Mythical Japanese Militarism

You know, it's hard to read stories like this one and take seriously the hyperventilating of certain talking heads about the supposed "militarism" which is rife in modern Japanese society. How many "militarist" societies are there in which the head of the army goes to work in a business suit for fear of causing embarrassment? The problem with modern-day Japan isn't that it's doing too much on the military front, but that it's doing too little - too little to ready itself for the threat posed by a rapidly arming China which is spending up to three times as much on its military as it lets on in its official accounts.

Comments

[Randy McDonald]

"The problem with modern-day Japan isn't that it's doing too much on the military front, but that it's doing too little."

More precisely still, the problem with modern-day Japan is that its peaceloving credentials aren't believed. When you have, among other things, the Education Minister undercutting apologies for the comfort women by quoting with approval a letter writer who said that they should be proud that they relieved the stresses of Japanese soldiers, East Asians are justified in being skeptical that Japan's truly sorry for the atrocities of the Second World War.

[Abiola Lapite]

1 - The actions of a few Japanese politicians cannot be taken as representative of the feelings of ordinary Japanese people, any more than the oafish statements of politicians and bureaucrats elsewhere are necessarily supported by the average person. As a factual matter, anyone who keeps abreast of events in Japan will know that ordinary Japanese are hardly sitting back and doing nothing about their leaders' provocative visits to Yasukuni:

http://japundit.com/archives/2005/10/07/1315/

It'll be a cold day in hell before the Chinese can even think of initiating similar actions against their own leaders.

2 - Whether or not Japan is sorry for the atrocities it committed has no bearing on whether its citizens are interested in engaging in militarism: for the latter issue, all that matters is that the Japanese are truly sorry about the violence visited upon *them*, and the genuinely widespread unpopularity of nuclear weapons within the country suggests that they have no desire to see the experience repeated. Nothing is stopping Japan from going fully nuclear in a matter of months or even weeks other than the aversion of the populace to such a policy, otherwise elements in the LDP would have initiated just such a measure years ago, rather than fearing to speak of it in public and risk mass outrage.

In short, Japan is not a threat to Asia, and as a democratic state in which freedom of speech exists, even the odd extremist can be expected to gain a high profile now and then, just as in the West. All the Chinese whining about Japanese "militarism" can't hide the fact that they're the ones hiking defense spending by double digits year after year while Tokyo has actually been cutting defense outlays - a fact reported, ironically enough, by Chinese propaganda organs, amongst other sources.

http://english.people.com.cn/200312/24/eng20031224_131124.shtml

[Randy McDonald]

"It'll be a cold day in hell before the Chinese can even think of initiating similar actions against their own leaders."

That's irrelevant to the issue at hand of Japanese social/political dynamics.

"Whether or not Japan is sorry for the atrocities it committed has no bearing on whether its citizens are interested in engaging in militarism: for the latter issue, all that matters is that the Japanese are truly sorry about the violence visited upon *them*[.]"

If that's the case--the Japanese are only afraid of being militaristic because they're afraid that they might get hurt, not because they're afraid of what they might do to others or because they're sorry for what they did do in the past--then the Chinese, South Koreans, and other East Asians are entirely right to be afraid of Japan's militaristic potential. Any great power with so little empathy for non-nationals is bound to do serious damage, and the threat of force is going to be the only thing discouraging it from foreign adventures at others' expense.

Fortunately for the Japanese and their neighbours, I don't think that this is the case. The Japanese people as a whole seems to be strongly opposed to militarism; when Japan's wartime atrocities are mentioned, sorrow seems the most common reaction, with denial motivated by guilt and horror (not by a stick-it-to-the-victims cruelty) coming behind. That's why it's all the more important for Japan's leaders to follow the desires of the Japanese people by not doing stupidly provocative things like visiting Yasukuni Shrine, or indeed like giving that shrine any sort of privileged position in Japanese public life.

[Abiola Lapite]

"That's irrelevant to the issue at hand of Japanese social/political dynamics."

Not in the least - unless you think what's going on in China ought to have no bearing on how Japan should wish to comport itself in international affairs. Why on earth should the average Japanese person have any great desire to see his leaders bow to the whims of a Communist autocracy which has killed far many more people than Japan ever did, yet hardly makes any mention of same in its textbooks or official records? Why cater to the demands of a Marxist dictatorship which still runs vast concentration camps even as it orchestrates anti-Japanese riots over similar activities which occurred 60 years ago? This isn't me engaging in hypotheticals here: just go to the Ninki Blog Ranking service and use Google to translate what popular Japanese bloggers have to say about the endless Chinese demands for this, that or the other.

http://blog.with2.net/rank1510-0.html

"If that's the case--the Japanese are only afraid of being militaristic because they're afraid that they might get hurt, not because they're afraid of what they might do to others or because they're sorry for what they did do in the past--then the Chinese, South Koreans, and other East Asians are entirely right to be afraid of Japan's militaristic potential."

