Remembering Japan: A bilateral history

Japanese Politicsand Economics in a New Era

Perhaps only one developmentpromises greater challenge to Japan'seconomic and political system thanthe incredible turmoil of the last twoyears: the wrenching change yet tocome. The three essays in this sectionoffer an engrossing portrait of a/' jnation confronting the need for majorsocial reform even as \i struggles todevelop a firm sense of itself! 7? ,^ x

In the first article,, journalist PatrickSmith suggests that the American •:image of Japan needs rethinking—inTokyo as well as Washington. UtS.occupiers put in place manf of Japan'spolitical and economic institutions,Smith points out; now the end of theCold War has weakened the originalrationaj^l^lêm, leaving t ^JapaagftSpJ^riearly to reconsiderthei(jjaiKal identity from the .f ,{g r o d ^ | l % h e next two pieces, ' iexceHHpom a recent report fromiiJtê « M » - for Strategic and ; -*•*•? rM

-1ntdb|i|i|Blinal Studies, lay out the -' •atnJ^^ponênsus inside and outsidfiJapdj^fethe need for major reform;!

Patrick Smith

Remembering Japan:A Bilateral History

"But the essence of a nation is that all the individuals share a great manythings in common, and also that they have forgotten some things."

—Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?, 1881

A little more than a year ago, a retired attorney named CharlesLouis Kades passed away in a rural Massachusetts hospital. It was not an un-timely death: Kades was 90; his life had been full. He had been a prominentNew Dealer in Washington before World War II and a lieutenant colonel inthe occupation force led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur after Japan's surren-der. In February 1946, under MacArthur's orders, Kades oversaw the draft-ing of a new Japanese constitution. The Japanese still live under thatconstitution—the "peace constitution," so called because it bars Japan fromwaging war or maintaining a standing army.

I begin with Kades's passing because of the way we are invited to remem-ber him. His obituaries were effusive. "In one whirlwind, a ten-day effort,"the New York Times noted, "Mr. Kades supervised the transformation of Ja-pan from a monarchy into a democracy."1 The Economist, in a full-page ap-preciation, called Kades "the American father of Japanese democracy."2

These remarkable assertions are not merely overweening memorials to oneman's place in postwar history—a place no one could possibly occupy. Theytell us that Americans stepped into a vacuum—political, social, civic—when they arrived in Japan in the late summer of 1945. To put it anotherway, we have left no room for any Japanese—no thinker, no politician, nopopular leader, no ordinary citizen—in the tale we now tell ourselves aboutCharles Kades.

Patrick Smith was Tokyo bureau chief for the International Herald Tribune and corre-spondent for the New Yorker. He is the author of Japan: A Reinterpretation (Pantheon,1997).

Copyright © 1997 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and theMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Washington Quarterly • 21:1 pp. 121-136.

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY • WINTER 1998 121

I Patrick Smith

With due respect to the late lieutenant colonel, I rank these two quota-tions among the most objectionable things I have ever read about Japan.Kades did a lawyerly job in Tokyo after the war; the occupation's legacy is inmany respects formidable. But Kades did not give the Japanese democracy.No one can do that anywhere—as Americans ought to understand betterthan almost anyone. To me, our created memory of Kades and, by extension,

of our seven-year occupation of Japan, isbut one measure among many of an oldhabit we have, the hundred-year habit oflooking across the Pacific and presumingwe see reflections of ourselves.

In its postwar version, let us call thishabit "history without memory." By this Imean the sweeping narrative of the Ameri-can century that we tell ourselves and oth-ers, an epic with clear, well-defined lines, abig blue sky, and a cast of heroes and de-

rlistory withoutmemory confinesus to a sort ofeternal present.

mons usually attired in either white or black. It is not an altogether inaccu-rate picture of the past 50 years. But it falls critically short on everydaydetail—the people, actions, events, and consequences that reside in humanmemory. Like much else in our culture—like television, for instance—his-tory without memory tends to confine us to a sort of eternal present. We areespecially weak—I put this bluntly—when it comes to remembering whatwe have done to other people, as against with or for them.

History without memory is a pervasive product of the Cold War, most evi-dent in our gloss of events where East-West tension was at its greatest: inItaly in the late 1940s, in Iran or Guatemala in the 1950s, in Indonesia inthe mid-1960s. Japan presents an early and clear example, a nation where aCharles Kades may have made history but where we see little need to re-member much else. And because we forget the details—or perhaps becausewe never knew them—history without memory resembles that old habit oflooking across the ocean and discerning an idealized likeness of ourselves.

