The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 8, No. 2, February 24, 2014.<\/b><\/p>\n
NOTE: This essay, written in January 2013, appears as the first section in a book co-authored by John W. Dower and Gavan McCormack and published in Japanese translation by NHK Shuppan Shinsho in January 2014 under the title<\/i> Tenkanki no Nihon e: \u201cPakkusu Amerikana\u201d ka\u2014\u201cPakkusu Ajia\u201d ka (\u201cJapan at a Turning Point\u2014Pax Americana? Pax Asia?\u201d; the second section is an essay by McCormack on Japan\u2019s client-state relationship with the United States focusing on the East China Sea \u201cperiphery,\u201d and the book concludes with an exchange of views on current tensions in East Asia as seen in historical perspective). An abbreviated version of the Dower essay also will be included in a forthcoming volume on the San Francisco System and its legacies edited by Kimie Hara and published by Routledge. <\/i><\/p>\n
As the endnotes reveal, many of the issues addressed here will be familiar to close followers of <\/i>The Asia-Pacific Journal. The essay was written for a general audience rather than for specialists, with particular concern for calling attention to (1) the interwoven nature of contentious current issues, and (2) their historical genesis in the early years of the cold war, and in some cases earlier. Apart from a few very minor stylistic changes, the contents of the several texts of the essay are identical. No attempt has been made to incorporate developments since early 2013. Only this present version introduces illustrations. <\/i><\/p>\n
Legacies of the past are never far from the surface when it comes to present-day controversies and tensions involving Japan, China, and the United States.<\/p>\n
Take, for example, a single day in China: September 18, 2012. Demonstrators in scores of Chinese cities were protesting Japan\u2019s claims to the tiny, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese\u2014desecrating the Hi no Maru<\/i> flag and forcing many China-based Japanese factories and businesses to temporarily shut down.<\/p>\n
Simultaneously, Chinese leaders were accusing the United States and Japan of jointly pursuing a new \u201ccontainment of China\u201d policy\u2014manifested, most recently, in the decision to build a new level of ballistic-missile defenses in Japan as part of the Obama administration\u2019s strategic \u201cpivot to Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n
And September 18 in particular? This, the Chinese were keen to point out, was the eighty-first anniversary of the Manchurian Incident of 1931\u2014the staged event that the Japanese military used as a pretext for seizing the three northeastern provinces of China and turning them into the quasi-colony they renamed Manchukuo.<\/p>\n
The disputed islands, the containment-of-China accusations, even the bitter \u201chistory issue\u201d involving recollection of imperial Japan\u2019s militarism all have toxic roots in the early years of the Cold War. Together with other present-day controversies, they trace back to the San Francisco System under which Japan re-entered the post-war world as a sovereign nation after being occupied by U.S. forces for over six years, from August 1945 to the end of April 1952.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The tensions of September escalated in the weeks and months that followed, and the alarm this generated was occasionally apocalyptic. Pundits spoke of \u201cflash points\u201d\u2014in this case, the Senkaku\/Diaoyu confrontation\u2014that could lead to an \u201caccidental war\u201d in which U.S. forces supported Japan against China. This, it was observed, would be consistent with America\u2019s obligations under the bilateral security treaty with Japan that lies at the heart of the San Francisco System.<\/p>\n
That this worst-case scenario could be taken seriously in 2012 is both surprising and unsurprising. It is surprising because this was taking place forty years after both Japan and the United States belatedly normalized relations with the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC), dramatically abandoning the \u201ccontainment\u201d policy that had defined Cold War China policy prior to 1972. Over the course of those four decades, the economies of the three countries had become interdependent, seemingly creating a foundation for durable peace.<\/p>\n
What makes the crisis of 2012 unsurprising, on the other hand, is the fact that China\u2019s emergence as a major economic power has been followed by intense nationalistic pride coupled with resolute commitment to military modernization. This may have been predictable, but it nonetheless came as a shock to those who took the overwhelming military supremacy of the Pax Americana for granted.<\/p>\n
The San Francisco System and this militarized Pax Americana go hand in hand. They have defined the strategic status quo in the Asia-Pacific area since the early 1950s. They have shaped (and distorted) the nature of the post-war Japanese state in ways beyond measure. They have involved both peace-keeping and war-making.<\/p>\n
As the events of 2012 made much clearer, this system and these structures now stand at a turning point.<\/p>\n
I. The Contorted Origins of the San Francisco System<\/b><\/p>\n
The San Francisco System takes its name from two treaties signed in San Francisco on September 8, 1951, under which the terms for restoring independence to Japan were established. One was the multinational Treaty of Peace with Japan that forty-eight \u201callied\u201d nations signed with their former World War II enemy. The second was the bilateral U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, under which Japan granted the United States the right to \u201cmaintain armed forces \u2026 in and about Japan,\u201d and the United States supported and encouraged Japanese rearmament.<\/p>\n
Both treaties came into effect on April 28, 1952, the day the occupation ended and Japan regained sovereignty.<\/p>\n
Two aspects of these agreements are notable. First is the timing. Japan was still occupied and under U.S. control when the treaties were signed, and the Cold War was at fever pitch. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, triggering the nuclear arms race. The victorious Communists proclaimed the People\u2019s Republic of China on October 1 of that same year, and a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was concluded on February 14, 1950. On June 25, 1950, war erupted on the divided Korean Peninsula, drawing in U.S.-led United Nations forces immediately. Four months later, in late October, Chinese forces entered the war to counter what China\u2019s leaders perceived to be a U.S. threat to advance through North Korea up to\u2014and possibly across\u2014the border with China. The Korean War dragged on until July 1953, and the peace and security treaties of September 1951 were signed during a protracted stalemate in this conflict.1<\/sup><\/p>\n Equally significant but less well remembered, the San Francisco settlement was a \u201cseparate peace.\u201d The omissions from the list of nations that signed the peace treaty were striking. Neither Communist China nor the Chinese Nationalist regime that had fled to Taiwan were invited to the peace conference, despite the fact that China had borne the brunt of Japanese aggression and occupation beginning a full decade before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war. Both South and North Korea were excluded, although the Korean people had suffered grievously under Japanese colonial rule and oppressive wartime recruitment policies between 1910 and 1945. The Soviet Union attended the peace conference but refused to sign the treaty on several grounds, including the exclusion of the PRC and Washington\u2019s transparent plans to integrate Japan militarily into its Cold War policies.<\/p>\n Viewed from the perspective of the separate peace, the San Francisco settlement thus laid the groundwork for an exclusionary system that detached Japan from its closest<\/p>\n neighbors. In the months following the peace conference, the United States tightened the screws on this divisive policy by informing a dismayed and reluctant Japanese government that Congress would not ratify the peace treaty unless Japan signed a parallel treaty with the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan, thus effectively recognizing that regime as the legitimate government of China. Failing this, the U.S. occupation of Japan would be perpetuated indefinitely. Japan acquiesced to this ultimatum in the famous \u201cYoshida Letter,\u201d dated December 24, 1951 (from the Japanese prime minister Yoshida Shigeru to John Foster Dulles, the U.S. emissary in charge of the peace settlement). The ensuing peace treaty between Japan and the \u201cRepublic of China\u201d ensconced in Taipei was signed on April 28, 1952\u2014the same day the peace and security treaties signed in San Francisco came into effect.<\/p>\n Although the Soviet Union and Japan established diplomatic relations in a joint declaration signed on October 19, 1956, they did not sign a formal peace treaty and left territorial issues regarding control of the disputed islands between Japan and the Soviet Union unresolved. Japan and South Korea did not normalize relations until June 22, 1965 (in a Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea). Diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC were not restored until 1972 (in a joint communiqu\u00e9 issued on September 29), and it was only in 1978 that the two countries concluded a formal Treaty of Peace and Friendship (on August 12).<\/p>\n The corrosive long-term consequences of this post-occupation estrangement between Japan on the one hand and China and Korea on the other are incalculable. Unlike West Germany in post-war Europe, Japan was inhibited from moving effectively toward reconciliation and reintegration with its nearest Asian neighbors. Peace-making was delayed. The wounds and bitter legacies of imperialism, invasion, and exploitation were left to fester\u2014unaddressed and largely unacknowledged in Japan. And ostensibly independent Japan was propelled into a posture of looking east across the Pacific to America for security and, indeed, for its very identity as a nation.<\/p>\n II. Eight Problematic Legacies<\/b><\/p>\n The conservative Yoshida government that negotiated Japan\u2019s acceptance of the San Francisco System faced a fundamentally simple choice in 1951. In return for agreeing to Washington\u2019s stipulation that a multinational peace treaty had to be coupled with Japanese rearmament, continued U.S. bases in Japan, and exclusion of the PRC from the peace conference, Japan gained independence plus assurance of U.S. military protection. In the real world of power politics, the alternative that Yoshida\u2019s liberal and leftist domestic critics endorsed\u2014namely, to insist on Japan\u2019s disarmed neutrality in the Cold War and a non-exclusionary \u201coverall\u201d peace treaty\u2014meant postponing the restoration of sovereignty and submitting to continued U.S. military occupation.<\/p>\n Even Yoshida\u2019s staunchly pro-American and anti-communist supporters in Japan expressed anxiety about the price to be paid for agreeing to Washington\u2019s demands. Acquiescing in the non-recognition and isolation of the PRC was unpopular, especially in business circles. The uncertain future scale and disposition of post-occupation U.S. bases throughout the nation was worrisome. And Washington\u2019s demands that Japan rearm rapidly were deemed short-sighted and foolhardy. Precipitous remilitarization, Yoshida and others argued, would provoke major opposition both domestically and among the recent foreign victims of Japanese aggression.2<\/sup><\/p>\n Despite such reservations, the government and most of the populace welcomed the 1951 treaties and ensuing restoration of sovereignty; and, by and large, this Cold War settlement continues to be applauded in mainstream Japanese and American circles. The reasons why are not far to seek. The peace treaty itself was non-punitive and generous to Japan. And the U.S.-Japan military relationship has remained the cornerstone of Japanese strategic and diplomatic policy to the present day. Under the San Francisco System, Japan has established itself as a democratic, prosperous, and peaceful nation.<\/p>\n Rather than viewing the San Francisco System as an unmitigated blessing, however, it is necessary to recognize the many specific ways in which it has become a straitjacket\u2014a system that locked Japan into policies and attitudes that have become more rather than less problematic with the passage of time. The \u201cblessing\u201d and the \u201cstraitjacket\u201d are not mutually exclusive. They coexist, and call attention to intractable contradictions that have been inherent in the system since its inception.<\/p>\n Eight of these problematic legacies deserve particular attention: (1) Okinawa and the \u201ctwo Japans\u201d; (2) unresolved territorial issues; (3) U.S. bases in Japan; (4) rearmament; (5) \u201chistory issues\u201d; (6) the \u201cnuclear umbrella\u201d; (7) containment of China and Japan\u2019s deflection from Asia; and (8) \u201csubordinate independence.\u201d<\/p>\n 1. Okinawa and the \u201cTwo Japans\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n One of the tragic legacies of World War II and the early Cold War was the creation of divided countries\u2014notably Korea, Vietnam, Germany, and China. In a perverse way, the San Francisco System made Japan another divided country by detaching Okinawa Prefecture, the southern part of the Ryukyu Islands chain, from the rest of the nation and turning it into a U.S. military bastion.<\/p>\n This was not a tragedy on the scale of the other divided countries. It was, moreover, a territorial partition that involved Tokyo\u2019s close and even avid collusion with Washington. In American eyes, Okinawa became an indispensable \u201cstaging area\u201d for U.S. forces in Asia from the moment the war ended\u2014a policy that the Soviet atomic bomb, the Communist victory in China, and the outbreak of the Korean War all hardened beyond any possible challenge. To Japanese policy-makers, Okinawa and its residents were simply an expendable bargaining chip. Well before the San Francisco conference, planners in Tokyo began drawing up proposals to sacrifice Okinawa if this would hasten the restoration of sovereignty to the rest of Japan.3<\/sup><\/p>\n The San Francisco settlement formalized this policy by excluding Okinawa from the \u201cgenerous\u201d peace terms. The prefecture remained under U.S. administration, with only \u201cresidual sovereignty\u201d vested in Japan. During the Korean War, B-29 Superfortress bombers (which only a few years earlier had firebombed the cities of Japan) flew missions to Korea from Okinawa\u2019s Kadena Air Force Base. Between 1965 and 1972, Okinawa was a key staging area for the devastating U.S. air war against North Vietnam as well as the secret bombing attacks on Cambodia and Laos. Although administration of Okinawa was restored to Japan in 1972, after twenty-seven years of direct U.S. control, this did not diminish the prefecture\u2019s role as the centerpiece of America\u2019s forward military posture in Asia.<\/p>\n The on-going impact of this \u201ctwo-Japans\u201d policy operates at many levels. Most obvious is the degradation inevitable in any such gargantuan military-base milieu, including GI crimes, noise pollution, and environmental destruction. Less visible is the institutionalized practice of non-transparency, duplicity, and hypocrisy by both the U.S. and Japanese governments\u2014as seen in revelations of secret activities and agreements involving storage on Okinawan soil of both nuclear weapons and chemical weapons such as Agent Orange.4<\/sup><\/p>\n Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the shameful spectacle of a government that has consigned a specific portion of its land to extensive military use by a foreign power, and simultaneously treated its populace there as second-class citizens.<\/p>\n 2. Unresolved Territorial Issues<\/i><\/p>\n Five territorial disputes that plague relations in the Asia-Pacific region today trace back to issues of sovereignty left unresolved in the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Nor was this ambiguity a matter of simple inadvertence or oversight. On the contrary, much of it was deliberately introduced in the final drafts of the peace treaty by the United States, in conformity with Washington\u2019s overall strategy of thwarting communist influence in Asia.5<\/sup><\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, these disputes mostly involve countries that did not participate in the separate peace: notably, the Soviet Union (now Russia), South Korea, and China. Three of the disputes involve Japan directly; all of them have become highly contentious issues in the decades following the San Francisco conference. National pride and strategic concerns naturally underlie these conflicting territorial claims, but in several cases their intensification in recent years also reflects the discovery of maritime resources such as undersea oil and natural gas deposits.