IT HAS NOT BEEN an especially good decade for the Japanese left. The old Socialist party has splintered. The main opposition party, founded in 1998, has absorbed former members of the right-wing Liberal party. (Its leader is now ex-Liberal boss Ichiro Ozawa, a prominent conservative.) The consensus on sundry foreign and defense policy matters has shifted rightward. And Japanese voters have elected their two most hawkish prime ministers since the mid-1980s.
Cause for alarm among the neighbors? Hardly. Japan still boasts the world’s most famously pacifist constitution. It still keeps military spending capped at an artificially low level. “Collective self-defense” remains a legal bugaboo. The nuclear “allergy” still pervades Japanese society. Indeed, Tokyo’s chief foreign policy adjustments in recent years have all been blessedly reasonable: beefing up the U.S. alliance, pursuing a missile defense shield, and moving toward a global security role commensurate with its economic power.
While Japan has become more assertive–and more conscious of its slow return to “normalcy” in world affairs–its political culture has also become more pro-American. Bashing Uncle Sam may be de rigueur in Seoul, but not in Tokyo. (Unlike the South Koreans, most Japanese don’t blame the North Korean problem on George W. Bush.)
The slim evidence of Japanese “remilitarization” is all relative. Take the ban on collective self-defense. As Christopher Griffin has noted recently, Tokyo has lately carved out an “operational exception” to permit joint inspections of North Korean ships. Further exceptions may be necessary for collaboration on missile defense. Ultimately, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to revamp Article 9 (the peace plank) of Japan’s constitution, which was imposed by General Douglas MacArthur after World War II.
But these decisions must be taken in context. Japan lies well within striking distance of North Korea (as a 1998 rocket launch made frighteningly clear). It is wary of the Chinese missile buildup near Taiwan (those missiles can also reach Japan), and of Beijing’s tendency to stoke anti-Japanese nationalism. Yet its principal response to Kim Jong Il’s treachery and China’s bellicosity has been defensive rather than offensive: boosting the U.S. alliance and deploying anti-missile technology.
As for Article 9, Prime Minister Abe insists he will make constitutional reform a campaign theme in the months leading up Japan’s upper-house elections this July. But, again, Abe couches the necessity of such reform in the language of self-defense and global security. “I believe this article needs to be revised from the viewpoint of defending Japan, and also in order to comply with the international expectation that Japan make international contributions,” he told the Financial Times in October. Over the past two decades, Japan’s contributions have included peacekeeping missions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, plus post-9/11 noncombat aid to Western operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“There are provisions within the constitution that no longer befit the reality of the day,” Abe told the Financial Times. These provisions now hinder progress on missile defense, leave Japan more vulnerable to North Korean threats, and impede greater strategic cooperation with democracies such as America, India, and Australia. Yet while Abe’s ruling party hopes to amend Article 9, it is not seeking to discard the repudiation of war.
“The idea that people are throwing out–that Japan is remilitarizing–is just plain wrong,” says Michael Green, who served as a senior Asia hand at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2005 and now holds the Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Even if the Japanese were so inclined, their dependence on American power gives them less flexibility to pursue a truly militaristic agenda. Some have argued that the United States should encourage Japan to “go nuclear” in order to strengthen the alliance. In fact, the opposite is true: A nuclear Japan would be a far trickier ally. The American security umbrella has traditionally dampened the appeal of bloated defense budgets and rearmament.
In any case, warnings about Japanese nukes are hopelessly premature. Abe publicly squelched the idea a few months ago. Top Japan experts in the United States–including former Bush 43 and Clinton administration officials–firmly discount it. One Japanese scholar based in Tokyo recently told me that no “realistic” person in Japan expected it. At a conference on the U.S.-Japan alliance hosted by CSIS in October, a senior researcher for the main Japanese opposition party said flatly, “It will not happen.”
Offer these points to the Chinese and South Koreans, and you may get a simple response: What about Yasukuni?
GOOD QUESTION. The reference is to a Shinto religious shrine located in Tokyo, which memorializes the spirits of some 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including a handful of war criminals from the Pacific theater, such as Hideki Tojo. An accompanying museum whitewashes the history of Japanese militarism.
Yasukuni was first established in 1869, following the Boshin war. After World War II it became a private religious institution with no official links to the state. The war criminals were secretly enshrined in 1978; when that news became public, Emperor Hirohito stopped his shrine visits. While in office, former Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi, who served from 2001 to 2006, made an annual pilgrimage to Yasukuni, keeping his campaign pledge.
Never mind that Koizumi signed or delivered several official apologies for Japanese aggression. (One of these apologies, in October 2001, took place near China’s Marco Polo Bridge, the site of a famous battle that sparked the Sino-Japanese war in 1937.) Never mind that, as a senior Japanese diplomat has written, Koizumi “repeatedly stated that the purpose of his visits [to Yasukuni] is not to glorify Japan’s militaristic past or the Class A war criminals listed in the shrine, but to renew his vow never to go to war again.” Never mind that Koizumi pledged fidelity to Japan’s anti-nuclear principles. Yasukuni poisoned the chalice. It also allowed a Communist dictatorship to wrest the moral high ground from a liberal democracy.
To be sure, much of the Chinese outrage over Yasukuni smacks of politics: The shrine issue offers a convenient tool for weakening the U.S.-Japan alliance and reminding other Asian countries of Japan’s dark history. For that matter, is there a Chinese word for “chutzpah”? An autocratic regime that continues to deny or airbrush its own 20th-century ignominy–Mao’s crimes, the Great Leap famine, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution–feels free to scold an apology-prone democratic government on historical “responsibility.” The irony is palpable.
THAT SAID, do the Chinese and South Koreans have a point? We must first concede the obvious: There is a far right wing in Japanese politics whose nationalism is both atavistic and noxious. The hardcore nationalists, who often roam the streets with megaphones shouting racist propaganda, have polluted the broader debate over Japanese history. Every August 15th, the anniversary of Emperor Hirohito’s famous surrender speech in 1945, the Yasukuni shrine becomes “a Bartholomew Fair of thugs, fantasists in military garb, deniers of atrocities, and xenophobes peddling conspiracy theories,” reports the Economist. That a conservative prime minister would visit Yasukuni on such a date, as Koizumi did last year, may seem unsettling.
Beijing and Seoul have seized on the shrine issue, claiming it raises an uncomfortable specter. They also howl about a smattering of Japanese textbooks that downplay wartime atrocities. They note that Abe, who has visited Yasukuni in the past, supports teaching patriotism in Japanese schools. The Chinese, as is their wont, have railed against the supposed revival of Japanese “rightism.”
Abe’s family tree further muddies the water. His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, served as the Japanese minister of commerce and industry during World War II, and was later imprisoned as a war criminal (though never tried). Following a 1952 amnesty, Kishi rejoined Japanese politics and became prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Perhaps out of loyalty to his grandfather, Abe has raised questions about the legitimacy of the postwar Tokyo Trials.
So will he again trek to Yasukuni this year? Abe won’t say. But if he does, we must recognize what the shrine issue has effectively become: a test of Tokyo’s resolve in the face of Chinese pressure. “It is something that we should decide ourselves,” a senior Japanese diplomat told me in June, implying that the Chinese Communists would not be permitted to bully Japan over its history.
Many Japanese suffer from “apology fatigue”: the feeling that Tokyo has expressed sufficient compunction for its Tojo-era crimes and been a good global citizen for more than six decades since 1945–so China (and everyone else) should just move on. Of course, for certain generations of Americans, Chinese, and others, the horrors of the Rape of Nanjing and the Bataan Death March can never be fully absolved. But just as Americans tire of being lectured over slavery, the Japanese have grown weary of perpetual penitence.
Then there is the culpability of Emperor Hirohito, an issue often overlooked by foreigners but one that epitomizes the delicacy of World War II in the collective Japanese consciousness. As Shohei Muta, a senior researcher at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, recently told Agence France Presse, “Germany had Hitler. Italy had Mussolini. But Japan did not have a matching person.”
What about the emperor? After Tokyo’s surrender in 1945, the Australian government (among others) wanted Hirohito charged as a war criminal. General MacArthur disagreed, viewing the emperor as a bulwark of stability around which postwar Japan could rebuild and maintain a sense of national continuity. So Hirohito avoided the Tokyo Trials and stayed on in a ceremonial role, wearing the new title of “constitutional monarch” and relinquishing his previous claims to a godlike religious status. He served as emperor until his death in 1989, after which, in Japan at least, he became known as Emperor Showa.
For decades, scholars inside and outside of Japan debated whether Hirohito deserved blame for the war. The conventional wisdom cast him as a mere puppet or figurehead. Then, in 2000, historian Herbert P. Bix published Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, a smashing bit of revisionism that won Bix a Pulitzer Prize. As he later told a Japanese newspaper, Bix argued that Hirohito “bore moral, legal and political responsibility of the highest degree for the war–and that responsibility extended also to war atrocities.” One thing is clear: The unresolved question of Hirohito’s guilt cannot be divorced from Japan’s broader sensitivity over World War II.
There has been some progress of late, however minimal. For one thing, the language in the Yasukuni history museum has been slightly adjusted. “I think many Japanese would be as shocked as Americans are at the depiction of history in the museum,” says Professor Edward Lincoln, a Japan specialist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Further steps may soon be taken by a joint panel of Chinese and Japanese scholars to reach a shared understanding of the past.
Meanwhile, Japan’s most ubiquitous and influential media tycoon, 80-year-old Tsuneo Watanabe, has spearheaded a journalistic probe of Japanese imperialism during the 1930s and 1940s. The resulting articles, recently published as a book, paint a harsh portrait of wanton violence and depravity. They first appeared in Watanabe’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, the most widely read Japanese daily. “The largely positive public response” to this project, Watanabe told the Financial Times, rebuffs the notion that Japan is embracing right-wing nationalism.
IT’S ALSO FUNNY what one trip to Beijing can do. When Abe traveled to the Chinese capital in October, amidst news of the latest provocation from Kim Jong Il, observers hailed it as a diplomatic coup. It was “the Japanese version of Nixon’s visit to China,” said Yoichi Nishimura, a prominent Japanese political journalist. The new prime minister has declared his intent to forge a “mutually beneficial” Sino-Japanese relationship.
Consider the economic stakes: China is now Japan’s biggest trading partner. This counsels strongly against a cold war, whatever their historical grievances and picayune territorial spats. Simply put, Japan can’t afford to have a sour relationship with China. Small wonder that, last spring, a leading group of Japanese corporate executives, known as Keizai Doyukai, warned that the Yasukuni shrine issue threatened to pinch Sino-Japanese business ties.
Abe’s pragmatism on China suggests that his much-ballyhooed nationalism merits a closer look. He frequently touts postwar Japan’s “new values”–the values of “freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” He envisions a grand democratic coalition in East Asia of Japan, America, India, and Australia. After meeting with Abe last November, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post wrote that, “While the freedom agenda is increasingly on the defensive in Washington, it seems to have found a new champion in Tokyo.”
Japanese foreign minister Taro Aso captured the new mood in a speech this past fall. Stressing the importance of “value-oriented diplomacy,” Aso laid out Japan’s desire to build an “arc of freedom and prosperity” among “the successfully budding democracies that line the outer rim of the Eurasian continent.”
There’s no question Japan is wrestling with an identity crisis, spurred not just by the rise of China and the North Korean menace but also by a shrinking population, a looming social-welfare crisis, and a political culture in limbo. But that hardly means the Japanese are seeking out new enemies abroad. “I don’t see this as a hardline nationalism emerging in Japan,” says Professor Lincoln. “There’s really no danger of Japan going down that road again.”
Chinese hectoring aside, Japan does have an obligation to honestly confront its own history. That’s what healthy democracies do. But the “history issue” should not blind us to the fact that Prime Minister Abe, like Prime Minister Koizumi before him, is preaching a decidedly centrist nationalism, based on the belief that Japan must adequately address new dangers to its own citizenry while also playing a more robust role in nation building, democracy promotion, and multilateral security.
For the world’s second largest economy, such a shift is long overdue. Not only is it overwhelmingly in Japan’s interest–it is in America’s interest, too.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
