By Tom Plate
LOS ANGELES ― A measure of melancholy from time to time will settle over Tokyo, in the manner of an unseasonable sprinkling of harsh weather, as if what was thought long past will pop out of nowhere to reassert itself with present force. This is Japan’s condition now, its season of discontent. The past is returning to the present ― bringing with it the chilling question of whether the future will also be like the past. Outer cohesion is being eroded by inner doubt. Is today’s Japan ― that most harmonious nation, with its celebrated societal consensus and prideful coming-together ― splitting into two minds? In which direction will Japan go? It may not be sure itself.
Since 1945 the Japanese public has offered the world an iconic pacifist mentality, formed out of war and remembrance ― from the radioactive clouds of atomic denouement that remain as psychologically unsettling as ikebana arrangements are soul soothing. But recently a peace demonstration took place in Tokyo that, in a way, was as remarkable as even the now-famous Occupy Central street protests in Hong Kong.
Japan is anything but a protest culture ― so wound up in its own DNA that significant change is rarely viewed as a way out, but more probably as a rebuke to what exists. So its pacifism, a sophisticated admirable modernism, evidences a turn of political mind not of cowardice but of steely psychological resistance to war as a valid option of national policy. If that wisdom is waning, then a new ― or old - Japan is surfacing.
Which takes us to the other Japan: led by the spiritually vacuous but still potent Liberal Democratic Party - a riotous backroom of coalitions convenient and inconvenient.
Attention, Asia! Japan's LDP-led parliament, working into wee hours, ignoring Diet seizures and street tumults, has forced through a re-conceptualization of the proper role of its military. It took on the implicit pacifism planted into its Constitution by the occupying Americans in world-famous Article 9. The legislative change is arguably only an adjustment in the sense, perhaps, of how an unfolding tsunami starts off gradually and gathers momentum like waves of fury. So attention must be paid: For the first time in seven decades, even if no imminent outside element threatens, the government now claims to be able to deploy forces overseas ― preemptively, or for that matter, even provocatively. And so in one diluting of Constitutional Article 9, an otherwise revered restriction, Japan is unmoored from the deeply reflective country that rose from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is now, by the ironic global definition of what defines the norm, a “normal nation.” Presumably this means a sovereign state that might be able to do something as dumb as Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan or ― say- America’s of Iraq.
This forced march of the Diet (parliament) to a condition of geopolitical ‘normality’ has long been the dream of incumbent Shinzo Abe, now in his second go-around as prime minister. With his economic plan sputtering, the government reverted to the tom-toms of warfare to maintain momentum. But at the same time it is lost on no one, not even Abe’s fiercest critics, that new regional tensions have made his need for ‘normalcy’ seem less mendacious. Rising China’s historically driven push to occupy the East China and South China seas has not just Japan but other Asian nations popping anti-anxiety pills. What will Beijing do next?
Fear tends to be disproportionate whenever the actual threat is not existential. Everyone assumes that Beijing will not readily back down as it shores up military capabilities and fashions a connect-the-dots network of dual-use, reef upgrades for its aircrafts and ships. But no one assumes of China the disposition to replicate the Japanese campaign of 1937-1942 Asia – at least no one I know of outside a few windowless offices in the U.S. Pentagon.
For pragmatic reasons, the United States felt the need in 1947 to stick Article 9 in the Constitution: "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…. Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." Ah - that was then, this is now. Reverting to a kind of ‘restrain-ment’ policy, Washington did not discourage Abe’s revision of the Constitution. In sectors of the East Coast U.S. establishment, the attitude now is: All hands on deck as China rises.
For Hong Kong, it has always been my instinct that the long-view of patient negotiation and mutual respect would trump boisterous impatience as the best method for leveraging Beijing into calm acceptance of the Special Administrative Region’s election and civic-emotion needs. But for Tokyo, the better way is opposite: May a thousand anti-Abe protests bloom in its streets. May all of us outsiders offer high applause for those brave students, academics, mothers-for-peace, pacifist sects and many others doing so ‘un-Japanese’ a thing as public protesting.
These are true peace warriors of our time. And if they can help pull their Japan back from the brink of a tragic re-purposing, they will have offered the world an honorable lesson ― and one that must not be lost on Beijing. Military force can rarely solve problems; its utility is marginal. In their heart of hearts, many Japanese understand this better than most of us. Opting out of war in the best option, for all of Asia.
Prof. Tom Plate, the Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, has been writing columns and books about Asia since 1995. He is a fortnightly columnist with the South China Morning Post.