<\/p>\n The territorial dispute with Russia involves what Japan calls the \u201cNorthern Territories\u201d and Russia \u201cthe southern Kurile Islands\u201d\u2014focusing on four islands or island clusters north of Hokkaido. The issue hinges in considerable part on whether these islands are properly regarded as part of the Kurile chain or of Hokkaido, and it is complicated by the Soviet Union\u2019s abrupt transformation from ally to enemy in American eyes during the course of 1945 to 1947. At the secret \u201cbig three\u201d Yalta conference in February 1945, the United States and Britain agreed that the Kurile Islands would be \u201chanded over\u201d to the Soviet Union following Japan\u2019s defeat. This was one of the inducements the Anglo powers used to persuade the USSR to enter the war against Japan; and when the war ended Soviet forces took over the Kuriles, including the now disputed islands. The United States reversed its position as the Cold War took hold and, by the time of the San Francisco conference, essentially viewed the contested islands as Japanese territory under Soviet military occupation. Although the 1951 peace treaty stated that Japan renounced \u201call right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands,\u201d it neither assigned the Kuriles to the Soviet Union nor mentioned the names of the disputed islands.<\/p>\n The Cold War linkage between this territorial dispute and the \u201ctwo Japans\u201d policy, whereby the United States detached Okinawa from the rest of Japan, emerged in a revealing manner five years after the San Francisco conference. Prior to the finalization of the peace treaty, both U.S. and Japanese policy-makers gave serious consideration to the argument that the two southernmost of the four islands (Shikotan and the Habomais) were not part of the Kuriles, but that the other two islands (Etorofu and Kunashiri) might reasonably be regarded as such. When high-ranking Soviet and Japanese officials met to negotiate a projected peace treaty in 1956, the former proposed such a compromise \u201ctwo island return\u201d solution to the territorial dispute, which was initially supported by the Japanese foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru. Such a trade-off was foiled when the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, informed Shigemitsu that if Japan conceded sovereignty over the Kuriles to the USSR, the United States would regard itself as \u201cequally entitled to full sovereignty over the Ryukyus.\u201d Although the 1956 negotiations led to resumption of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Tokyo, this U.S. threat helped prevent conclusion of a formal peace treaty.6<\/sup><\/p>\n Territorial confrontation with South Korea centers on small islets in the Sea of Japan called the Liancourt Rocks in English, Takeshima in Japanese, and Tokdo (also Dokdo) in Korean. Early U.S. drafts of the Treaty of Peace with Japan explicitly recognized Takeshima\/Tokdo as part of Korea, but in December 1949\u2014immediately following establishment of the PRC, but before the outbreak of the Korean War\u2014U.S. treaty drafts reversed course and assigned the islands to Japan. U.S. drafts beginning in August 1950 became \u201csimple\u201d and made no specific mention of Takeshima. The final peace treaty vaguely mentioned Korean independence, but did not describe Japan\u2019s territorial limits. In August 1951, a month before the San Francisco conference, the United States did inform the government of South Korea that it regarded Takeshima as Japanese.7<\/sup><\/p>\n On January 18, 1952\u2014three-plus months before the peace treaty went into effect\u2014the president of South Korea, Rhee Syngman, issued a declaration defining his country\u2019s maritime borders. He described the purpose of this \u201cRhee Line,\u201d which encompassed Takeshima\/Tokdo, as being to protect Korea\u2019s maritime resources, referring in this case primarily to fisheries. On May 23, 1952\u2014roughly a month after Japan regained sovereignty\u2014an official of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed a parliamentary committee that the ministry had approved use of the disputed islands for bombing practice by U.S. forces, the assumption being that this would confirm Japanese sovereignty over the disputed islets. B-29s operating out of Okinawa had in fact used Takeshima\/Tokdo as a target as early as 1948, but in practice South Korea succeeded in enforcing the Rhee Line by imposing control over the area with its coast guard. The restoration of relations between Japan and South Korea in 1965 did not resolve the sovereignty issue, although an accompanying fisheries agreement eliminated the Rhee Line, under which South Korea had seized hundreds of Japanese fishing vessels in the intervening years.8<\/sup><\/p>\n The Senkaku\/Diaoyu dispute involving China and Japan that erupted with alarming intensity in 2012 involves a small cluster of islets and rocks in the East China Sea, situated between Okinawa and Taiwan and often collectively described in the media as \u201cbarren rocks.\u201d Here, the territorial issue is entangled not only with the \u201ctwo Japans\u201d legacy of the San Francisco settlement, but also with \u201chistory issues\u201d that date back to the end of the nineteenth century. Japan first laid formal claim to these islands in 1895, following its crushing victory in the first Sino-Japanese War.<\/p>\n Taiwan was the great territorial prize extracted from defeated China in 1895. Although Japan acquired nearby Senkaku\/Diaoyu that same year, it did not do so as part of its war spoils. Rather, after declaring these uninhabited rocks to be terra nullius<\/i>, or \u201cland belonging to no one,\u201d Japan simply annexed them. They were treated thereafter as part of Okinawa Prefecture\u2014and passed into U.S. hands as such after World War II. The Americans used them for occasional bombing practice. When the United States returned sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan in 1972, Senkaku\/Diaoyu was included\u2014albeit under protest from both the PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan.<\/p>\n In late December 2012 a Chinese-language memorandum surfaced in Beijing that suggests the territorial issue might well have been resolved without great difficulty if the PRC had been able to participate in the peace settlement. Dated May 15, 1950\u2014before the Korean War, and at a time when China apparently still anticipated being invited to the peace conference\u2014this ten-page memorandum used the Japanese rather than Chinese name (that is, characters) for the islands and reflected ambiguity concerning their sovereignty. At one point the islands were explicitly identified as part of the Ryukyus, but elsewhere in the memo it was noted that their proximity to Taiwan required further examination.9<\/sup><\/p>\n In theory, the Treaty of Peace with Japan that came into effect in 1952 restored all territories seized by Japan between 1895 and the end of World War II to the nations to whom they originally belonged. As the 1950 Chinese memo indicated, the point at issue is whether the Senkaku\/Diaoyu islands are properly regarded as part of Okinawa or part of Taiwan\u2014and in the 1970s, when Japan and the PRC established formal relations, it was tacitly acknowledged that this question was too complicated to be resolved at that time. In preparatory talks for reconciliation in 1972, Zhou Enlai told a Japanese politician, \u201cThere is no need to mention the Diaoyu Islands. It does not count [as] a problem of any sort compared to recovering normal relations.\u201d Six years later, when the two countries signed a formal peace treaty, they reached a verbal agreement to postpone discussing the issue. Chinese records quote Deng Xiaoping, the PRC\u2019s supreme leader, as telling Japan\u2019s foreign minister that issues involving the Diaoyu Islands and continental shelf \u201ccan be set aside to be calmly discussed later and we can slowly reach a way that both sides can accept. If our generation cannot find a way, the next generation or the one after that will find a way.\u201d In his extraordinarily successful October 1978 goodwill tour of Japan\u2014the first such visit ever by a Chinese leader\u2014Deng said the same thing in response to a journalist\u2019s question at a huge press conference in Tokyo. The militant confrontations of 2012 made clear that such optimism was misplaced.10<\/sup><\/p>\n The fourth \u201cisland\u201d dispute, the greatest of all, pre-dates the San Francisco conference but was integral to the very essence of the separate peace\u2014namely, the separation of Taiwan from the People\u2019s Republic of China. This blunt Cold War intrusion into sovereign affairs can be dated precisely to June 27, 1950, two days after the outbreak of the Korean War, when the United States dispatched its Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to prevent the Chinese Communists from consolidating their victory. The bilateral \u201ctreaty of Taipei,\u201d which the United States forced Japan to conclude with the government on Taiwan on April 28, 1952, reinforced this intervention. In the eyes of the PRC, this amounted to perpetuating the dismemberment of Chinese territory: first, by Japan\u2019s seizure of Taiwan among its spoils of war in 1895 and, now, by Japan and the United States collaborating to thwart Taiwan\u2019s return to China.<\/p>\n Although the United States and Japan both recognized the government in Beijing as the sole government of \u201cone China\u201d when relations with the PRC were established in 1972, this did not alter a major premise of U.S.-Japan military planning under the San Francisco System. To the present day, Pentagon projections have consistently emphasized the threat of conflict between the PRC and Taiwan\u2014and, conversely, China\u2019s accelerated military modernization focuses strongly on deterring U.S. intervention should such conflict arise.<\/p>\n The fifth territorial dispute left unresolved at the 1951 peace conference in San Francisco involves the sparsely populated Spratly and Paracel islands (plus the Scarborough Shoal) in the South China Sea, a strategically situated area that in the late-1960s was discovered to be rich in oil and natural gas. Here, sovereignty claims by China were put forth in the late 1940s\u2014first by the Nationalist government and then by the Communists\u2014in the form of a sweeping \u201cnine-dash-line\u201d on a maritime map. This claim is challenged by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei.<\/p>\n At the request of France, which still maintained a colonial presence in Vietnam, the peace treaty signed in San Francisco included a clause stating \u201cJapan renounces all right, title and claim to the Spratly Islands and to the Paracel Islands.\u201d Although China\u2019s claim was deliberately ignored, the treaty did not specify to whom the islands belonged. In the words of the leading historian of territorial disputes stemming from the San Francisco conference, this ambiguity left one more potential \u201cwedge\u201d against China, creating a source of future conflict that it was anticipated would \u201cconveniently serve to contain communism\u201d in Asia.11<\/sup><\/p>\n 3. U.S. Bases<\/i><\/p>\n The original professed rationale for maintaining an extensive network of U.S. military bases in Japan\u2014as elsewhere throughout the world\u2014was defense against a perceived threat of communist aggression directed by Moscow. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States vacated around sixty percent of its overseas bases. Following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, it constructed many hundreds of new facilities in the Middle East, before dismantling most of them as it prepared for withdrawal in the 2010s. Still, America\u2019s worldwide \u201cempire of bases\u201d is today more extensive than ever before. U.S. military personnel are stationed in around 150 foreign countries, and reasonable estimates place the total number of overseas U.S. military sites at over 1,000\u2014some of them enormous, some of them small, and increasing numbers of them secret and engaged in covert activities.12<\/sup><\/p>\n U.S. bases in Japan must be seen in this larger context. They are rooted in the occupation of Japan and the ensuing Cold War, with their ongoing presence being formalized in the 1951 security treaty and subsequent bilateral agreements. At the same time, they are but one small part of an American military empire that has taken on a new post-Cold War momentum. In current scenarios, China is a major projected enemy.<\/p>\n From the outset, maintaining a military presence in Japan has served three purposes in the eyes of American planners. First and foremost, it provides an offshore staging area close to continental Asia and Russia. Second, and little remembered today, this presence ensures control over Japan should the country ever be inclined to revert to a more autonomous and militaristic course. (This argument was often heard in the 1950s, when many Americans and other foreigners had reservations about Japan\u2019s trustworthiness. It resurfaced in the early 1970s, when the United States normalized relations with China.) Third, and most popular among supporters of the bases, the stationing of U.S. forces in and around Japan contributes\u2014as stated in Article 1 of the 1951 security treaty\u2014\u201cto the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without.\u201d<\/p>\n In the wake of the \u201c3-11\u201d disaster of 2011, when Japan\u2019s T\u00c5\u008dhoku region was stricken by an earthquake and tsunami, followed by nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, U.S. forces in Japan assumed a new and highly praised role by providing emergency aid and humanitarian relief. Codenamed \u201cOperation Tomodachi\u201d (Operation Friend), this involved input from bases situated throughout the country.<\/p>\n In practice, the most conspicuous use of the bases has been to support U.S. combat operations outside Japan. They were a major staging area for the air war against Korea, where U.S. warplanes dropped more tonnage of bombs than in the air raids that devastated Japan in 1945. (General Curtis Le May, who commanded the firebombing of Japan before moving on to Korea, later observed, \u201cWe burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both<\/i>\u2026. we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue.\u201d) Between 1965 and 1972, this use of bases in Japan for deadly combat elsewhere was repeated against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos\u2014where U.S. forces dropped more than seven million tons of bombs, well over twice the total tonnage dropped by U.S. and British forces in the European and Asian theaters combined in World War II. Bases in Japan, particularly in Okinawa, also have been used to support the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although not for launching bombing missions per se.13<\/sup><\/p>\n Preserving the peace in Asia and the Pacific through multinational security agreements is obviously an essential endeavor, but past experience under the Pax Americana indicates how destructive this may become in actual practice. It is not plausible that Japan\u2019s hypothetical enemies\u2014the Soviet Union and China in the Cold War, China and North Korea today\u2014have ever really posed a serious threat of unprovoked armed attack on Japan, as the rhetoric in the original security treaty implies. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the continued presence of the bases ensures that in the future, as in the past, Japan will have no choice but to become a participant in America\u2019s global military policies and practices, even where these may prove to be unwise and even reckless.<\/p>\n 4. Rearmament<\/i><\/p>\n When the U.S.-Japan security treaty was signed in 1951, it was clear to both sides that Japan\u2019s commitment to rearm was unconstitutional. In 1946, when the new \u201cpeace constitution\u201d was being debated in the Diet, Prime Minister Yoshida responded to a question about Article 9 and the charter\u2019s \u201cno war\u201d provisions by declaring that this prohibited any remilitarization whatsoever, even in the name of self-defense. As late as January 1950, Yoshida was still talking about \u201cthe right of self-defense without force of arms\u201d\u2014vividly evoking an old samurai image to clarify that this meant \u201cself-defense which does not employ even two swords.