Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (35 page)

Toward that end, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what American officials call a “normal nation.” On August 13, 2004, in Tokyo, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated baldly that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council it would first have to get rid of its pacifist constitution. Bush administration officials would like to turn Japan into what they call the “Britain of the Far East”—and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. Another major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan’s active participation in their massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is seeking, among other things, an end to Japan’s ban on the export of military technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the technical problems of its so far failing Star Wars system. The Koizumi cabinet has not
resisted this American pressure since it complements a renewed nationalism and xenophobia among Japanese voters—attitudes that the Koizumi government has fostered—and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan’s established position as the leading economic power in East Asia.

What the Bush strategists and the Pentagon do not seem to understand is that China has real grievances against Japan and that American policy is exacerbating them. During World War II, the Japanese killed approximately twenty-three million Chinese throughout East Asia—higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis—and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and American imperialism.
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In what for the Chinese is a painful act of symbolism, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo after becoming Japanese prime minister in 2001, a practice he has repeated every year since. Koizumi likes to say that he is merely honoring Japan’s war dead, but Yasukuni is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in domestic military campaigns aimed at returning direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country’s wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.

In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying only, “The winner passed judgment on the loser.”
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In a museum on the shrine’s grounds, there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that, according to a placard, made its 1940 combat debut over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly no accident that, during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals in Chongqing, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese national anthem.
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Yasukuni’s priests have always claimed close ties to the Japanese imperial household, but the late emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there. In July 2006, the Tokyo press reported on recently discovered diaries kept by a former high-ranking aide to Emperor Hirohito. They revealed that the wartime emperor objected to the 1978 decision of the Yasukuni priests to add the names of fourteen World War II leaders who had been convicted of crimes against humanity to the list of those honored at the shrine. According to the diarist, who died in 2003, Hirohito said to him, “That is why I have not visited the shrine since.” Hirohito died in 1989.

The Chinese regard Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni as insulting and somewhat comparable to President Reagan’s ill-considered 1985 visit to Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where SS soldiers are buried. The Chinese thus are not inclined to see the reorganization of American bases in Japan as a response to the Okinawans’ outrage over the SOFA or any other technical issue. Instead, Beijing regards the new deployments as part of a provocative policy of American imperialism to shore up its hegemony in East Asia.

On November 27, 2003, President Bush issued an official statement: “Beginning today, the United States will intensify ... our ongoing review of our overseas force posture.”
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The administration indicated that nations such as Germany, South Korea, and even Japan could see significant redeployments of military forces as the Pentagon focused more on the “war on terror.” China was not mentioned directly, but it was certainly on the minds of Bush’s advisers. If, in the cases of Germany and South Korea, the United States was retaliating—for German hostility to the invasion of Iraq and South Korea’s openly expressed feeling that including North Korea in the president’s “axis of evil” was a strategic blunder—Japan was still being touted as the “keystone” to America’s position in East Asia.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration had clearly not given much thought to how to sell its plans for “global force repositioning” to Japan. In their monthly meetings with Japanese defense officials, Pentagon subordinates began by talking about making Japan into a “frontline base” or an “East Asian Britain.” These trial balloons so alarmed the Japanese that they asked for further discussions to be delayed until after the July 2004 elections for the upper house of the Diet. While the United States complied, the Japanese press reported that “the Pentagon is irritated by Japan’s unenthusiastic response to U.S. plans.”
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From July 15 to 17, 2004, the two sides met in San Francisco, where American negotiators introduced some of their concrete proposals. The United States would replace the air force lieutenant general who normally commanded U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) with an army four-star general, and move USFJ headquarters from Yokota Air Force Base to Camp Zama, the elegant old army base south of Tokyo (and site of the prewar Japanese military academy). All army, navy, air force, and marine troops stationed in Japan would be placed under the general, who would also replace the army commander in Korea—his headquarters would be abolished—giving the new commander authority to direct all American military operations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. His only superior officer would be the PACOM commander in Hawaii. The Thirteenth Air Force headquarters in Guam would be merged with that of the U.S. Fifth Air Force at Yokota, near Tokyo, while the headquarters of the army’s First Corps, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, would be moved to Zama, closer to possible imperial policing duties. The idea behind these changes was to have American troops “forward based” but not in potential areas of conflict, as in Korea.
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The Pentagon has many other plans for Japan, including replacing the forty-five-year-old aircraft carrier USS
Kitty Hawk,
currently homeported at the old Japanese naval base of Yokosuka, with the USS
George Washington,
a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, despite Japan’s well-known “nuclear allergy.”
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The United States, in short, is planning to turn Japan into the “control tower” of U.S.-enforced security in Asia.
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For the Japanese, such changes are intensely controversial, unleashing powerful grassroots protests not just in Okinawa but in many Japanese prefectures, particularly Kanagawa, which includes Prime Minister Koizumi’s own electoral district. From the autumn of 2004 through 2005, the United States and Japan engaged in acrimonious negotiations, while Richard Lawless, the chief American negotiator, berated the Japanese for their “false kabuki”—a reference to the allegedly slow pace of traditional Japanese theater.
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The most important issue at stake, however, is not base realignment but the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty itself.

