Page 1 of 2 Japan: The price of normalcy By John Feffer
In the early 1990s, the Japanese military adopted a cute mascot by the name of
Prince Pickles. He's a little guy with a big head and big eyes who lives in a
tranquil country bordering some pretty dangerous territory. In three
action-packed comic books aimed at young people, Prince Pickles overcomes his
naive belief that a land at peace needs no army. He enlists in his own
country's forces to defend against the predations of the neighboring evil
empire. He endures intensive training. He helps with disaster relief. He goes
on peacekeeping missions. And of course, after
these mini-heroic efforts, Prince Pickles gets the girl, his comrade-in-arms
Miss Parsley.
The transformation of Prince Pickles is meant to represent the recent history
of Japan. In her groundbreaking new book Uneasy Warriors, Sabine
Fruhstuck describes Prince Pickles's transformation as a coded message from the
state to its citizens that "knowledge and appreciation of the military can be
or should become a normative element of growing up. Only a state with a
military is normal and mature, and only a man with military experience is a
real man." If a fellow who is only two feet tall and looks like a toadstool
with eyes can "grow up" with such aplomb, surely young Japanese men have
nothing to worry about, even without access to a Marine Corps boot camp to
affirm their masculinity.
Prince Pickles is not the only pop culture gimmick that the Japanese military
has used to improve its image in recent years and overcome the deeply engrained
pacifist tendencies of the Japanese population. In recruitment posters,
professional female models proclaim in English, "Peace People Japan, Come On!"
A music festival sponsored by the military brings in 40,000 people for annual
performances that include sexy young women from the pop music scene. The
overall message is that Japan's new military is fun, flirtatious, and yet
family-oriented - a far cry from the message that the US military projects of
strength, determination, and leadership. If the US Army is from Mars, its
Japanese counterpart is clearly from Venus. Such are the inescapable influences
of Japan's kawaii (cute) culture of Hello Kitty and giggling
schoolgirls.
Don't be fooled. The new Japanese military is far from cuddly.
In the past decade, a group of neo-nationalist politicians has begun to more
aggressively dismantle the restrictions that have bound the Japanese military
since the end of World War II, when, uniquely among industrialized nations,
Japan renounced its right to defend itself by military means. Japan's Maritime
Self-Defense Force (SDF) has helped refuel coalition forces in Afghanistan
since 2003. It has sent troops to Iraq and ships to the Persian Gulf,
transported coalition forces on SDF planes, cooperated with the United States
on missile defense, and fired on mysterious ships that entered its territorial
waters.
It sports new and sophisticated hardware like tanker aircraft for in-air
refueling, and has tried to purchase the latest US fighter jets. Despite
widespread public resistance to many of these undertakings, Japan's
neo-nationalists have grander designs. With strong encouragement from
Washington, they have set in motion a process to revise the Japanese
constitution, while seeking to boost military spending and make Japan a fully
"normal" military power.
They are playing hardball on territorial disputes such as the Senkaku/Diaoyu
island conflict with China and the Dokdo/Takeshima island dispute with Korea.
(See China shelves island
dispute, yet again Asia Times Online, December 16, 2008). Prime
Minister Aso Taro has also spoken of reopening the debate on whether Japan
should acquire nuclear weapons.
Not everyone agrees that Japan is undergoing such a profound change. After all,
the country is not exactly Costa Rica, which even today lacks a military.
Despite its self-imposed limits on military spending - no more than 1% of GDP -
Tokyo has built the fourth most powerful military in the world with Asia's
strongest navy. Neo-nationalists have spent several decades chipping away at
the pacifist foundations of the constitution. Some scholars argue that the
post-war consensus on security policy has only been stretched, not broken. But
whether its new military posture - and Prince Pickles's metaphoric
transformation from naif to soldier - is revolutionary or evolutionary, Japan
is no longer a marvelous exception in the world of international security.
Japan's pacifist legacy
Japan was not born with a peace constitution, nor did it achieve one. Rather,
it had a peace constitution thrust on it - by the United States immediately
after World War II. For the first time in world politics, albeit prodded by an
occupying force, a state renounced its right to build and deploy armed forces.
According to its new constitution, Japan couldn't use military force even to
defend itself. The famous Article 9 asserts 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" and "land, sea, and air forces, as
well as other war potential, will never be maintained".
Although the Japanese government has gradually altered the substance of Article
9 - it maintains land, sea, and air forces according to the thin fiction of
"self defense forces" - nearly half of all Japanese still believe that the use
of force to defend one's own state is illegitimate.
But almost as soon as it engineered this new, pacifistic Japan, the United
States reversed course. With the Cold War escalating and the US in need of a
regional ally, America encouraged Japan to rearm. Many of the
ultra-nationalists and former military officers that had been under a cloud
after World War II were back in business by the time of the Korean War, a boom
time for Japanese rearmament. Weapons sales, largely to the US army, went from
7 million yen in 1952 (then $19,000) to 15 billion yen two years later, and it
was the Korean War that jump-started Japan's devastated economy. Meanwhile, in
1954, Tokyo altered the prohibition on maintaining any military capability by
creating its own army, the strategically named Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
As Richard J Samuels writes in his admirable though dense new book Securing
Japan, which traces the history of the country's evolving military
doctrine, Japanese politicians forged a consensus that somehow accommodated
these contradictions. The United States acquired a reliable ally - an
"unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the words of former Japanese prime minister
Nakasone Yasuhiro - that played a supporting role in its various Asian Cold War
adventures.
At the same time, Tokyo didn't threaten Washington's interests by entangling
itself with other Asian countries or going head-to-head with the United States
on military exports. In return, the United States financed the greater part of
Japan's defense needs. Japanese liberals were delighted that this rather
lop-sided alliance allowed them to focus on rapid economic development,
pacifists were relieved that constitutional restraints kept Japan from fighting
American wars in the Pacific, and militarists took solace in the residual
defense capabilities that Japan maintained and ultimately expanded.