\u201d<\/p>\n The United States began pressuring Yoshida to begin rearming Japan even before the outbreak of the Korean War. When that conflict erupted on June 25, 1950, rearmament was in fact initiated. The United States envisioned deploying Japanese ground forces in Korea, and pushed for extremely rapid remilitarization. Yoshida\u2019s policy, by contrast, was to go slow. When the bilateral security treaty endorsing Japanese rearmament was signed, it was with the understanding on both sides that this commitment to rearm was legally precarious and would require constitutional revision in the near future.14<\/sup><\/p>\n Neither Washington nor the conservative government in Tokyo anticipated that popular support for the anti-militarist ideals embodied in Article 9 would block constitutional revision once Japan regained its independence, and would continue to do so for decades to come. The ensuing debate has rattled Japanese politics for over six decades. Failure to revise the constitution has not prevented the government from engaging in \u201crevision by reinterpretation\u201d and creating a technologically advanced military with a continually redefined mission. At the same time, the constitution has retained sufficient influence to place restraints on both the weaponry these \u201cself-defense forces\u201d can acquire and the missions in which they can participate (such as supporting the United States and United Nations militarily in overseas conflicts).<\/p>\n The constitutional crisis is the most widely discussed outcome of Japan\u2019s legally dubious rearmament, but it is not the only problematic legacy of this aspect of the San Francisco System. Rearmament has two additional ramifications. First, like the military bases in Japan, it locks Japan into U.S. tactical planning and strategic policy. Second, it goes hand in hand with downplaying, sanitizing, and denying what the Japanese military actually did in its earlier incarnation, when the emperor\u2019s soldiers and sailors ran amok in Asia.<\/p>\n Supporters of revising the constitution to remove restrictions on rearmament argue that this will enable Japan to become a \u201cnormal nation,\u201d to participate in international peace-keeping operations under the auspices of the United Nations, and to develop an autonomous capability to defend itself. In fact, the more Japan rearms, the more it will be placed under irresistible pressure to make ever more substantial contributions to America\u2019s war-fighting activities.<\/p>\n 5. \u201cHistory Issues\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n The link between rearming Japan and decontaminating the nation\u2019s past becomes clear when we recall how little time elapsed between Japan\u2019s defeat and the inauguration of the San Francisco System. Yesterday\u2019s militaristic enemy was being rehabilitated as today\u2019s peace-loving ally\u2014while at the same time, yesterday\u2019s World War II ally China was demonized as part of a \u201cRed menace\u201d that threatened world peace. Promoting rearmament dictated playing down Japan\u2019s transgressions and China\u2019s victimization\u2014not only in Japan, but also in the United States and internationally.<\/p>\n This sanitization of imperial Japan\u2019s conduct began before the San Francisco conference. The U.S.-led war crimes trials conducted in Tokyo between mid 1946 and the end of 1948, for example, suppressed atrocities that would poison relations between Japan and its Chinese and Korean neighbors when exposed decades later. One of these crimes was the murderous medical experiments conducted on prisoners by the imperial army\u2019s \u201cUnit 731\u201d in Harbin. Another was the abduction of women, mostly Koreans, who were forced to provide sexual services as \u201ccomfort women\u201d (ianfu<\/i>) to the imperial forces. Once the Tokyo trials of high-ranking \u201cClass A\u201d defendants ended in November 1948, moreover, further investigation of war crimes and prosecution of accused high-level war criminals was terminated.<\/p>\n In an ideal world, the 1951 peace conference might have been an occasion for forthright historical summation and engagement with issues of war responsibility. Instead, the San Francisco settlement did not just exclude the two countries most deserving of apology and redress, China and Korea, but also became an occasion for spinning history and encouraging amnesia. In the favorite adjective of official Washington, the San Francisco treaty was to be a \u201cgenerous\u201d peace. When participating countries such as Britain and Canada recommended that the peace treaty include \u201csome kind of war guilt clause,\u201d the Americans opposed this idea.15<\/sup><\/p>\n The separate peace did not just endorse exclusion over overall reconciliation and leave the deepest wounds of imperialism and war unaddressed. In Japan, the San Francisco settlement also paved the way for the return of politicians and bureaucrats who had been purged for militarist activities during the occupation and in some cases even arrested for war crimes. By 1957, the prime minister was a former accused (but never indicted) war criminal, Kishi Nobusuke; when the U.S.-Japan security treaty came up for revision and renewal in 1960, it was Kishi who rammed this through the Diet in the face of massive popular protests. (In the final month of 2012, in the midst of the intensifying Senkaku\/Diaoyu crisis, Kishi\u2019s right-wing grandson Abe Shinz\u00c5\u008d assumed the premiership for a second time and immediately announced a renewed campaign to promote patriotism and challenge the alleged war crimes of his grandfather\u2019s generation.)<\/p>\n Coupled with the many years that elapsed before Japan established formal relations with South Korea and China, the return to power in the 1950s of a largely unrepentant old guard ensured that troublesome history issues would be passed on to later generations. Still, the joint communiqu\u00e9 that restored diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC in 1972 did state that \u201cThe Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself.\u201d Twenty-six years later, in 1998, another Sino-Japanese declaration of friendship and cooperation similarly included a paragraph emphasizing the importance of \u201csquarely facing the past and correctly understanding history,\u201d in which, for the first time, the Japanese government endorsed characterization of Japan\u2019s actions \u201cduring a certain period in the past\u201d as \u201caggression.\u201d16<\/sup><\/p>\n The anomaly of the \u201chistory problem\u201d that blights present-day relations between Japan on the one hand and Korea as well as China on the other is that uses and abuses of the recent past became hugely contentious only after diplomatic ties were belatedly established. Reconciliation and the cultivation of constructive relations went hand in hand with intensification, rather than dissolution, of strident nationalism on all sides. There have been many official Japanese apologies to China and Korea since the 1970s. These expressions of remorse, however, have been undercut with almost metronomic regularity by the whitewashing and outright denial by prominent politicians and influential individuals and organizations of imperial Japan\u2019s overseas aggression and oppression.<\/p>\n The escalating Sino-Japanese clash over history issues unfolded in often jarringly tandem steps. Conclusion of a formal peace treaty between Japan and the PRC in 1978, for example, coincided with the secret enshrinement of fourteen Japanese convicted of Class A war crimes in Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the souls of those who fought on behalf of the emperor; they were entered in the shrine\u2019s register as \u201cmartyrs of Sh\u00c5\u008dwa\u201d (Sh\u00c5\u008dwa junnansha<\/i>). Visits to Yasukuni by politicians first precipitated intense domestic as well as international controversy when Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro and members of his cabinet visited the shrine in an official capacity on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1985\u2014which, as it happened, was the same year the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall opened in China. As time passed, Chinese fixation on Japan\u2019s wartime aggression and atrocities grew exponentially at every level of expression, from museums to mass media to street protests\u2014while conservative and right-wing denials of war crimes grew apace in Japan.<\/p>\n In part (but only part), \u201chistory\u201d became more contested after Japan normalized relations with China and South Korea for a simple reason: interest in the recent past was rekindled on all sides, and historical resources became more accessible. The best scholarship on Japanese war crimes and war responsibility\u2014concerning the Nanjing Massacre, criminal experiments of Unit 731, exploitation of non-Japanese ianfu<\/i>, etc.\u2014dates from the 1970s and after. This investigative work, much of it by Japanese scholars and journalists, was provocative by nature. It triggered patriotic rebuttals in Japan and rage outside Japan. It was tinder for nationalistic sentiments already on the rise on all sides\u2014and grist, as well, for political leaders preoccupied primarily with domestic problems and audiences.<\/p>\n At the same time, it is hardly a coincidence that, in both Japan and China, burgeoning nationalism rode on the back of burgeoning economic growth. In Japan\u2019s case, the pride and hubris that accompanied the so-called economic miracle of the 1970s and 1980s spilled over into patriotic campaigns to erase the stigma of the \u201cTokyo war crimes trial view of history\u201d (a favorite right-wing pejorative phrase). In China, the turn to capitalism introduced by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978 displaced prior fixation on Marxism and Maoism and left an ideological gap filled with a new nationalism focusing on victimization by foreign powers, Japan foremost among them. In the several decades following establishment of the PRC in 1949, Communist propaganda had much to say about the military threat posed by the United States and Japan, but relatively little to say about historical grievances against Japan. That changed abruptly after the brief period of amity and goodwill that accompanied reconciliation in the 1970s.17<\/sup><\/p>\n In both China and Japan, this convergence of history and nationalism has turned \u201cmemory\u201d into propaganda and \u201chistory issues\u201d into history wars that have no end in sight. Denunciation versus<\/i> denial of Japanese war crimes has become a multi-directional and almost ritualistic cycle. In Japan, cleansing the past is integral to attempts to inflate a waning spirit of national pride. In China, manipulating history involves an even more convoluted domestic dynamic. Repetitious attacks on both Japan\u2019s war crimes and its alleged post-war failure to show genuine contrition do more than just pump up patriotic ardor. These attacks also provide a distraction from domestic problems and grievances. At the same time, lambasting historical sanitization by the Japanese diverts attention from the PRC\u2019s own top-down historical sanitization concerning crimes against the Chinese people inflicted after 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party itself.18<\/sup><\/p>\n 6. The \u201cNuclear Umbrella\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n In becoming incorporated in the San Francisco System, Japan placed itself under the U.S. \u201cnuclear umbrella.\u201d This is a seductive euphemism\u2014suggesting that in American hands nuclear weapons are purely defensive. By contrast, the Soviet Union\u2019s acquisition of nuclear weapons, following its successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949,<\/p>\n was portrayed as provocative and threatening. The same perception was extended to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by China and North Korea (first tested in 1964 and 2006. respectively).<\/p>\n It is challenging to sort out the quirks and contradictions in this \u201cumbrella\u201d argument. The United States was, and remains, the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war; and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was in a unique position to bear testimony to the abomination of such weapons. When the San Francisco System was being assembled, however, there existed no significant anti-nuclear movement in Japan. Until 1949, U.S. occupation authorities had censored writings or visuals about the atomic-bomb experience, out of fear this could provoke anti-Americanism and public unrest. Only marginal public attention was given the subject thereafter, until the occupation ended. Astonishingly, the first serious selection of photographs published in Japan of the two stricken cities appeared in a magazine dated August 6, 1952\u2014the seventh anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and over three months after the peace treaty came into effect. Essentially, the Japanese government took shelter under the \u201cnuclear umbrella\u201d before the Japanese people had seriously confronted the horror of their own nuclear experience.19<\/sup><\/p>\n At the same time, however, it was known well before the San Francisco conference that U.S. planners were considering using nuclear weapons in the Korean War. President Harry S. Truman caused an international uproar when he refused to rule out using atomic bombs in a press conference on November 30, 1950, following China\u2019s all-out intervention in the conflict two days earlier. Subsequent fears (and premonitions of \u201cWorld War III\u201d) did not go away. We now know that nuclear scenarios were seriously discussed at various levels within the U.S. government and military from an early date. On July 24, 1950, almost exactly one month after the war began, for example, General Douglas MacArthur anticipated that Chinese intervention would create \u201ca unique use for the atomic bomb.\u201d Five months later, shortly after Truman\u2019s inflammatory press conference, MacArthur actually submitted a plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that projected using thirty-four atomic bombs in Korea. By the end of March 1951, at the height of the conflict, atomic-bomb loading pits had been made operational at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, lacking only the nuclear cores for the bombs. The following month, in a significant departure from previous policy, the U.S. military temporarily transferred complete atomic weapons to Guam.20<\/sup><\/p>\n The most harrowing contingency study involving bases in Japan took place in late September and early October of 1951, a few weeks after the peace conference in San Francisco. Codenamed \u201cOperation Hudson Harbor,\u201d this secret operation involved flights of B-29s operating out of Kadena and carrying out simulated nuclear attacks on targets in Korea. These trial flights, which did not actually carry atomic bombs, were coordinated from Yokota Air Base, near metropolitan Tokyo.21<\/sup><\/p>\n Although the possibility that America might use nuclear weapons against its latest Asian enemies (China as well as North Korea) was alarming, anti-nuclear sentiment did not gain widespread support in Japan until almost two years after the country regained sovereignty. The catalyst for this popular opposition was the Bikini Incident, in which fallout from a U.S. thermonuclear (hydrogen bomb) test on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, irradiated over 7,000 square miles in the mid-Pacific. The destructive force of the Bikini explosion was roughly 1,000 times that of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima. Contrary to U.S. denials, radioactive fallout was extensive. And this fallout quickly took on an intimately human dimension when it became known that ashes from the explosion had rained down on the twenty-three-man crew of a Japanese tuna-fishing vessel named Daigo Fukury\u00c5\u00abmaru <\/i>(Lucky Dragon #5), which was outside the danger zone declared by the United States in advance of the test. The entire crew was hospitalized with symptoms of radiation sickness upon returning to Japan, and the ship\u2019s radio operator died over half a year later, on September 23, 1954.