How do we view the Japanese today? As we constantly remind ourselves,they are struggling to emerge from a recession now seven years old. Theireconomic and social systems remain in the grip of a tired but tenacious bu-reaucracy. In Nagatacho, Tokyo's political quarter, the Liberal Democratsreign again after a brief interruption—even though the scandals that beganamid the "economic bubble" a decade ago (and which actually reach back tothe occupation years) have continued more or less without interruption.

Scandals, sluggishness, the dead weight of overpopulated ministries—allof it is evident. But then comes our conclusion: Backs to the wall, we say,

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the Japanese have no choice but to free their economy, deregulate theirmarkets, privatize everything, and in general get with the program we callglobalization. In today's environment, those dirigiste bureaucrats cannot butdecree their own demise. The future has arrived—as ineluctably at theother end of the Pacific as at ours. There are even a few Japanese politicalleaders, including Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, willing to nod in ap-parent assent.

But there are always a few officials around Tokyo who will accept ourscoldings and affirm our dire warnings. Assenting to the American view hasbeen, after all, the job of Japan's conservative political elite since we helpedconsolidate its position during the occupation. As these officials under-stand, they are there to help us deceive ourselves, for (as they also under-stand) the reality in Japan is almost always quite different from what wethink we see.

Japan's economy, apparently in recovery earlier this year, has fallen backto the brink of renewed recession. But we must guard against making toomuch of the nation's performance in this quarter or that. More Japanesetraveled overseas last year than ever before. Imports of luxury autos are attheir highest, while Japan's trade surplus is again rising. Under these circum-stances, we ought not be surprised to discover that Japan is not rushingheadlong into radical reform. If anything, the way it has ridden out the1990s tends to affirm the course bureaucrats have followed for the past fivedecades. "We are not a troubled nation," a Japanese newspaper columnisttold me during a recent trip to Washington. "You just don't see the symp-toms of economic problems when you are inJapan."

But you do see certain things quite easilywhen you are in Japan. The nation has en-tered an era of profound self-examination ,r

, , c u it, self-examination.and change, bo have its people—who aremore troubled than my columnist friendwants to admit. Japan faces a period of fun-damental flux comparable with the start ofits great modernization in the 1860s or with the years after the surrender in1945. However complacent the Japanese are about their immediate eco-nomic prospects, they understand this. And they understand that the mostessential change to come is a change of consciousness.

We do not understand this, for we are still making our history withoutmemory. This time we can call it post-Cold War triumphalism—our obses-sive conviction that the world must conform to the turn our society is tak-ing. Once again, at a critical phase in Japan's evolution we are unable to see

J apan has enteredan era of profound


I Patrick Smith

it clearly, for we insist upon seeing only ourselves.

Reverse Course

One day in December 1945, a few months after the surrender, a U.S. corre-spondent named Mark Gayn took a trolley to the Shimbashi district, justsouth of Tokyo Station and the Ginza. Then as now, Shimbashi was a hecticquarter given over to small-time businesses, though all that had survivedthe war was a bustling black market. Gayn later recorded the excursion inhis book Japan Diary: "Conductors are having difficulty with men whosmoke in streetcars, despite 'No Smoking' signs. The men say: 'Do we havedemocracy or don't we?'"3

Nothing better captures the confusion that greeted the occupationforces. What was this talked-of thing called demokurashii—or minshu shugi,

"people masterism" in a literal translation? One problem the Japanese facedhad to do with institutions. They didn't have the mediating mechanisms ademocracy needs to interpret diverse interests. But as the men on the trolleysuggested, Japan had a deeper problem—the problem of inexperience, whichis to say the problem of consciousness. In the Japan of late 1945, peopletended to think democracy meant everyone got what he or she wanted. Thiswas natural enough: It was democracy that had overturned the imperialstate, and in the imperial state nobody got what he or she wanted.

But none of this was new. The Japanese had been wrestling with thequestion of democracy for 75 years by the time the Americans arrived. Soonafter Mark Gayn took his trolley ride they began the most important debateof the postwar era. It concerned something called shutai-sei, "subjectivity."The term refers to the perceiving, judging, deciding individual. To achieveshutai-sei meant to establish one's autonomous identity—to leave behindall the old, enveloping conventions. The shutai-sei debate was a kind of na-tional conversation. It involved scholars and intellectuals of many politicalhues and was widely followed in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Tomany Japanese, cultivating the autonomous self was the fundamental post-war task, more essential than any other. Their failure to make subjectivejudgments, they said, had led them to acquiesce when the wartime dictator-ship draped a net of ideology over them and pushed the nation into tragedy.As one of the leaders of this debate put it, "An internal reform of the psy-chological structure of society must occur."4 Japan required what many awk-wardly called a "new democratic human type."