This US-Japan alliance was not, Samuels argues, a product of karaoke diplomacy,
the United States determining the music and lyrics and the Japanese politicians
simply singing along. Rather, the post-war consensus that helped Japan become
the number two economy in the world cleverly appealed to the key ideological
camps - liberals, pacifists, and militarists - that had been battling for the
soul of modern Japan since the end of the 19th century. Although the United
States largely wrote the peace constitution, the Japanese have adapted these
words to their own music and changed the tune when necessary to fit the tempo
of the times.
Outsider observers, fooled by the superficial uniformity and tranquility of
Japan, often miss the considerable strife beneath the surface. Although Japan
has been essentially a one-party state since World War II, the post-war
consensus on security policy was constantly under attack and subject to
modification. Some of the first blows came from the Japanese left, which had
initially prospered under the US occupation but gradually lost power in the
1950s alongside the radical labor unions that had also gained ground in the
first flush of post-war liberalization.
As Mari Yamamoto explains in Grassroots Pacifism in Post-War Japan,
large majorities of Japanese supported the peace constitution - indeed, for
many Japanese, the document represented atonement for Japan's conduct during
the war. But pacifism in the sense of a principled objection to all wars did
not sink into the population, and, indeed, few Japanese protested the Korean
War when it broke out in 1950.
The Japanese peace movement, Yamamoto points out, was able to mobilize unions
and the incipient women's movement - alongside anti-nuclear, anti-military
base, and student movements - to challenge the US-Japan security treaty when it
came up for re-negotiation in 1960. The protests on campuses and in the streets
paralyzed the Japanese government and even forced Dwight D Eisenhower to cancel
a state visit. But the security consensus weathered this challenge, and the
US-Japan alliance held. The left pushed the government to adopt the three
non-nuclear principles in 1967 and the arms export ban in 1976. But these were
partial victories, and in subsequent years, Japan's pacifism devolved into
merely a way for nationalists to fend off unwanted US demands.
The peace movement tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to prevent the post-war
security consensus from sustaining crippling blows from the other side of the
political spectrum. Japan's ascendant hardliners, unlike the status-quo seeking
conservatives with whom they often partner, were willing to risk Japan's
pacifist legacy and even its alliance with the United States to forge a new
military identity for the country.
Neo-nationalist salami tactics
After rising to the status of the world's second largest economy, Japan
suffered several setbacks after the end of the Cold War. When the bubble
economy popped in 1989, financial anxieties plagued the prosperous nation -
anxieties that worsened in the wake of several governmental failures, including
its inept response to the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the utter failure to prevent
the Aum Shinrikyo cult's sarin attacks in the Tokyo subways. The US-Japan
alliance also entered a rocky period when Tokyo was faulted for its failure to
provide "boots on the ground" in the 1991 Gulf War (its $13 billion was the
largest contribution to the war effort with the exception of the United States)
and for sitting on the sidelines of the 1993-94 conflict with North Korea over
its nuclear weapon program.
While a 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three US soldiers
galvanized the anti-base movement, Japanese neo-nationalists worked hard
throughout the 1990s to transform the country's military and foreign policy. As
Samuels relates, "The strategy - at least as we can now reconstruct it - was to
expand legal and operational capacities for the most overtly peaceful SDF roles
and missions, saving for later those which were more publicly military and
closest to the homeland." Samuels compares this subtle approach to the salami
taktik - one slice at a time - by which newly reunified Germany
acquired offensive capabilities such as heavily armed intervention forces and
high-tech air support.
Between 1954 and 1989, the Japanese parliament amended the Self-Defense Force
Law only once. Since 1989, as the hardliners shifted into overdrive, there have
been over 50 amendments. The intrusion of North Korean vessels into Japanese
waters facilitated the large-scale transformation of the Coast Guard into a de
facto fourth branch of the military, and the 1998 launch of a North Korean
rocket into Japanese airspace provided the rationale for Tokyo to ramp up its
participation in US missile defense.
And after September 11, 2001, Japan passed new emergency laws that endowed the
SDF with new powers to support US forces outside of Japan and explicitly
sanctioned the use of military force should the country come under attack.
Although the Japanese public did not see far-off Afghanistan and Iraq as
suitable for the involvement of Japanese troops, the hardliners deployed a
threat nearer to hand - North Korea's credible nuclear and missile programs -
and whipped the public into a near frenzy to garner support for a more muscular
policy. Japan's Defense Agency has been elevated to ministry level, the SDF is
on the verge of being re-branded the National Defense Forces, and Prime
Minister Aso is urging a "reinterpretation" of constitutional clause Article 9
so that Japan retracts its renunciation of the right to wage war.
Where many specialists emphasize transformation, Andrew Oros, author of Normalizing
Japan, sees continuity. He argues that some norms - such as the
restrictions on military spending - have proven so durable that, in the 1980s,
when Nakasone made a
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Prince Pickles is not the only pop culture gimmick that the Japanese military
has used to improve its image in recent years and overcome the deeply engrained
pacifist tendencies of the Japanese population. In recruitment posters,
professional female models proclaim in English, "Peace People Japan, Come On!"
A music festival sponsored by the military brings in 40,000 people for annual
performances that include sexy young women from the pop music scene. The
overall message is that Japan's new military is fun, flirtatious, and yet
family-oriented - a far cry from the message that the US military projects of
strength, determination, and leadership. If the US Army is from Mars, its
Japanese counterpart is clearly from Venus. Such are the inescapable influences
of Japan's kawaii (cute) culture of Hello Kitty and giggling
schoolgirls.