<\/p>\n The Bikini Incident precipitated the greatest crisis in Japan-U.S. relations since World War II. Public concern over the plight of the fishermen was compounded by fear that fish caught in the Pacific were contaminated, and these concerns in turn spilled into outrage at dismissive or deceptive responses by U.S. officials. By mid 1955, a nationwide petition campaign to ban hydrogen bombs had garnered tens of millions of signatures, and a spectrum of grassroots organizations had coalesced to form Japan\u2019s first anti-nuclear organization.22<\/sup><\/p>\n The emergence of this anti-nuclear movement coincided with the secret intensification of U.S. nuclear deployments in the Asia-Pacific area. In December 1954, the United States introduced \u201ccomplete nuclear weapons\u201d in Okinawa for the first time, and simultaneously approved introducing \u201cnon-nuclear components\u201d (bomb casings or assemblies capable of being quickly nuclearized) to bases elsewhere in Japan. In the years immediately following, military planners in Washington gave serious thought to using these nuclear weapons against China on at least three occasions: in September 1954, during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis; in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, which erupted in August 1958; and during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when Mace nuclear missiles in Okinawa were placed on a fifteen-minute nuclear alert.23<\/sup><\/p>\n Between 1954 and the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese administration in 1972, nineteen different types of nuclear weapons were stored there, mostly at Kadena Air Base and probably totaling close to 1,000 at any given time. At the request of the Japanese government, these were removed when reversion took place. The nuclear-ready \u201cnon-nuclear components\u201d on bases elsewhere in Japan appear to have been removed in 1965, but this did not prevent the U.S. military from bringing nuclear weapons into Japan. In 1981, former ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer caused a commotion by acknowledging what he himself regarded as common knowledge: that nuclear-armed U.S. warships regularly entered Japanese waters and ports.24<\/sup><\/p>\n In the aftermath of the Bikini Incident, supporters of the \u201cnuclear umbrella\u201d in and outside Japan lost no time in mounting a multi-front offensive. Then and thereafter, the anti-nuclear movement was both castigated as being manipulated by hardcore communists and belittled as reflecting a \u201cpathologically sensitive\u201d victim consciousness. This is when the pejorative term \u201cnuclear allergy\u201d became attached to the Japanese\u2014as if loving the bomb were healthy, and fearing and deploring it a kind of sickness. At the same time, the United States launched an intense campaign to divert attention from the nuclear arms race by promoting the peaceful use of atomic energy throughout Japan. The success of this \u201catoms for peace\u201d crusade became widely recognized over a half century later, when the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011 highlighted the country\u2019s great dependence on nuclear energy. The Fukushima disaster also served as a reminder of the extent to which Japan\u2019s advanced nuclear technology has made it a \u201cparanuclear state\u201d or \u201cvirtual nuclear weapons state,\u201d with extensive stockpiles of separated plutonium that make it capable of transitioning to the development of nuclear weapons within a year or so should a decision be made to do so.25<\/sup><\/p>\n From the 1950s on, Japan\u2019s conservative leaders have been caught between a rock and a hard place where nuclear policy is concerned. Beginning in the 1960s, they responded to domestic opposition to nuclear weapons with several grand gestures designed to associate the government itself with the ideal of nuclear disarmament. These included the highly publicized \u201cthree non-nuclear principles\u201d introduced by Prime Minister Sat\u00c5\u008d Eisaku in 1967 and endorsed in a Diet resolution four years later (pledging not to possess or manufacture nuclear weapons, or permit their introduction into Japanese territory). Japan signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 (ratifying it in 1976), and Sat\u00c5\u008d shared the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear performances.<\/p>\n At the same time, however, living under the nuclear umbrella has engendered secrecy, duplicity, and unflagging Japanese subservience to U.S. nuclear policy. In the wake of the Bikini Incident, and for years thereafter, Japanese officials accompanied the government\u2019s public expressions of concern over U.S. thermonuclear tests with private assurances to their American counterparts that these should be understood as merely \u201ca sop to the opposition parties in the Diet and \u2026 primarily for domestic consumption.\u201d Their public protests, they explained confidentially, were just \u201cgoing through the motions.\u201d26<\/sup><\/p>\n When the mutual security treaty was renewed under Prime Minister Kishi in 1960, a secret addendum (dating from 1959) referred to consultation between the two governments concerning \u201cthe introduction into Japan of nuclear weapons including intermediate and long-range missiles, as well as the construction of bases for such weapons.\u201d27<\/sup> Similarly, the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 was accompanied by a prior secret agreement between Sat\u00c5\u008d and President Richard Nixon (in November 1969), stating that the United States could reintroduce nuclear weapons in Okinawa in case of emergency, and also sanctioning \u201cthe standby retention and activation in time of great emergency of existing nuclear storage locations in Okinawa: Kadena, Naha, Henoko and Nike Hercules units.\u201d28<\/sup><\/p>\n On various occasions during and after the Cold War, influential Japanese politicians and officials have made clear\u2014sometimes privately and frequently publicly\u2014that they themselves do not suffer any \u201cnuclear allergy.\u201d In May 1957, for example, Prime Minister Kishi told a parliamentary committee that the constitution did not bar possession of nuclear weapons \u201cfor defensive purposes.\u201d Four years later, in a November 1961 meeting with the U.S. secretary of state, Kishi\u2019s successor Ikeda Hayato wondered out loud whether Japan should possess its own nuclear arsenal. (He was told that the United States opposed nuclear proliferation.) In December 1964, two months after China tested its first atomic bomb, Prime Minister Sat\u00c5\u008d informed the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo that Japan might develop nuclear weapons. A month later, Sat\u00c5\u008d told the U.S. secretary of state that if war broke out with China, Japan expected the United States to retaliate immediately with nuclear weapons. Despite having signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, moreover, Japanese politicians and planners have secretly examined the feasibility of Japan acquiring tactical nuclear weapons. Over the course of recent decades, various conservative politicians and officials have publicly stated that this would be constitutionally permissible and strategically desirable.29<\/sup><\/p>\n Lost in these charades\u2014and probably lost forever\u2014has been the opportunity for Japan to build on its own tragic nuclear experience and move beyond rhetoric and token \u201cmotions\u201d to take a vigorous leading role in promoting nuclear arms control and ultimate abolition.<\/p>\n Lost, too, is any apparent concern that what American and Japanese supporters of the nuclear umbrella present as \u201cdeterrence\u201d is, in the eyes of the targets of this arsenal, threatening and provocative.<\/p>\n 7. Containment of China and Japan\u2019s Deflection from Asia<\/i><\/p>\n It is perhaps inevitable that, nearly seventy years after World War II, Japan and China have still failed to establish what might be called, idealistically, deep peace. Beginning with the intrusion of the Western powers into East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the respective experiences of the two nations could hardly have been more different. To contemporary Chinese, the narrative of their nation\u2019s modern times is in great part a story of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. In each and every retelling, moreover, it is made clear exactly when this began: in 1840, with the country\u2019s shattering defeat in the First Opium War and the subsequent imposition of unequal treaties by Great Britain and other Western imperialist powers.<\/p>\n Japan\u2019s response to the Western challenge, by contrast, was in the terms of the times a resounding success, in which rapid \u201cWesternization\u201d was carried out under such provocative slogans as \u201cthrowing off Asia.\u201d The signal event in this putative success took place in 1895, when Japan joined the imperialist camp by crushing China in the first Sino-Japanese War, imposing its own unequal treaty on the defeated foe and acquiring Taiwan as its first colony. (Korea was annexed in 1910.) In the larger global arena, the spoils of war for Japan included being treated as a great power. Imperial Japan\u2019s subsequent depredations in China up to 1945 rested on this 1895 base. In theory, the 1951 San Francisco peace settlement took 1895 as its chronological demarcation point for stripping Japan of an ill-begotten empire and restoring its parts to their rightful sovereigns.30<\/sup><\/p>\n The humiliation of being defeated, dismembered, invaded, and occupied by Japan between 1895 and 1945 has not been expunged in China, and never will be. Nor, on the other hand, has the arrogance of a one-time conqueror (and erstwhile pre-war successful Westernizer as well as post-war economic superpower) been dispelled from Japan. Deeply discordant historical narratives, kept alive by the potent machinery of manipulated memory, thus blight contemporary Sino-Japanese relations in especially harmful ways. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that the historical humiliation that fuels contemporary Chinese nationalism extends beyond Japan to include the Western powers.<\/p>\n The piling up of historical grievance did not, of course, end for China with Japan\u2019s defeat in World War II or the Communist victory in 1949. Rather, it was compounded by the exclusion of the PRC from the 1951 peace conference and Japan\u2019s subsequent incorporation in the policy of non-recognition and \u201ccontainment\u201d mandated by Washington. For two decades, ending only in 1972, Japan was deflected from the Asian continent and wrapped in the embrace of its new American partner. The Cold War mindset welcomed and encouraged protracted hostility between Japan and China. Reconciliation and healing were thwarted, while trends detrimental to the process of coming to terms with the past were given time and space to take root.<\/p>\n The proclaimed premise of Washington\u2019s containment policy was elemental. An America-led \u201cfree world\u201d confronted a monolithic communist bloc directed by Moscow. China was but a puppet or satellite of the Soviet Union. And Japan, with its potential to become again the \u201cworkshop\u201d of Asia (like West Germany in Europe), could tip the global balance of power if allowed to interact closely with the communist side of this bipolar divide.31<\/sup><\/p>\n Less openly acknowledged, another premise behind detaching Japan from China was racist, and entailed exploiting the old \u201cthrowing off Asia\u201d mentality. John Foster Dulles, who choreographed the drafting of the peace and security treaties (before later becoming secretary of state), conveyed this in a confidential conversation with a British diplomat in Tokyo in January 1951, in which he called attention to how \u201cthe Japanese people have felt a certain superiority as against the Asiatic mainland masses,\u201d and consequently \u201cwould like to feel that they belong to, or are accepted by, the Western nations.\u201d (The two Anglo diplomats also referred to affiliation with \u201can elite Anglo-Saxon Club.\u201d) Less than six years after the end of an atrocious war, Japan\u2019s recent enemy was envisioning a partnership based on a fusion of Caucasian supremacy with Japan\u2019s warped envy of the West and contempt for other Asians.32<\/sup><\/p>\n For largely practical reasons, many Japanese conservatives disagreed with the Manichaean outlook that set Japan against China; where Japan was concerned, the containment policy was never watertight. Between 1952 and 1972, a modest level of trade took place between the two nations, as well as exchanges involving non-governmental or semi-official political, cultural, business, and labor delegations. At the same time, Japan was inhibited from restoring diplomatic relations with Beijing or recognizing the Communist government as the sole government of China.<\/p>\n This changed dramatically in July 1971, when President Richard Nixon unexpectedly announced that the United States was abandoning containment and that he would soon visit the PRC. America\u2019s volte-face<\/i> shocked the world and caused particular bitterness in Japan, where the government was informed of the new policy fifteen minutes in advance of Nixon\u2019s announcement. Such public humiliation replicated the cavalier manner in which Japan had been forced to participate in the containment of China two decades earlier\u2014only now the spin was in the opposite direction. Nixon\u2019s rapprochement with China paved the way for restoration of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations in 1972.<\/p>\n The full significance of this abandonment of the containment policy lay in its confluence with other developments. These included not only the winding down of the Vietnam War and restoration of Okinawa to Japanese administration, but also early harbingers of Japan\u2019s \u201ceconomic miracle\u201d and the uncertain effect this might have on Japanese remilitarization. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who laid the groundwork for rapprochement in top-secret talks with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in 1971, informed Nixon that \u201cfear of revived Japanese militarism was a major theme throughout our discussions.\u201d This same theme carried over to the president\u2019s own conversations with Zhou in Beijing the following year. Had Japan\u2019s leaders been privy to these exchanges, the mortification they experienced upon being given only a few minutes\u2019 advance notice that Nixon would visit China would have seemed negligible by comparison.33<\/sup><\/p>\n As conveyed by Zhou, the PRC feared that Japan\u2019s economic boom was bound to lead to expansion abroad, which in turn would inevitably be accompanied by military expansion\u2014especially given \u201ctheir tradition of militaristic thinking.\u201d At one point, Zhou referred to Japan as a \u201cwild horse,\u201d making clear that the PRC was particularly apprehensive that Japanese military forces might in the near future be dispatched to Taiwan and South Korea. What China wished to see was abrogation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty and Japan\u2019s reversion to a position of unarmed neutrality.<\/p>\n Kissinger and Nixon rejected this unrealistic scenario not by dismissing fears of a resurgent Japanese militarism as irrational, but rather by arguing that (in Kissinger\u2019s words) \u201cparadoxically, the presence of US troops on Japan helped to restrain the Japanese rather than the reverse.\u201d As Nixon put it, continuing the U.S.-Japan defense relationship \u201ccan restrain Japan from following a course which the Prime Minister correctly pointed out could happen, of economic expansion being followed by military expansion\u2026. If we don\u2019t have that close relationship they aren\u2019t going to pay any attention to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Such frank acknowledgment that a basic rationale for U.S. bases in Japan was to exercise control over the Japanese was embellished with other statements that would also have made Japan\u2019s faithful pro-American leaders cringe. Kissinger argued that Japanese neutralism \u201cwould probably take a virulent nationalist form,\u201d while Nixon agreed that, without the U.S. defense partnership, the Japanese as a people, given their \u201cdrive and a history of expansionism,\u201d would be \u201csusceptible to the demands of the militarists.\u201d At one point, in responding to Zhou\u2019s expressed concerns, Kissinger delivered an extended indictment of the Japanese national character. He observed that \u201cChina\u2019s philosophical view had been generally global while Japan\u2019s had been traditionally tribal,\u201d described Japan as a nation \u201csubject to sudden explosive changes,\u201d and declared that the Americans \u201chad no illusions about Japanese impulses and the imperatives of their economic expansion.\u201d When Zhou opined that the U.S. nuclear umbrella tended to make Japan more aggressive toward others, Kissinger declared that the alternative was \u201cmuch more dangerous. There was no question that if we withdrew our umbrella they would very rapidly build nuclear weapons.\u201d Absent the restraint of the bilateral security treaty and U.S. bases in Japan, there was no way of predicting what Japan might do beyond near certainty that it would be destabilizing.<\/p>\n The Americans won this argument hands down, to the extent that the PRC subsequently ceased to criticize the U.S.-Japan security relationship. Even as America\u2019s highest officials were endorsing Chinese mistrust of Japan, Japan and the PRC were separately working out their own joint declaration of reconciliation. In this honeymoon period of U.S.-Japan-PRC rapprochement, shared strategic preoccupation with the Soviet Union helped persuade the three nations to submerge their prior antagonism.34<\/sup><\/p>\n Formally, the reconciliation of Japan and China was affirmed in four joint documents between 1972 and 2008. These pronouncements created and reinforced a bilateral relationship under which mutually beneficial exchanges flourished across the board, with particularly spectacular results in areas such as business, commerce, and technology transfer. Despite these declarations of friendship and concrete manifestations of bilateral integration, however, reconciliation remained fragile and deep peace elusive. The ratcheting up of the Senkaku\/Diaoyu islands dispute that took place beginning in September 2012 was the most alarming example of this fragility, but this simply exposed tensions and fissures that had already become apparent in the 1980s, soon after the normalization of relations.35<\/sup><\/p>\n The parallel but contradictory trajectories of genuine Sino-Japanese reconciliation after 1972 on the one hand and, on the other hand, intensified tensions that trace back to creation of the San Francisco System are both dramatic and disturbing. The Senkaku\/Diaoyu dispute is but one example of this. Taiwan is another example. For four decades after Washington and Tokyo recognized \u201cone China\u201d under the sole government of the PRC, Taiwan remains a source of discord and distrust, as the Chinese perceive that neither the United States nor Japan actually desires reunification. On the contrary, much U.S.