The United States had no part in this debate. What it gave the Japa-nese—a sophisticated and magnanimous gift—was not democracy so muchas time, the prospect that they would have a chance to begin again. The oc-


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cupation began by allowing the Japanese to make their own choices for thefirst time in their history—to form political parties and labor unions, for in-stance, and to select leaders by a method of their own making. In substancethe U.S. gift of time arrived in a series of social and political reforms. Notleast, the occupation set about purging the military, bureaucratic, and busi-ness elites who had led the imperial state.

Unfortunately, we withdrew our generous gift almost as soon as we gaveit. The Cold War brought a radical shift in our priorities. Rather than en-courage the Japanese in their necessarily messy experiment with democracy,we put political and economic stability before all else. The transformationwas nearly total. The occupation dropped or rolled back many of the earlyreforms, stopped the purges of the wartime elite, and encouraged the purgeof those who opposed them. Corruption became so widespread that it wassoon inseparable from the normal workings of government. A little morethan a decade after the surrender, Japan had an accused war criminal,Nobusuke Kishi, as prime minister. Not surprisingly, the new democratic hu-man type lost his way in all of this: He never appeared on the scene.

In Japan this momentous shift is called the "reverse course." I know of noJapanese who considers this phase of postwar history a matter of any debate;it is too important to what Japan has—and has not—become. One can evendate the reverse course, more or less precisely: Its harbinger appeared onFebruary 1, 1947, the day MacArthur blocked a general strike that was tohave marked a major advance in Japan's democratization. Nonetheless, weread almost nothing about the reverse course in our standard accounts ofpostwar Japan. With the reverse course, our vision got blurry, and we startedto construct our history devoid of memory.

Americans wrote this history, so oddly divorced from ordinary fact andrecollection, in the 1950s and 1960s. It began with the idea that the warwas a brief aberration in Japan's progress toward liberal democracy. This maynot sound like much more than an ordinary historical thesis, one way oflooking at the past. But it was an essential untruth, a sort of founding fic-tion, because from it flowed so many other fictions and untruths. The nextwas that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Japan as it had devel-oped during the modern era, that it did not require a lot of New Deal-ishreform. Democratic consciousness? Marxist bunkum. Now that the war hadended the nation simply needed "a slight readjustment of the rules."

These words belong to the late Edwin O. Reischauer. The son of mission-aries, Reischauer became a scholar, Washington advisor, and—during thepresidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—ambassador to To-kyo. Reischauer was also a principal architect of the "Japan" we still accepttoday as a matter of fact—a version of the nation that will always require


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quotation marks because it stands so far from reality. Reischauer elaboratedupon this Japan over many years in such volumes as Japan: Past and Present,M} Life Between Japan and America, and The Japanese (which remains inprint as The Japanese Today) .5

Reischauer was not alone. Many other scholars wrote from the same per-spective. Ezra Vogel's Japan As No. 1, published in 1979, did much to turnthis perspective into our conventional wisdom.6 Their numerous critics termthese scholars the Chrysanthemum Club, after the seal of the Japanese im-perial house. In my view, the Chrysanthemum Club is notable in two re-spects: its almost complete control over our understanding of Japan and theextent to which it put scholarship in the service of Cold War ideology—thatis, almost completely.

We are all familiar with the Chrysanthemum Club's Japan. It did not havea rather gruesome feudal past, as we had once thought, nor was it a coercivestate in the modern era, as we had believed during the war. It was a countryruled by "tradition" and "culture," as embodied by the emperor, a good manwho had opposed the war. Tradition and culture explained the enviablework ethic of the Japanese and their humility before authority. Harmonyand consensus prevailed, for the Japanese were a modest people given tocompromise in all things. Nagatacho was not a hive of corrupt ultranation-alists resurrected from wartime cliques; it was the home of East Asia's firstup-and-running parliamentary democracy.

In 1970 or so, we took to calling this imaginary country "Japan Inc."—anentire nation cast as a corporation, and its people as employees rather thancitizens. By and large, we saw nothing wrong with Japan Inc. Its mission wasto produce. It ran with the sound and rhythm of a sewing machine. Peopledid not bother with politics. They did everything in groups—an essential in-heritance from "tradition"—and were happiest when putting in 12-hourdays at the camera factory. They had a constitution that declared thempacifist, but by treaty they were our Cold War allies. This may seem confus-ing—even contradictory—but it did not matter, for the Japanese were ourfaithful, compliant, uncomplicated friends.

