emperors in the past — or allowing women to use their maiden names after they get married. Nippon Kaigi started drawing attention to itself late this summer. The daily Tokyo Shimbun reported that two local politicians who had come under fire for sexist or otherwise insensitive comments belonged to the group, and noted its size and reach. And the daily Asahi Shimbun reported that local politicians throughout the country who are affiliated with Nippon Kaigi were trying to stir up a grassroots movement to eliminate the so-called “peace clause” from the Constitution. With the recent reshuffling of Mr. Abe’s cabinet, Japanese people are only just realizing that a group they had not even heard of a month-and-a-half ago is helping shape national policy. Nippon Kaigi has about 35,000 dues-paying members. (In accordance with its values, men pay 10,000 yen in annual fees and women half that much.) The group has more than 250 offices around the country. According to Asahi Shimbun, the Nippon Kaigi Discussion Group of the Diet has 289 members, mostly conservatives from the Liberal Democratic Party (L.D.P.) — about 40 percent of the entire Parliament. Revising the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority (plus a simple majority in a subsequent referendum), but it probably already exists if you add to the Nippon Kaigi discussion group the other pro-revision politicians in the L.D.P. and other parties. And, of course, Nippon Kaigi has a powerful friend in Mr. Abe. Recent reports on Nippon Kaigi tend to describe it simply as the largest right-wing organization in Japan. In reality it is akin to Japan’s version of the Tea Party: Like the Tea Party in the United States, it is a product of deep conservative anxieties about the future. Nippon Kaigi first emerged in 1997, a few years after the L.D.P. lost the ability to govern on its own and began forming coalition governments, and it expanded after the centrist Democratic Party of Japan’s brief rise to power in 2009. Both Nippon Kaigi and the Tea Party cast themselves as “grassroots” movements that represent the “traditional” values of “the people.” One of the Tea Party’s slogans is “Take Back America,” and in the last election one of the L.D.P.’s was “Take Back Japan.” But from whom exactly do Mr. Abe, the L.D.P. and Nippon Kaigi want to take Japan back? Unlike the Tea Party, which could not be more explicit in its rejection of President Obama and the American left, these Japanese conservatives have been unwilling to come out and say exactly what they oppose. Their vagueness reminds me of the title of a book that the conservative politician (and Nippon Kaigi officer) Shintaro Ishihara published in English in 1991: “The Japan That Can Say No.” At the time, Mr. Ishihara was arguing that Japan had to stand up to the United States. Later he redirected his frustration about Japan’s seeming inability to do this into infamous anti-Chinese polemics. Nippon Kaigi and the L.D.P., which the group is rapidly claiming as its own party, are also adopting provocative stances toward some of Japan’s neighbors: They vigorously defend Japan’s claim over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which China also claims, and they deny that during World War II the Japanese military forced so-called comfort women into sexual slavery. Ultimately, however, these positions are only proxies. The real issue is this: the profound sense, shared by Japanese of many other political persuasions, that postwar Japan has never stood on an equal footing with the United States. For now, the Tea Party of Japan looks like any other nationalist right-wing group. But its strength is growing. And there is no telling when its members might start saying what really is on their mind: “Take Back Japan From America.” Norihiro Kato is a literary critic and a professor emeritus of Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese. |
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Reinterpreting Japan's Constitution
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sheilaasmith/2014/07/03/reinterpreting-japans-constitution/ Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed a reinterpretation of Japan’s postwar constitution to allow the military to use force alongside other national militaries, a right that postwar Japanese leaders have to date refused their Self-Defense Force (SDF). Japan’s decision will shape the way the SDF cooperates not only with the U.S. military but with other militaries in Asia, where relations are increasingly fraught. Japan has already expanded its security consultations with a variety of regional powers, including Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and India, and has relaxed restrictions on the transfer of military technology. Now, the SDF could play a role in building regional military coalitions. For Washington policymakers, this seems long overdue as Japan is increasingly challenged by the geostrategic changes underway in the Asia-Pacific region. The aim is to conclude the domestic deliberations over collective self-defense to coincide with completing the revision of the U.S.-Japan defense cooperation guidelines at the end of 2014. Yet within Japan, the debate is less about strategy and more about the efficacy of the broader domestic reforms in civil-military relations instituted in the wake of Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II. Abe’s effort to reinterpret the constitution remains contentious among opposition legislators, including his coalition partner, the New Komeito Party, and the public seems uncomfortable with pushing the bounds of Article 9. The Relaxation of Military Restrictions The relationship between Japan’s constitution, drafted under U.S. Occupation and ratified by the Japanese government in 1947, and the development of Japan’s postwar military remains largely misunderstood. Article 9 states 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.” For that purpose, “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” The Japanese government interpreted its constitution to allow for