When the treaty was first drawn up in the aftermath of World War II, the intent on both sides was not just to protect Japan in case of international conflict but to keep Japan, then seen as the scourge of Asia, disarmed.
As a result the treaty is deeply one-sided. In return for bases in Japan, the United States pledges to defend the country; Japan, however, does not assume any comparable responsibilities toward the defense of the United States. Moreover, according to the treaty, the bases in Japan are to be used for “the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East,” not to shore up and police the U.S. global empire. Article 9 of Japan’s American-drafted constitution explicitly states that Japan will not maintain any offensive military capability or resort to war in its international relations. In fact, however, other than nuclear arms, virtually all of Japan’s postwar pacifism is, some fifty-plus years after Article 9 was written, a fiction. According to one source, Japan, with 139 warships, now has the second most powerful navy on the planet.
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Its army, navy, and air force has a total of 239,000 officers and men, deploys 452 combat aircraft, and is financed by a budget roughly equal to China’s military expenditures. Despite its low profile, Japan is a growing military powerhouse and its conservative leaders have increasingly wanted to stretch the country’s martial legs and the boundaries of Article 9. Deployment of a fairly large contingent of soldiers to Iraq gave Prime Minister Koizumi the chance to overcome the old constraints and precedents on Japanese “offensive” operations. When the Bush administration “persuaded” him to send troops to Iraq, Koizumi finessed the constitutionality of his action by insisting that the troops would only be engaged in peaceful reconstruction and not take part in warfare.

Large sections of the Japanese public remain devoted to Article 9, even if only as a statement of an ideal. They do not want to be dragged into America’s “preventive wars” as a result of the Security Treaty.
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The political left in Japan, although in decline, argues that the military realignments in Japan are changing the nature of the treaty from defense to war.
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Some influential politicians on the right, which is dominant, see the basing changes the Pentagon now favors as challenges to Japan’s sovereignty.

The U.S. at first tried to argue that since Japan depends on oil from the Middle East, its security should not technically be restricted to the “Far East” and that support for the broader American mission in Iraq and elsewhere under the rubric of the war on terror is therefore not in conflict with the Security Treaty. This formulation convinced no one, particularly since many Japanese believe that U.S. policy in the Middle East actually
threatens their fuel supply. To finesse this issue, the United States decided to call Zama a “forward operational headquarters” and pledged that it will not do “global control” from there, although it certainly will. This linguistic hairsplitting temporarily resolved the legal difficulties, but the population around Camp Zama—an upscale residential area—remains adamantly opposed to enlarging the base. The Japanese government ultimately agreed to an upgraded military command at Camp Zama, but before that came about, the acrimonious dispute concerning the relocation of Futenma Air Base within Okinawa had to be resolved.
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In 2005, after protesters had stopped even survey work for the airfield on the coral reef, the Japanese government proposed building it on land within the little-used Camp Schwab.
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The United States rejected this recommendation. Japan then proposed building half of the airport in Camp Schwab and half on pilings extending into the ocean. The United States rejected this as well, suggesting among other things that it would be too noisy for the troops barracked at the base. At this point, the talks broke down.
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The two sides never seriously discussed the most obvious solution— simply closing Futenma and moving what few functions it still performs into existing locations elsewhere in Japan or to Guam or Hawaii. Lawless rejected this out of hand on grounds that the United States has to maintain a “deterrent capability” in Okinawa, particularly to restrain China, and his view was seconded by the U.S. consul general in Okinawa.
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The idea that China might be “deterred” by an understrength American marine division on a distant island is, of course, absurd, not to mention that during 2004 and 2005 significant numbers of the marines based in Okinawa were actually in Iraq.

After intense negotiations, on October 29, 2005, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Japanese Defense Agency chief, and the minister of foreign affairs finally signed an “Interim Agreement.”
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It included setting up the army’s command headquarters at Camp Zama and moving Futenma to the ecologically delicate coastal area of Henoko within Camp Schwab. (There was no agreement on joint civil-military use nor on the fifteen-year limit demanded by the Okinawans.) The United States promised that if everything goes as agreed, it would transfer several thousand marines, mostly headquarters and staff personnel, from Okinawa to Guam over a six-year period. Until the new airport
is completed—an estimated decade in the future—Futenma remains open and a threat to surrounding communities.

Rumsfeld seems not to have understood a fundamental feature of Japanese politics. The Japanese people are riven about their defense relationship with the United States. They like being protected by the United States against possible threats from China and North Korea, but they do not like having foreign troops living anywhere near them. Over the past half century of alliance, the Japanese government has cynically dealt with this problem by using Okinawa as the dumping ground for the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces based in Japan. From the perspective of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan since 1955, Okinawan anger is a small price to pay so long as the troops are physically removed from daily contact with the politically more influential population on the main islands.