{"id":227843,"date":"2023-01-23T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=227843"},"modified":"2023-01-22T03:32:03","modified_gmt":"2023-01-22T03:32:03","slug":"japan-reenlists-as-washingtons-spear-carrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/japan-reenlists-as-washingtons-spear-carrier\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan Reenlists as Washington\u2019s Spear-Carrier"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

President Biden and Prime Minister Kishida of Japan at West Wing Colonnade in 2023. Office of the President of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Jan 2023 – <\/em>It is always the same when Japanese premiers travel to Washington to summit at the White House. Nothing seems to happen and nobody pays much attention even when important things happen, when we should all pay attention, and, when we do pay passing attention, we usually get it wrong. In January 1960, when Premier Nobusuke Kishi visited Washington, President Eisenhower blessed the war criminal and signed a security treaty the Japanese public vigorously opposed. That week Newsweek marked Kishi down as \u201cthat friendly, savvy Japanese salesman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kishi proved a salesman, all right. Three years later he used armed police to clear the Diet of opposition legislators and force ratification of the Anpo treaty, as the Japanese call it, with members of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the only ones present to vote on it. \u201cA 134\u2013pound body packed with pride, power and passion\u2014a perfect embodiment of his country\u2019s amazing resurgence,\u201d TIME wrote of the man who ought to have been hanged a decade earlier.<\/p>\n

Now we have Premier Fumio Kishida, who summited with our asleep-at-the-wheel president in the Oval Office a week ago. I do not know how much Kishida weighs or how proud of himself or his nation he is, but, in an uncanny echo of the Kishi\u2013Eisenhower summit, Joe Biden blessed his radical turn toward the militarism Japan\u2019s pacifist constitution forbids.<\/p>\n

There is a long history here. American New Dealers wrote Japan\u2019s pacifist constitution shortly after the August 1945 surrender. But since the Truman administration set the Cold War in motion in 1947, Washington has incessantly, diabolically pressed the Japanese to breach it. \u201cDo more\u201d was the common exhortation during my years in Tokyo. Now Kishida obliges. If he is the perfect embodiment of anything, it is the obsequious pandering with which Japan\u2019s conservative and nationalist political cliques have conducted relations with the U.S. since the August 1945 defeat.<\/p>\n

I read in the hours Kishida spent at the White House the further polarization of the planet as the U.S. insists on compelling it and the capitulation of yet another nation previously capable of a mediating role between East and West, between Global South and Global North, between the U.S. imperium and its designated enemies, China and Russia chief among them. Sweden, Finland and Germany have already abandoned this admirable place in the global order in the name of supporting the regime in Ukraine. Japan now follows suit.<\/p>\n

There is a simple chronology leading to the Kishida\u2013Biden summit, and it is useful to follow it. Biden traveled to Tokyo last May to meet with the recently elected Kishida, and the two made a great show of committing to \u201ccontinually modernize the alliance, evolve bilateral roles and missions, and strengthen joint capabilities, including by aligning strategies and prioritizing goals together.\u201d A month ago the Kishida government announced that it would raise the 2023 defense budget by $7.3 billion, the biggest increase in postwar Japanese history, and that it would double defense expenditure, to 2 percent of gross domestic product, over the next five years. Tokyo has for decades held defense spending to 1 percent of GDP.<\/p>\n

Prior to his arrival in Washington last week, Kishida made a grand tour through Europe, stopping in every Group of 7 capital except Berlin. In each the topic was the same: Tokyo will now count itself a fully committed member of the Western alliance, signing on to all that animates it. In London, Kishida concluded a mutual-access defense accord permitting each to station troops on the other\u2019s soil. This followed by a few months a Tokyo\u2013London\u2013Rome agreement jointly to develop a new fighter jet.<\/p>\n

And now the Oval Office summit, during which the two leaders pledged, as the government-supervised New York Times put it, \u201cto work together to transform Japan into a potent military power to help counterbalance China and to bolster the alliance between the two nations so that it becomes the linchpin for their security interests\u00a0in Asia.\u201d The artless Biden, who seems to delight in putting his foot in his mouth, had to add to his official statement, \u201cThe more difficult job is trying to figure out how and where we disagree.\u201d Indeed, Joe, a 78-year-old truth, bitter as they come.<\/p>\n

This is a very big deal, and, yes, I mean to equate its significance to the Kishi\u2013Eisenhower doings at the height of Cold War I. The ruling LDP, which has tried and failed severally to alter the pacifist constitution to release the Self-Defense Forces from the \u201cno war\u201d Article 9, has periodically \u201creinterpreted\u201d it\u2014stretched it like a rubber band\u2014for many years. Shinzo Abe, the nationalist premier who was assassinated last year after leaving office two years earlier, forced legislation through the Diet allowing the SDF to engage in overseas combat missions.<\/p>\n

That was in 2015. Kishida has now gone further, and in a more highly charged context. He has turned what had been by and large a domestic question concerning the constitution into a global commitment. He has also set Japan on course to become the world\u2019s third-largest military power after the U.S. and China and ahead of France. A lot of the new spending on defense will go to missile systems and warships that will project Japanese power far beyond the home islands and maritime zones over which Tokyo claims jurisdiction. The missiles, which are to include U.S.\u2013made Tomahawks, will be capable of hitting targets on the Chinese mainland.<\/p>\n

