{"id":13333,"date":"2015-05-30T08:11:42","date_gmt":"2015-05-30T18:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=13333"},"modified":"2015-09-26T15:58:28","modified_gmt":"2015-09-27T01:58:28","slug":"my-next-japan-times-just-be-cause-column-88-u-s-green-lights-japans-march-back-to-militarism-on-americas-historical-amnesia-in-us-japan-relations-out-june-1-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=13333","title":{"rendered":"My Japan Times JUST BE CAUSE column 88: “U.S. green-lights Japan’s march back to militarism”, on America’s historical amnesia in US-Japan Relations, June 1, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog. My monthly Japan Times columns have moved to the first Monday of the month. \u00a0This time I’m talking about the geopolitics and historical amnesia behind PM Abe’s April visit to the United States, and what all the misdirected fanfare means not only for Asia as a region, but also NJ residents in Japan. Please have a read and feel free to comment below.<\/p>\n

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\nJUST BE CAUSE<\/strong>
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\nhttp:\/\/www.japantimes.co.jp\/community\/2015\/05\/31\/issues\/u-s-greenlights-japans-march-back-militarism\/<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. green-lights Japan’s march back to militarism<\/strong>
\n By Dr. ARUDOU, Debito, The Japan Times, June 1, 2015<\/strong>
\n JUST BE CAUSE Column 88 for The Japan Times Community Page<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve often written, I\u2019m a big proponent of the historical record \u2014 if for no other reason, so we can look back at the past and learn from our mistakes.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That has been a major issue for the current Japanese government. As hundreds of historians have publicly stated, the Shinzo Abe administration has been systematically working to deny (or in Abe-speak, \u201cbeautify\u201d) Japan\u2019s worst wartime ugliness, on an increasingly obvious quest to reconfigure Japan as a military power. In other words, the right is marching the country back to the Japan that nearly annihilated itself 70 years ago.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But I\u2019m even more disappointed with the historical amnesia of the Americans. Abe\u2019s standing-ovation tour of the United States in April, during which the two allies established the new Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation, has basically helped Abe further destabilize the region.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s awful news. The U.S., Japan\u2019s strongest ally and chaperone for most of its foreign policy, is, given Japan\u2019s powerless leftist opposition, basically the only one who can stop this. The U.S. has great sway over Japan due, again, to history. After World War II, America did an outstanding job of enabling Japan to get rich \u2014 thanks in part to its provision of advantageous trade and exchange-rate agreements and a subsidized security umbrella.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As the Asian extension of America\u2019s Marshall Plan (a means to keep European countries from warring again by making them economically integrated, interdependent and successful, rather than leaving them to exact wartime reparations and revenge), Japan\u2019s economic success is still seen amongst Washington\u2019s foreign policy wonks as proof of their ability to foster democracy worldwide.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But the U.S., now assuming the post-Cold War mantle of world\u2019s policeman, is undermining that goal by continuing to meddle in Japan\u2019s politics.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We first saw this happen in the \u201creverse course\u201d of 1947, when it was clear that China was going communist. Back then, Washington feared that labor unions might gather enough strength to force Japan into a similar leftist lurch (as seen in Italy, where the Americans also intervened and set Italian politics back into an unstable, corrupt funk that lasted decades).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

So, in the name of \u201ccontaining communism\u201d at the dawn of the Cold War, the U.S. released the Japanese war criminals they hadn\u2019t executed, who then went on to become prominent politicians, businessmen, organized-crime figures \u2014 even a prime minister.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It also basically handed back the levers of power to Japan\u2019s prewar governing elites \u2014 for example, by reviving the zaibatsu industrial war-machine conglomerates (as keiretsu cartels), overlooking the domination of the education system by historical revisionists and blood-nationalists (the education ministry has since steadily reinstituted prewar traditions of suppressing history and enforcing patriotism), forgiving egregious war misdeeds (through the overgenerous Treaty of San Francisco in 1952), and allowing the re-creation of Japan\u2019s military (as \u201cSelf-Defense Forces\u201d) soon after the U.S. Occupation ended.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The blowback, however, is that America has been constantly snake-charmed by those elites. Their professional \u201cgaijin handlers\u201d (see \u201cJapan brings out big guns to sell remilitarization in the U.S<\/a>.,\u201d Just Be Cause, Nov. 6, 2013) have decades of experience of playing the anticommunism card to suppress their mortal enemies \u2014 Japan\u2019s leftists.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Even as Japan embarked on the road to recovery, the U.S. made sure that \u201cour bastards\u201d (to paraphrase at least one American president) remained in power, creating a shadowy electoral slush account for the Liberal Democratic Party called the \u201cM-Fund,\u201d<\/a> and fostering a one-party state that lasted several decades.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Then came the infamous U.S.-Japan Security Treaty amendments in 1960, forced upon the Japanese electorate without due process, causing enormous public opposition, riots and social damage, both in terms of property and political polarization.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This overt circumvention of Japan\u2019s democratic institutions stunted the political maturation of Japan\u2019s civil society: Japan never had, for example, the healthy subsequent antiwar grass-roots activism that unseated leaders worldwide in the late 1960s and beyond. As prominent American analysts themselves put it, Japan became an economic giant but a political pygmy<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fast-forward to April 2015 and Abe\u2019s U.S. tour. Despite years of media and academic attention on Abe\u2019s revisionism, the U.S. bestowed upon him honors that no other Japanese PM has enjoyed, essentially legitimizing Abe\u2019s campaigns worldwide.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Contrast this with how non-LDP left-leaning prime ministers have been treated: President Bill Clinton publicly humiliated Morihiro Hosokawa in 1994, and Washington hobbled Yukio Hatoyama five years ago (see \u201cFutenma is undermining Japanese democracy<\/a>,\u201d JBC, June 2, 2010) on trade, military-base issues and reordered relations with China. Both PMs were so discredited that they were soon swept away by LDP re-elections, with reenergized conservatives on the rebound making reforms that set the stage for Japan\u2019s recidivism today.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Why are the Americans resuscitating these toxic security guidelines? Simple: to contain China. But, to return to my original point, has Washington learned nothing from history? Can\u2019t they see that the Cold War has been over for decades, and replacing the Soviet Union with China is a bad fit?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Granted, one can make a convincing case that China\u2019s attitude towards democratic institutions ill-befits the Pax Americana. But the PRC is not the USSR \u2014 if anything, it\u2019s precisely what the Marshall Planners would have wanted to happen to China.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

