Japan's Right-Wingers Getting Out of Control
Japan is making its way back as a topic of interest on the nation's front pages and editorials -- not for trade related problems which dominated the US-Japan relationship through most of the 1990s -- but mostly because of its creep towards a revived strident right-wing nationalism that promulgates obsessive cultural uniqueness as well as a sneering dismissal of historical accountability.
The latest prominent Japan-focused piece appeared under George Will's by-line this morning.
But what worries me is not the American press about Japan -- but rather the battle inside Japan among Japanese -- and the fact that the good guys are losing.
Masaru Tamamoto -- editor of an important on-line magazine, JIIA Commentary published by the Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs-supported Japan Institute for International Affairs -- is under attack from Yoshihisa Komori, the long-time DC-based former editor and now roving editor of Japan's right-wing newspaper, the Sankei Shimbun.
I know both of these writers/intellectuals -- and Komori has established a kind of franchise on the debate about Japan's historical memory. He is the authoritative right-wing commentator on the politics of Japan's war memory and on Japan-China relations. He's part of a group that understandably argues that Japan needs to get beyond its kow-towing to China and other nations in the region over World War II -- particularly given the behavior of the Chinese government towards its own people in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tamamoto is probably the smartest modern intellectual in Japan -- who sees beyond Japan's often-self imposed identity constraints. He reminds me a lot of the late Masao Miyamoto, whose tales of Japan's absurd bureaucratic rigidities made his audiences howl in laughter. But Tamamoto is not a comedic type. But he writes and thinks about Japan's place in the world in often startling fresh ways and has astonishing insights into the debates about Japan's evolving national identity.
I mostly agree with Tamamoto's analysis of Japan's foreign policy portfolio -- but Komori has put out the clarion call to zealots and fanatical right-wingers in Japan to protest Tamamoto as an an anti-Japanese, extreme leftist intellectual, according to one observer, "in essence a panda-hugging traitor."
While Tamamoto has critiqued the Prime Minister and the government for flirting with a wrong-headed strident nationalism that is more destructive than constructive in remarking about Koizumi's recent visit to Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of Japan's worst class-A war criminals are allegedly enshrined, Komori has unleashed the right-wing goons to pressure the Japan Institute for International Affairs to shut down his gig.
Don't do it. The President of JIIA is Yukio Satoh -- one of Japan's premier diplomats who secretly was the brains behind the ASEAN Regional Forum and who pulled off for Japan some of its few diplomatic coups. And JIIA's Director is Makio Miyagawa, well known to be the intellectual behind Ichiro Ozawa's famous Futsu no Kuni book (A Normal Nation) and campaign.
JIIA has already shut down the website on which Tamamoto's commentary was posted with a note:
TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED
These guys should not be push-overs for a history-denying cabal of right-wing thugs who want to take Japan back to the 1930s. But as things stand right now, word is that Satoh and Miyagawa are yielding to the pressure stirred up by the Sankei Shimbun's Komori. If they succeed in the campaign against Tamamoto, these right-wingers will find themselves intoxicated with success and think about what other public intellectuals they can savage and have pushed out of their jobs. It will become mechanical, outrageous, and disturbingly reminiscent of what Japan's right wingers did to public intellectuals in the build up to World War II.
If JIIA yields to those who want even what Tamamoto has written to be completely pulled off its site, sort of ERASED from memory immediately -- then those of us who value honest debate and discussion should register our shock and outrage about this censorship.
Those who are ticked off about this development in Japan -- and in my world (and yours), this does matter -- can email JIIA through its as yet unsuspended contact page or email directly jiiajoho@jiia.or.jp.
Just for the record and to establish complete transparency about my own views, I have written about Japan's competing nationalisms before and have always been a proponent that Japan develop a healthy and balanced nationalism that takes into account its past and its interest-based future. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that America's six-decade long military presence there is warping Japan's post-Cold War national identity.
Rather than these long term American military deployments stabilizing Japan and the region, they just as easily could trigger both anti-American sentiment among right wing zealots who think that America is constraining Japan's military capacity or alternatively, could give Japan a sense of such safety that it feels it can behave irresponsibly in the region -- particularly when it involves verbal, historical rhetoric and manipulation of symbols like Yasukuni Shrine -- without fear of serious military consequences.