Kishida, like Kishi 60\u2013odd years ago, must now get his new \u201cdefense strategy\u201d through the Diet. I cannot predict his political chances but stand with those many Japanese who hope he either fails or faces a vigorous fight that shakes the Japanese and the rest of us awake to what Tokyo\u2019s ruling cliques are attempting. Japan is not, by law and national sentiment, supposed to be \u201ca potent military power,\u201d as The Times approvingly put it. Japan has sought, with difficulty, a new purpose for itself since the Cold War\u2019s end and its achievement of economic equality with the West. Reenlisting as Washington\u2019s principal spear-carrier in the western Pacific is nothing more than weak-minded recidivism.<\/p>\n

It could not be clearer that Tokyo has just elected to stand with Washington in the latter\u2019s campaign of hostility and provocation against the Chinese People\u2019s Republic. It is equally the case that the five Chinese missiles that landed in Japan\u2019s territorial waters following Nancy Pelosi\u2019s grandiose visit to Taiwan last summer weighed on Kishida\u2019s course of action\u2014if only by way of giving him a political opportunity.<\/p>\n

But Tokyo would have handled this matter differently in years past. There would have been a diplomatic contretemps, and maybe some temporary sanctions against Chinese-made products the Japanese can do well enough without. But Japan would have maintained its delicate balancing act between the U.S. and the mainland. Of this I am certain. Neither would a premier visiting Washington sound off about the conflict in Ukraine, as Kishida has taken to doing. This, too.<\/p>\n

I fail to see any way Japan\u2019s new declaration of allegiance more secure, and let us not speak of the rest of East Asia. Washington desires above all to raise tensions in the Pacific. Kishida has inadvisedly\u2013with plenty of precedent\u2013to cooperate in this cultivation of anti-Chinese belligerence.<\/p>\n

There is a history here, too. The Japanese have nursed a pronounced ambivalence as to their place in the world since they began making themselves modern in the 1870s. Yukichi Fukuzawa, a prominent Meiji-era intellectual, published an essay in 1885 called \u201cDatsu\u2013A ron,<\/em>\u201d \u201cOn Departure from Asia.\u201d In our time there have been numerous refinements on the thought. We have datsu\u2013A, nu\u2013O<\/em>, leaving Asia, joining the West, and datsu\u2013A, nu<\/em>\u2013<\/em><\/strong>Bei<\/em>, leaving Asia, joining America. More recently: nu\u2013A, datsu\u2013O<\/em>, joining Asia, departing from the West; nu\u2013A, nu\u2013O<\/em>, joining Asia and the West both, and nu\u2013A, shin\u2013O<\/em>, joining Asia and being merely friendly with the West.<\/p>\n

I find zai\u2013A, shin\u2013O<\/em>, which translates as being Asian, being merely friendly with the West, the most curious of these variations: Being Asian, or \u201cexisting in Asia\u201d (another translation), is a considerable leap after more than a century of confusion as to the national identity. Kishida has just tossed out this notion in favor of the old \u201cleaving Asia,\u201d impossible as this may be.<\/p>\n

It is well enough, you could argue, to transcend an enduring confusion. But the Kishida government has done so in the worst kind of way. Japan\u2019s proper place resembles Germany\u2019s: Its destiny is to stand between West and East, and there need be no confusion about this.<\/p>\n

All gone now. I have no idea how Japan will fit in the Western security alliance, but I am pretty certain it will be other than an equal partner. Since Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s day the U.S. has never looked straight across the Pacific at eye level. Subtly or otherwise, it knows only how to look down.<\/p>\n

If Shinzo Abe was an out-of-the-closet militarist and nationalist\u2014Nobusuke Kishi was his grandfather\u2014Fumio Kishida\u2019s background makes him a less-than-obvious read for the direction he now takes. He has long been a senior figure in the LDP\u2019s K\u014dchikai faction, among the party\u2019s oldest and, by tradition, comprised of foreign policy doves who favor diplomatic engagement and who defend Article 9 of the constitution. On the other hand, he served as Abe\u2019s foreign minister from 2012 until the latter left office eight years later. When he was elected premier last year, Kishida immediately came out against China\u2019s supposed aggressions, as Washington incessantly cites them, and I wish someone would at last give us a list of these, as I cannot think of any.<\/p>\n

There is a tradition among Japanese conservatives, and certainly its mainstream nationalists, that we cannot leave out. It is subtle, a paradox, and I used to find it difficult to explain to my foreign editors. However vigorous the nationalism of Japanese nationalists, they always turn out to be putty in Washington\u2019s hands. Nobusuke Kishi was an excellent example of the phenomenon. I think this reflects some respect for the victor long lodged in the consciousness of precisely those most inclined to defend Japan and \u201cJapanness\u201d against the crude intrusions of \u201cround eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Washington loved Kishi for his abuses of Japan\u2019s citizenry, Washington loved Abe for his effort to revise outright the constitution American wrote and the Japanese treasure. Even if he failed, Abe gave the question a new legitimacy. Now Washington loves Fumio Kishida, who knows enough to leave the constitution alone and oblige Washington with another of the LDP\u2019s reinterpretations. It is a loss for Japan, for Asia, for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the <\/em>International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century.\u00a0His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.\u00a0His website: Patrick\u00a0Lawrence<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Jan 2023 – It is always the same when Japanese premiers travel to Washington to summit [submit?] at the White House. Nothing seems to happen and nobody pays much attention even when important things happen, when we should all pay attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":227845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[867,1126,1050,179,291,2462,70],"class_list":["post-227843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-pacific","tag-anglo-america","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-japan","tag-military","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}