-Japan joint military planning remains predicated on responding to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.36<\/sup> \u201cContainment of China\u201d is yet another reminder of the linkage between early post-war policy and present-day affairs. In the second decade of the twenty-first century\u2014six decades after the Cold War containment policy was introduced, and four decades after it was ostensibly repudiated as an \u201cabnormal state of affairs\u201d\u2014the air is blue with American and Japanese strategists and pundits warning about a new China threat and calling for a new policy of military containment.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most corrosive deep legacy of mistrust lies in the contention over \u201cwar history\u201d that became so bitter after normalization of relations. Where China is concerned, anti-foreign nationalism was promoted to compensate for the waning of Marxist ideology, as market-oriented reforms gained traction beginning in the 1980s. That Japan became the prime villain in a historical narrative of victimization and humiliation was unsurprising, given its predatory activities in China beginning with the first Sino-Japanese War. This demonization, however, has been abetted in ways beyond measure by the postwar eruption of right-wing nationalism in Japan, in which denial of imperial Japan\u2019s aggression and war crimes plays a central role.<\/p>\n In a convoluted way, Japanese neo-nationalists are driven by much the same mixture of pride and humiliation that propels their Chinese counterparts: pride at throwing off adversity and becoming a post-war superpower, and humiliation, in this case, from seeing their erstwhile holy war turned into a criminal and atrocious undertaking. Much of the conservative retelling of Japan\u2019s war history reflects an attempt to eradicate, or at least diminish, this stain on Japan\u2019s national honor. And much of this revisionism is directed at domestic audiences and a domestic electorate, with scant regard for how negatively it is seen by outsiders.<\/p>\n The onus of defeat, coupled with accusations of criminality, weighs heavily indeed in these circles\u2014more rather than less so as time passes\u2014and this has inflicted Japan with a debilitating malaise. Sanitizing the war years and repeatedly undercutting official apologies and expressions of remorse is widely perceived by others\u2014including not just foreigners, but also many thoughtful Japanese\u2014to be not only dishonest, but also appallingly insensitive to the victims of imperial Japan\u2019s expansion and aggression. Certainly among Chinese and Koreans, this conveys the impression of an utter lack of empathy, identity, responsibility, guilt, or repentance. It suggests that Japan is once again \u201cthrowing off Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n No matter how often and how sincerely Japan and China have pledged to work together for the peace and progress of Asia from the 1970s on\u2014and no matter how great their interactions and economic interdependence have become\u2014what matters most decisively to Japan\u2019s leaders in the final analysis is continuity of the intimate U.S.-Japan relationship.<\/p>\n 8. \u201cSubordinate Independence\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Strategically, materially, and psychologically, Japan\u2019s current status in Asia\u2014and in the world more generally\u2014is riddled with ambiguity. In considerable part this reflects China\u2019s emergence as a major economic power, coupled with the countervailing spectacle of Japan\u2019s relative decline since the 1990s. The labels that were attached to Japan in the 1970s and 1980s\u2014\u201ceconomic superpower,\u201d \u201cmiracle,\u201d \u201cJapan as number one,\u201d and so on\u2014have evaporated where Japan is concerned, but they have not disappeared. They have been more or less transposed to China.<\/p>\n There is a great deal of exaggeration in this role-reversing and relabeling, of course: Japan remains a major power, and China faces daunting economic, political, social, demographic, and environmental challenges. Still, there has been a tectonic shift in stature and influence since the early years of the Cold War, when Americans referred to the Pacific as an \u201cAmerican lake\u201d and Japan was projected as the<\/i> great workshop of Asia. All eyes now focus on China as the mesmerizing rising nation-state in the Asia-Pacific region, and on the uncertain configuration of power politics this portends\u2014especially where the \u201ctriangle\u201d of the United States, China, and Japan is concerned.<\/p>\n This is a lopsided triangle, however, for it is comprised of two indisputably autonomous nations (the United States and China) and a third, Japan, which still lacks genuine independence. This may be the most intractable legacy of the San Francisco System, and it is especially ironic when one considers the original premise of the Cold War containment policy. Global communism was monolithic, it was argued then, and the newly established People\u2019s Republic of China but a puppet or satellite of Moscow. China\u2019s independence has been clear for all to see since the Sino-Soviet split erupted in the early1960s, and no one today could possibly question its autonomy. The same cannot be said of Washington\u2019s \u201cfree world\u201d ally Japan.<\/p>\n Japan\u2019s circumscribed autonomy is inherent in the nature of the U.S.-Japan military relationship. Although the two countries have been at odds on many issues since the San Francisco System was created, especially during the heyday of Japanese economic expansion that began in the 1970s, even the most acrimonious trade disputes were never allowed to disturb the security alliance. With few exceptions, Washington\u2019s basic strategic and foreign policies go unchallenged in Tokyo. Even staunch supporters of the alliance acknowledge that it is \u201cinherently and unavoidably asymmetrical.\u201d Harsher appraisals employ the language of subordination and subservience, arguing that since the end of the Cold War Japan has become an American \u201cclient state\u201d in ever deepening, rather than diminishing, ways.37<\/sup><\/p>\n It can be argued that this unbalanced relationship has brought phenomenal benefits to Japan in the form of peace and prosperity. At the same time, however, it can also be argued that post-war Japan never actually faced a serious external threat from the Soviet Union or so-called Communist bloc, and that the nation\u2019s prosperity derives far more from Japanese efforts than from American patronage. Be that as it may, peace and prosperity for Japan has come at the cost of being a cog in an American war machine that has indeed kept the peace at various times and in various places\u2014but that also has squandered resources, precipitated arms races, flirted with \u201cfirst use\u201d of nuclear weapons, committed atrocities (like targeting civilians and practicing torture), and inflicted enormous destruction and suffering in Korea, Indochina, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Client-state status has also required giving generally unstinting support to less overtly militarized U.S. foreign policies that are often shortsighted and counterproductive. It has inhibited geopolitical flexibility and stifled any real possibility of innovative statesmanship on Japan\u2019s part.<\/p>\n To more than a few Japanese, ranging across the full political spectrum, this protracted patron-client relationship is as \u201cabnormal\u201d as the state of affairs Japan and China repudiated when they restored relations in 1972. To some, this poses basic foreign-policy questions about Japan\u2019s orientation and identity, particularly as an \u201cAsian\u201d power. To others, the root issue is national pride. In conservative and right-wing circles, agitation to become a \u201cnormal\u201d nation focuses on revising the constitution and throwing off constraints on remilitarization. But the notion that accelerated militarization is a path toward more bona fide independence or autonomy is delusory. Japan cannot escape the U.S. military embrace. In fact, the United States desires a more militarized partner, free of constitutional restraints, to support its evolving strategic visions not only in Asia, but globally.<\/p>\n Asymmetry is not exceptional in relations between the United States and its allies. On the contrary, hierarchy is integral to the hegemonic nature of the post-war Pax Americana. Notwithstanding this, it can be argued that no other bilateral relationship between Washington and its allies is more conspicuous and commented-upon in its structural imbalance than the U.S.-Japan relationship. Even among Japanese who accept the fact that wisdom and restraint have often been wanting in post-war U.S. war and peace policies, it is customary to hear the argument that going along with the dictates of Washington is a small price to pay for maintaining the precious friendship that has been forged between the two countries.<\/p>\n Obviously, especially when one recalls the hatreds and horrors of the Pacific War, that friendship is indeed precious. The price paid for this under the San Francisco System, however, has been higher than is usually acknowledged\u2014whether measured by the humiliation of being regarded as a client state, or by Japan\u2019s inability to speak with a truly independent and persuasive voice about matters of war and peace. This is an unfortunate legacy to carry into the second decade of the twenty-first century, when power politics are in flux and talk about an impending \u201cAsian century\u201d is more compelling than ever before.<\/p>\n III. Present Uncertainties <\/b><\/p>\n It is generally acknowledged that the U.S. restoration of relations with China in 1972\u2014coupled with the winding down of the Vietnam War\u2014ushered in almost four decades of uncontested U.S. strategic supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region. In return for Washington recognizing its legitimacy, the Communist government in Beijing dropped its criticism of the U.S.-Japan security alliance and refrained from criticizing or challenging America\u2019s overwhelming military superiority. Shared enmity toward the Soviet Union helped cement this Sino-U.S. agreement. So did U.S. assurances to China that Japan would not, and indeed could not, re-emerge as a major military power so long as the bilateral security treaty was maintained.38<\/sup><\/p>\n This tacit understanding amounted to China\u2019s leaders accepting a gross imbalance of power vis-\u00e0-vis the United States in the Pacific until their country became more prosperous\u2014and prosperity arrived more quickly than anticipated.39<\/sup> Beginning in 1978, reforms introducing capitalist market principles led to annual growth rates averaging around ten percent. In 2008, China surpassed Japan as the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities and became the largest creditor nation in the world. Two years later, the nation\u2019s gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed Japan\u2019s, making China under \u201cstate capitalism\u201d the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Predictions of when China\u2019s GDP would surpass America\u2019s usually look to a mere two decades or so hence\u2014that is, to around 2030.<\/p>\n One outcome of this stupendous growth was increasing interdependence between China and the rest of the world, including the United States and European Union, not just China\u2019s Asian neighbors. China became the world\u2019s biggest recipient of direct foreign investment, as well as its biggest trader. The PRC soon emerged as Japan\u2019s largest trading partner in both exports and imports, while the United States became China\u2019s major export market and its second largest overall trading partner (after the European Union). China\u2019s integration into the global economy seemed to signal a materialization of converging interests that could and would become a sound foundation for future peaceful relations.<\/p>\n By the second decade of the twenty-first century, such shared interests seemed imperiled. Economic globalization was accompanied by China asserting its status as a great power more generally\u2014and these great-power aspirations extended to overturning the modus vivendi <\/i>negotiated forty years earlier and challenging the military status quo. This is the milieu in which so many of the problematic legacies of the San Francisco System resurfaced in disquieting ways\u2014including not just territorial disputes and contested history issues, but also accelerated Japanese remilitarization. The U.S. response to this unsettled and fluid situation has been to engage in new levels of strategic planning aimed at maintaining an unchallenged Pax Americana in the Pacific.<\/p>\n Given the enormous domestic challenges China will face for many decades to come, the goal of its military transformation is not to achieve strategic parity with the United States. That is not feasible. Rather, the primary objective is to create armed forces capable of blunting or deterring America\u2019s projection of power into China\u2019s offshore waters\u2014to develop, that is, a military strong enough to dispel what Henry Kissinger has called China\u2019s \u201cnightmare of military encirclement.\u201d40<\/sup> In military jargon, this mission is referred to as China\u2019s pursuit of \u201canti-access\/area denial\u201d (A2\/AD) capabilities, and the area of particular strategic concern lies within what Chinese (and others) refer to as the \u201cfirst island chain\u201d or \u201cinner island chain,\u201d which includes the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, and South China Sea. Central to this area-denial strategy is developing \u201casymmetric capabilities\u201d that will enable Chinese forces to offset America\u2019s ability to intervene militarily should, for example, a conflict over Taiwan arise.<\/p>\n This accelerated militarization on China\u2019s part reflects more than rising economic clout and assertive nationalism. It is also driven by technological imperatives that escalated to new realms of sophistication when the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 essentially coincided with the takeoff of digital technology and the revolutionary transformation of precision-guided warfare. The so-called asymmetric capabilities under development in China cover a broad range of weaponry: nuclear warheads; 41<\/sup> short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, including a \u201ccarrier-killing\u201d anti-ship ballistic missile (the Dong Feng 21D); long-range cruise missiles; \u201cfourth generation\u201d jet aircraft as well as a \u201cfifth generation\u201d stealth fighter (the Chengdu J-20); missile-carrying submarines, warships, and aircraft; an envisioned albeit still far-distant fleet of aircraft carriers; fiber-optic command and control centers; advanced laser and radar systems; satellite surveillance systems; anti-satellite and cyberwar capabilities; and so on. Should conflict with U.S. forces arise, China\u2019s response presumably would include missile attacks on U.S. bases in Guam and Okinawa (notably Kadena Air Force Base).42<\/sup><\/p>\n Such an agenda of military modernization by a late-arriving power in a new world of high-tech warfare is predictable. Also predictable is the alarm it has provoked among those who take America\u2019s overwhelming military superiority for granted, especially in the United States and Japan. Rhetorically, the American response to the rise of China often calls to mind the early years of the Cold War. Anti-communism no longer defines this rhetoric. What remains relatively unchanged is an assumption of fundamentally adversarial rather than convergent American and Chinese values, interests, and agendas. In 2012 alone, Americans were bombarded with headlines and book titles about \u201cThe China Threat,\u201d a new \u201cCold War with China,\u201d an impending \u201cStruggle for Mastery in Asia.\u201d \u201cContainment of China\u201d was resuscitated as geopolitical wisdom from an earlier generation. More detached commentators called attention to a pervasive \u201cChina-bashing syndrome.