You write as if every German pacifist had a heartfelt desire to refrain from war only out of concern for the damage done to others, rather than out of a fear of experiencing the ruin that befell Germans themselves in the end - which no doubt explains why Germany was so eager to engage in aggression on the heels of World War I, or all that present-day talk of the "unfairness" of the Benes decrees and Churchill's "war crimes" ... Don't confuse German shame for acts which were too big to cover up, and self-recrimination at simply having lost the war, with heartfelt regret over the wrongs done others - words are cheap, especially when the nuclear-armed victors' troops are on your soil, as French, British, American troops were and still are.

"Any great power with so little empathy for non-nationals is bound to do serious damage, and the threat of force is going to be the only thing discouraging it from foreign adventures at others' expense."

This is a non-sequitur: that the Japanese are more concerned with their own sufferings than they are with the sufferings they inflicted upon others does *not* in the least mark them out from the common run of humanity - show me the American majority for chestbeating over the wrongs done to Mexico and the Phillipines, or the overwhelming regret in Britain for its bloody colonial conquests in Africa and South Asia, or even a hint of British shame over the Chinese Opium Wars and subsequent dope peddling.

"That's why it's all the more important for Japan's leaders to follow the desires of the Japanese people by not doing stupidly provocative things like visiting Yasukuni Shrine, or indeed like giving that shrine any sort of privileged position in Japanese public life."

"Is" and "ought" are rarely the same thing in politics, and the fact of the matter is that there is not only a highly nationalistic constituency which is electorally worth catering to in Japan, just as in every other country, but that every time the Chinese indulges in a hypocritical* orgy of condemnation of these visits, it breeds sympathy for these views which might not otherwise have existed. It isn't the Japanese who are out rioting on the streets at real or imagined slights by foreigners, they aren't the ones making aggressive claims of overlordship over people who have no interest in living under their rule (Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan), and Japan isn't the country whose generals boast of how losing tens of millions of their own people in a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for turning California into glass. To ignore these realities over visits to some shrine by a few right-wing politicians is to miss the forest entirely for the trees.

*A government which still officially reveres Mao Zedong has no business calling a piker like Tojo a "war criminal."

PS: Consider the following story,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4176805.stm

in which Gordon Brown says the days of Britain apologizing for its colonial exploits are "over" (as if Britain has ever even made such an apology), and take into account that Britain not only held colonial overlordship well into the 1960s, or more than 2 decades after Japan retreated to its home islands, but that the British Empire for which Gordon Brown sees no need to apologize was by far the greatest practitioner of human slavery since the glory days of Rome, and responsible for more than half of all slaves sold during the last 3 centuries. Why is this man not deserving of the sorts of shrill accusations routinely cast at Japanese leaders, and where was the widespread outrage at home or abroad at his remarks when he made them? It would seem that imperialist aggression is only a fleeting and forgiveable sin when perpetrated by Europeans, but becomes uniquely unforgiveable and unforgettable when the Japanese attempt to do the same.

[Randy McDonald]

"Not in the least - unless you think what's going on in China ought to have no bearing on how Japan should wish to comport itself in international affairs."

I do. I also think that mature democracies should behave in a mature way. West Germany had many more grievances with the Soviet Union than Japan is ever likely to have with China, but West German politicos who said things like proclaiming their support for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union and insulting Holocaust victims did not advance very far indeed. With good reason: Gratuitously insulting authoritarian countries whose populations had good reason to dislike Germans based on their experiences of genocide by Germans is a very stupid policy indeed.

"You write as if every German pacifist had a heartfelt desire to refrain from war only out of concern for the damage done to others, rather than out of a fear of experiencing the ruin that befell Germans themselves in the end - which no doubt explains why Germany was so eager to engage in aggression on the heels of World War I, or all that present-day talk of the "unfairness" of the Benes decrees and Churchill's "war crimes" ..."

Um. You're conflating two different sorts of things. After the First World War, Germany and Germans openly wanted to reconquer the areas lost at Versailles and then some. The current debates on the Benes decrees and what happened to German civilians, in contrast, are rooted not in revanchist nationalism but in a legitimate desire to examine what happened and why.

"Don't confuse German shame for acts which were too big to cover up, and self-recrimination at simply having lost the war, with heartfelt regret over the wrongs done others[.]"