I believe that a new "bargain" between the Japanese public and the U.S. needs to be struck about the strategic benefit and about the relative costs and benefits to our societies of the US-Japan alliance as currently structured before these bases become seriously cancerous to our bilateral relationship and undermine our security strategy in the region.
Masaru Tamamoto respectfully disagrees with my assessment -- but he has never unleashed a torrent of intolerant thugs on me for my views and has engaged them and me in a civil and healthy discussion about Japan's evolving nationalisms.
That defense of discourse is what JIIA should be deploying -- not censorship 1930's style.
-- Steve Clemons is Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note.
Look, here's the situation. It's pretty obvious to anyone in the far east that American power has suddenly become unreliable and is on the verge of collapse.
This is largely due to the incompetence of the Bush administration and its fatal policies in the middle east. The mid-east consumes all the administrations energy and focus. Meanwhile, the far east, including North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan and China are subject to wavering and inconsistent policy, and a continuing drawdown in force.
The obvious conclusion for the Japanese is that the United States is no longer reliable, and that within the near term, its power or authority may cease to be relevant.
This will create a power vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The most likely power to move into that vacuum eventually will be China.
This will result in a reduction of Japan's economic predominance and political insularity. It and every other pacific rim state will inevitably be re-aligned into a Chines oriented web, dominated by China's colossal population and territory, central location and economic clout.
However, this will not happen overnight. Even given a collapse of American influence, China is not in a position to immediately move into the vacuum.
This means that the Japanese have an opportunity to seek to preserve their independence and economic and political status by forming an alternative to Chinese Hegemony.
Japan itself is no more able to resist Chinese hegemony than any other local state.
However, a Japan which forms an EU/NATO style political, economic and military alliance with the other industrial economies... South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and with the hinterland economies, Indonesia, Phillipines, Malaysia, Vietnam/Indochina, Thailand, might be able to rewrite the map.
We're talking the revival of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Japanese right wing is the natural place that this will re-enter Japanese political discourse.
Of course, there's no way to re-impose such an alliance militarily. It will have to be through forging economic, diplomatic and military alliances.
But right now, this is an idea that the Japanese are waking up to...
the post-America world.
August 20, 2006 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
In any economic competition between Japan and China I would bet on Japan and not China. Japan, whatever its problems, is truly First World. China is big old Potemkin natrion propped up by piratical mercantlist policies for now.
August 20, 2006 7:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
True enough. But China has twelve times as many people as Japan, its got thirty times the land mass. It's got a central position in the region. And it has a willingness (if not yet much capacity) to aggressively deploy force.
So, Japan in its current configuration may be feeling very vulnerable.
August 20, 2006 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
No comments, but a few questions:
If this is censorship it certainly does deserve condemnation. But I found Will's comments more incoherent than I usually expect from him, and I'm wondering if this is a tempest in a teapot (if so, how big a teapot) or is this a sign that the polarization between left and right in the United States has some parallels in Japan and the Japanese are on different point in the cycle.
aMike
August 20, 2006 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
When was the last time that China has aggressively deployed force?
Yes, China is trying to establish itself as the dominant regional power in East and Central Asia, but beyond Taiwan have they threatened military action against anyone recently?
August 20, 2006 9:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmm...
Well, there was that spy plane incident with the United States which involved a bit of military brinksmanship.
Then there was that regional war with Vietnam in the 80's. Prior to that, a military fracas with the USSR along the border in the 70's. And before that, they got spitty with India in the 60's. In the 1950's, of course, there was their participation in the Korean War. And Tibet is in there somewhere. I think that there were a few border incidents with Burma, during the 60's and 70's, but that wasn't much of anything. Then there's the whole Taiwan thing.
True, that's not much of a record of warmongering compared to, oh say the United States, or Israel. But its pretty healthy.
The Chinese have not had much of a seagoing presence, nor a significant air force. They've been constrained by American power.
We can expect this to inevitably change as American power declines and Chinese dominance emerges. It's worth noting that many of the countries, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Phillipines and Indonesia have large Chinese minorities, so this may be a key to Chinese interests.
