The first is the American principle, free worldism if you like, or pledge of semper fi to the American Empire. The postwar Japanese state was a joint product of the U.S. occupation and the pro-American segment of the Japanese ruling groups, or SCAPpon as John Dower termed it. The U.S.-Japan security treaty, originally signed in 1951 in San Francisco concurrently with the peace treaty and revised in 1960, serves as the legal and institutional leverage to keep America inside the Japanese state with its supra-constitutional powers. Postwar Japan developed as a capitalist economy within the realm and domain prescribed by Washington, building its relationship with the rest of Asia as subordinate variables of the U.S. relations with Asia. In all senses, the United States of America has never been external to the postwar Japanese state but has been one of its chief constituent elements. In other words, postwar Japan has been organically integrated with the U.S. military and political domination of the world, particularly East Asia and the Pacific, offering bases and facilities, logistically and economically helping in U.S. wars from the Korean through Vietnam to the Iraq war. More importantly, Japan began to remilitarize by building up its armed forces as a supplementary force to the U.S. strategy. The point is that this was in outright violation of the peace clause of the constitution, a case dramatizing the incompatibility between the American principle and the principle of constitutional pacifism.

The second principle, constitutional pacifism, as all Japan observers may admit, is the most salient feature of postwar Japan. Ironically, it was the U.S. occupation that introduced this principle into the 1947 Constitution whose concept and first draft were made by the U.S. occupation. As is well known Article 9 of the constitution says that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained” and that “the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” There is no room for misunderstanding this article and its requirements – total and complete demilitarization of the country. Demilitarization of Japan was one of the original purposes of American occupation to prevent Japan from reemerging as a military threat to America, but the Article 9 pacifism came to have its own life independent of American intentions. In fact it was reappropriated and remade by postwar Japanese social and political movements that represented a significant segment of war-wary Japanese population. In this process Article 9 came to be the backbone of the Constitution as embraced by the Japanese people throughout most of the postwar years so that it became as essential to the Japanese constitution as republicanism is to the French constitution and freedom to the U.S. constitution. Therefore, the constitution as a whole was represented as “Peace Constitution,” other values of democracy, basic human rights, and some social rights being organized around the notion of peace as the core. This pacifism clashed head-on with the Americanist principle that always demanded Japan’s increased military role.

For most of the postwar period, the incompatibility of the pro-American and pacifist principles underlay major political issues of postwar Japan. Largely the LDP represented the Americanist principle and the opposition forces, headed by the Socialist Party and trade union center Sohyo, promoting the pacifist principle. The antagonism between the two camps had moments of confrontation on issues such as the 1960 revision of the security treaty, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, and Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in the 1970s. Obviously, Article 9 pacifism and Japan’s military commitment to the American empire – the security treaty and Japan’s own military buildup – were incompatible. In order to make the impossible possible, the LDP government has invented one acrobatic logic after another to plead for the constitutionality of military buildup and, in fact, has managed to create the world’s third most expensive and highly technology-intensive military force. But even so, the pacifist constitution placed certain restraints on Japan’s military functions. The gap between the U.S. demand for Japan’s increased military role and Japan’s constitutional limits became unbridgeably large as Washington escalated its demand after the end of the Cold War and particularly under the Bush’s post-911 strategy.

In the second half of the 1990s, Japan made a breakthrough toward full remilitarization by even sending ground troops to Iraq as part of the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” and introducing a set of draconian legislation readying the country for battles in Japan’s own territories. All this has brought Japan to the point where the war-oriented realities can no longer be legally justified unless the constitution is changed to suit to them. America now feels free to openly demand removal of Article 9. In April 2004, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told a visiting Japanese politician Nakagawa Hidenao, an LDP hardliner, that war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution was blocking the progress of the Japan-U.S. alliance and that if Japan wanted to be a permanent member of the U.N. security council, it needed to revise Article 9 so that it could play an increased military role. Though Armitage added all this was his personal opinion, it is obvious that the U.S. government wanted to deliver its clear message to Japan through this veteran Japan hand.