I think you're misreading German attitudes significantly. Again, I point to the examples of German polticos: Politicians who praise any of the actions of Nazi Germany do not advance very far, and it's agreed upon that they should not. Compare the situation in Japan.

"This is a non-sequitur: that the Japanese are more concerned with their own sufferings than they are with the sufferings they inflicted upon others does *not* in the least mark them out from the common run of humanity[.]"

I grant you that Japan's treatment of the atrocities committed by Japanese against civilian populations is much closer to that of Italy than to Germany's. Who in Italy speaks frequently of the systematic extermination of Ethiopia's educated classes, the genocide visited upon Libyan nomads, or the thankfully aborted plans to kill the irritating Slovenes? That this hasn't provoked more and bigger catastrophes in Italy's political life frankly owes much to the inherent weaknesses not only of Italy's victims but of Italy.

""Is" and "ought" are rarely the same thing in politics, and the fact of the matter is that there is not only a highly nationalistic constituency which is electorally worth catering to in Japan, just as in every other country, but that every time the Chinese indulges in a hypocritical* orgy of condemnation of these visits, it breeds sympathy for these views which might not otherwise have existed."

Yes. Jews who condemn all Germans indiscriminately have been blamed for German anti-Semitism. And ... ?

"Japan isn't the country whose generals boast of how losing tens of millions of their own people in a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for turning California into glass."

Point. That threat was apparently made in response to American threats to bomb the Three Gorges dam. Threats to visit mass murder are irresponsible regardless of the nationality of the person making the threat.

"*A government which still officially reveres Mao Zedong has no business calling a piker like Tojo a "war criminal.""

And the people? They have no rights?

[Gordon Brown]

"Why is this man not deserving of the sorts of shrill accusations routinely cast at Japanese leaders, and where was the widespread outrage at home or abroad at his remarks when he made them?"

Where did I say that he wasn't? Straw man.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Gratuitously insulting authoritarian countries whose populations had good reason to dislike Germans based on their experiences of genocide by Germans is a very stupid policy indeed."

And where are these Japanese politicians "gratuitously insulting" China? Visiting Yasukuni is a right freely exercised in a country which guarantees religious freedom, a concept of which the Chinese government has no understanding. Helmut Kohl had no problem dragging Ronald Reagan along to the Bitburg cemetary in which SS men are buried, yet he wasn't condemned for his "stupidity" despite having done this at the height of the Cold War, nor did the Soviets bother to seize upon the incident as an occasion to engage in shrill rhetoric.

"Um. You're conflating two different sorts of things. After the First World War, Germany and Germans openly wanted to reconquer the areas lost at Versailles and then some. The current debates on the Benes decrees and what happened to German civilians, in contrast, are rooted not in revanchist nationalism but in a legitimate desire to examine what happened and why."

You must be living in a fantasy world - I actually do follow the German media closely in the original language, so pardon my not going along with this utterly ridiculous claim. There's no "legitimate desire to examine what happened and why" pushing the Vertriebenen or the likes of Jorg Friedrich to portray their side as "victims." Are you trying to tell me I'm hallucinating the words I read coming directly from these sources? Perhaps you should try reading up on Erika Steinbach or following up the story of Das Bild's serialization of "Der Brand" before making such patently wrong remarks.

"Politicians who praise any of the actions of Nazi Germany do not advance very far, and it's agreed upon that they should not."

But British politicians who see no reason to apologize for the colonial days *do* get very far, even rising to the second-highest position in the land, a fact you conveniently ignore. Britain has never apologized for *anything*, not Amritsar, not the Mau-Mau campaigns, not the slaughter of the Matabele, not the gassing of Iraqis, not a single thing whatsoever, and Britain continues to engage in military excursions around the world to this day, but I bet you don't see the British as the danger you see the Japanese. It would be futile to list the number of colonial butchers safely memorialized in statues in central London and enconsced in places like Westminster Abbey, yet no one seems to bat an eye at the fact that they are paid a level of explicit homage that would be unthinkable for the likes of Tojo in Japan, certainly not you - and yet you want me to view the Japanese politicos' visits to Yasukuni as uniquely outrageous? Fuggedaboutit!

"Yes. Jews who condemn all Germans indiscriminately have been blamed for German anti-Semitism. And ... ?"

Utter and total nonsense. Is Israel a murderous Communist dictatorship? Does Israel have concentration camps set up in which Palestinians are worked to death and their body parts sold to the highest bidder?

"And the people? They have no rights?"

