Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  Japan’s new government fumbled to put flesh on the bones of Hatoyama’s vision. In the name of transparency, it began an inquiry to expose secret Cold War agreements that had allowed, among other things, American nuclear-armed warships to use Japanese ports in contravention of Japan’s non-nuclear stance. Successive administrations had implausibly denied the existence of such ‘secret pacts’, concluded in the 1960s, even though they had long been revealed through the publication of declassified documents in the US. By acknowledging those agreements, the idea was to deal with the Japanese public more openly and honestly. For one thing, it would bring out the contradiction of Japan’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent even as it clung to the charade of disavowing nuclear weapons. For some, that fiction was symbolic of a stunted democracy in which the ‘happy children of Japan’, in the words of artist Yoshitomo Nara, were not trusted with the whole, uncomfortable, truth.13 They lived in a fantasyland of happy consumerism, exquisite design and exacting hygiene standards while the blood-and-guts business of defending their nation was outsourced to the Americans. The new government also began a public review of the billions of dollars that Tokyo gave to US troops stationed in Japan, a contribution that at the height of Japan’s economic power had been termed, rather condescendingly, a ‘sympathy budget’ – presumably sympathy for the poor state of Washington’s finances.

  • • •

  Hatoyama’s vision – and eventually his entire premiership – foundered over the issue of US bases on Okinawa, long a potent symbol of Japanese subservience to its American overlord. Okinawa, a chain of tropical islands far to the south of Japan, comprises just 0.6 per cent of the Japanese landmass, but plays host to three-quarters of US bases and more than half of the 36,000 troops stationed in Japan.14 Many Okinawans had for years campaigned for the US to move some or all of the bases off the island, but there were few places on Japan’s built-up mainland that would have them.

  Okinawa was a semi-colony, incorporated into Japan only in 1879. For Tokyo, ambivalent about surrendering its territory to US bases, Okinawa was a convenient location to host foreign forces, out of sight and mostly out of mind. For hundreds of years before it was claimed by Japan, Okinawa had been the independent kingdom of the Ryukyus, with its own language and customs. It had paid tribute to China, which largely left it alone. Only when it came into closer contact with Japan was its independence threatened. In 1609, it became a vassal state of Satsuma, which was one of the Japanese fiefdoms – Choshu was another – that played a decisive role in the Meiji Restoration. After the Restoration, Tokyo formally incorporated the Ryukyus into its territory, renaming them Okinawa. Even modern-day Okinawa, the poorest prefecture in Japan, does not feel entirely Japanese. During the US occupation of the islands from 1945 until their return to Japan in 1972, some Okinawan residents complained that the Japanese knew so little about them that they asked whether they spoke English at home and used knives and forks.15 A native sushi chef in Naha, the Okinawan capital, summed up the sense of discrimination. Referring to the quintessential symbol of what it is to be Japanese, he told me glumly, ‘The people from the mainland say that Okinawa’s cherry blossoms are not real cherry blossoms. They say they’re different.’

  Okinawa’s radicalism was born in the terrible experience of 1945, when nearly 150,000 islanders, or a quarter of the population, were killed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Some civilians were press-ganged by the Imperial Army into committing mass suicide rather than surrendering to the Americans. Under Abe’s government, the education ministry had sought to erase references in school textbooks to the enforced suicides, prompting some 100,000 Okinawans, one in ten of the population, to demonstrate against the attempted whitewash. Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel laureate, went to court to prove the military were involved in coercing suicides, a judgment he eventually won. He told me the Japanese state was trying to spread the false idea that ‘Okinawans died a beautiful and pure death for the sake of the country’.