The pro-American principle is now asserting itself to crowd out the constitutional pacifist principle. This is certainly the major practical factor that propels the current drive for the change of the constitution centering on the deletion of the second paragraph of Article 9.

Third Principle – Glory of the Japanese Empire

But there is the third principle that complicates the situation. The third is the principle of continuity of the Japanese empire. Whether or not there was a break between the prewar Japanese state and the postwar state has in fact been an important intellectual issue of practical importance debated throughout the postwar years. I am with those who see continuity rather than break, but obviously it is not a simple continuity. The historical specificity of the postwar Japanese state, I would argue, lies in the particular way the continuity has been preserved in the state.

As is well known, the preoccupation of the Japanese ruling elite in accepting surrender to the allied powers was the protection and preservation of kokutai, which is translated as polity, but means something that they considered the essence of the Japanese statehood the loss of which would make Japan non-Japan. The essence, to them, was the Emperor (Tenno) system. They decided to surrender in the understanding that the enemy would not destroy the Emperor system. The U.S. occupation, particularly Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur himself, strongly wanted to use the Emperor system to facilitate its rule over the enemy country. MacArthur used all his influence to absolve Hirohito of war crimes and succeeded in keeping him on the throne as Emperor. The political and moral survival of the top war leader Hirohito, who was even honored as “the symbol of the unity of the nation and state” in the new constitution, made it impossible for postwar Japan to fully destroy the continuity from the prewar state. When the top war leader was exonerated and admired as “peace maker” whose “holy decision” brought the end to the war, how can minor war criminals and their crimes be penalized? The continuity from the prewar empire was thus preserved in the postwar kokutai of Japan. As is often discussed, the postwar Japanese state, unlike the postwar German states, never openly negated the pre-1945 Empire.

However, the status of this third principle has been insecure compared with the other two since its presence had to be concealed from the external world, especially from Asian peoples who had suffered from Japanese imperial invasion and colonization. Openly declaring the continuity principle would destroy relationship with neighboring Asia as it involves justification and glorification of imperial Japan’s conquest of Asian neighbors since the Meiji period. Theoretically, this principle contradicted the pro-American principle too as it implies justification of the Pearl Harbor, and the rejection of the America-made “Pacific War view of history.” But this aspect has long been conveniently covered up by both for pragmatic purposes of cooperation in the Cold War.

The embeddedness of this third principle in the Japanese state explains why throughout the postwar decades so many Japanese government leaders have made statements blatantly unrepentant of the past, like glorifying Japan’s colonization of Korea, negating Nanjing massacre, and justifying war purposes, and had to take the blame for “a slip of tongue” and to resign.

This explains also why education and textbooks have chronically been a serious issue disputed with other Asian countries as well as between the Ministry of Education and the Japan Teachers’ Union. The Ministry of Education for years served as one of the main custodians of the continuity principle in postwar Japan, as though it had taken on the mission to educate boys and girls in a spirit different than the postwar peace education being energetically promoted by the teachers’ union. Attacking peace education as “deviation” and trying to water down self-critical views of modern Japanese history, the MOE used the textbook censorship system based on the “teaching guideline” to foist its message into history textbooks. The textbook issue has a long history since 1955 when then Democratic Party attacked the school history textbook for “leftwing deviation.” In 1963, MOE turned down a history text book written by progressive historian Ienaga Saburo and Ienaga filed a lawsuit against this government intervention in 1965, which lasted for the subsequent 32 years.

The textbook issue became a keen diplomatic issue in 1982 when the press exposed that the MOE censors’ pen changed the expression in the draft of a history textbook, “Japan’s invasion of China” into “Japan’s advance into China” (italic by the author). This invited strong protest from China and South Korea, and the government had to apologize and to introduce a guideline the MOE should follow to check whether text book expressions might cause international trouble or not. It is interesting to note that at that time this whole issue including the apology was understood merely as a matter of Japan’s diplomatic convenience and not at all as a matter of how the Japanese state recognized what imperial Japan did in the past. The government position was, and has been, that apologies were because neighbors wanted them and not because Japan felt it had done something wrong. This was another way of preserving the imperial continuity principle but rather secretly. This double standard certainly kept postwar Japan a suspicious, untrustworthy country to the rest of Asia despite repeated verbal apologies.