It is not the Chinese people's "right" to prevent Japanese politicians from exercising freedom of speech or paying their respects to the dead, even if they find it offensive, nor are they in any fit position to judge to what extent Japan deserves their outrage, given the absurdly mangled version of history taught in their schoolbooks. People who don't even know what happened in their own country's capital as recently as 1989 have no basis for confidently assessing what happened in 1939.

"Where did I say that he wasn't? Straw man."

This is just plain ridiculous: the point is clear enough and there's no use avoiding it - you're trying to condemn the Japanese as uniquely culpable for holding attitudes hardly anyone, not even you, seems to have a real problem with where Westerners are concerned. China is no more deserving of special consideration for past imperialist aggression than any other country in the world, and anyone who says otherwise is just being a useful idiot for age-old Chinese ethnocentrism. When Britain, France, America, Belgium and the Netherlands have their leaders routinely engage in abject apologies for their long histories of conquest and remove all aspects of their "glorious" imperialist pasts from their national museums and public parks, maybe I'll have some sympathy for attitudes like yours, but I'm not going to agree that a peaceful Japan which spends less on defense, even as its aggressive, autocratic, nuclear-armed neighbor goes on a spending spree, is some sort of "threat" merely because a few right-wing politicians go to visit a shrine which honors *all* of the millions of Japanese casualties from the war, not just the few men like Tojo hypocritical Chinese jingoists focus on.

[dsquared]

[It would be futile to list the number of colonial butchers safely memorialized in statues in central London and enconsced in places like Westminster Abbey]

I've occasionally idly wondered whether it would be in poor taste to sponsor an "Eichmann Scholarship" at Oxford, to go alongside the Rhodes one.

[Randy McDonald]

"And where are these Japanese politicians "gratuitously insulting" China? Visiting Yasukuni is a right freely exercised in a country which guarantees religious freedom, a concept of which the Chinese government has no understanding. Helmut Kohl had no problem dragging Ronald Reagan along to the Bitburg cemetary in which SS men are buried[.]"

It wasn't a SS cemetary, mind.

http://intellectualize.org/archives/004693.html

More to the point, that wasn't a very smart decision by Helmut Kohl. At least that visit didn't involve him paying obeisance to the spirits of the dead! Shinto may hold that the sins of the living aren't transferrable to the souls of the dead, and indeed no one would have a problem with this were these Japanese sins committed against Japanese.

As it happens, they weren't, and the lack of insensitivity is shocking. Witness the hostile greeting arranged by shrine supporters to the Taiwanese aborigines who wanted their relatives' names removed from the temple scrolls in light of the fact that they were conscripted and sent off to die for Japan without so wanting. There's certainly nothing wrong with honouring the souls of the dead _per se,_ but it seems as is the Yasukuni Shrine, its backers and their ilk are going out of their way to be crudely offensive towards non-Japanese.

"This is just plain ridiculous: the point is clear enough and there's no use avoiding it - you're trying to condemn the Japanese as uniquely culpable for holding attitudes hardly anyone, not even you, seems to have a real problem with where Westerners are concerned."

You're engaging in a fallacy, the sort of thing that I've seen certain Jews engage in when they condemn people for criticizing Israel but not (say) Iran in the same article, or certain Muslims when they condemn people for criticizing Iran but not (say) Israel in the same article, or ...

Just because I'm not criticizing a certain kindred phenomenon at present doesn't mean that I've nothing critical to say about it at all. If we were talking about the sins of the British empire, then I'd be saying much the same thing. As it is, we're supposed to be talking here about the sins of the _Japanese_ empire. A good case can be made that certain sins were exceptional--Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanjing don't immediately bring up to mind any contemporary parallels outside of Nazi Germany. That said, I'm very skeptical of imperialism's claims to beneficence as a rule.

And on this note, I'll end my participation in this comments thread. Clearly nothing will come of it.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Just because I'm not criticizing a certain kindred phenomenon at present doesn't mean that I've nothing critical to say about it at all. If we were talking about the sins of the British empire, then I'd be saying much the same thing."

This retort is entirely beside the point, as the point I'm making isn't that other nations' misdeeds somehow makes Japan's acceptable. The point you're *still* seeking to elide is that to use Japan's unwilligness to fully confront the shameful aspects of its past as evidence of incipient "militarist" tendencies is deeply hypocritical since I don't see you extending the same logic to other cases like Britain or France's in which such an inference would be far better supported by the evidence at hand. If visits to Yasukuni show that it's right to distrust today's pacifist Japan, the whole of Westminster and large sections of Paris must scream of Anglo-French ambitions for world-conquest - if you're willing to follow your reasoning through to its full conclusion, that is. That you don't says to me that you have a blind spot where Japan is concerned.