No correspondent I know has accepted this version of Japan withoutquestion (though some come awfully close). Nonetheless, I was stunnedwhen I arrived in Tokyo, a decade ago this autumn, to open a news bureaufor the International Herald Tribune. Japan Inc. was there before me, cer-tainly, but it afforded no explanation as to how it got there. Missing, ofcourse, was perspective or depth—in other words, history and memory to-gether. Japan has long had the habit of presenting a face to the world andveiling the reality behind. Japan Inc. was another such face—this one madeafter the war by the United States and managed by the reinstalled Japanese


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elite. You were supposed to look at Japan as if it were a television show.Once you started to pry beneath the surface, Japan Inc. looked as if it mighteasily come undone.

And that is precisely what began to happen within a few months of myarrival in Japan. It is the process we continue to witness today.

'Japan Is Seething Within'

In Japan today one can only imagine the scene during the late 1940s andearly 1950s: a lively, engage populace, a place of diverse, contending views, aglorious cacophony of voices—an active society, in short, a civil society inthe making, mindful that it had much to decide. Picturing such a nation isan act of the imagination because Japan today so emphatically lacks theseattributes. Japan has no public life to speak of; as a civil society its was putto sleep even as it awakened. Company belonging, clan politics, and otherforms of corporatist identity were urged upon the Japanese in place of aworking democracy. People call Japan an "economic democracy," but ofcourse no such thing exists: No quantity of consumer goods, however evenlydistributed, can ever substitute for the exercise of democratic rights by in-formed individuals.

But by the end of my tour in Japan, in the mid-1990s, I could hear thefaint echoes of those early postwar years. A place that never seemed tochange—a correspondent's nightmare in many respects—had begun tochange fundamentally. One could read these seismic rumblings at first onlywith difficulty—a point underscored, perhaps, by the diversity of forces thatproduced them. With the "bubble economy" of the late 1980s, Japan be-came aware that it had caught up with the West—in material terms, atleast. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the Cold War's end. Amid thesemomentous developments came a third: The emperor died. Hirohito hadseen Japan through 62 years of militarization, conquest, war, defeat, resur-rection, and, finally, affluence.

These events have produced the Japan we see now, a Japan rocked loosefrom its moorings. To make itself the West's technological equal was a dreamJapan had harbored since it began to modernize in 1868. Having realized thedream, the nation had to find something else, some other ambition, to driveit forward. Hirohito's passing in January 1989 gave the Japanese an im-mense, altogether palpable sense of psychological release. At last they couldbegin the long, fraught task of coming to terms with the past—and enter, asthey like to put it, the "post-postwar era."

Dramatic as these developments were, however, neither has been so star-tling in its consequences as the ebbing of the Cold War tide. There before


I Patrick Smith

us, as if in a sort of freeze-frame, is the same nation the United States did somuch to create when it reversed course 50 years ago: extravagantly corrupt,obsessed with market dominance, ecologically reckless, stifling of the indi-vidual, politically dysfunctional, leaderless, incapable of decisions. In sum,Japan is again a nation that has many things to decide—the same things, byand large, that the Cold War kept it from deciding.

In the West we understand that it is decision time—in a general kind ofway. The Japanese talk of reforms of many types these days—political, bu-reaucratic, administrative, economic, social. And as most Japanese recog-nize, they certainly need reforms of this nature. But much of the talk wehear from the other side of the Pacific is intended only to placate expectantoutsiders, to satisfy our anticipation as to the imminence of change. Changewill come to Japan, but there is nothing imminent about it. We seem tothink we are watching a short, while in my view we are in for a very longmovie.

We miss, as we missed it 50 years ago, that Japan must undergo one par-ticular change before any of the others can have any substance or meaning.No one uses the old language anymore, but I think it is useful to see theJapanese as launching something very like that "internal reform of the psy-chological structure of society" that they debated just after the war. That isto say, the Japanese have begun again to look within themselves for the newdemocratic human type that, half a century ago, eluded both the intellectu-als and the smoking men on the trolley.

This change of consciousness, which I noted at the outset, seems finallyto have begun, and I think the world—and especially Americans—ought toapplaud it without reservation. If such a process is not in motion, we willhave to view the reverse course as not just a 50-year delay in Japan's effortto build a democratic society, but something nearer to a tragedy. More prac-tically, as I have already indicated, none of the other reforms now on thetable in Japan will ever amount to much unless this "internal reform" ac-companies or precedes them. Bureaucrats and ministries do not regulatethemselves out of power; corrupt, old-guard politicians do not rule them-selves out of office. The recent controversy surrounding Koko Sato, a con-victed bribe-taker, is eloquent as a case in point. Hashimoto hired him intohis cabinet—to reform the bureaucracy no less—only to fire him within daysamid mounting public outrage.