  Summing up the impact of war trauma, one senior Bush administration official said many Okinawans felt ‘this should be an island of peace’. They viewed the US military bases as ‘foreign transplants’, he said. ‘The vast majority of Okinawans think like that.’16 Masahide Ota, a former governor of Okinawa, told me, ‘The Americans occupied Okinawa during the war and they feel it is their own territory. They believe it is theirs to use as freely as they wish.’17 Long-standing resentment had come to a head in 1995 when three American servicemen stationed on Okinawa abducted a twelve-year-old girl, sealed her mouth with duct tape and raped her. Under the principle of extraterritoriality granted by the US–Japan Status of Forces Agreement – a throwback to the unequal treaties Europeans and Americans had imposed throughout Asia – the three servicemen were exempted from Japanese law. Admiral Richard Macke, commander of the US Pacific Command, made things worse with remarks of staggering insensitivity. ‘I think it was absolutely stupid,’ he said of the servicemen’s actions. ‘For the price they paid to rent the car [in which the girl was abducted], they could have had a girl,’ he said, meaning a prostitute. Not surprisingly, massive anti-US demonstrations swept Okinawa. Such was the furore that Washington decided it had no choice but to hand over the three servicemen to be tried in Japan. They were sentenced to between six-and-a-half and seven years each. In the following year, President Bill Clinton sanctioned the amendment of the Status of Forces Agreement so that, in the case of serious crimes, suspects could be handed over to Japanese authorities.

  In the aftermath of the rape, the US agreed to reduce its presence on Okinawa by a fifth, amalgamating some bases and pulling back about 8,000 marines to Guam, a US territory in the Western Pacific. The Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Base, dangerously situated in the middle of a dense city, was to be shifted to a more remote part of the island, with a runway jutting out into the sea. The plan to move Futenma, however, became ensnared in interminable negotiations over its environmental impact, and the noise and danger it would bring to its new location. There was also the broader question of who would pay for the redeployment. Washington wanted Tokyo to foot the bill. To make matters more complicated, this was not just a two-way discussion between Tokyo and Washington. Okinawans had their say too. With each new local election cycle, the prospect of building the new air base waxed and waned. Some senior US officials were scathing in their condemnation of a Japanese government that could allow the sentiments of a small island to obstruct the vital matter of national and international security. Not for nothing had an American ambassador once compared Okinawa to a bone stuck in the throat of the alliance.18

  The disagreement over Okinawa reflected deeper problems in a post-war US–Japan relationship that had been tricky from the start. In one sense the alliance between victor and vanquished, what the scholar John Dower had called a ‘sensuous embrace’, was a miracle of twentieth-century diplomacy. The ties were mutually beneficial. Washington got a sturdy, and increasingly wealthy, ally in the Pacific. Japan snuggled under the US nuclear umbrella, releasing it from the burdens of diplomacy and the expense of self-defence. That allowed it to concentrate on the business of getting rich. Such ‘free-riding’ even became the name of a credo, the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, named after Shigeru Yoshida, who was prime minister for eight years after the war. ‘Just as the US was once a colony of Great Britain but is now the stronger of the two,’ he said, ‘if Japan becomes a colony of the US it will also eventually become the stronger.’19

  Subservience to America, however, had lasted far longer than Yoshida might have imagined. Japan had never stepped far out of line and critics had gone so far as to call it America’s ‘client state’.20 Such an unequal relationship had bred resentment not only among the left, which tended to want American bases out, but also among the right. Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo and co-author of The Japan that Can Say No, a book urging greater Japanese independence, resented that his country was ‘at the beck and call of
the US’.21 The view of Japan as a client state had infiltrated popular culture too. In 2005, Takashi Murakami, one of Japan’s best-known modern artists, curated an exhibition of subculture in New York called Little Boy. The title referred to the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But Little Boy could also be shorthand for Japan’s stunted development as a state and its lopsided relationship with Washington. According to the exhibition notes, Murakami sought to explore ‘Japan’s military and political dependence on the US; and the replacement of a traditional, hierarchical Japanese culture with a disposable consumer culture ostensibly produced for children and adolescents’. Little Boy, it said, referred to ‘the infantilization of the Japanese culture and mindset’, the result, in Murakami’s view, ‘of Japan’s economic and political dependence on the west’.

