Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (33 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.

•   •   •

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 Great 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.

Japan’s new government fumbled to put flesh on the bones of Hatoyama’s vision. In the name of transparency, it began an inquiry to expose secret Cold War agreements that had allowed, among other things, American nuclear-armed warships to use Japanese ports in contravention of Japan’s non-nuclear stance. Successive administrations had implausibly denied the existence of such ‘secret pacts’, concluded in the 1960s, even though they had long been revealed through the publication of declassified documents in the US. By acknowledging those agreements, the idea was to deal with the Japanese public more openly and honestly. For one thing, it would bring out the contradiction of Japan’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent even as it clung to the charade of disavowing nuclear weapons. For some, that fiction was symbolic of a stunted democracy in which the ‘happy children of Japan’, in the words of artist Yoshitomo Nara, were not trusted with the whole, uncomfortable, truth.
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They lived in a fantasyland of happy consumerism, exquisite design and exacting hygiene
standards while the blood-and-guts business of defending their nation was outsourced to the Americans. The new government also began a public review of the billions of dollars that Tokyo gave to US troops stationed in Japan, a contribution that at the height of Japan’s economic power had been termed, rather condescendingly, a ‘sympathy budget’ – presumably sympathy for the poor state of Washington’s finances.

•   •   •

Hatoyama’s vision – and eventually his entire premiership – foundered over the issue of US bases on Okinawa, long a potent symbol of Japanese subservience to its American overlord. Okinawa, a chain of tropical islands far to the south of Japan, comprises just 0.6 per cent of the Japanese landmass, but plays host to three-quarters of US bases and more than half of the 36,000 troops stationed in Japan.
¹⁴
Many Okinawans had for years campaigned for the US to move some or all of the bases off the island, but there were few places on Japan’s built-up mainland that would have them.

Okinawa was a semi-colony, incorporated into Japan only in 1879. For Tokyo, ambivalent about surrendering its territory to US bases, Okinawa was a convenient location to host foreign forces, out of sight and mostly out of mind. For hundreds of years before it was claimed by Japan, Okinawa had been the independent kingdom of the Ryukyus, with its own language and customs. It had paid tribute to China, which largely left it alone. Only when it came into closer contact with Japan was its independence threatened. In 1609, it became a vassal state of Satsuma, which was one of the Japanese fiefdoms – Choshu was another – that played a decisive role in the Meiji Restoration. After the Restoration, Tokyo formally incorporated the Ryukyus into its territory, renaming them Okinawa. Even modern-day Okinawa, the poorest prefecture in Japan, does not feel entirely Japanese. During the US occupation of the islands from 1945 until their return to Japan in 1972, some Okinawan residents complained that the Japanese knew so little about them that they asked whether they spoke English at home and used knives and forks.
¹⁵
A native sushi chef in Naha, the Okinawan capital, summed up the sense of discrimination. Referring to the quintessential symbol of what it is to be Japanese, he told me glumly, ‘The people from the mainland say that
Okinawa’s cherry blossoms are not real cherry blossoms. They say they’re different.’

Okinawa’s radicalism was born in the terrible experience of 1945, when nearly 150,000 islanders, or a quarter of the population, were killed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Some civilians were press-ganged by the Imperial Army into committing mass suicide rather than surrendering to the Americans. Under Abe’s government, the education ministry had sought to erase references in school textbooks to the enforced suicides, prompting some 100,000 Okinawans, one in ten of the population, to demonstrate against the attempted whitewash. Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel laureate, went to court to prove the military were involved in coercing suicides, a judgment he eventually won. He told me the Japanese state was trying to spread the false idea that ‘Okinawans died a beautiful and pure death for the sake of the country’.

Summing up the impact of war trauma, one senior Bush administration official said many Okinawans felt ‘this should be an island of peace’. They viewed the US military bases as ‘foreign transplants’, he said. ‘The vast majority of Okinawans think like that.’
¹⁶
Masahide Ota, a former governor of Okinawa, told me, ‘The Americans occupied Okinawa during the war and they feel it is their own territory. They believe it is theirs to use as freely as they wish.’
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Long-standing resentment had come to a head in 1995 when three American servicemen stationed on Okinawa abducted a twelve-year-old girl, sealed her mouth with duct tape and raped her. Under the principle of extraterritoriality granted by the US–Japan Status of Forces Agreement – a throwback to the unequal treaties Europeans and Americans had imposed throughout Asia – the three servicemen were exempted from Japanese law. Admiral Richard Macke, commander of the US Pacific Command, made things worse with remarks of staggering insensitivity. ‘I think it was absolutely stupid,’ he said of the servicemen’s actions. ‘For the price they paid to rent the car [in which the girl was abducted], they could have had a girl,’ he said, meaning a prostitute. Not surprisingly, massive anti-US demonstrations swept Okinawa. Such was the furore that Washington decided it had no choice but to hand over the three servicemen to be tried in Japan. They were
sentenced to between six-and-a-half and seven years each. In the following year, President Bill Clinton sanctioned the amendment of the Status of Forces Agreement so that, in the case of serious crimes, suspects could be handed over to Japanese authorities.