The postwar Japanese statehood thus has been chronically suffering from a twisted nature where the three contradictory principles, each asserting itself at the sacrifice of the others, had somehow to coexist and compromise. As none of the three was able to abolish the others, the outcome has always been opportunistic behavior of the Japanese state. But under the surface the inter-principle (inter-social group) strife has always continued, tensions amongst the three factors pushing the state toward one solution or another.

Rightist Offensive –- Revisionist View of History

What is happening now is an offensive of rightists to reinstate and legitimate this shady principle through the making of a new constitution. The offensive was launched on a full scale in the second half of the 1990s.

Looking back, the mid-1990s was the turning point for the Japanese situation. It was a period of empty hope for change in domestic politics, loss of the power of progressive social movement, and of false solutions. In 1993, the LDP government collapsed and a new non-LDP coalition government headed by an extremely popular former aristocrat HOSOKAWA Morihiro stepped into power. Weary of the perennial rule by the LDP, this government was unusually popular and many felt that change could come. But the Hosokawa government lasted only for eight months. From 1993 through 1995, different combinations of parties were tested as the ruling coalition, including a Socialist-LDP coalition headed by Chairman Murayama Tomiichi of the Socialist Party.

In 1995, the 50th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in WWII, a group of liberal parliamentarians and intellectuals took the initiative to produce a unanimous Diet statement critically evaluating the past and thus settling the past once and for all. But this idea met fierce resistance from within the LDP, and what emerged was a miserably empty declaration satisfying no side. That was why Prime Minister Murayama made a statement on behalf of Japan admitting that Japan “caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to Asian nations” and offered “sincere apologies.” Also, by that time, the government had to admit the moral responsibility for the sexual slavery of Korean, Chinese and other Asian women (comfort women issue ).

By now, it is clear that the mid-1990s solutions were fake solutions. In spite of Prime Minister Murayama’s “apologies,” most of the LDP leaders understood the apologies as merely a gesture to satisfy Asian neighbors. In the same period, the government had to admit, in the face of firm documented evidence, that the “comfort women” had been systematically recruited and organized by the Japanese military. The government said it was “morally responsible” but stuck to the position that there was no “legal responsibility” on this matter and that therefore the Japanese government would not pay compensations. For the aversion of the government’s legal responsibility, the Murayama cabinet set up a non-governmental fund (Asian Women’s Fund for short) to raise money from the public to compensate the victims of the sexual slavery. This hypocrisy enraged the surviving victims all over Asia, many of them refusing to receive the “consolation” money offered by the women’s fund, but the fund sent organizers around Asia to force money into the victims’ hands in order to give the appearance of settlement to the war crimes issue. In this brief period of “openings” other major long-dragging issues such as the Minamata mercury pollution were said “settled” in similar deceptive ways with no real redress for the victims. These “solutions” served only to bury the issues.

The rightwing offensive began after the old issues were thus buried. Characteristically, this offensive focused on the interpretation of modern Japanese history, promoting historical revisionism under the slogan of “rectification of the masochist view of history,” meaning that the school-taught history of Japan, especially of modern Japan, exaggerated the dark sides of Japanese history like Nanjing massacre, “comfort women,” and other war crimes. Because of inculcation of this negative history, they argued, the Japanese nationals (kokumin) lost their national pride, became ego-centered, and forgot the virtue of self-sacrifice and dedication to the “public” (state), and the Japanese traditions with the Emperor in the center as the basis of identity. The rightists renewed their campaign to minimize or even negate the Nanjing massacre, to present “comfort women” as “prostitutes working for money,” and to otherwise erase or minimize Japan’s war crimes. Their message was: “This is the truth of history hidden for long from your eyes!”