\u201d43<\/sup><\/p>\n \u201cChina-bashing\u201d itself carries distorted echoes from a more recent past, notably the 1970s and 1980s when Japan was still being mythologized as a superpower and \u201cJapan-bashing\u201d was all the vogue in America. There is, however, no real comparison. Japan-bashing focused exclusively on economic issues, and Japan\u2019s moment in the sun was ephemeral. No one believes China\u2019s rise to be a passing phenomenon. This poses an unfamiliar challenge to the United States: the notion of exercising power in the Pacific from a position of other than overwhelming superiority. There is no post-war precedent for this.<\/p>\n In U.S. strategic planning circles, the most widely publicized concept aimed at countering \u201cemerging anti-access\/area denial challenges\u201d is called Air-Sea Battle (ASB). First mentioned publicly by the secretary of defense in 2009, this calls for integrated air, sea, space, and cyberspace forces capable of overcoming the \u201casymmetric capabilities\u201d of adversaries. An Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO) was established in the Pentagon in August 2011, and an acronym-heavy release from the ASBO explains, in formulaic language repeated in other official statements, that \u201cThe Air-Sea Battle Concept centers on networked, integrated, attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy and defeat (NIA-D3) A2\/AD threats.\u201d Another official report typically notes that the goal is \u201cto preserve U.S. and allied air-sea-space superiority.\u201d44<\/sup><\/p>\n U.S. officials usually take care to declare that ASB does not specifically target China and is a general and still rudimentary projection. In fact, the concept dates from war games initiated around a decade and a half earlier that identify the PRC as the major projected adversary (with Iran a distant second). These scenarios make clear that disrupting, destroying, and defeating China\u2019s anti-access\/area denial capabilities may involve operations such as destroying surveillance systems and missile defenses located deep inside the country, followed up by \u201clarger air and naval assault.\u201d 45<\/sup><\/p>\n The Air-Sea Battle projections have provoked criticism in U.S. strategic planning circles concerning costs, risks, and implications for existing U.S. bases and operations in Asia. Much of this debate, however, involves inter-service turf battles and efforts to reconcile ASB with an alphabet soup of other current strategic formulations. These include the Pentagon\u2019s overarching JOAC (Joint Operational Access Concept); Army and Marine Corps projections such as the GMAC (Gain and Maintain Access Concept) and JCEO (Joint Concept for Entry Operations); and the Navy\u2019s MDBS (Mutually Denied Battlespace Strategy). As summarized by a strategic analyst in Asia, the Army-Marines JCEO strategy focuses on \u201camphibious, airborne and air assault operations to gain and maintain inland access to the adversary\u2019s territory,\u201d while the Navy\u2019s MDBS plan would \u201crely on U.S. maritime superiority to deny access to Chinese warships in their own waters and [Chinese] commercial shipping in the surrounding oceans.\u201d Consistent with these projections, in 2012 the United States announced plans to shift long-range B-1 and B-52 bombers as well as a fleet of high-altitude surveillance drones from the Middle East to the Pacific.46<\/sup><\/p>\n These strategic guidelines, all easily accessible in declassified form, entered the public domain virtually hand in hand with widely quoted official pronouncements that the U.S. would \u201cpivot to Asia\u201d or \u201crebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region\u201d as it withdraws from its misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The \u201cpivot\u201d term emerged during President Obama\u2019s trip to Asia in November 2011, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed with an article on \u201cAmerica\u2019s Pacific Century\u201d that same month. This rhetorical offensive was widely interpreted as indicating that the hegemonic Pax Americana would be maintained in the face of proposals to work toward attaining some sort of less confrontational and more balanced multinational power sharing.47<\/sup><\/p>\n The pivot to the Pacific involves two distinct levels of projected integration. One, embodied in the Air-Sea Battle concept, focuses on joint U.S. military operations that optimize cutting-edge weaponry and technology. The other involves promoting greater strategic integration with Asian allies like Japan and South Korea. Although all parties speak with apparent sincerity about restoring the spirit of cooperation and interdependence with China that was initiated in the 1970s, the inherently confrontational and hierarchical aspects of the San Francisco System still define this evolving recalibration of power.<\/p>\n Where Japan is concerned, the concurrence of North Korea\u2019s traumatizing development of nuclear weapons and mounting tensions with China has given new direction to the two bedrock policies that date back to inauguration of the San Francisco System: taking shelter under the U.S. military shield and promoting incremental militarization under the still unrevised \u201cpeace constitution.\u201d Pyongyang\u2019s test of a ballistic missile in 1998 triggered a series of policy decisions in Tokyo that prioritized establishing a multi-layered missile defense system in close collaboration with the United States. (Among other things, this involved revising earlier Japanese restrictions on arms exports plus lifting a ban on the military use of space.) Virtually in tandem with this, new \u201cNational Defense Program Guidelines\u201d issued in 2004 expressed concern over China\u2019s military modernization for the first time.48<\/sup><\/p>\n Revised guidelines issued in December 2010 reaffirm Japan\u2019s peaceful goals of defense and deterrence under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but take note of a \u201cglobal shift in the balance of power \u2026 along with the relative change of influence of the United States.\u201d While acknowledging that Japan faces no serious threat of being invaded, the guidelines call renewed attention to disputes and confrontations that must be prevented from escalating into war. These \u201cgray zone\u201d areas of concern include the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and the spectacle of China \u201cwidely and rapidly modernizing its military force\u201d and intensifying its maritime activities in surrounding waters. Essentially, the 2004 and 2010 guidelines reflect the shift in Japanese security focus away from Cold War preoccupation with the Soviet Union toward heightened concern about Korea, China, and the seas and islands to the south. They also reflect the same technological imperatives that drive war planning by the United States and China.<\/p>\n The breakthrough concept in the 2010 guidelines is creation of a \u201cdynamic defense force\u201d (d\u00c5\u008dteki b\u00c5\u008deiryoku<\/i>) capable of \u201cimmediate and seamless response to contingencies.\u201d This envisioned force, which replaces prior focus on a more static \u201cbasic defense force\u201d (kibanteki b\u00c5\u008deiryoku<\/i>), will \u201cpossess readiness, mobility, flexibility, sustainability, and versatility \u2026 reinforced by advanced technology based on the trends of levels of military technology and intelligence capabilities.\u201d Attaining these capabilities will \u201cfurther deepen\u201d the security alliance with the United States in areas such as contingency planning, joint training and operations, information gathering (extending to capabilities in outer space and cyberspace), and \u201ctechnology cooperation,\u201d with particular attention to ballistic missile defense. At the same time, the new emphasis on \u201cdynamic deterrence\u201d points to a conspicuously more proactive defense posture on Japan\u2019s part.49<\/sup><\/p>\n In November 2011, almost a year after the guidelines were issued, the Japanese government announced that it was loosening restrictions on arms exports that had been introduced in 1967 and reformulated in 1976 as a general ban \u201cregardless of the destinations.\u201d One early result of this, it was anticipated, would be selling submarines to countries like the Philippines and perhaps Vietnam\u2014another example of the strategic regional integration envisioned under the \u201cpivot\u201d to Asia. In September 2012, Japan announced that it would host a second U.S. advanced anti-ballistic-missile radar system. Although ostensibly directed against North Korea\u2019s nuclear provocations, this was denounced by Beijing as another step toward the containment of China. In December 2012, the Wall Street Journal<\/i> praised Japan for now possessing \u201cthe most sophisticated missile-defense system outside the U.S.,\u201d describing this as \u201ca system poised for export to other nations.\u201d50<\/sup><\/p>\n Sixty years later, containment of China has clearly evolved into something radically different and more complex and contradictory than when this policy was first introduced under the San Francisco System.<\/p>\n IV. Fears and Hopes<\/b><\/p>\n The thrust of these developments is disturbing. The rise of China challenges the Pax Americana that has prevailed in the Asia-Pacific area since the 1950s. A stepped-up arms race looms\u2014now pitting the United States and Japan against China rather than the Soviet Union, and driven by the impact of the digital revolution on precision warfare and cyberwar. We have entered a new era of strategic escalation without leaving reliance on brute force behind, and without any reason to believe that advanced hardware and software has produced a wiser generation of leaders.<\/p>\n All participants in this arms race naturally claim to champion peace: their militarization is bubble-wrapped in the rhetoric of \u201cdefense\u201d and \u201cdeterrence.\u201d On all sides, however, strategizing shades into paranoia. Chauvinism burns ever more feverishly. The structures of goodwill and interdependence between China and the rest of the world that were painstakingly built up beginning in the 1970s appear brittle. Warnings of \u201caccidental war\u201d hang in the air.<\/p>\n There is no reason to believe that the problematic legacies of the San Francisco System will disappear soon, or that new threats to stability can be held in check easily. Rival nationalisms are here to stay, manipulated by jingoists in and out of public office and passed on to younger generations. History wars will go on unabated, hand in hand with the cynical cultivation of historical amnesia for domestic audiences and agendas. Territorial disputes that were embedded in the peace treaty signed in San Francisco and aimed at thwarting \u201ccommunism\u201d in Asia will fester for years to come. The American empire of bases will keep contracting and expanding like a shape-shifting monster, as it has done since the end of the Cold War; but the disgrace of Okinawa and the \u201ctwo Japans\u201d will not change drastically in the foreseeable future. Japan\u2019s incremental but now \u201cdynamic\u201d remilitarization under the nuclear umbrella will continue to accelerate\u2014even more dynamically if the constitution is revised, but never to the point of eliminating the material and psychological constraints of subordinate independence under the eagle\u2019s wing.<\/p>\n \u201cAsymmetry\u201d is a central concept in commentary on the rise of China and the U.S. \u201cpivot\u201d to Asia. The term has numerous connotations. It calls attention to the patron-client nature of the U.S.-Japan relationship, for example, and also characterizes China\u2019s present and projected military capabilities vis-\u00e0-vis the prodigious arsenal of the United States. As America\u2019s experience in post-World War II conflicts makes clear, however, asymmetrical capabilities can stymie overwhelming superiority in weaponry. This was the (unlearned) lesson of the Vietnam War, repeated in the U.S. debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. China\u2019s military modernization rests on recognizing the potential effectiveness of materially inferior forces in deterring what American strategists hubristically refer to as \u201cfull spectrum dominance.\u201d The U.S. response, epitomized in concepts like \u201cAir-Sea Battle\u201d and jargon about \u201cA2\/AD\u201d threats and \u201cNIA-3D\u201d in-depth attacks, guarantees that strategists and weapons manufacturers on all sides will never break out of this vicious circle.<\/p>\n There is also asymmetry of a political nature in China\u2019s challenge to continued domination of the San Francisco System: the PRC is an authoritarian state, whereas democratic principles underlie governance in the United States and Japan. This is a critical difference. At the same time, it should not obscure the fact that powerful dysfunctional influences are in play in all three states. Transparency is blatantly absent in the PRC, but secrecy and non-accountability are not peculiar to China. Beginning with the onset of the Cold War\u2014and with almost exponential acceleration after September 11, 2001, when terrorism entered the picture as an obsessive security concern\u2014the United States has become a national-security state of unprecedented bloat and clandestine activity. Special interests influence and pervert policy-making in all three nations. So does corruption, and so do delusion and wishful thinking. Time and again, pathologies rather than rational policies and practices influence the course of events.<\/p>\n Where, then, do hopes for a more stable and constructive future lie? They do not lie in fixation on military confrontation, although this is where political resources and media attention tend to be directed. Nothing hopeful can come from perpetuating hateful nationalisms, although this has become addictive in China, Japan, and Korea through ceaseless rekindling of the history wars. Nor can stability be secured by postulating a zero-sum struggle between China and the old Pax Americana for domination over the Asia-Pacific area. The United States is no longer the sole great power in the region, but it maintains an awesome military juggernaut coupled with a sprawling network of alliances consolidated in the early years of the Cold War. China\u2019s long-delayed re-emergence as a great power is irresistible\u2014unlike imperial Japan\u2019s doomed aggression in the early twentieth century and post-war Japan\u2019s short interval as a putative superpower in the 1970s and 1980s\u2014but both domestic and external factors militate against China imposing hegemonic influence over the area.<\/p>\n Future hope lies in returning to the visions of peaceful integration that accompanied the normalization of relations with the PRC beginning in the 1970s, and in strengthening the many concrete areas of cooperation and economic interdependence that gave substance to these optimistic projections. As regional tensions heated up in 2012, \u201cpower-sharing\u201d became the phrase of choice for postulating a less confrontational new order. This found expression in formulations such as a \u201cConcert of Asia\u201d or \u201cPacific Community\u201d or \u201cPax Pacifica\u201d (as opposed to the Pax Americana).51<\/sup><\/p>\n This is more easily imagined than realized, of course, especially when territorial disputes and military expansion have been elevated to issues of national honor as well as security. \u201cAsia-Pacific\u201d regional organizations have been active since the 1990s and provide an object lesson in the unwieldiness of multinational forums, as well as their potential for promoting constructive engagement.52<\/sup> Ultimately, however, the success of power sharing depends on expanding the non-governmental civilian networks that lie at the core of genuine interdependence and mutual understanding. These crisscrossing personal and corporate connections run the gamut from NGOs and multinational corporations to cultural and educational exchanges to tourism and pop culture. They are the bedrock of grassroots collaboration and integration\u2014and, as such, the antidote to ultranationalism and bellicose confrontation.<\/p>\n These networks are already substantial. The questions that demand attention are: Why have they failed to decisively tip the balance against voices of extremism and unreason? Can they do so? And if so, how?<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n 1<\/sup> Great Britain, which formally recognized the People\u2019s Republic of China in January 1950, supported PRC participation in the peace conference before bowing to U.S. pressure in July 1951. The ostensible reason for excluding Korea was that, as a Japanese colony, it had not been a belligerent party against Japan in World War II. On August 16, 1951, Zhou Enlai, serving simultaneously as foreign minister and prime minister of the PRC, released a statement criticizing the treaty and conference. South Korea also expressed outrage when informed it was being excluded. For China and Korea, see John Price, Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific <\/i>(University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 245-48.