Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (32 page)

Some Japanese teachers were alarmed about what they saw as the further encroachment of revisionist propaganda. A number of school authorities had, for instance, started demanding that teachers attending school ceremonies stand before the Japanese flag and sing the national anthem. In Tokyo, the school board had ruled that, ideally, one teacher should learn to play the
Kimigayo
, ‘His Majesty’s Reign’, on the piano. Outside the classroom, these symbols had begun to shed their taboo status. In the 2002 soccer World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, crowds had good-humouredly waved the flag and sung the anthem at home games. But some teachers remained intensely wary of attempts to instil – or enforce – patriotism in schools. They still regarded both the
Hinomaru
flag and
Kimigayo
anthem – with its entreaty for ‘eight thousand generations’ of imperial rule – as symbols
of the cult that had led Japanese unthinkingly into war. Kozo Kaifu, a lawyer acting for the rebellious teachers, put it in terms that Yukichi Fukuzawa, the nineteenth-century liberal thinker who had stressed the importance of individualism, would have understood. ‘Post-war education is intended to raise children not for the emperor but for themselves, so they can be the best people they can be,’ he told me.

Hiroko Arai was a mild-mannered English teacher at a school in Tokyo. At fifty-nine, she was nearing retirement. One of eight siblings brought up in the intellectual ferment immediately after the war, she was among those who refused to stand. Her father had run a
sento
public bath in Fukui prefecture. As a child, Arai was taught by her parents to believe in what she called the sovereignty of the people. ‘My favourite phrase is “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”,’ she told me, quoting Thomas Jefferson. That meant standing up – or in her case sitting down – for what you believed in. When the
Hinomaru
flag was raised she remained resolutely stuck to her seat. As a punishment for her refusal to honour the national symbol, the school board forced Arai into early retirement with a reduced pension. She was also obliged to attend a ‘re-education seminar’ at which, she said, she was monitored by officials who noted her every reaction on a multi-coloured form. ‘During the Second World War, the
Hinomaru
flag and the
Kimigayo
became symbols of what we did,’ she said of Japan’s invasion of China and Southeast Asia. ‘I can’t show respect to these symbols.’
¹⁴

Shy and quietly spoken, Arai had struggled with herself to carry out her protest. Japan was not the easiest society in which to be the odd one out, she said. She thought the older teachers were more rebellious than the younger ones for whom the war was more distant. Unlike the generation after the war, younger Japanese had been taught to be more obedient. She paused. ‘I suppose it’s the fault of us teachers,’ she added, almost to herself, acknowledging her profession’s role in educating generations of what she deemed quiescent Japanese. ‘I didn’t want to educate them to be so obedient. I wanted them to be critical of authority.’ Arai was worried about the new school textbooks too. Even the old ones were bad enough, she said. Far from being masochistic, as the right claimed, they barely mentioned the suffering Japan had brought to the countries it invaded. Instead, they revelled in
Japan’s own suffering. She also thought they tended to project a negative view of Asian neighbours, instilling the notion that Japan was alone in a hostile region. One textbook, she recalled, contained the sentence, ‘Look at the map. The Korean peninsula thrusts like a dagger at Japan.’

In the same year I met Yuko Tojo, the
Yomiuri
newspaper, a rightwing publication with a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 13 million, launched a year-long investigation into Japan’s war record. The articles were reasonably probing, although they were careful to exonerate the emperor. One of the pieces found that Japan’s leaders had treated human life across Asia with contempt, sacrificing even Japanese soldiers as they might toss out ‘a pair of worn-out shoes’. The series was hardly revelatory for anyone with a knowledge of the war, but for its pains the newspaper’s offices were surrounded by the black vans of ultranationalists, which blared patriotic music and shouted menacing slogans. Tsuneo Watanabe, octogenarian chairman of the newspaper, said he had launched the project to counter what he deemed a lack of sincerity. ‘We committed acts of aggression in the continent and we need to study these in detail and leave the results to posterity,’ he said, speaking through a fog of pipe smoke. Political leaders had ‘failed to grasp’ the need to dig into Japan’s past and squarely face up to it, he went on. ‘Unless we do that, Chinese leaders will not be able to build favourable relations with Japan.’
¹⁵