In 1995, FUJIOKA Nobukatsu, a leftist-turned rightist scholar, triggered an offensive in history education by publishing his book titled, “Liberalist view of history” (“Liberalist” as against Marxist). About simultaneously, a host of rightist intellectuals began to work together systematically and organized a national campaign demanding deletion of critical reference to “comfort women” in school textbooks. Rightist groups strewn all over the country worked on local assemblies to pass resolutions calling on the central government to delete references to “comfort women” from school textbooks. In 1997 rightist intellectuals including Fujioka organized the Society for Writing a New Textbook on History (Tsukuru-kai) to produce their own school textbooks and spread their use at public schools. In this climate Kobayashi Yoshinori, an iconoclast cartoonist popular among the youth, came out with a series of political cartoon books reinstating the value of the state, praising wartime heroes, and adoring war. His books, especially “Discussing War,” sold in millions of copies.

It was around this time that formal and informal coalitions of rightists from “grassroots conservatives” through local assembly politicians and to national Diet representatives sprang up to promote their grand strategy of fully reinstating the imperial continuity principle. On the LDP side, the party in 1993 set up an official history evaluation commission consisting of 105 Lower and Upper House representatives. On August 15 1995, the commission published a document titled, “Evaluation of the Greater East Asia War,” that declared that the GEA War was a war of liberation of Asia as well as for Japan’s defense and survival, that the stories of Nanjing massacre and “comfort women” were fictions, and that a national movement should be launched to rectify leftwing deviations of school textbooks and spread its view of history among the people. It is important to note that this “war evaluation” report was announced the same day Prime Minister Murayama made his statement of apology. Tsukuru-kai came into being with this LDP move as the pioneer.

In 1997, two largest rightist organizations, the National Conference to Defend Japan (Nihon-o mamoru kokumin kaigi) and the Society to Defend Japan (Nihon-o mamoru kai) merged to form a coalition called Japan Conference (Nihon kaigi) headed by former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court MIYOSHI Toru as president and with local branches in almost all prefectures. The National Conference consists mostly of rightist intellectuals while the Society has under its wing wealthy and tightly organized rightist religious organizations. Japan Conference promotes campaigns for the revision of the constitution and the Basic Education Law, supports and commends prime minister’s visits to Yasukuni, opposes foreign residents’ voting rights in local elections, supports dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq, and upholds other rightist goals.

The crucial point is that Japan Conference has its powerful parliamentary contingent. The Japan Conference Caucus comprising 242 Lower and Upper House representatives has in its roster top-ranking LDP leaders who have assumed prominent government positions, such as former Prime Minister MORI Yoshiro, HIRANUMA Takeo, minister in charge of economic affairs more than once, and ABE Shinzo, LDP secretary general until recently. The caucus works to translate Japan Conference policies into official government policies in the three strategic areas: (1) history, education, and family system, (2) defense, diplomacy, and territorial issues, and (3) constitution, imperial household, and Yasukuni shrine. In 2004 Abe as LDP Secretary General issued an intra-party directive, practically urging all LDP chapters to work energetically for the adoption of the Tsukuru-kai textbooks by local boards of education. “LDP believes that history education is a crucial issue determining the essence of the future of the state,” the directive said. Tawara Yoshibumi, a leading scholar/activist heading the national network on textbooks and children, called Abe a veritable ultra-right politician, whose prominence and influence in Japanese politics ought to have been problematized just as much a political scandal as the case of Jorg Haider of Austria.

