Japan gets ready

Quietly through legislation and not so quietly through public displays, Japan seems to be signaling its intent to re-arm. Is war in the offing?

by Reza Fiyouzat

The past year in Japan saw a stealth rewriting of the constitution, in particular, of Article 9, which prohibits Japan from participating in aggressive wars. With the necessary technicalities inserted, the Japanese government may now participate in such wars, aggressive or not, regardless of Article 9's clear instructions.

The past year also saw the passage of a set of bills, the Third Emergency Legislation, which is akin to the USA Patriot Act, originally billed as legislation needed to deal with natural disasters and national security emergencies. Under this legislation, the government can suspend any of numerous individual and civil rights in order to “better protect the public.” This includes possible suspension of property rights of individuals and companies; suspension of labor rights, particularly the right to refuse work, overtime work, or the right to challenge work conditions; as well as rights of assembly and protest. So, if the government, deeming the conditions ripe, wishes to declare the country under the threat of an imminent attack and organize the citizenry into unpaid work gangs, it now has the legal system to do so, imminent threat or not.

But the dispatch of the Japanese Self Defense Forces to Iraq was accomplished by the most ingenious of methods, by declaring to the Japanese public a “humanitarian mission,” a mission to rebuild Iraq. In reality, however, public appearances of the SDF, all 550 of them, in the town of Samawa, about 260 kilometers south of Baghdad, has apparently been so few and far between that their clean vehicles which occasionally leave their well-guarded camp, do not look very impressive to the local, extremely impoverished Iraqis, whose local tribal leaders must have been promised heaven and earth to give safe haven to the Japanese forces.

According to Mainichi Shimbun of December 4, 2004, “Samawa residents had believed a computer would be provided to each of the households, that new buildings would be constructed, and that numerous jobs would be created after the SDF deployment. However, the SDF troops have done only simple things such as supplying clothes to poor people and repainting school walls. The unemployment rate in the city probably remains over 50 percent. Residents are disillusioned by the SDF.”

Meanwhile, Japan is playing a very active role behind the scenes, supporting and oiling the wheels of the war machine to the best of her diplomatic, financial and logistical ability. For example, Japan has provided free fuel to the US fleets involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, for at least until this writing, and will most likely keep on doing so, for as long as the Koizumi government can get away with it vis-à-vis public opinion: it is the Japanese taxpayers, not him, who are footing the bill.

According to The Japan Times of October 2, 2004, “Some within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party have said Japan should charge for the fuel because the revised bilateral Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement that took effect in late July allows for supplies and goods to be exchanged for money.” The paper said, however, that, “Japan intends to continue providing free fuel to US warships in the Arabian Sea, despite [the] pact that allows it to charge fees, according to government sources.”

When push comes to shove, policy makers and their advisers, or their academic allies, point to the enormous debt owed by the Iraqi government to the Japanese government and banks as the bottom-line reason why Japan has to participate so diligently in this illegal war of aggression against the people of Iraq. Should the Japanese government not lend its symbolic and financial—as well as logistical—support to its ally and friend in this time of need, not only will the US be less likely to look out for Japan's interests in general, but will also not cooperate on a range of issues essential to Japan, most urgent among them being the apparent North Korean nuclear threat.

According to an editorial by the left-of-center newspaper Asahi Shimbun , “A fighter of the [Imperial] Japanese navy is on display on the first floor of the Yushukan war memorial museum at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It is a Mitsubishi Zero-type shipboard fighter model 52, one of the Zero fighters. The plane can also be viewed from the outside through a glass wall.”

The editorial goes on to quote the explanation that accompanies the display, which reads: “Its first campaign was in September in the 15th year of Showa (1940). In an air battle against Soviet-made Chinese war planes in Chongqing, China, it shot down most of the enemy planes with no damage on the Japanese side in an unprecedented victory. With its great combat capability and long flying range, it was the world's strongest fighter.”

The Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is the place where, along with the remains of 2.5 million Japanese soldiers of various wars, are buried the remains of Class A war criminals who were convicted in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals, and subsequently executed. It is also the shrine in the center of a big international controversy, since the current Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has developed a liking for visiting the shrine in official capacity, on a regular basis, something the Korean and the Chinese leaders have not taken to kindly.

One may venture to throw caution to the wind and suggest that the display of the Zero Fighters in the Yasukuni shrine could well be a tit-for-tat responding to the US's fully-restored display of Enola Gay in the Smithsonian. Or perhaps this is a two-step dance of like-minded fellows.

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