I discussed Japan’s difficult external relations with Toshiaki Miura, a thoughtful commentator at the left-of-centre
Asahi
newspaper and a regular television pundit. Miura was a tall, slightly shy man with grey hair and spectacles. There was something of the academic about him, though he also had the jumpy quality of a good journalist waiting for the next twist in the story. In a remark that neatly summed up Japan’s international isolation, yet its keen sense of wanting a place in the world order, he told me, ‘Our psyche is very insular. But we always see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside.’ That struck me as a perfect summation of the Japanese paradox – and the root of some of its tragic missteps. Because of its insularity, Japan’s only way of understanding itself has been with reference to other nations. An obvious benchmark in the nineteenth century had been Britain, an island
nation just like Japan and a country that had the power and status to which Japan aspired. ‘Britain is much closer to the continent,’ said Miura, in a commonly voiced lament about Japan’s geographical – and psychological – isolation. ‘One of the tragedies of Japan’s position in international society is that we have no neighbours of the same size or the same level of industry. If Japan were placed in Europe, you would have Germany, Italy and England to get along with, and we could learn how to coexist with countries of the same strength, the same industrial level. But here in Asia we have a huge neighbour, China, a divided Korean peninsula, and a bunch of small states in Southeast Asia. It’s very difficult to develop a diplomatic sense that we are one of many countries.’

•   •   •

Koizumi never stopped visiting Yasukuni, although subsequent prime ministers, including the more overtly nationalist Shinzo Abe, did refrain from doing so. In Koizumi’s case, if anything, the criticism galvanized his resolve to go. He repeated his pilgrimage during each of his six years in office, the last, defiantly, on the highly charged day of 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. There was a sense of paranoia about a rising China in parts of the administration and a feeling that a stand had to be made. One diplomat, who tried to persuade the prime minister not to go, later told me about the encounter. ‘Koizumi’s face went completely red and he grew very angry. He said, “Don’t you understand? Unless I keep visiting the shrine, China will forever bring up the issue. By continuing to go, I can put a stop to this once and for all.”’ One close adviser was openly fearful of a resurgent Middle Kingdom. ‘We have seen nothing like this in human history, a country where massive amounts of people are geared towards profit-making and whose leaders are ready to compromise any values for an economic return,’ he told me. ‘It is like putting five or six Japans of the 1960s together. The level of enthusiasm for development is breathtaking.’ As the US historian Kenneth Pyle wrote, Japan’s post-bubble generation ‘sees China not as a war victim but as a rival’.
¹⁶

During Koizumi’s period in office, relations with Beijing became the sourest in a generation. Koizumi was not once invited to China on an official visit, an extraordinary lapse of contact between what were far and away Asia’s two biggest economies.
¹⁷
(Japan was then the largest
and China second.) Some brushed off the costs of the diplomatic freeze, arguing that trade between Japan and China was flourishing and that officials from both countries maintained regular contact outside the public limelight. Many Japanese business leaders did not see it that way. By 2004, China had overtaken the US as Japan’s most important trading partner and the business lobby began to worry that the official stand-off between the two countries would harm their interests. Toyota had already had to withdraw an advertisement in which Chinese stone lions had been depicted bowing to one of its vehicles. The commercial had provoked outrage in China’s internet chatrooms which saw it as a national slur. Mori Building was forced to change the design of its 101-storey skyscraper in Shanghai because the large hole at the top of it was said to resemble the Rising Sun flag. Yotaro Kobayashi, chairman of Fuji Xerox, a company with several factories in China, publicly urged that pilgrimages to Yasukuni cease. ‘Visits are rubbing against the grain of Chinese people’s sentiments,’ he said. For his pains, he was castigated by the ultraright as a salesman more interested in profits than in Japan’s dignity. Black trucks swarmed outside his house and one day Kobayashi received an anonymous letter. The envelope contained a bullet.

China and Japan were already scrapping over gas reserves deep under the waters of the East China Sea and there were regular clashes – thankfully verbal – over fishing-boat and submarine incursions into waters administered by Japan. Long-smouldering tension escalated dramatically in 2005 when anti-Japanese demonstrations spread across China. In April, protesters in several Chinese cities targeted Japanese department stores and small businesses, hurling rocks through plate-glass windows and throwing food at Japanese restaurants and Japanese cars. In Shenzhen, up to 10,000 people surrounded the Jusco supermarket, a Japanese chain, chanting slogans and urging people to boycott Japanese goods. Young Chinese shouted insults against ‘little Japs’ and ‘Japanese pigs’. Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, said, ‘The core issue in the China–Japan relationship is that Japan needs to face up to history squarely.’
¹⁸
In Japan, though, most politicians were tired of apologizing.