Vision of Japan LDP Designs –- Not an “Ordinary State”

The extremely alarming development is that the LDP’s constitution-amending plan is being pushed forward precisely along this ultra-right line and on the initiative of the ultra-rightist forces. The party’s plan is to complete its draft constitution by October this year and the party’s subcommittees are now working to produce it. The party has disclosed four interim documents as its drafting process proceeded. Though some lip service is made to “basic ideas” of the current constitution, these documents unambiguously show that the projected “new shape of the nation” is one based on the justification of the Japanese imperial past basically along the ultra-right line. For instance, the “outline” worked out by chapter-to-chapter subcommittees of the LDP’s Constitution Drafting Committee disclosed in April, in the section detailing what is to be written in the preamble of the new constitution, reads:

The Japanese people have been working to bring prosperity to the nation in the spirit of harmony (wa) and laboring to make history always rallied around the Emperor as the symbol of the unity of the nation. The Japanese people have vigorously developed their nation by enduring a number of ordeals and overcoming a number of hardships such as the last war.

Read this carefully. Here “the last war” is perceived as nothing but a heart-warming story of the Japanese nation “enduring ordeals and overcoming hardships.” There is no room here for critical reflection of the past, nor is there the determination expressed in the preamble of the current constitution that the Japanese people “shall not allow the horrors of war to again visit us through the action of government.”

The basic tenet of the LDP-planned new constitution is the idea that the Emperor is the core of the Japanese nation and the source of Japanese identity. The LDP’s “tentative proposal” disclosed in December 2004 proposed that the Emperor be enhanced to the status of the head of the state and that the Shintoist rituals the Emperor conducts, now considered the imperial family’s private affair, be recognized as a “public affair” under the constitution. The Emperor himself being the highest Shintoist leader of state Shintoism, the Emperor system in the current constitution is already problematic as it contradicts the constitution’s secular statehood clause. In the LDP draft, this obstacle is proposed to be overcome by official recognition of a new version of state Shintoism.

The stress of the LDP-planned constitution, as seen from the several interim proposals and draft summaries so far disclosed by the LDP, is on the importance of “the public.” The “public” here means the state that is based on Emperor-centered “legacies and traditions.” Their new constitution, the “tentative proposal” says, should “rectify misguided individualism and let the people rediscover the correct meaning of the public (sate and society).” It is characteristic that “public” (kokyo) is in fact a magical word used to decimate individual freedom. The “outline” (April 2005) argues that the “public welfare” used in the current constitution is ambiguous and therefore should be redefined as a concept that is synonymous with “security of the state and preservation of social order.” In the new constitution, the LDP suggests, “public welfare” should be replaced by “public interest” or “public order.”

As critics unanimously point out, and as the LDP drafters themselves admit, the LDP-promoted scheme intends to change the meaning of the constitution from a law that binds the conducts of the powers that be to a set of rules that binds and controls the people’s conducts and thoughts. The “tentative proposal” explains that in order to show this nature of the constitution, the LDP draft has introduced the concept of people’s “obligations” as differentiated from legal duties. “Legacies, traditions, and values” connected with the Emperor are to be put into the LDP constitution and it is to be the people’s obligation to respect and defend them. What is envisaged, therefore, is a state that imposes certain moral values on the people in the name of people’s obligations.

In this moral value approach, the LDP in the June 2004 “gist of discussion” document proposed to remove Article 24 of the current constitution that provides for sexual equality in marriage and family life. This clause, the LDP project team stated, “should be reviewed from the point of view of appreciating the family and community values.” Gender equality and “excesses” in sexual education at classrooms in fact are now under heavy attacks from the same rightist coalition that campaign on textbook issues. As women’s organizations immediately reacted vehemently against this blatant proposal, this particular reference to Article 24 was later dropped in the subsequent LDP documents on constitution drafting. But the idea remains. The April “outlines” suggested the people’s “obligation to maintain their family in a good shape through cooperation of man and his wife.” As Saito Emiko points out, the LDP regards the family as an intermediary body linking individuals to the state so that individuals will fully serves the state. She quoted an LDP Diet representative as suggesting, “If you ask individuals to serve the state, it may sound far fetched. You can first tell them to serve the family and the community, and in that context you can ask them to serve the state.” (Kato Katsunobu, DLP Constitution Amendment Project meeting, Oct. 31, 2004)

Critics from the peace movement side usually describe the current process as an attempt to remake Japan into a country capable of legitimately waging war. The movement against the revision of the Constitution, specifically against the change of Article 9, is conducted on this basis. While this approach is perfectly legitimate, we need to recognize that what is actually happening is something more than that. It is not just an “ordinary state” like France or Mexico or Thailand with legitimate regular armed forces that is emulated by the main forces promoting this process including the LDP. The state they want to introduce is a peculiar state based on the principle of Japan’s imperial continuity as well as on the American empire principle.