  Hatoyama tried to tap into this vein of dissent, with the issue of bases on Okinawa as his chosen battleground. He had recklessly promised the Okinawan people that he would scrap the plan to relocate Futenma to another part of the island and, instead, move it off Okinawa altogether. Unfortunately, his plan had not been squared with Washington, nor with his own bureaucrats in the foreign ministry who sought to undermine him by privately advising their US counterparts not to budge. He had spent months desperately seeking an alternative location on the Japanese archipelago. Unsurprisingly, it was proving difficult to find a community willing to accept noisy helicopters in their midst. Hatoyama was eventually forced to fly to Okinawa to tell angry crowds that he couldn’t fulfil his pledge. A replacement for Futenma would have to be built on Okinawa after all. The decision had been ‘heartbreaking’, he said, but in the end he had to prioritize national security and the deterrence provided by US Marines. His apology was not accepted. In Okinawa he was greeted by bright yellow signs that said simply ‘Anger’, and by jeering crowds who urged him to ‘Go Home’.22 The word on everybody’s lips was ‘betrayal’.

  Within a few weeks of his humiliating climbdown, Hatoyama had resigned. By June 2010, he was gone. His tenure of just eight-and-a-half months was short even by the fleeting standards of Japan’s prime ministers. His own view of a normal nation had been just as difficult to execute as Abe’s. His grandiose vision of forming an ‘East Asian Community’, modelled on the European Union, had gone precisely nowhere. Of his attempt to put Japan’s relations with the US on a more equal footing, he said in a tearful resignation speech, ‘Someday, the time will come when Japan’s peace will have to be ensured by the Japanese people themselves.’23 That day, evidently, had not come yet.

  • • •

  Standing up to the US over Okinawa had done nothing to further Hatoyama’s other principal policy goal of building a better relationship with China. Beijing was slow to respond to his overtures, perhaps because it had sensed, correctly, that his power base was weak in Japan. The country’s merry-go-round of now-you-see-them now-you-don’t prime ministers made it hard for foreign capitals to take any particular administration’s proposals seriously. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party lacked deep contacts in China, which had over many decades got used to doing business with the more conservative Liberal Democrats.

  It was ironic that under the Democratic Party, which had held out an olive branch to Beijing, Sino–Japanese relations should actually deteriorate. The new battleground was not Yasukuni or textbooks, but something more tangible: islands.24 Called the Senkaku by Japan and the Diaoyu25 by China, the five uninhabited islands and three rocky outcroppings covered a total area of less than three square miles and were too small to figure on most maps. But they were a proxy for national pride and unresolved wartime animosities. They were located in the East China Sea, a little over 100 miles northeast of Taiwan and 250 miles west of Okinawa. The Chinese claimed that they had discovered the islands in ancient times and that they had appeared on Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) maps as Chinese territory. According to Beijing, the islands were war booty stolen during the 1895 Sino–Japanese War. As such, they should have been returned according to the dictates of the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, which issued the terms of Japan’s surrender. This stipulated that ‘Japanese territory shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.’ According to Beijing, that clearly meant Japan was supposed to give up the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands along with Taiwan, South Korea and other territory seized in war.

  The Japanese argued that the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, which incorporated the Potsdam Declaration, did not include the Senkaku. The reason, it said, was that the islands had not been seized in war at all but had instead been legally annexed on 14 January 1895. ‘From 1885 on, our government conducted on-site surveys time and again, which confirmed that the islands were uninhabited and there were no signs of control by the Qing Empire,’ Tokyo said.26 That meant they were ‘terra nullius’ when Japan found them – land belonging to no one – and thus available under international law to be claimed by Japan. The upshot of the San Francisco Treaty was that the islands, rather than being ‘returned’ along with Taiwan, fell under US administration as part of Washington’s control of Okinawa. Tokyo said Beijing had not objected at the time, although, in fairness, China was not present at San Francisco nor a signatory to the treaty. Beijing began to voice its claim, Tokyo said, only when, in the late 1960s, it was discovered there may be oil around the islands. In 1972, the US ‘returned’ the islands to Japan along with Okinawa over China’s objections.