<\/p>\n 2<\/sup> The third distinguishing feature of the San Francisco settlement (alongside the Cold War setting and \u201cseparate peace\u201d) was the \u201cunequal treaty\u201d nature of the bilateral U.S.-Japan security treaty. As Secretary of State Christian Herter told a Senate committee when the treaty came up for revision in 1960, \u201cThere were a number of provisions in the 1951-1952 Security Treaty that were pretty extreme from the point of view of an agreement between two sovereign nations\u201d; U.S. Senate, Committee of Foreign Relations, Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan<\/i>, 86th<\/sup> Congress, 2nd<\/sup> Session (June 7, 1960), esp. 11-12, 27, 30-31. This gross inequality provoked considerable tension between Tokyo and Washington in the 1950s, prompting revision and not just renewal of the treaty in 1960. Various backstage exchanges and commentaries on this issue are included in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960. Japan; Korea<\/i>, vol. 18; see 23-29 for a representative expression by the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo of U.S. apprehension concerning \u201cthe stigmas and disadvantages now associated in Japan with the present Security Treaty.\u201d<\/p>\n 3<\/sup> Nishimura Kumao, who played a leading role in Japanese planning for the restoration of sovereignty, details the evolution of post-war strategic projections, including Okinawa, in his illuminating San Furanshisuko Heiwa J\u00c5\u008dyaku<\/i>, vol. 27 in Kajima Kenky\u00c5\u00abjo, ed., Nihon Gaik\u00c5\u008d Shi<\/i> (Kajima Kenky\u00c5\u00abjo, 1971). As early as September 1947, a letter from Emperor Hirohito himself was delivered to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied occupation forces, proposing that Okinawa be leased to the United States for twenty-five or fifty years, or \u201ceven longer,\u201d to support the struggle against communism and hasten the end of the occupation. The letter was uncovered by Professor Shind\u00c5\u008d Eiichi and reported in \u201cBunkatsusareta Ry\u00c5\u008ddo,\u201d Sekai<\/i>, April 1979, 31-51 (esp. 45-50).<\/p>\n 4<\/sup> The major investigative work on Agent Orange and other toxins in Okinawa has been conducted by Jon Mitchell. See his \u201cUS Military Defoliants on Okinawa: Agent Orange\u201d and \u201cAgent Orange on Okinawa\u2014New Evidence,\u201d both in volume 9 of the The Asia-Pacific Journal<\/i> (September 12, 2011, and November 28, 2011, respectively); these are accessible here<\/a>. See also Mitchell\u2019s articles in Japan Times<\/i>: \u201cAgent Orange \u2018tested in Okinawa\u2019\u201d (May 17, 2012); \u201c25,000 barrels of Agent Orange kept on Okinawa, U.S. Army document says\u201d (August 7, 2012); and \u201cU.S. Agent Orange activist brings message of solidarity to Okinawa\u201d (September 15, 2012). Secret agreements on nuclear issues are discussed and annotated below under \u201cThe \u2018Nuclear Umbrella\u2019.\u201d The most detailed and incisive critical commentary on Okinawa in English appears in various publications by Gavan McCormack, including most recently his co-authored (with Satoko Oka Norimatsu) Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States <\/i>(Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).<\/p>\n 5<\/sup> The major scholarly study of the origins of these territorial issues is Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System <\/i>(Routledge, 2007, 2012), which devotes separate chapters to each of the disputes. Hara reiterates the thesis of deliberate ambiguity in the San Francisco peace treaty concisely in various essays. See, for example, \u201c50 Years from San Francisco: Re-examining the Peace Treaty and Japan\u2019s Territorial Problems,\u201d Pacific Affairs <\/i>(Fall 2001) and \u201cCold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: The Troubling Legacy of the San Francisco Treaty,\u201d The Asia-Pacific Journal<\/i> (September 2006). For another densely annotated treatment, see Seokwoo Lee\u2019s online article, \u201cThe 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,\u201d from Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal<\/i>, 2002.<\/p>\n 6<\/sup> For the U.S. response to the 1956 Japan-Soviet negotiations, see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-57. Japan<\/i>, <\/i>vol. 23, part 1:202-5, 207-13. See Hara, Cold War Frontiers<\/i>, 71-99 on the 1945-1951 background, and 96 (and accompanying citations) on the thwarted compromise of 1956.<\/p>\n 7<\/sup> Hara, Cold War Frontiers<\/i>, 14-49, esp. 31-35, 47.<\/p>\n 8<\/sup> The densely annotated entry on \u201cLiancourt Rocks dispute\u201d on Wikipedia includes many references to Korean-language sources. The Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (North Korea) also declares the islands to be Korean territory.<\/p>\n 9<\/sup> The May 15, 1950, memorandum was reported by Japanese journalists affiliated with the Jiji Press news agency in Beijing; see the December 27, 2012, Beijing Jiji dispatch \u201c\u2018Senkaku wa Ry\u00c5\u00abky\u00c5\u00ab no Ichibu\u2019\u201d online<\/a>, as well as coverage in the Asahi Shimbun<\/i> on December 27 and 28.<\/p>\n 10<\/sup> For Zhou and Deng, see Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II<\/i> (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194; M. Taylor Fravel, \u201cSomething to Talk About in the East China Sea,\u201d The Diplomat<\/i>, September 28, 2012; and Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China <\/i>(Harvard University Press, 2011), 303-4. Speculation about potential oil and gas resources in the East China Sea dates from the late 1960s, and obviously influenced both China\u2019s and Japan\u2019s perceptions of the Senkaku\/Diaoyu dispute. The increasingly intransigent Chinese position that developed after Zhou and Deng\u2019s downplaying of the dispute in the 1970s is that there is a deep historical record showing that the islands have traditionally been regarded as part of China. The U.S. position is that it is agnostic on the sovereignty issue, but obliged to side with Japan militarily if Sino-Japanese tensions over the Senkakus lead to conflict. For an almost elegiac essay on the early history of the islands between China and Okinawa, see \u201cNarrative of an Empty Space: Behind the Row over a Bunch of Pacific Rocks Lies the Sad, Magical History of Okinawa,\u201d The Economist<\/i>, December 22, 2012.<\/p>\n 11<\/sup> Hara, Cold War Frontiers<\/i>, <\/i>157.<\/p>\n 12<\/sup> The concept of an American \u201cempire of bases\u201d was introduced by the late Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic<\/i> (Metropolitan Books, 2004). For an informative recent overview, see David Vine, \u201cThe Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War,\u201d posted online in July 2012 at Tom Dispatch<\/a>.<\/p>\n 13<\/sup> See Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story<\/i> (Doubleday, 1965), 382. LeMay spoke similarly in an April 1966 interview for the J. F. Dulles Papers archive at Princeton University; cited in Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History<\/i> (Modern Library, 2010), 151-52. He was not taking pride in this devastation, but rather arguing that immediate and massive bombing of key cities in North Korea might have been more effective and less costly in human terms than the devastation wreaked in the protracted air war. The cities in South Korea were bombed when they were occupied by North Korean or Chinese forces. On the air war in Korea in general, see Cumings, Korean War<\/i>, 147-61; Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam<\/i> (Free Press, 1986), 226-48, 259-60; and Taewoo Kim\u2019s two-part treatment: \u201cWar against an Ambiguous Enemy: U.S. Air Force Bombing of South Korean Civilian Areas, June-September 1950,\u201d Critical Asian Studies <\/i>44, no. 2 (June 2012) and \u201cLimited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of North Korea during the Korean War, 1950-1953,\u201d Critical Asian Studies<\/i> 44, no. 3 (September 2012). Bombing tonnage varies depending on the source. Cumings (Korean War<\/i>, 159) calculates that the United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs (plus 32,557 tons of napalm) in Korea, compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. Marilyn Young puts the volume of bombs dropped in the Korean War at 386,037 tons (and 32,357 tons of napalm), with a total of 698,000 tons when all types of airborne ordnance are included; \u201cBombing Civilians: An American Tradition,\u201d The Asia-Pacific Journal, <\/i>April 19, 2009, accessible online<\/a>. At the peak of the bombing in Korea, U.S. planes were dropping around a quarter-million pounds (125 tons) of napalm per day\u2014with napalm tanks initially manufactured in Japan; see the \u201cNapalm in War\u201d entry here<\/a>, and also Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Incendiary Weapons<\/i> (MIT Press, 1975), 43. The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the British and U.S. air forces combined in World War II was slightly over two million tons, of which 656,400 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater. In the U.S. air war that devastated over sixty Japanese cities, the total tonnage dropped was 160,800 tons (24 percent of the Pacific theater total); see United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War)<\/i>, July 1, 1946, 16. In the air war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the volume of bombs dropped by U.S. forces escalated to over seven million tons.<\/p>\n 14<\/sup> Yoshida\u2019s early arguments in defense of Article 9, and the later shift in policy, are annotated in J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954<\/i> (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1979), 369-400.<\/p>\n 15<\/sup> See, for example, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951. Asia and the Pacific<\/i>, vol. 6, part 1:831. In the end, Article 11 of the peace treaty simply stipulated that \u201cJapan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan\u201d\u2014a proviso that required the Japanese government to obtain permission of the foreign governments involved in these trials before altering individual sentences that had been imposed.<\/p>\n 16<\/sup> The translations from 1972 and 1998 are from the English renderings released by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The full apologetic phrasing of the 1998 \u201cJoint Declaration on Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development\u201d reads as follows: \u201cThe Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious distress and damage that Japan caused to the Chinese people through its aggression against China during a certain period in the past and expressed deep remorse for this.\u201d The 1998 declaration was issued during a state visit to Japan by China\u2019s president Jiang Zemin, and accompanied by acrimonious public exchanges over Japan\u2019s war responsibility that are not reflected in the text of the declaration itself. See Kazuo Sato, \u201cThe Japan-China Summit and Joint Declaration of 1998: A Watershed for Japan-China Relations in the 21st<\/sup> Century?\u201d, CNAPS Working Paper Series, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, Brookings Institute, 2000-2001; accessible here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 17<\/sup> The escalating acrimony from the 1980s of \u201cwar history\u201d issues on both the Chinese and Japanese sides, including the politics propelling this, is a major theme in He, The Search for Reconciliation<\/i>.<\/p>\n 18<\/sup> The devastating famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, the destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, for example, are all taboo subjects in China\u2014ignored in textbooks, censored on the Internet, and brushed over in historical exhibitions such as at the recently renovated National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square.<\/p>\n 19<\/sup> On censorship of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II <\/i>(Norton & The New Press, 1999), 413-15, 620-21. The first major collection of photographs appeared in the August 6, 1952 edition of Asahi Gurafu<\/i>.<\/p>\n 20<\/sup> For U.S. considerations concerning the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, see Bruce Cumings, \u201cKorea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats,\u201d Le Monde Diplomatique<\/i>, December 8, 2004, accessible here<\/a>\u00a0and reproduced as \u201cNuclear Threats Against North Korea: Consequences of the \u2018Forgotten\u2019 War,\u201d available here<\/a>; also Cumings, \u201cWhy Did Truman Really Fire MacArthur? The Obscure History of Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War Provides an Answer,\u201d History News Network <\/i>(George Mason University), January 10, 2005, accessible here<\/a>.\u00a0See also Malcolm MacMillan Craig, \u201cThe Truman Administration and Non-use of the Atomic Bomb during the Korean War, June 1950 to January 1953\u201d (M.A. thesis, Victoria University, New Zealand, 2009), accessible online.<\/p>\n 21<\/sup> Operation Hudson Harbor is discussed in Craig, \u201cThe Truman Administration and Non-use of the Atomic Bomb,\u201d 119-21.<\/p>\n 22<\/sup> The literature on the impact of the Bikini Incident is enormous. For a descriptive overview that places Japanese anti-nuclear protests in a global context, see Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970 <\/i>(Stanford University Press, 1997), vol. 2 of The Struggle against the Bomb<\/i>, esp. 8-10, 42-43, 241-46, 321-24. Wittner also describes the high-level U.S. response to the Bikini Incident, which included identifying the Lucky Dragon<\/i> as a \u201cRed spy outfit\u201d and the ship\u2019s captain as being \u201cin the employ of the Russians\u201d (this by the head of the Atomic Energy Commission), denying that the fishing boat had been outside the officially announced danger zone, emphasizing the \u201chigh degree of safety\u201d of American nuclear tests in general, and asserting that the vessel\u2019s radio operator had died of hepatitis rather than \u201cradiation sickness,\u201d as the Japanese government itself reported. In a cable to Washington, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo described the popular outrage in Japan as \u201ca period of uncontrolled masochism\u201d as the nation \u201cseemed to revel in [its] fancied martyrdom.\u201d See ibid., 146-48, 153-54.<\/p>\n 23<\/sup> Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, \u201cWhere They Were,\u201d Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/i>, vol. 55, no. 6 (November\/December 1999), 26-35. On mobilization during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Jon Mitchell, \u201c\u2018Seconds Away from Midnight\u2019: U.S. Nuclear Missile Pioneers on Okinawa Break Fifty Year Silence on a Hidden Nuclear Crisis of 1962,\u201d The Asia-Pacific Journal<\/i>, July 20, 2012; accessible online<\/a>.<\/p>\n 24<\/sup> Norris, Arkin and Burr, \u201cWhere They Were.\u201d Reischauer\u2019s statement came in an interview with the Mainichi Shimbun<\/i> on May 18, 1981; for an English summary, see \u201cNuclear \u2018Lie\u2019 Strains U.S. Ties,\u201d Time<\/i>, June 8, 1981. Reischauer threatened to resign as ambassador in 1967 when he \u201cdiscovered that there was a craft at Iwakuni, the Marine base on the Inland Sea, which held a store of nuclear weapons.\u201d In his view, this was entirely different from the legitimate transit of nuclear-armed ships through Japanese waters, and violated understandings with the Japanese government. He regarded the uproar that greeted his 1981 acknowledgement of the latter as a \u201cfiasco\u201d; see his memoir My Life between Japan and America <\/i>(Harper & Row, 1986), 249-51, 276-77, 280, 299, 346-47.<\/p>\n 25<\/sup> See, for example, Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick, \u201cJapan, the Atomic Bomb, and the \u2018Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power\u2019,\u201d The Asia-Pacific Journal, <\/i>May 2, 2011; accessible here<\/a>. The \u201cparanuclear state\u201d language appears in a lengthy treatment of nuclear development in Japan titled \u201cNuclear Weapons Program,\u201d accessible here<\/a>. As of late 2012, it was calculated that Japan\u2019s stockpiles of separated plutonium totaled more than nine metric tons, enough to make \u201cmore than 1,000 nuclear warheads\u201d; \u201cRokkasho and a Hard Place: Japan\u2019s Nuclear Future,\u201d The Economist<\/i>, November 10, 2012. See also Frank N. von Hippel and Masafumi Takubo, \u201cJapan\u2019s Nuclear Mistake,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, November 28, 2012. The easy conversion from civilian nuclear programs to weapons projects is addressed in Matthew Fuhrmann, Atomic Assistance: How \u201cAtoms for Peace\u201d Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity<\/i> (Cornell University Press, 2012); see 221-25 on Japan.