August 20, 2006 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Chinese Military hardliners were pointing out in 2004 that if they were ever going to invade Taiwan, they should do it then because the US was too bogged down in Iraq to do anything about it.
Do you think that they would fear China more than they hate Japan?
August 20, 2006 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Politics always makes strange bedfellows. At the same time, I find myself wondering how deep the antipathy to Japan actually is in many of these countries.
Anti-Japanese resentment is understandable in Taiwan and Korea, since Japan's domination and control over these countries dates back to the 19th century and ran up to 1945. They had two full generations to lose friends and influence enemies.
Imperial Japan became heavily involved in Manchuria and China during the period between world wars.
However, much of East Asia were colonial holdings of various European powers, and the Japanese had no influence or power there.
On the other hand, when you look at the Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Indochina, the period of Japanese domination was only from about 1941 to 1945.
If you look at the Phillipines for instance, we see a period of US domination from 1899 to 1942, which early on featured the Philipine insurrection and the slaughter of half a million filipinos. The American regime was an industrious, but colonial one. The Filipinos were no more willing to readmit the Americans when they got rid of the Japanese... The Phillipines became independent in 1946. Following that there was a long period of American neocolonialism, and American support of corrupt dictatorships.
Look to Indochina, the Japanese made no friends there. But the French preceded them by a century, and after the Japanese were evicted, attempted to hang on until 1954. Thereafter, the Americans hung in until 1972, losing friends and killing people.
For many areas, the brief spurt of Japanese occupation two generations ago may not be significant, particularly in light of modern changing realities.
August 20, 2006 9:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Spy plane incident did involve a lot of chest thumping, but can you imagine what the US reaction to Chinese spy planes off the US coast would be?
Most of the military engagements China has been in amount to skirmishes rather than full fledged wars. The only exceptions that I can think of are Vietnam, Korea and Tibet. I'm sure you and I, to say nothing of the Tibetans and Taiwanese, don't see it this way- but in terms of the Chinese poiltical discourse the are veiwed as internal, not external problems. I don't mention that to deminish the bad things that they've done in Tibet (and the oft overlooked Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia). But in terms of the way that they frame it, China holds pretty consistantly to their statements against interfering with the domestic politics of other countries through force (or sanctions for that matter). Compare that to the US's fairly explicit policy that they have the right to attack any country anywhere for whatever reason they feel fit (which isn't really new with Bush, he's just expanded it).
I think that China has ties to Southeast Asian countries through the Chinese diaspora, but I don't see that as a motivating factor in their military expansion. I was in Beijing in 1998 when, durring the fall of Suharto, the Chinese community of Indonesia was singled out and attacked. A group of students from Beijing University were trying to protest the Indonesian embassy over the systematic rape of Indo-Chinese women, but the government didn't allow it.
Thats just my general impression - I'm not an expert on the subject. I don't say any of this because I support the Chinese government. But there's a lot of disinformation being thrown about over the "China threat" and I frankly just don't see it. I'll start taking that seriously once they've got some aircraft carriers.
August 20, 2006 9:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
And you're right, I don't know how deep the anti-Japanese sentament is in places that they attacked in WWII. However, I was always impressed that there didn't seem to be a European counterpart with Germany.
August 20, 2006 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
The 'Chinese Threat' is a neocon bugbear and I don't endorse it.
On the other hand, powerful states exercise power in order to have their way. China is no exception.
China's limitations on its use of force have had more to do with geography and the poor infrastructure and logistics of its military than any benign sentiment on its part.
The conflict with India was in the middle of the frikkin Himalalayas for pete's sakes. It's amazing that troops weren't passing out from cold and altitude just toting their rifles around.
The conflict with vietnam is most highly illustrative. Vietnam represented a hostile soviet client state on China's southern flank. Nevertheless, the Chinese were unable to penetrate more than a few miles inland. My view is that their logistics were simply not up to the task. They could not bring large enough numbers of troops and equipment to bear, and they could not support those troops more than a few miles inland.