China\u2019s rapid economic growth and heavy integration into the world market<\/a>, both as its factory and lender of last resort<\/a>, indicates that it shall not (and should not) be so easily contained. Containment strategies drawn up by George Kennan 68 years ago are clearly obsolete.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Washington seems eager to start Cold War II, with Japan again acting as America\u2019s \u201cunsinkable aircraft carrier\u201d in Asia. Except this time, it does not have an American at the steering wheel in Tokyo, and the blood-nationalist in charge is a descendant of the ruthless right, bent on settling old personal scores and putting Japanese weapons<\/a> and military forces overseas<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the Americans are fully aware of what they are encouraging. Abe will erode the very democratic institutions (including the pacifist Constitution) the U.S. established to \u201ccure\u201d Japan\u2019s war-like tendencies in the first place.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Abe has already enacted the means to engineer public opinion through media censorship, half-truths and big lies, as well as to intimidate critics and punish whistle-blowers.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, freshly emboldened after his trip to Washington (he even recently sent his \u201cliberal\u201d wife to visit war-celebrating Yasukuni Shrine), Abe will soon legally reconstitute the mythological version of Japan \u2014 the one that made so many Japanese support total war and carry out continent-wide genocide.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you think I\u2019m exaggerating, look again at history. Japan has swung back from liberalism before, after the \u201cTaisho Democracy\u201d of the 1920s. The flowering of democratic institutions, moderate tolerance of dissent and unprecedented prosperity did happen, but it only lasted about 15 years before the ruthless right took over.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This time it lasted much longer, but Japanese society has numerous bad habits that foster a reverse-engineering into militarism. Five years ago I thought remilitarization inconceivable after generations of a pacifist narrative, but seeing now how fast Japan has snapped back is cause for great alarm. This will be confirmed beyond doubt once we see the revival of prewar politics by assassination, the natural progression from the current trends of intimidation and death threats.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This will certainly abet Japan\u2019s domestic conversion from a mild police state into a much harsher one. And then what? If the past 15 years are any guide, Japanese society\u2019s latent suspicion of outsiders will manifest itself in the targeting of its non-Japanese residents with even more force.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Why? Because it can. They\u2019re here and subject to our laws. If they don\u2019t like it, they should leave. Because Japan is for the Japanese, as the blood-nationalists would define them.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Look out, non-Japanese residents, you\u2019re going to attract even more attention now \u2014 as lab rats for Japan\u2019s nascent foreign policy. Nice work, America, \u201cArsenal of Democracy.\u201d History shows that once again, you\u2019ve encouraged more arsenal than democracy.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

======================================<\/p>\n

Debito\u2019s own 20-year-old historical archive of life and human rights in Japan is at www.debito.org. Twitter @arudoudebito. Just Be Cause appears in print on the first Monday of the month. Comments and story ideas: community@japantimes.co.jp<\/p>\n

ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This time I’m talking about the geopolitics and historical amnesia behind PM Abe’s April visit to the United States, and what all the misdirected fanfare means not only for Asia as a region, but also NJ residents in Japan. Here’s the opening:<\/p>\n

JT JBC: As I\u2019ve often written, I\u2019m a big proponent of the historical record \u2014 if for no other reason, so we can look back at the past and learn from our mistakes.<\/p>\n

That has been a major issue for the current Japanese government. As hundreds of historians have publicly stated, the Shinzo Abe administration has been systematically working to deny (or in Abe-speak, \u201cbeautify\u201d) Japan\u2019s worst wartime ugliness, on an increasingly obvious quest to reconfigure Japan as a military power. In other words, the right is marching the country back to the Japan that nearly annihilated itself 70 years ago.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m even more disappointed with the historical amnesia of the Americans. Abe\u2019s standing-ovation tour of the United States in April, during which the two allies established the new Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation, has basically helped Abe further destabilize the region.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s awful news. The U.S., Japan\u2019s strongest ally and chaperone for most of its foreign policy, is, given Japan\u2019s powerless leftist opposition, basically the only one who can stop this. [But they won’t. In fact, they’ve done exactly the opposite by publicly legitimizing Japan’s march back to militarism…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,36,19,33,50,20,26,4,14,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-bad-social-science","category-education","category-fingerprinting-nj","category-gaiatsu","category-history","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-politics","category-unsustainable-japanese-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}