  In subsequent years, there were periodic clashes between Japanese fishermen and those from China and Taiwan who also fished around the islands. The territory, however, remained under effective Japanese administration and Tokyo refused to concede even that there was a dispute over their ownership at all. The first intimation that the tussle over the islands was getting more serious came in September 2010 when Zhan Qixiong, a fishing boat captain from Fujian province, rammed his boat into two coastguard vessels. Some evidence later came out that he had been drunk. Zhan and his fourteen-member crew were arrested and Japan indicated that prosecutions would follow. Beijing called for their immediate unconditional release. ‘We demand Japanese patrol boats refrain from so-called law-enforcement activities in waters off the Diaoyu islands,’ the foreign ministry thundered.27 Tokyo said the matter was for the courts to decide. As the stand-off worsened, Beijing retaliated by placing an informal ban on the export of ‘rare earths’, vital to Japan’s electronics industry. Within days, Japan buckled, releasing the crew and the captain. It was a humiliating climbdown.

  Yoichi Funabashi, the former editor of the left-leaning Asahi newspaper, who considered himself a friend of China, called the incident the ‘Senkaku shock’. It was worse, he said, than the ‘Nixon shock’ of 1971 when Richard Nixon, the US president, normalized relations with China behind Japan’s back. In an open letter entitled ‘Japan–China Relations Stand at Ground Zero’, he wrote that Japan’s half-hearted actions, including its decision not to prosecute the Chinese captain, revealed its weakness. ‘One cannot help but concede that Japan is either still clumsy in its diplomatic efforts or simply a poor fighter. In comparison, the various measures taken by the Chinese government to apply pressure on Japan can only be described as a diplomatic “shock and awe” campaign.’ The clash, he wrote, exposed the fantasy of trying to forge ‘a mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests’, the official policy between the two countries since an aborted rapprochement in 2006. Instead, Japan would have to cut its losses and discard its naïve dreams of normalizing relations with Beijing. The relationship would be in constant danger of rolling completely out of control, he argued. ‘If China continues to act as it has, we Japanese will be prepared to engage in a long, long struggle.’28 Funabashi’s was a pessimistic analysis. Normalizing relations with China, he implied, was – at least for the foreseeable future – a lost cause.

  In their different ways, both Abe and Hatoyama had sought to make Japan a more normal nation. Abe had wan
ted Japan to throw off its war guilt and its pacifist constitution and become again a ‘beautiful country’ that could hold its head high in the international community. He resented what America had done to Japan at the end of the war, but saw little alternative to maintaining a strong alliance with its powerful western ally. Hatoyama’s normalization had been more subtle, though ultimately more confused. He had attempted to ‘triangulate’ the relationship with the US and China, drawing slightly away from Washington in order to be friendlier with Beijing. It didn’t work. The deep historical rift with China could not be fixed with a little diplomatic repositioning. Japan was still isolated in Asia. Diplomatically, it remained lost, a prisoner of its geography and of its history.

  PART SIX

  After the Tsunami

  14

  Fukushima Fallout

  It looked like any other provincial Japanese town. There was the Shiga Hair Salon, with its red, white and blue barber’s pole, offering cuts and ‘iron perms’. Next door was the Watanabe Cake Shop, doing business since 1990 and housed in a two-storey mock Tudor building. Outside the nearby Jokokuji temple, a tiny granite stone Buddha figurine stood at the entrance, dressed in a weather-worn pink ceremonial shawl. The traffic lights clicked on and off, from red to orange to green and back again. Korean pop music erupted from unseen speakers, breaking what had been a fetid silence. The only thing missing in this town of Odaka, located less than ten miles north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, was people.