Putting aside the "should" of the equation, there is ample evidence of theendeavor I describe. One sees it in schools and universities, the corporateworld, political parties, the national legislature—even, at times, in the bu-reaucracy. To put the finest possible point on it, when we describe change inJapan today we mean the change occurring in individuals' relationships to


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Japan has longpresented one faceto the world andveiled the realitybehind.

whatever social institutions may concern them. To put it another way, theterms of belonging are changing. Or another: An essentially corporatist so-ciety is gradually becoming its opposite—pluralist. As I note in ]apan: A Re-interpretation, it is the difference between the furtive, private individualityrequired in a "group" society and the public individuality permissible in aliberal society.7

One of the more graphic instances of the phenomenon occurred in 1996in Maki, a town of 30,000 located on the Sea of Japan coast. The TohokuElectric Power Company, the regional utility, proposed a nuclear-powerplant on Maki's outskirts. Townspeople opposed to the project gathered suf-ficient signatures to hold a referendum—thefirst such vote in Japan's history. At thispoint, Tohoku Electric and the national gov-ernment did what authorities in Japan havedone for decades as a matter of course. Theydid not debate the issue; they began takingthe good citizens of Maki out to French res-taurants, carnival events, and hot-springbaths—so seeking to establish the propersense of patronage. This is the sort of thingapologists call "Japanese democracy." In thepast it would have worked.

The turnout on referendum day was nearly 90 percent and the voters de-feated the nuclear plant proposal by a 61 to 39 margin. Although the votewas not binding, Tohoku Electric acknowledges that it dare not go forward.But the outcome is only part of the tale. The true drama of the piece lay inthe extraordinary effort Maki's people made to do what they had never be-fore done: to form their views as individuals and then express them publicly.

These are interesting times in Japan. The nation is a mess in many re-spects, but this is not altogether bad. In certain ways Japan is again the kindof work-in-progress it was after the war. After 50 years of stasis, one shouldexpect a period of creative destruction; renewal will follow. The economyrequires an overhaul. Nagatacho is out of balance, careening toward no oneknows quite what. Nine governments have ruled since I first arrived in To-kyo, and countless parties and coalitions have formed and fallen apart. Butas incidents such as that in Maki indicate, the Japanese are at last learningto operate the machinery of democracy. They are stubbing out their ciga-rettes on the trolley, let us say.

It is not, one must add, an especially enviable time. The Japanese havepaid heavily to reach this point. The best description I have heard of theJapanese today—of the Japan that began to emerge during my tour for the


I Patrick Smith

Herald Tribune—comes from Robert Jay Lifton, the noted New York psychia-trist and a student of Japan for more than 30 years. "Japan is seethingwithin," Lifton told me recently. "We're terribly impressed with its achieve-ments, but we tend not to look at the underbelly of Japanese society, andthe underbelly is pain, confusion, and resentment. Only now have the Japa-nese begun to build something like a civic culture. A kind of democracy-mindedness has begun to change the prevailing psychology. And with itthere is an aversion toward the remaining authoritarian institutions."

Memory without History

One of the extraordinary interludes of my years in Japan began after Iraq in-vaded Kuwait in August 1990. As Washington started gathering support fora military response, Tokyo stood like a deer caught in headlights—paralyzed.Given that its constitution excludes it from collective security actions, whatwas Japan to do? Legalities aside, what did it want to do? Numerous shadesof opinion were aired. Many Japanese thought the events in the Persian Gulfhad nothing to do with them. But just as many voiced shame that theircountry was unable to act.

In hindsight, this was the point at which the Japanese realized that thepost—postwar age was upon them. In some inchoate way, even the conserva-tive leadership understood that the old arrangements could not hold muchlonger. As Tokyo dithered, Washington grew more shrill. And this wasamong the more peculiar aspects of the episode. The United States did notseem to recognize that the Japanese hesitated because of the constitution itwrote for them. And as a measure of Tokyo's long habit of deference, noJapanese official noted this bitter irony. But the Japanese quietly understoodfrom this time on, it seems to me, that among the many other things theywould have to change, relations with the United States would be high onthe list.

But what was it that had to change most of all? What change would tietogether all of the others that the Gulf war incident brought to the fore? Aswith the question of Japan as a democratic society, the essential change tocome will be in people's heads. The Japanese need self-awareness.

"Thus, the Japanese, not long ago one of the most militaristic peoples ofthe world, have now become ardent champions of internationalism." Sowrote Edwin Reischauer shortly after the war. And so did the United Stateslaunch among the Japanese an enduring confusion as to their identity, theirprinciples, and their contribution to the world.