self-defense, however, and this is reflected in the name of its postwar military, the Self-Defense Force, created in 1954. Japan’s military has come a long way since then. Its capability was largely rebuilt by the 1970s, and while Tokyo limited expenditures to 1 percent of GDP, economic growth allowed for the modernization of significant air and naval power. Media depiction of Japan as a “checkbook power” during the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991, however, stung in Tokyo and Japan’s decision-makers began to relax limits on overseas deployment, signing the Peacekeeping Operations Law in 1992. Over the past two decades, Japan has dispatched the SDF to thirteen UN Peacekeeping Operations (PKO), including missions in Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Haiti, and most recently South Sudan. At home, the SDF earned popular support after the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. Japan’s military became the first responders to the earthquake and tsunami damage, coping with tremendous loss of life and property in Tohoku. Close cooperation with U.S. military forces demonstrated the tremendous value of the peacetime exercises and planning in the U.S.-Japan alliance. These experiences have brought home the difficulties in the current interpretation of the constitution for SDF operations. Multilateral military cooperation in particular revealed contradictions in Japan’s position on the right of collective self-defense. For example, the dispatch of the SDF to Iraq in support of reconstruction activities required other militaries to provide perimeter defenses, as the Ground Self-Defense Force members were unable to use their weapons beyond the narrow purpose of defending themselves. When Japan decided to send its Maritime Self-Defense Force to participate in the anti-piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden, ships were initially discouraged from using force on behalf of other coalition partners. The Right of Collective Self-Defense Two arguments are shaping Japan’s contemporary politics over the “right of collective self-defense”: the military rationale for policy change and the demand for a national consensus on changing the government’s interpretation of the constitution. The Military Rationale Debate over reinterpreting the constitution to allow for the right of collective self-defense is not new. Prime Minister Abe constituted an advisory board to consider Japan’s defense requirements and the right of collective self-defense during his first tenure as prime minister in 2006. When he returned to office, he reconstituted the Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security in early 2013. The group presented its findings to the prime minister last month, and offered a much broader set of recommendations for reconsidering the constraints currently imposed on Japan’s military. Several new aspects of their recommendations stand out. First, this recent assessment includes not only the United States but also other potential military partners. Second, the report addresses the overall needs of the SDF and weighs the impact of constraining their ability to use force collectively as well as on their own. Finally, the report tackles the overarching question of whether Japan can adequately defend itself without considering integrating the command structure for U.S. and Japanese forces. The main reason for taking another look at how Article 9 is interpreted is the new security environment in Asia, and Japan’s growing need for security cooperation not only with the United States but also with other partners in the region. But another impetus for Abe’s proposal is the growing list of lessons learned by the SDF as they have accumulated significant experience in working alongside other nation’s militaries. The contingencies in which Japan thought it might be involved in a conflict were all contingencies elsewhere. During the Cold War—and even in its aftermath—the Korean peninsula and the Taiwan Straits seemed to be the flashpoints in East Asia most likely to require Japan to consider its defense needs. Yet the role expected of Japan was to support U.S. operations both in Japan and elsewhere in the region. Should a conflict spill over to affect Japan, the U.S. and Japanese militaries would cooperate to defend the country. The division of labor in the alliance was that the United States would provide offensive capability and the SDF would concentrate on the less likely and smaller scale impact of any spillover effects from regional conflicts. Today that assumption is being questioned. North Korea’s nuclear and missile proliferation provides ample opportunity for challenging Japan’s defenses. China’s growing military power and the tensions that have erupted over the island dispute in the East China Sea raise the prospect of a more direct confrontation between Asia’s two major powers. Japanese planners worry that the limits imposed on the SDF may constrain their ability to work with U.S. forces on ballistic missile defense and maritime security, two missions increasingly prominent in alliance priories. Attention is focused on what Japan’s military can do with others, but there are also important questions about the limits imposed on the use of force for self-defense. While politicians debate over how best to implement the spirit of Article 9, the SDF must interpret how the basic premise of the minimum level of force translates into actual military operations. For example, must the Japanese military wait for another country to strike the first blow before it initiates the use of force? What should the SDF do to respond to incidents below the level of war, the so-called “grey zone” scenario of an uncertain missile launch or a paramilitary landing on Japanese islands? Part of the Abe cabinet’s effort to clarify the legal basis for SDF response focuses on emerging scenarios and new technologies. Building a Political Consensus The larger challenge for Abe will be to build a national consensus around his cabinet’s decision. Already, protestors have gathered in