While I agree that China has not had the same 'bomb everyone all the time' approach that America has, in large part, it has been politically, economically and militarily circumscribed. It's troops can't walk to Indonesia or the Philipines. It has no border with Thailand. The border with Myanmar is difficult mountain and hill country, and the border with India is worse. The USSR and its client states provided a block on movement. India was large enough to coherently defend itself. The rest was American clients or overseas. In short, given China's situation, its amazing that they managed to pick as many fights as they have.
The collapse of American hegemony will not mean that China moves immediately into the vacuum. This was part of my point. But the expectation will be that China will eventually move into a position of influence, in the absence of any other power.
August 20, 2006 11:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Clemons -
Thank you for trying to bring Tamamoto-san's misfortune to a wider audience.
Right wing nutdom had a great week last week:
Some of us here on the west side of the Pacific were under the impression that "radical leftist scholars" (Komori's term for Tamamoto, not mine) are citizens too--and that their opinions, even if they are not allowed to matter, should at least be heard.
We are facing the possibility we were mistaken.
A swinging public attack in a major newspaper on a public figure such as Sato Yukio for the work of a research associate is a rather un-Japanese way of resolving an intellectual dispute. Since Komori Yoshihisa has been a fixture in Washington for ages (I note you and he are both Fellows of the Institute for Corean-American Studies) I can only guess from whom he learned his chops.
August 21, 2006 1:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
The obvious conclusion for the Japanese is that the United States is no longer reliable, and that within the near term, its power or authority may cease to be relevant.
I'm not sure that that this is the reason. The issue of normalization has been bubbling for nearly 20 years now, and has been encouraged by the U.S., which, as noted in the Ikenberry post over the weekend, is in part due to the U.S. desire to have a Britain-like ally in East Asia. Domestically, I think that the movement to re-militarize has some connection to a sense of insecurity, relative to North Korea, but is really more about the resurgence of the right wing, and the decline of the wartime generation that gave such gravity to Japanese pacifism.
August 21, 2006 9:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Steve, I haven't followed the cultural side of Japanese politics closely since I moved back to the U.S. twelve years ago, and so I wonder: has the right wing managed to develop deeper roots in Japanese society, as it seems from afar, or is this the kind of loud-voice conservatism that the right wing in the U.S. seems to have perfected, of acting as though you have deep support?
August 21, 2006 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately the American Right does have deep support. That's not the same of course as saying they have broad (i.e., majority)support but they certainly do have a solid core of near-fanatical adherents.
August 21, 2006 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Japan itself is no more able to resist Chinese hegemony than any other local state.
The Japanese managed to escape Chinese political hegemony for 1500 years, with an assist from a typhoon when the Mongols came calling. They did borrow a lot culturally, but politically and even economically Japan was always master in its house (the US occupation excepted), and I don't see that changing.
August 21, 2006 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re; Actually, some Native Taiwanese (that is, people who lived in Taiwan before the Chinese Nationalists came over after the Civil war) have started focusing on Japanese culture as a way to contest the Chinese identity forced on the Island by the KMT.
Are you referring to the aboriginal Austronesians (who are related to the Filipinos) or to the earlier-established Chinese population? Or to both?
August 21, 2006 3:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
China has a very ancient tradition of seeking hegemony over its next-door neighbors and control of its trade routes with the Middle East. But China never sought to project power overseas; the nation did not even become interested in Taiwan until the 1600s when the Portuguese has shown them that the island could be used as a base by others.
August 21, 2006 3:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not too up on Taiwanese politics these days, so I don't know much about contemporary Aboriginal Taiwanese identity. I was mostly referring to the 86% of the Taiwanese population who'se ancestors migrated to Taiwan from what is now mainland China in the centuries before the KMT fled and took over the politics of the Island.
Are they Chinese? That's a question that is starting to be contested with the opening up of Taiwanese political discourse after the end of martial law. I'm not as up on it as I'd like to be, and I'm not in a position to have much of an opinion either way, but I find it fascinating.
As I understand it, the Taiwanese were more integrated into the administration of Taiwan under Japanese colonialization then they were under the KMT. For whatever reason, they were spared the widespread attrocities that marked the Japanese occupation of China. Since the end of martial law some native Taiwanese have used Japanese culture to contest the Chinese identity promoted by the KMT.