"And on this note, I'll end my participation in this comments thread. Clearly nothing will come of it."

Nothing will come of it because you're determined to ignore all reason and evidence in favor of your prior predispositions, and since you can't win the argument based on reason, you're going to loftily retreat to the safety of your perch by striking a cheap "I'm simply above this sort of thing" pose. Whatever.

[Joel]

Nice heated but still fairly civil debate, Abiola and Randy. A lot of points worth pondering.

I'd like to add a small anecdote that may indicate how widespread Japanese militarism is or isn't at the ground level these days. During my recent 2 months in Japan, I often walked past a combined recruiting office for all branches of the SDF on the outside ground floor of the busy Ashikaga Tobu line train station (60+ trains daily to and from Tokyo). The office was as big as the travel agency offices that can be found at any such train station, but was far, far less busy. In fact, I never saw any customers, or any activity whatsoever in that office, despite passing it several dozen times during normal business hours.

[Jim]

Joel, I have heard much the same kind of thing and I can attest from the few times I have interacted with Japanese officers that the Army is not where it is happening in Japan. And even if it were, so what? Japan is in no position to threaten China militarily. It would be military suicide and economic suicide. This caterwauling from China has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with national dominance, and it isn't the Japanese who are planning to take over the eastern end of Asia.

It is odd that no one else in the region is half so loud about Japanrese miltarism, even countries that might be expected to be worried. What are Vietnam or the Philippines saying? They are probably just trading knowing glances.

It is irrelevant how Japan acted in the past. It takes opportunity as well as motive to commit a crime. Even if Japan has the motive to go out and start wars, and there is no actual evidence of that, they could never bring it off.

China is the expansionist power in that region. want to start a pool on which neighboring county will bethe next one remember used to be tributary to them, part of China, dontcha know, or in which one they will try that breed-and-grab trick that worked so well in Taiwan.

Hstorical note: Mexico was a colonial power in Arizona, "New Mexico" and in Texas.

[Randy McDonald]

"A point you're *still* seeking to elide is that to use Japan's unwilligness to fully confront the shameful aspects of its past as evidence of incipient "militarist" tendencies is deeply hypocritical since I don't see you extending the same logic to other cases like Britain or France's in which such an inference would be far better supported by the evidence at hand."

_That's because we're not talking about the British or French empires._ Or, at least, we weren't until you brought them up from nowhere, without any warning.

One might as well condemn me for talking about the genocide of the Armenians and not bringing up the Circassians' own experience with unchecked state power and xenophobic hatred.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Or, at least, we weren't until you brought them up from nowhere, without any warning."

I brought them up because they are extremely relevant to the topic under discussion, namely whether visits to Yasukuni by a few Japanese right-wingers constitutes reason enough for the Chinese and Koreans to be suspicious of resurgent Japanese "militarism": you insist that this is the case, so it is only fair to point out to you that by your own standards the rest of the non-white world ought to be quivering in fear of American and European intentions, which they manifestly are not, nor have I ever seen you suggest that they should be - nor do I think they ought to be either, while we're at it.

You cannot insist we flinch at every small thing occuring in Japan which happens to rub one's sense of historical honesty the wrong way without also holding the West to the same standards - are you ready to call Gordon Brown a Colonel Blimp-ish imperialist for his "no apology" remarks or not? Do you believe African countries ought to be on their guard against everything Britain says and does because Cecil Rhodes, Frederick Lugard and Alfred Kitchener are still held in high regard in that country or aren't you? A simple, straightforward "yes" or "no" to both questions would be nice, thank you very much, though I won't stay up late waiting for one.

Japan was a brutal imperialist, yes, but this hardly sets it apart from the other brutal imperialists of the world, nor does its inability to fully own up to its past mark it as especially worthy of suspicion; what *is* pathological is that we should treat the cynically orchestrated anti-Japanese agitation of a vicious dictatorship which is itself currently engaged in colonialism as if it were born of legitimate fears.

The bottom line is that Germany's apologies for its misdeeds in World War 2 are exceptional (as befits exceptionally barbaric behavior) and not necessarily as sincere as they might seem, while Japan is actually way out ahead of other former colonial powers in having actually apologized for its misdeeds, however grudgingly, and repeatedly too, for that matter; to keep on maintaining that the rest of Asia is right to be wary of Japanese intentions because certain LDP politicians dare to act in ways some in Seoul and Beijing don't like makes even less sense to me than saying the entire Arab world should be on its guard against the French because the latter aren't bent over in remorse at their deeds in Algeria, i.e, none whatsoever. Keep evading this obvious point if you like, but it won't do anything for the credibility of your position.