Abnormal Nation

At fifty-two, Shinzo Abe was the youngest post-war prime minister and the first to be born after 1945. He was the chosen successor of Junichiro Koizumi and he came into office in September 2006, right after Koizumi had stepped down. His political heartland was Yamaguchi prefecture in western Japan. That had been the old feudal domain of Choshu, one of four that had rebelled against the
shogun
in the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration in order to bring about a national modernization capable of repelling foreign imperialists. It was in Choshu that the concepts of a professional army and Japan’s national interest had been born. These were causes close to Abe’s heart. Above all, said one of his closest advisers, he sought what the Japanese call
hinkaku
, or dignity – ‘to be a man worthy of respect and to build a nation worthy of respect’.
¹

Abe (pronounced Ah-bay) was a nationalist, the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a wartime cabinet minister and one-time economic tsar of the puppet state of Manchukuo. After the war, Kishi was arrested, but he was never convicted of war crimes, though he was accused of being responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Chinese forced labourers.
²
Kishi re-entered politics after the American ‘reverse course’ – which strengthened the Japanese right as Washington grew more wary of Communism – and completed his return to respectability by becoming prime minister in 1957. Three years later, he sacrificed his premiership in order to renew the unpopular US–Japan Security Treaty, whose ratification prompted massive street protests in which one woman, a 22-year-old student at Tokyo University, was killed. Nearly half a century after these events – the high-point of post-war radical expression – in September 2006, Abe, who vividly
remembered sitting on his grandfather’s knee as protesters surrounded the house, formed his own ‘cabinet for the creation of a beautiful country’.
Beautiful Country
was the title Abe gave his book, a political manifesto in which he had argued that Japan should stop apologizing for itself, learn to appreciate its culture and stand on its own two feet. In one of his first newspaper interviews as prime minister, he told me emphatically that he would rewrite the constitution within six years.
³
‘The current constitution was written before Japan became independent after the war,’ he said, referring to the period of US occupation. ‘With 60 years past, there are provisions within the constitution that no longer befit the reality of the day.’
⁴
Among the changes he sought was a revision of the pacifist Article 9, which obliged Japan to renounce its sovereign right of war. The article, Abe said, was incompatible with the new, proactive international role he envisaged for the country. He also sought to revamp education, to make it more ‘moral’ with less liberal parsing of Japan’s history. ‘The time has come for us to step forward, with quiet pride in our hearts, to create a new country,’ he told parliament in his wooden style. ‘A beautiful country, Japan is a country that values culture, tradition, history and nature . . . A beautiful country, Japan is a country that is trusted, respected, and loved in the world.’ Abe had obviously not been reading the Chinese press.

One of his closest foreign policy advisers, once described to me as Abe’s ‘brain’, was Hisahiko Okazaki, an oleaginous man who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Thailand and who now devoted himself to several of Japan’s rightwing causes. He worked in an office hung with Japanese scrolls off Toranomon, Tiger’s Gate, a busy intersection near the heart of political power at Nagatacho, Tokyo’s Capitol Hill. He liked to describe himself as an intelligence officer, something still nominally illegal in Japan, and he read voraciously to keep abreast of world affairs. Okazaki had standard rightwing views. He denied the worst atrocities of the war – he said perhaps a thousand civilians had been killed in Nanjing – and still quietly fumed at the American imposition of ‘victors’ justice’ after the war. He thought Japanese schools had been hijacked by Communist labour unions and that they taught children a peculiarly self-flagellating view of history. He wanted children to marvel at their ancient heroes, including some of their enlightened emperors. ‘For the Marxists,
they’re all feudal, and feudal was bad,’ he said.
⁵
Like Abe, he rejected any notion that schoolchildren should be taught more comprehensively about the war. Far from it, he said, it was time Japanese youth stopped wallowing in national guilt and learned a little pride.

Okazaki was one of those urging Abe to ‘normalize’ Japan by reviving its right to possess, and if necessary use, its armed forces in the service of its allies. He wanted to override what he said was a self-imposed ban on ‘collective self-defence’. This meant that, although the country’s defence was solely in the hands of the US, Japan was not allowed to come to America’s rescue even if, say, a US ship were attacked off the Japanese coast. Shedding this restriction was necessary to balance the precipitous military rise of China, Okazaki said. ‘Having a navy and an army might be a breach of the constitution. But they already exist, so the question is how to use them,’ he argued, using the circular logic that pervades constitutional discussion in Japan. If Tokyo could drop its ban, the balance of power in East Asia would be altered overnight. With one stroke of a pen, Japan’s battleship and supersonic jet-owning ‘police force’ could admit that it was actually a fully fledged fighting force. ‘If you calculate the joint strengths of America and Japan, it will take the Chinese ten or twenty years to catch up,’ he said.

Okazaki didn’t go out of his way to disguise his resentment at America and its post-war domination of Japan. But, like many on the right, he believed Tokyo had little option but to cling more tightly to Washington. ‘You know Japan’s international relations only started in 1853,’ he said, referring to the year of the Black Ships when America tried to force Japan open. ‘Before that we were simply isolated with no international relations. For 150 years since then, apart from the fifteen years between 1930 and 1945, we were allied with either Britain or the Americans. During that time we were absolutely safe and prosperous.’ So long as Japan was allied with a western power, he was saying – not left alone in its cut-throat neighbourhood with China – everything would be fine. The fifteen years from 1930 to 1945, when Japan struck out on its own, were a disastrous ‘aberration’, he said. It was a variation on the ‘leaving Asia’ theme. Japan was better off as a ‘western power’, or at least closely allied with one. I asked why he thought Japan and China were unable to live alone together without
a foreign power to keep them apart. After all, historically their cultures had been very similar. ‘I don’t accept that argument. We are different countries. Your neighbour is always a competitor,’ he said. ‘All neighbours are like that: the Romans and the Persians, the Germans and French. Why should neighbours be friendly? Are there any examples in history?’

•   •   •

I had witnessed for myself just how ‘abnormal’ a country Japan still was a couple of years before when I went to see a contingent of Japan’s Self Defence Forces. Dressed in military fatigues and wearing tin hats, they were digging ice and snow. Their mission: to produce exquisite, shimmering ice sculptures of palaces, fairy grottoes and a fifteen-foot high replica of the Parthenon. Their theatre of operations: Sapporo’s world-famous Snow Festival. Carving ice sculptures was a job these men had done for decades. That told you a lot about post-war Japan. So pathologically militaristic was its society deemed to be by the Americans that, at the end of the war, it was forced to adopt a constitution for ever renouncing its right to wage war. Article 9 of a document scrambled together by young American idealists working for General Douglas MacArthur stated that: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.’ As a result, ‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’.

Almost as soon as the ink was dry, the Americans regretted having put Japan in its constitutional straitjacket. With the outbreak of the Korean War and the subsequent onset of the Cold War, it ill-suited Washington to have an emasculated Asian ally entirely dependent on the US for military protection. The Self Defence Forces were formed in 1950. At first, they were called the National Police Reserve. And so, the fiction of an army that was not an army gradually came into being, creating a body of men – some quarter of a million strong at its peak – that looked and felt like a military, but didn’t generally behave like one. The ability to deploy this formidable force was heavily circumscribed. Only in the past decade has a series of laws been passed that, among other things, relieves tanks of their requirement to stop at traffic lights in the event that Japan comes under attack. As we saw, as
recently as 1995, when the Kobe earthquake destroyed huge sections of one of Japan’s biggest cities, authorities were reluctant to send in a force that, for some people at least, still retained echoes of Japan’s Imperial Army. The warm reception to the massive deployment of the Self Defence Forces after the March 2011 tsunami was a revealing contrast – and may yet prove something of a turning point in public attitudes towards its own military.

One of the schemes the top brass dreamed up to improve its image – and presumably give it something to do – was to lend a hand at the Sapporo Snow Festival. From 1955, recruits from a nearby base in Hokkaido began to build the massive, yet exquisite, ice sculptures for which the festival gained fame. Over the years, the glistening creations of Japan’s military grew in popularity. By 2004, the year I attended, the Sapporo festival, held in February, was attracting 2.5 million visitors. The soldiers took their duties seriously. The commanding general of the 11th Division had given the troops explicit instructions, Captain Hisashi Matsumoto told me. ‘He told us we should carve spellbinding ice statues for the people,’ the captain said, in a clipped voice and with no trace of irony. Matsumoto, who had joined up aged fifteen, said the nearest he had come to action in his twenty years of service was when he participated in the search for an old lady who had got lost picking mushrooms in the mountains. When he posed for a photograph in front of one of the ice sculptures, Matsumoto initially made the two-fingered peace sign beloved of Japanese when confronted with a camera. Only when he recomposed himself for a second shot did he assume a stiff-backed stance more befitting a military man.

That year, the government had ordered several hundred members of the Self Defence Forces, including some from the 11th Division, to report for duty in Iraq, where Japan was about to embark on its most controversial mission since the Second World War. Tokyo had been determined Japan should shake off some of the inhibitions – constitutional, legalistic and, after sixty years of pacifism, now socially ingrained – that had restricted its international actions throughout the post-war period. Japanese troops would go to Iraq to take part in rebuilding efforts, specifically to help fix water and electricity supplies. Part of the reasoning was tactical. Japan wanted to please its
most important ally, the US, which sought a show of solidarity for its controversial war in Iraq. Part of it, though, was an effort to shake off a post-war taboo that had limited Japan’s military to carving ice sculptures but had deemed its soldiers too untrustworthy to be deployed abroad.

Thus, even before Abe came to power following Koizumi’s retirement, Japan had taken some important steps towards ‘normalization’. Soon after al-Qaeda’s attack on the US in September 2001, the Diet had passed a special law authorizing ships from the Maritime Self Defence Forces – Japan’s navy by another name – to supply America’s fleet in the Indian Ocean. The law restricted Japan’s cooperation to refuelling and logistics, but symbolically, at least, Tokyo was providing rear support for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Subsequent bills passed in the summer of 2003 broadened the government’s powers in case Japan’s territory was invaded. Japan was also in the initial stages of installing missile-defence systems. To deploy such equipment would require overturning the restrictions on collective self-defence so disliked by Abe.
⁶

Much of the Japanese public remained staunchly pacifist and wary about becoming entangled in a messy foreign adventure of Washington’s making. Although the government insisted the dispatch of members of the Self Defence Forces to Iraq was not unconstitutional, those on the left opposed watering down Japan’s pacifist charter. Naoto Kan, then opposition leader, denounced the dispatch as a ‘gross violation of the principles of the constitution’. Only sixty years previously, he reminded parliamentarians, ‘our government couldn’t control the Japanese army and we did a lot of damage in China and in Asia’.

The deployment of 550 ground troops began in January 2004. It turned out to be a largely symbolic affair. The Japanese, though lightly armed, were strictly forbidden from fighting even if soldiers from allied countries came under fire. In fact, they had to be guarded by soldiers from Holland, Australia and the UK, rendering their participation, from a purely military perspective, something of a nuisance. The mission was not without its incidents. In the run-up to the dispatch, two Japanese diplomats were shot and killed in Iraq. On several occasions, mortars were lobbed into the well-fortified Japanese encampment in
southern Iraq where, it was said, troops had fresh supplies of sushi flown in regularly. Yet, as the constitution dictated, there was nothing in the way of real combat. The Japanese forces did a bit of routine repair work and then left. At the end of their mission, in the summer of 2006, all 550 returned to Japan without so much as a scratch.

Even after their withdrawal from Iraq, Japanese Air Self Defence Forces stationed in Kuwait continued missions flying equipment and US and UN personnel into Iraq. I was part of the travelling press corps in April 2007 when Abe visited the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait, twenty-three miles from the Iraqi border, to review his troops. Abe swept in like some feudal clan leader, his retinue marching behind a purple flag decorated with cherry blossoms, a treasured national symbol especially beloved of the right. Standing behind a makeshift podium inside an aircraft hangar, he spoke to about a hundred Japanese personnel lined up in front of a bulbous C-130 transport aircraft. ‘You will be the ones who will turn the Iraqi reconstruction work into a glorious chapter in the history of Japan,’ he said hopefully.
⁷
‘As your commander-in-chief, I want to thank you from my heart.’ In my notebook, I wrote, ‘Japan is forbidden by its constitution from maintaining land, sea and air forces. But no one said anything about a commander-in-chief.’