August 21, 2006 5:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK - sorry if I misunderstood your point.
I do agree that China's ideology of noninterferance might very well be a way of covering up their inability to project power beyond their immediate region. And I think that China is rising as a regional power regardless of America's falling influence. The Shanghai Group, for example, was established as a coalition of China, Russia and central Asian states to block US influenec in the region - and they've been somewhat successful in that already.
I think that China's neigbors, especially Japan, will view this as a threat. I don't think China will inevidably try to use its expanding military power to exhert hegemony over its neighbors. Their economy is so dependent on foreign investment and exports that I can't see them disrupting the economic growth that they use to legitimize their rule (in the absence of any coherant ideology) by running amok. (but that sounds conspicuously like something Tom Friedman would say, so its probably wrong)
But anyone who places thier faith in the benevolence and competance of the Chinese government shouldn't be taken very seriously.
August 21, 2006 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
My error - I would have been clearer if I'd said that they lack broad support. Whether it's true or not is up for debate. And as long as were debating undebatables, one might wonder whether the depth of support here holds a candle to the narrow but deep support evident for Japanese neo-imperialists.
August 21, 2006 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Are they Chinese?
Ethnically, yes. they are qite distinct from the native Taiwanese who, as I noted, are Austronesian people. What the "paleo-" Chinese of Taiwan are not is Mandarin Chinese, as most of them csme from southern China and speak other Chinese languages, not the official one. (Of course as with all the Chinese languages one system of writing unites them all.)
August 22, 2006 4:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, that all depends on how you define someone's identity. Objectively - you looking at them and placing them in a given category based on your criteria or Subjectively - listening to somoeone's own definition of their identity.
What Chinese identity consists of is a very difficult question both as it is answered by social science nerds as myself, and various Chinese people at different points in space and time. While it is constantly changing, the formative years for much of the modern conceptions of Chinese identity were the late 1800s/early 1900s, when under the influence of western nationalist thought Chinese reformers, modernizers and revolutionaries worked on the problem of creating a nation out of China. Taiwan was under Japanese occupation and, to the best of my knowledge, not part of the conversation. While modern Chinese nationalist thought was brought to Taiwan by the KMT, my understanding is that they did so by force.
In America, as in China, we tend to have a racialized understanding of Chinese culture. We see someone who "looks Chinese" and assume that they have a background understanding of Chinese culture and langauge. Last weekend some Chinese American friends who grew up as the only Asians in their town remarked that growing up they didn't know how to act Chinese in school. Their phenotype placed them in a category where other people assumed that they would fit various stereotypes. However, being completely culturally American, they didn't know how to meet those expectations and "be Chinese".
A Chinese woman that I was talking to a while back about meditation told me that it was much easier for Americans to become Enlightened because Chinese people have 5,000 years of philosophy running around in their heads, confusing them and keeping them from realizing the truth. We Americans, with only 200 years, are less burdened.
From the conversation it was clear that I knew more about the history of Chinese philosophy than she did. But even so, through shared descent it seemed more imminant to her in a way that it could never be to me. You hear that a lot in China - many a cab driver has lamented to me that China has 5,000 years of history weighing down their development.
Are people in Taiwan, apart from aboriginals, descended from people who migrated from Southeastern China over the course of the past 1,200 or so years? Sure.
Is there enough regional variation in culture and phenotype in Fujian and Guangzhou that the random sampling of people who migrated might create a different distribution of phenotype and cultural forms that would then be subject to widely different historical changes as well as changes through interaction with the aboriginal population?
Does phenotype determine identity? Nope. There are no categories of people, racial, ethnic or otherwise, beyond those that are arbitrarily created and treated as real.
Thats just a long winded way of saying that what Taiwanese people are or are not is something that has to be worked out by individual Taiwanese people on their own. And like I said in my earlier post, some of them are drawing on Japanese culture to assert an identity independent of China.
(sorry for the long, rambling and obscure post on something only marginally related to the original topic, but it came up, I'm doing research on the subject, and I've had way too much coffee)
August 23, 2006 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink