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Japanese Diplomat Decries Japan's Post-WWII Subservience to the U.S.; Advocates an Independent Japanese Foreign and Security Policy

This article is more than 10 years old.

On November 16 Prime Minister Noda Yoshihikowill dissolve the Diet (parliament) lower house and schedule a general election for December

16.  Very likely Noda’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) will fail to win a majority of Diet lower house seats, and a new government will be formed by the coalition of parties in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will hold a dominant position, and LDP leader and former PM Abe Shinzo will once again be elected prime minister.

Considering that Japan is in the worst foreign policy and security crisis since the end of WWII in the dispute with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, while at the same time parrying challenges to its territorial sovereignty by Russia and South Korea, we would expect Japan’s foreign and defense policies to be a focus of campaign rhetoric and debate between the contending parties.

There are some signs of this.  Former Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro’s newly formed “Sun Party” will have in its platform a pledge to scrap and rewrite Japan’s current “peace” constitution which was written in ten days February 1947 by two dozen American military and civilian personnel, supervised by Lieut. Col. Charles L. Kades, within Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur’s GHQ occupation command.

The hawkish Abe has advocated reinterpreting the constitution to allow Japan to participate in “collective self-defense” activities.

Abruptly changing course under Noda, and with his appointment of 71 year old Morimoto Satoshi as defense minister, the DPJ--which took power in 2009 on a platform advocating relocating U.S. Marine bases in Okinawa outside the prefecture or outside Japan and an “East Asia Union”—appears to have lined up with the LDP, other conservative parties, and the bureaucracy in advancing initiatives to “strengthen the U.S.-Japan security alliance.”

The most substantive of these, announced on November 9, will be to revise the 1978 “Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation.”  The Guidelines (link here) stipulate the roles to be played by Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF) and U.S. forces if Japan were threatened with attack or attacked by a third country (in 1978 presumed to the Soviet Union).  In the last revision, in 1997, controversially expanded the expected role of Japan in supporting U.S. military operations in Asia (e.g., defense of Taiwan) that might have an "indirect" effect on Japan's security.

But discussion of foreign policy, and particularly defense policy, is particularly fraught in Japan for reasons explained in a recently published, controversial, but best-selling book, The Truth about [Japan’s] Post-War History 1945-2012戦後史の正体 1945-2012」 by a former career Japanese diplomat and ambassador to Iran and Iraq, Magosaki Ukeru (孫崎享).

Magosaki’s book, besides selling widely to the public, has sent shockwaves through the government, and particularly through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA).  Like Zola’s J’accuse!, it presents an often shocking picture of opportunism and toadyism to U.S. hegemonic demands among Japan’s politicians and, particularly, its foreign affairs bureaucrats, during most of the post war period.  He describes a philosophical and psychological divide that has existed in Japan’s politics between those who would essentially be blind followers and supporters of U.S. policy, and those who would give primacy to Japan’s interests and seek an independent course.

Magosaki is plainly of the latter camp, in which he also identifies prime ministers Tanaka Kakue, Miyazawa Koichi, and Hatoyama Yukio.  He places the long-serving post-war prime minister Yoshida Shigeru, who signed the U.S.-Japan peace treaty and the first post-occupation status of forces agreement, in the former camp, along with Nakasone Yasuhiro,  Koizumi Junichiro, and Noda Yoshihiko.

Magosaki’s main point—which is hardly debatable—is that the goal of U.S. policy toward Japan has always been to advance U.S. interests, and not—or at least not mainly—to advance Japan’s interests.  Often, U.S. policy objectives have required Japan to make great sacrifices and take risks that have clearly not been in Japan’s interests.  One example among dozens offered is a concession to develop a major Iranian oil field that had been won by Japan when Magosaki was ambassador that Japan was forced by the U.S. to give up.  (The concession was then awarded by Iran to China.)

That 66 years after the end of WWII and 23 years after the end of the Cold War, Japan remains host to over 35,000 U.S. army, air force, navy, and marine personnel and perhaps 5,000 military-related civilian personnel and their families; that the U.S. should be operating out of dozens of bases, including Yokota, Misawa, Iwakuni,  Futenma, and Kadena air bases; that the 7th fleet remains based in Japan (in Yokosuka), seems incongruous, as Japan has developed its own self-defense capabilities.

Magosaki makes another point:  Over the decades, the U.S. has changed security policy several times, globally or toward Asia.  In many cases the U.S. has demanded that Japan conform its own policies to the U.S.’s even when doing so would violate Japan’s constitution or would otherwise be inimical to Japan’s interests.  China has always loomed large.  During much of the Cold War period, U.S. policy was anti-China and sought to block Japanese commercial and, especially, political bridge building to Beijing.

Today, the overriding U.S. strategic objective in Asia is to find a modus vivendi with China.   Magosaki would argue that Japan can take little comfort that the existence of the U.S.-Japan “alliance” will preclude an arrangement that sacrifices Japan’s interest to greater U.S. self-interests.   Rather, as in the past, Japan will be seen as a “pawn,” or perhaps as a “rook,” in the chess game with China.

Magosaki quotes a historian to the effect that we study history not so much to understand the past, but to understand the present.  In the month ahead we can expect the history of U.S.-Japan security relations since WWII to inform campaign speeches.  Thanks in part to Magosaki’s book,  support for a Japanese security policy more independent of the U.S. and the alliance could emerge and grow in the months beyond.