The United States encouraged an exchange in postwar Japan betweennationalism and internationalism. It may seem an easy notion to grasp. But


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the logic is apparent, not real. The Japanese still widely embrace the paci-fism embedded in the postwar constitution. But declaring one's pacifism isnot the same as repudiating any sense of national pride and identity. That,nonetheless, has been Japan's mistake. Internationalism in Japan is not aprinciple by which it proposes to engage the world. It is the idea Japan usesto justify its detachment. It is a way of saying what the Japanese will notdo—a way of denying themselves and their "Japaneseness"—an awkwardbut often-used word.

The postwar constitution well captures this notion of internationalism.Its 103 articles resound with shall not, like a set of commandments. "Chil-dren shall not be exploited." "Freedom of thought and conscience shall notbe violated." "Peers and peerage shall not be recognized." The constitutionJapan still abides by could hardly support any sense of nationality. It essen-tially bans the return of prewar Japan. And amid all the shall nots, one readsthat "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of thenation"—the wording of Article 9, the clause internationalists hold in thehighest esteem.

Shall nots aside, what shall Japan do? The question has been posed oftensince the Gulf war, but on this point the Japanese falter. They cling to thepostwar idea of a Japan that stands for something new on the planet, an un-armed evangelist for diplomacy and reason. In the next century, they say,economic power—capital and technology, the things Japan can give to therest of the world—will replace the old notion of power as a function of mili-tary strength and territorial dominion. "It may seem that Japan is abnor-mal," a thoughtful politician said to me a few years ago. "But when wesucceed in restructuring the international community, countries like Japanwill become the normal nations and those that maintain military power anddispatch it abroad will be abnormal." The French call this kind of talkangelisme. And it is precisely the angelisme of Japan's internationalist major-ity that ironically leaves the nation so oddly isolated at our century's end.

The great villains of postwar Japanese society are its nationalists, ofcourse, those diehards lingering in the shadows of ultra-rightist politics. Tomost Japanese, the nationalists are something like a bad dream. They keepalive the notion of Japan as a tightly coiled jack-in-the-box waiting tospring. They will not admit Japan's past aggressions. They refuse to acknowl-edge wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre. Xenophobes all, a fa-natical few drive their sound vans around Tokyo, blaring on throughmegaphones about everything from imported rice to foreign workers.

By any measure but its own, the nationalist fringe has chosen its groundwith egregious judgment. Nonetheless, I have always thought the ultra-rightminority deserves a more careful hearing. These Japanese deny both history


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and their responsibility in it. But haven't the gray old war horses, in theirsuits worn shiny with age, kept alive the ideas of self-respect and sovereigntyand Japaneseness, even if they do so in a form that appeals to no one butthemselves? They alone seem to stand for these things, and make grotesquecaricatures of them, for the simple reason that the internationalists havesurrendered the ground.

I know of few Japanese who will easily accept such assertions as anythingother than a kind of blasphemy—the arguments of an uncomprehendingforeigner who is either reckless or a rightist himself. But I likewise know offew Japanese who easily accept the constraints under which they have livedsince the war—and who do not feel the need somehow to address their rest-

lessness. It is almost as if, amid all the profes-sions of pacifism and cosmopolitan purpose,

Japan today isa nation rockedloose fronmoorings.

the detested far right—in some perverseform—voices the disavowed desires of the en-tire country.

loose from its Changing the constitution has been a ta-

boo subject in postwar Japan. Only an ultra-nationalist would even raise it. As everyinternationalist fervently believes, not onlydoes Article 9 protect the rest of the worldfrom Japan; it also protects the Japanese from

themselves. These assumptions still go more or less unchallenged in Japan.The United States cultivates them because they help to justify the presenceof almost 50,000 troops on Japanese soil. A few years ago, a U.S. correspon-dent asked a senior officer in Okinawa why Americans remain there. "No-body wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan," the U.S. officer replied. "So we area cap in the bottle, if you will."8

If this reasoning ever stood up, it does so no longer. Whom would Japanattack, and why, once fully "resurgent"? This question has no sensible an-swers—not if we consider how the world, and Japan along with it, hasevolved over the past five decades. Japan maintains a self-defense force of150,000 troops—all of them voluntary. In a nation where full employmenthas long been an article of faith, who would join a force with nothing to do,no role in domestic, regional, or global affairs? There is only one conclusion:All that keeps the nationalist threat alive is Japan's habitual fear of it. Ex-pose it to the fresh air of national debate and it will disintegrate like mum-mified remains once unwound.

The Gulf war episode prompted the Japanese to begin recognizing this.They are beginning to see that one cannot be authentically internationalistwithout first being a nationalist of one kind or another. Confident of their


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affluence, they have begun to claim as theirs the questions that in the pastonly the nationalists would,frame: Shall we reclaim our sovereignty now?What do we stand for? We are Japanese—and what is wrong with that? Be-hind these questions lies a process of exploration the Japanese call "becom-ing a normal nation."

At the end of 1994 the Yomiuri Shimbun, the largest of Japan's four na-tional newspapers, published a draft of a proposed new constitution. Theevent received little attention abroad. Yet it marked a profound departurefor the Japanese. It broke the taboo. Among its 108 articles, the Yomiuridocument declared the armed forces constitutionally legal and allowed thecountry to fulfill international security obligations without encumbrance. Iterased all the shall nots. "The people shall not be prevented from enjoyingany of the fundamental human rights" became "The people possess all fun-damental human rights." The newspaper's implicit message was clear: Japanmust finally say what it is, and what it will do.

I applaud the exercise. Only by enacting a new constitution can Japan as-sume the responsibilities that must accompany its economic prominence.Over time, Japan may choose the same basic law it now possesses; it maychoose to rearm fully, or not at all. These matters are less important thanthe choices the Japanese make after an open national debate—the morecontentious the better. Required to answer for itself, Japan would no doubtaccept more responsibility in matters such as trade and the global environ-ment. Its psychologically fraught relations with Asia would suddenly havemore to do with the future than with the past.

This last point leads to another, larger question. We have long accusedthe Japanese of "historical amnesia." That is what we call it when a nation-alist leader or a government minister distorts the past or refuses to acknowl-edge it. But this is a misnomer. The Japanese remember well enough. Whatthey lack is history. Internationalism made history the province of rightistsand the conservative elite, and the conservative elite simply does not wantJapan to take its proper place in history. So the Japanese, we may say, sufferthe inverse of the U.S. problem: We can call it memory without history.

Recovering history is an essential dimension of the project the Japanesenow contemplate. It is a battle to be fought on many fronts: in textbooks,courtrooms, newspapers, government ministries. It is their fight—the fightof ordinary citizens against official rewrites of the past. But the UnitedStates has a role in this, too. For the United States made it possible for theJapanese elite even to contemplate refusing to sign history's logbook. We didthis when we excused Japan—when we declined to consider the emperor asa responsible party to war and when we restored the wartime leadership inTokyo, those whose political heirs now govern Japan.


I Patrick Smith

The U.S. role in all of this is simple—simple to articulate, if not, perhapsto implement. Americans must start to recognize the extent to which wemade the Japan before us today. That is, we must begin to remember.

Mutual Dependence

I have described a Japan in transformation—a nation emergent. The re-maining question is evident: Are we prepared for the Japan of the future, amore open and assertive Japan, a less dependent Japan, a Japan likely to bemore of its own mind for the simple reason that its people will be?

We ought to be, of course. And we say we are. Washington wants Tokyoto "do more," to take a "global role"—phrases it has used often enough inrecent years. We want a less regulated Japan—so we decry the heavy handof the bureaucracy every chance we get. More fundamentally, we say wewant a more democratic Japan—the more democratic the better—and thatthe sewer of corruption that never ceases to run in Nagatacho repulses us.

But the record is not so clear on close examination. Do we really want amore responsible Japan—or do we prefer the diffident nation to which weare accustomed? We loudly berated the Japanese for their flubbed responseto the Gulf crisis, but we liked the check they wrote—a $13 billion contri'bution—and we liked it partly because it arrived with nothing more than amuttered "Me, too" in terms of policy demands. "Unhand that economy!"the United States forever exclaims. But every time Washington asks Tokyoto see that Japanese companies buy more U.S.-made widgets, the demandlends implicit support to the dirigiste system through which the bureaucracydirects the system.

Nor has Washington shown itself prepared to begin remembering its rolein Japan's past. One despairs of listing all of Washington's trade spats withTokyo. They began with textiles in the early 1970s and have since runthrough everything from baseball bats to skis to beef, cars, car parts, and (acurrent gripe) 35-millimeter film cassettes. But the export mill is our baby;every significant component of it was in place before the occupation hadended. Equally, we may be appalled by Nagatacho's scandal-ridden pols, butwe ought not hike up our skirts and trousers too high. These are our boys,after all—direct descendants of the restored wartime elite. For many yearsthe Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded its conservative favoritesin Japan, a fact that makes indignation a tough act to sustain.

Sadly, we seem to prefer the Japan we claim reflexively to dislike. In par-ticular, we have developed an unhealthy reliance on what is at best Japan'sweak, attenuated democracy. This may seem a preposterous assertion, buttravel 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo and it will not. If Okinawa is any


Remembering Japan

guide, a more democratic and autonomous people will want to live in a moreautonomous nation—an idea the United States does not yet seem preparedto accept.