<\/p>\n 26<\/sup> The two quotations are from internal Department of State memoranda, both dated May 4, 1956 (DOS file number 711.5611\/5-456), but many similar diplomatic notes and exchanges took place beginning in the mid 1950s. See Wittner, Resisting the Bomb<\/i>, 109, 116-17, 166-67, 388, 505n69, 514n17. For an accessible sample of these apologies (and the patronizing U.S. \u201cunderstanding\u201d they prompted), see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-57. Japan<\/i>, vol. 23, part 1:495-98, reporting on a September 1957 meeting in Washington between Secretary of State Dulles and Foreign Minister Fujiyama Aiichir\u00c5\u008d, who had just delivered a speech at the United Nations calling for an end to nuclear testing. Fujiyama took the occasion of this meeting with Dulles to essentially dismiss what he had said to the United Nations. His apology, as the State Department summarized it, ran as follows: \u201cThe Japanese people, old and young, are very sensitive on this question. It is not merely a question of communists. The Japanese Government was placed in a position where it had to lodge a protest. The handling of this matter is vital for the conservative government. The psychological situation in Japan compels the Government to stand for disarmament, the abolition of war, and the establishment of peace, and against the manufacture and use of all nuclear weapons.\u201d Dulles replied that he understood that \u201cthe Japanese Government has a special problem that is more emotional than reasonable. The American people perhaps reason about this, while the Japanese view the problem emotionally, and the Japanese Government must take that into account.\u201d<\/p>\n 27<\/sup> Eric Johnson, \u201cNuclear Pact Ensured Smooth Okinawa Reversion,\u201d Japan Times<\/i>, May 15, 2002, quoting from a declassified U.S. document dated June 20, 1959.<\/p>\n 28<\/sup> Many declassified English-language documents pertaining to the 1960 and 1969 secret agreements have been assembled by Robert A. Wampler and made available in two widely separated releases by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. See (1) \u201cRevelations in Newly Released Documents about U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Okinawa Fuel NHK Documentary,\u201d May 14, 1997, covering thirteen documents and accessible online<\/a>; (2) \u201cNuclear Noh Drama: Tokyo, Washington and the Case of the Missing Nuclear Arrangements,\u201d October 13, 2009, covering eleven documents and accessible here<\/a>. (3) The November 1969 secret agreement between Sat\u00c5\u008d and Nixon is discussed in Kei Wakaizumi, The Best Course Available: A Personal Account of the Secret US-Japan Okinawa Reversion Negotiations <\/i>(University of Hawaii Press, 2002); Wakaizumi was an aide to Sat\u00c5\u008d, and his book originally appeared in Japanese in 1994. An online copy of the agreement is accessible here<\/a>. Sat\u00c5\u008d\u2019s copy of the secret agreement was made available by his son in 2009 and reproduced in Asahi Shimbun<\/i>, December 24, 2009. (4) See also Shinichi Kitaoka, \u201cThe Secret Japan-US Pacts,\u201d in Research Group on the Japan-US Alliance, In Search of a New Consensus: The Japan-US Alliance toward 2010 <\/i>(Institute for International Policy Studies, December 2010), 15-27. Kitaoka, who headed a Foreign Ministry committee investigating the secret agreements, at one point refers to the Japanese government\u2019s \u201cintentional avoidance of clarification.\u201d He also quotes Sat\u00c5\u008d stating, in October 1969, that \u201cthe three non-nuclear principles were a mistake.\u201d The full Institute for International Policy Studies publication is accessible online. (5) Henry Kissinger discusses the Nixon-Sat\u00c5\u008d agreement (without calling it secret) in The White House Years<\/i> (Little, Brown, and Company,1979), 325-36, 1483.<\/p>\n 29<\/sup> For Kishi, see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. Japan<\/i>, vol. 23, part 1:285; Kishi was following up on a similar statement by the head of the Defense Agency the previous month. For Ikeda, see Jon Mitchell, \u201cOkinawa, Nuclear Weapons and \u2018Japan\u2019s Special Psychological Problem\u2019,\u201d Japan Times, <\/i>July 8, 2010. For Sat\u00c5\u008d as well as others on Japan possessing nuclear weapons, see \u201cNuclear Weapons Program,\u201d op. cit., here<\/a>.<\/a> Sat\u00c5\u008d\u2019s bellicose statement about attacking China with nuclear weapons is cited in \u201cThe U.S. Nuclear Umbrella, Past and Future,\u201d a December 27, 2008, editorial by Hiroshima Peace Media Center, accessible online<\/a>; their source is a declassified Foreign Ministry document. Beginning in the late 1950s, U.S. diplomats and planners sometimes anticipated that Japan might acquire nuclear weapons in the near future. See, for example, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. Regulation of Armaments; Atomic Energy<\/i>, vol. 20:276-77 (minutes of a January 1956 meeting involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff); also Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960. Japan; Korea<\/i>, vol. 18:27 (an April 1958 dispatch from U.S. ambassador to Tokyo Douglas MacArthur II).<\/p>\n 30<\/sup> The \u201cthrowing off Asia\u201d (datsu-A<\/i>) phrase comes from a famous 1885 essay attributed to Fukuzawa Yukichi. For an extended image-driven treatment covering Meiji Westernization, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Russo-Japanese War, see the three-part online treatment \u201cThrowing Off Asia<\/a>\u201d at visualizingcultures.mit.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n 31<\/sup> For the pivotal role assigned to Japan by U.S. Cold War planners, see John W. Dower, \u201cThe Superdomino in Postwar Asia: Japan In and Out of the Pentagon Papers<\/i>,\u201d in Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (ed.), The Pentagon Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition<\/i>, vol. 5 (Beacon Press, 1972), 101-42.<\/p>\n 32<\/sup> Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951<\/i>. Asia and the Pacific<\/i>, vol. 6, part 1:825-26. The fuller statement by Dulles explains that the Japanese \u201chave felt that the Western civilization represented by Britain, more latterly the United States \u2026 represents a certain triumph of mind over mass which gives us a social standing in the world better than what is being achieved in terms of the mainland human masses of Asia, and \u2026 they think that they have also achieved somewhat the similar superiority of mind over mass and would like to feel that they belong to, or are accepted by, the Western nations. And I think that anything we can do to encourage that feeling will set up an attraction which is calculated to hold the Japanese in friendly association with us despite the fact that the mainland is in possession of the economic means of setting up an attraction which we, perhaps, in those particular terms of economy cannot match.\u201d<\/p>\n 33<\/sup> For basic documents covering Nixon\u2019s talks with Zhou in February 1972 and declassified for the National Security Archive, see William Burr, \u201cNixon\u2019s Trip to China,\u201d posted December 11, 2003 and accessible here<\/a>; two long reports from Kissinger to Nixon summarizing his talks with Zhou in July and October 1971 can be accessed through note 4 here. Although these declassified documents are only lightly sanitized, some lines and passages pertaining to Japan have been excised.<\/p>\n 34<\/sup> The strategic considerations underlying the rapprochement are summarized in He, The Search for Reconciliation<\/i>, 182-89. The honeymoon wording is hers.<\/p>\n 35<\/sup> The four key bilateral documents are as follows: (1) The landmark \u201cJoint Communiqu\u00e9 of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People\u2019s Republic of China,\u201d issued on September 29, 1972, announced termination of \u201cthe abnormal state of affairs\u201d and established the basic terms reiterated in subsequent statements. Japan recognized the \u201cGovernment of the People\u2019s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China,\u201d and expressed understanding and respect for the PRC\u2019s position that \u201cTaiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People\u2019s Republic of China.\u201d The two nations declared commitment to peaceful coexistence as embodied in the charter of the United Nations, and pledged to \u201crefrain from the use or threat of force\u201d in any disputes that might arise between them. Japan expressed regret for \u201cserious damage\u201d inflicted on the Chinese people in the past, and China in turn renounced its demands for war reparations. Reparations had also been renounced by the Republic of China in 1952 and by South Korea in 1965. (2) The \u201cTreaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People\u2019s Republic of China\u201d that followed six years later, on August 12, 1978, was exceedingly brief, consisting of an introduction declaring continued adherence to the principles enunciated in the 1972 communiqu\u00e9, followed by five platitudinous articles.<\/p>\n (3) On November 26, 1998\u2014twenty years after the peace treaty was signed, and seven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War\u2014the two countries issued a lengthy \u201cJapan-China Joint Declaration on Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development,\u201d accompanied by a list itemizing thirty-three specific areas of proposed collaboration. In addition to apologizing for Japanese aggression in the past, this declaration opposed nuclear testing and proliferation, and called for \u201cthe ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.\u201d (4) The fourth joint statement\u2014issued ten years later, on May 7, 2008, and bearing the lengthy heading \u201cJoint Statement between the Government of Japan and Government of the People\u2019s Republic of China on Comprehensive Promotion of a \u2018Mutually Beneficial Relationship Based on Common Strategic Interests\u2019\u201d\u2014took care to emphasize that the two nations \u201care partners who cooperate together and are not threats to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n 36<\/sup> See, for example, Ronald O\u2019Rourke, China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Naval Capabilities\u2014Background and Issues for Congress<\/i> (Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2012); also Jianwei Wang, \u201cConfidence-Building Measures and China-Japan Relations,\u201d February 2000 report to the Stimson Center (Washington, D.C.), accessible here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 37<\/sup> For the asymmetry quotation, see Gerald L. Curtis, \u201cU.S. Policy toward Japan from Nixon to Clinton: An Assessment,\u201d in Curtis (ed.), New Perspectives on U.S.-Japan Relations <\/i>(Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2000), 39-40; this forty-three-page overview of U.S.-Japan relations after 1972 is accessible online<\/a>. <\/b>Gavan McCormack develops the client-state argument in detail in two books: Client State: Japan in the American Embrace <\/i>(Verso, 2007) and, with Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands<\/i>. <\/i>For a capsule summary, see McCormack, \u201cThe Travails of a Client State: An Okinawan Angle on the 50th<\/sup> Anniversary of the US-Japan Security Treaty,\u201d The Asia-Pacific Journal<\/i>, March 8, 2010; accessible here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 38<\/sup> The power-shift argument has been advanced by Hugh White of Australian National University, among others. For a concise presentation, see his \u201cPower Shift: Rethinking Australia\u2019s Place in the Asian Century,\u201d Australian Journal of International Affairs<\/i> 65, no.1 (February 2011), 81-93, esp. 82. For an extended analysis, see his The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power<\/i> (Australia: Black Inc., 2012). White\u2019s arguments have generated considerable online discussion and controversy.<\/p>\n 39<\/sup> In 1991, Deng Xiaoping advised colleagues to maintain good relations with the United Sates while building up China\u2019s strength; see Andrew J. Nathan, \u201cWhat China Wants: Bargaining with Beijing,\u201d Foreign Affairs<\/i>, July\/August 2011, 154.<\/p>\n 40<\/sup> Henry A. Kissinger, \u201cThe Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations,\u201d Foreign Affairs<\/i>, March\/April 2012; this essay was adapted from the afterword to a paperback edition of Kissinger\u2019s book On China<\/i> (Penguin Press, 2011).<\/p>\n 41<\/sup> In December 2012, the newly appointed Chinese leader Xi Jinping took care to make one of his first public events a meeting with the nuclear unit in charge of ballistic and cruise missiles (the Second Artillery Corps), praising it as \u201cthe core force of our country\u2019s strategic deterrent \u2026. a strategic pillar of our great power status, and an important bedrock for protecting our national security\u201d; Jane Perlez, \u201cNew Chinese Leader Meets Military Nuclear Officers,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, December 5, 2012.<\/p>\n 42<\/sup> For an overview of the revolution in precision warfare plus analysis of China\u2019s projected \u201cA2\/AD\u201d capabilities, see Andrew F. Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle?<\/i> (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010). Fear that China\u2019s growing sophistication in ballistic missiles threatens America\u2019s hitherto \u201cvirtually invincible\u201d Pacific fleet of carriers is typically expressed in a widely circulated Associated Press article: Eric Talmadge, \u201cDong Feng 21D, Chinese Missile, Could Shift Pacific Power Balance,\u201d Huffington Post<\/i>, August 5, 2010. For a concise sampling of current military jargon, see \u201cChina\u2019s Military Rise,\u201d The<\/i> Economist<\/i>, April 7, 2012.<\/p>\n 43<\/sup> Much of this bellicose rhetoric focuses on economic and financial issues. Its ubiquity can be gleaned by online searches under phrases such as \u201cChina threat,\u201d \u201ccontainment of China,\u201d and \u201cCold War with China.\u201d Certain books also trigger extended online commentary. See, for example, Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia <\/i>(Norton, 2011); Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can be Won<\/i> (FT [Financial Times] Press, 2006; revised and enlarged in 2008); and Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon\u2014A Global Call to Action<\/i> (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011). Death by China<\/i> became the basis of a full-length documentary film with the same title. China-bashing intensified during the 2012 presidential election, as noted in \u201cThe China-bashing Syndrome,\u201d The Economist<\/i>, July 14, 2012. The New York Times<\/i> published a selection of opinions under the headline \u201cAre We Headed for a Cold War with China?\u201d on May 2, 2012.<\/p>\n 44<\/sup> See press releases from the Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO) dated November 9 and 10, 2011, and titled respectively \u201cMulti-Service Office to Advance Air-Sea Battle Concept\u201d and \u201cThe Air-Sea Battle Concept Summary.\u201d For another concise summary of the ASB mission by two officers affiliated with this office, Navy Captain Philip Dupree and Air Force Colonel Jordan Thomas, see \u201cAir-Sea Battle: Clearing the Fog,\u201d Armed Forces Journal<\/i>, May 2012; accessible here<\/a>. The Defense Department\u2019s Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st<\/sup> Century Defense<\/i>, issued in January 2012, refers to \u201casymmetric challenges\u201d by states such as China and Iran, and italicizes its mission in this area as follows: \u201cAccordingly the U.S. military will invest as required to ensure its ability to operate effectively in anti-access and area denial (A2\/AD) environments.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n 45<\/sup> China was targeted as a rising problem by the incoming administration of President George W. Bush in 2001, but this was put aside after the September 11 terrorist attacks and ensuing fixation on the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d The ASB concept, with primary focus on China, is attributed to Andrew Marshall, the influential long-time head of the Pentagon\u2019s Office of Net Assessment. Its articulation is now strongly associated with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a Pentagon-supported think tank; see Greg Jaffe, \u201cU.S. Model for a Future War Fans Tensions with China and inside Pentagon,\u201d Washington Post<\/i>, August 1, 2012; this includes a map of the \u201cinner\u201d and \u201couter\u201d island chains where \u201cA2\/AD\u201d access is contested. For CSBA reports, see Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle?<\/i>; also Jan van Tol et al., \u201cAirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept,\u201d May 18, 2010, accessible online<\/a>. Krepinevich includes chapters on China and Iran, while emphasizing that the former is by far the greater threat to U.S. power projection; he also includes a map of the \u201cfirst\u201d and \u201csecond\u201d island chains. Air-Sea Battle represents a departure from \u201cAir-Land Battle\u201d concepts introduced after the Vietnam War for countering the Soviet threat.<\/p>\n 46<\/sup> Department of Defense,