front of his office, and the government will face further opposition in the fall parliamentary session when it seeks to revise legislation based on this new constitutional interpretation. With a majority in both houses of parliament, it may seem at first glance that Abe’s proposal will be realized without much fuss. Yet this is not the case. First of all, the LDP’s legislative majority relies on the cooperation of a smaller but politically valuable ally, Komeito. Already, Komeito has sought to limit Abe’s latitude on reinterpretation. President Natsuo Yamaguchi yesterday noted that any further changes in Japan’s constitution would require a formal process of revision, putting the government decision in front of the Japanese people. Second, Japan’s postwar politics in defense of its constitution have far deeper resistance within its society than a count of Diet seats would suggest. Persuading the Japanese people that it is necessary to reinterpret the constitution will be difficult. Abe will need to build a national consensus to make this work. The LDP has long argued for Japan to play a proactive role in its security and to reform Japan’s defense legislation to allow for a fuller SDF role in the U.S.-Japan alliance. Shigeru Ishiba, the secretary-general of the party, on a recent visit to Washington, DC, put it this way: “If Japan chooses not to exercise the right of collective self-defense, it will be unable to maintain deterrence and independence, and it will be unable to contribute to the peace and stability of the region. Alternatively, as the United States is attempting to transform its bilateral alliance relationships in Asia from the old hub-and-spokes model to a networked set of alliance relations, Japan could become a source of instability if it insisted on remaining in an unreciprocated military partnership with Washington.” Ishiba’s personal preference is to move the U.S.-Japan alliance further in the direction of other U.S. alliances, where both partners agree to defend each other. But this is not a widely held view outside of the conservative party. Even the LDP’s coalition partner argues against integrating Japan’s military into U.S.-Japan alliance missions. In the consultations that led to the cabinet resolution, LDP and Komeito party leaders Masahiko Komura and Kazuo Kitagawa discussed a variety of scenarios, and more often than not, Komeito argued that the current interpretation might be sufficient to meet most of the government’s concerns. Komeito contended that “grey zone” contingencies such as a landing on one of Japan’s many islands could best be handled by the Japan Coast Guard, and should be considered as a police mission rather than a military one. Likewise, Komeito saw the current interpretation as sufficient to allow expanding SDF participation in PKO. In the end, a far more limited reinterpretation of Article 9 was adopted largely as a result of Komeito’s cautious approach. Japan’s prime minister needs to persuade the Japanese public that he is on the right path. Public opinion polls by the major media outlets are revealing serious concerns over reinterpreting the constitution. Worries over the government’s approach are twofold. Many, including Komeito, argue that this discussion deserves more careful deliberation to build a consensus within Japan. Others, including those polled by the Nikkei Shimbun, worry about the concerns of Japan’s neighbors, and suggest that the Abe cabinet needs to provide greater consultations and transparency for those outside Japan about its ultimate objectives. Today’s debate over the right of collective self-defense also raises the question of whether the Japanese people have sufficient voice in the process of policy change. While the government’s goals for new legislation that will allow the SDF greater latitude for military cooperation focus on specific military missions, it is clear that the LDP ultimately wants to revise the document that has defined Japan’s postwar policy of military restraint. The prime minister has consistently advocated for revision as a way of “escaping the postwar” constraints on Japan’s autonomy. In his writings during his time out of office, Abe unabashedly argued that Japanese themselves did not author the document, and its origins as a product of the U.S. Occupation compromises its ability to represent Japan’s contemporary identity. In Abe’s New Year’s address this year, he argued that the constitution “expresses the form of the nation,” and thus after sixty-eight years, the time had come to “deepen our national discussions, with a view to introducing amendments” that reflect the changes of the times. For those anxious about Abe’s ultimate intentions, criticism focuses on process more than substance. Hovering over the debate over collective self-defense, therefore, is this question about the legitimate process for changing policy on the SDF’s use of force. In a recent poll by the Asahi Shimbun, opinion was divided over the policy change, but a majority felt that reinterpretation without seeking the direct voice of the Japanese people was “inappropriate.” The United States is largely seen as an advocate for greater action by the Japanese military, both in terms of its radius of operations and the latitude it has to cooperate with U.S. forces on shared missions. But the U.S. stake in Japan’s constitution extends far beyond this narrow debate over how the SDF operates. It is in the interest of the United States to ensure that any changes Abe makes are fully supported by the Japanese people. Otherwise, any decision on collective self-defense would undermine confidence in the alliance if it was perceived as appeasing Washington rather than serving Japan’s own interests. The Japanese people must support this evolving role for their military and remain confident that their government will only use military force for the purpose of self-defense. This article originally appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Asia Unbound blog, which can be found here. |
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