Three-fourths of the U.S. military facilities in Japan are crammed ontoOkinawan soil and occupy a fifth of the prefecture's usable land. A great de-bate has arisen as to the necessity of these installations in the post-ColdWar world, but that is not the present point. Okinawans have opposed thebases for decades. They hinder economic development, are noisy and pollut-ing, and cause crime and accidents. Last year, a month after the referendumin Maki, Okinawans held one of their own: Nine of ten voters opposed theU.S. presence. Last spring, 3,000 landowners refused to renew leases on ter-ritory U.S. bases occupy. Tokyo's response was to legislate away the refusers'property rights.

The Okinawa debate could be a moment of true arrival for the Japanese.It could allow Tokyo to show itself prepared to preside over a democracy, acivil society, instead of an unsovereign economic machine. By resolving theOkinawa question in a calm, democratic fashion, Japan could demonstratethat it deserves a larger position among global powers: a seat on the UnitedNations Security Council, for instance—its abiding ambition for some years.Instead, Okinawa reveals only that Japan is not yet ready for such a privi-lege. The principle here is simple: Responsibility begins at home.

Okinawa also reveals as starkly as any such issue can that the UnitedStates is not yet ready for the Japanese to join the world, either. Washingtonhas become dependent, one might say, on Tokyo's dependence, as well as onthe dependence the Japanese have long exhibited toward authority. If theJapanese succeed in wringing this dependence out of their psyches and theirpolitical system, and then build a country that speaks for itself, U.S. troopsand planes will no longer be stationed on Japanese soil.

That is a reality. The broader reality is that a healthier relationship be-tween the United States and Japan must inevitably be a more distant one.Japan's constitutional debates make this point implicitly, though these de-bates remain in a nascent phase. The need for distance is considerablyclearer when it comes to the treaty governing our security ties. The securitytreaty is another of those issues the Japanese are gradually removing fromthe deep freeze since the Cold War's end. As numerous newspaper polls nowindicate, roughly two-thirds of Japanese voters want to reduce the U.S. pres-ence. That was emphatically their desire in 1960, the last time the treatywas altered.

Not only does the tilt of public opinion reflect political sentiment, but itis also a practical matter. As every thoughtful Japanese understands, thepact will now work only as long as we do not use it. Once we face a crisis


Patrick Smith

and must consider implementing its pledges—once U.S. soldiers and pilotsbegin to die protecting Japan while the Japanese continue producingHondas and Walkmans for export—the security pact would very probablydamage relations with the United States beyond immediate repair. This isordinary logic. Yet Washington recently reaffirmed the security treaty with-out alteration (and earlier this year vowed to maintain troop strength in Ja-pan at current levels). Tokyo, of course, provided its predictable approval.

"America as teacher, Japan as student; America as superior, Japan as infe-rior—that's the psychology that came out of the war," John Dower, a profes-sor of Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, oncetold me. "It has colored the relationship ever since, but it's time to move on.It's long past time that we see each other as equals."

This accurately reflects the way many Japanese view our ties in their cur-rent form, even if leaders on both sides of the Pacific ignore the reality. Ourbilateral relations now present us with critical challenges. Yet in neither To-kyo nor Washington does one find any sense of innovation, imagination, orsympathy. One finds inertia—an inertia that probably reflects the enormityof the task. It leaves us to wonder: What event will force us to act? Whatcrisis will we have to rush to manage? Where lies the trip-wire that willcause us to stumble into the future—for is that not what we intend to do?

Notes

1. Robert McG. Thomas Jr., "Charles Kades, 90, Architect of Japan's Postwar Char-ter," New York Times, June 21, 1996, p. A25.

2. "Charles Kades," Economist, July 6, 1996, p. 77.

3. Mark Gayn, Japan Diary (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1984), p. 13.

4. The quotation is from Maruyama Masao, the pre-eminent figure in postwar intel-lectual discourse. In the shutai-sei debates, Maruyama led a faction known as "themodernists." For this passage, see "Nationalism in Japan: Its Theorhetical Back-ground and Prospects," p. 152 in Maruyama's Thought and Behavior in Modern Japa-nese Politics, Ivan Morris, translator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, expandededition, 1969).

5. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: Past and Present, revised edition (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1958); My Life Between Japan and America (Tokyo: John Weatherhill, 1986);and The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity (Cambridge, Mass.: The BelknapPress, 1988).

6. Ezra E Vogel, Japan As No. 1: Lessons for America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1979).

7. See Chapter 2, "Hidden History," in Japan: A Reinterpretation (New York: PantheonBooks, 1997).

8. Fred Hiatt, "Marine General: U.S. Troops Must Remain in Japan," Washington Post,March 27, 1990, p. A14.


Documents

Remembering Japan: A bilateral history