The ongoing state remaking process represents a tactical alliance among two of the three contradictory principles, namely, the American empire principle and the Japanese empire principle for the convenience of battering to the ground, and preempt the ground long occupied by, their common sworn foe, the pacifist principle.

Despite the apparent strong thrust of the rightist movement, this state restructuring drive has the following three major weaknesses.

(1) The new Japanese state they are eager to introduce are to be based on two mutually contradictory principles for legitimation – the principle of Japanese imperial continuity and the principle of U.S. imperial domination. These two principles can work together to the extent that they enable Japan to have legitimate military forces but will have little in common beyond that point. The imperial continuity principle, however muffled, asserts that Japan had waged a just war and negates the legitimacy of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal and that is what the United States can never accept. The new statehood thus will still be enmeshed in irresoluble contradictions, this time without the convenient façade of constitutional pacifism.

(2) More importantly, the reaffirmation of the imperial continuity principle in the “new state” under the new constitution will totally destroy Japan’s relations with the neighboring Asian countries. As said at the outset of this paper, this is already happening in dramatic ways even prior to the official proclamation of this principle in a new constitution. Japan of course cannot survive economically and politically if it sets itself on a collision course with the rest of Asia, China and Korea, in particular.

(3) Japan’s full military-political commitment to the U.S. imperial strategy by changing the constitution is nothing but a foolish, untimely, and reckless bet at a time when the U.S. global scheme is crumbling and when the U.S. is increasingly isolated from the people around the world. Despite Japan’s courting, Washington on its part will not fully trust it, a former enemy country that reaffirms legitimacy of the Greater East Asia War (and therefore Pearl Harbor).

For these reasons, we can say that in historical perspective the rightists’ current state-remaking venture has no future. It is doomed from the start. But that does not mean its automatic collapse. Unless Japanese people block this attempt by upholding the peace principle of the constitution, generalize it and defeat the rightist scheme totally, the eerie metamorphosis of the postwar Japanese state into some grotesque creature will be completed. Fortunately, 60% or so of the Japanese public oppose revising Article 9 as most opinion polls show. The various political forces pushing for amending the constitution have their respective motivations and ideas with regard to their future images of Japan. Nor can the LDP dream to make its draft the final proposal to go to the national referendum. Complex processes of politicking, maneuvering, and compromising are in store before they come up with some definite proposal.

Can the progressive movements build up to counter the full range of the rightist offensive? Can they do so based on the legacies of Japanese people and society favoring peace and justice? Is such a struggle a struggle of the people in Japan alone or is it to be part and parcel of the movement to introduce another Asia and another world? All these are emerging as pressing questions. In another paper, I will try to answer them by introducing what is happening in terms of people’s movement and actions in the Japanese archipelago.

MUTO Ichiyo: An activist/writer on political and social affairs, national and global; born in 1931 in Tokyo, he joined student movement and peace movement in the 1950s, active in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, jointly with like-minded friends, founded the English journal AMPO and the Pacific-Asia Resources Center in the 1970s, engaged in Asian people’s solidarity activities, initiated the People’s Plan 21 in the 1980s, and founded the People’s Plan Study Group (PPSG) of which he is a co-president in the 1990s; taught at the sociology department of State University of New York at Binghamton in the 1980s-90s; author of many books in Japanese, the most recent one being “Empire vs. People’s Alliance” (2003, Tokyo).

Posted with the consent of the author
Source: http://www.ppjaponesia.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=11