The real problem with Asō's gaffe

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht, "Die Lösung" (1953)

Deputy Prime Minister/Finance Minister Asō Tarō kicked off the second leg of the second Abe government with a fine contribution to the hall of fame of gaffes committed by Japanese politicians.

Speaking at a symposium hosted by the right-wing Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, Asō spoke about how the Abe government should approach constitution revision. He said:

Now if you say "let’s do it quietly," you need to look back at the Weimar Constitution, whose amendment went unnoticed. It was changed before most people realized it had happened. We need to learn from this. I have absolutely no intention of rejecting democracy. But I don’t want to see us make these decisions in the midst of an uproar. 

(That's from a translation by Peter Durfee; the full text of his remarks can be found here.)

The resulting international uproar — usually presented under headlines like "Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso comes under fire for Nazi remarks" — has resulted in Asō's coming under pressure to resign from opposition parties, and under pressure from the prime minister (jp) to retract his remarks. He has retracted, but has said he will not resign.

However, in my reading of his remarks, Asō's interpretation of how the Weimar constitution was revised may have been the least offensive aspect of his speech. What's offensive about Asō's speech is the arrogant disdain for the messy reality of democracy, the lament of every would-be utopian in history eager to ram the square peg of humanity into their round hole of choice. Asō repeatedly bemoans the "boisterousness," "tumultuousness,"and "uproariousness" present in public discussion of constitution revision. He seems to say, Why can't the people see that we know what's best for them? Can't they see that the facts demand revision? I read this less as a blueprint for revision than as a whine about how it's all the fault of the public and the mass media for how little success Japan's revisionist right has had when it comes to building a consensus in favor of their vision of the constitution.

Why shouldn't the debate be boisterous? Why shouldn't there be uproarious and fierce opposition when the debate is about the document that serves as the nation's moral center — especially when the LDP's draft makes no secret of its plans to change the values enshrined in the constitution?  Why shouldn't Japanese defenders of the constitution feel just as strongly about defending a document — a document that, whatever its origins, has become an important pillar of postwar Japanese society — as the revisionists feel about changing it? Who are Abe, Asō, and company to decide whether a debate is being conducted appropriately or not?

At its best, liberal democracy is "boisterous" and "uproarious," because if the people have the freedom to speak their minds, there is bound to be a tumult. Politicians seeking order, politeness, and decorum can find some fine examples in Japan's immediate neighborhood.

In the final analysis, I don't think Asō was longing for an end to democracy or outlining a secret plan for constitutional revision. Rather, he has once again revealed a fundamental fact about his and Abe's worldview: they have no problem stating their love for democracy as an abstract idea, a value to be promoted in East Asia and a rhetorical cudgel with which to bludgeon China, but they have little love for democracy as it is actually practiced in Japan.

Abe's underwhelming victory

Abe Shinzō's LDP-led coalition with Komeitō got its wish Sunday, winning enough seats to retake control of the House of Councillors for the government and ending the "twisted" Diet for at least the next three years. With five seats still undecided, the LDP and Kōmeitō have secured 134 seats, comfortably over the majority threshold of 122 seats.

But it is difficult to declare Sunday's results an strong mandate for Abe and his program.

First, the LDP fell short of winning an outright majority. The LDP is once again the largest party in the HOC, but it will still need to secure the votes of Kōmeitō to pass legislation in the upper chamber. It is unclear what threats Kōmeitō can wield to modify the government's behavior — I doubt whether it can credibly threaten to leave the coalition — but since they wield the deciding votes in the HOC, they will be in a position to influence the government's agenda, which will likely have consequences for nuclear energy and constitution revision. One could argue that Kōmeitō was the real winner on Sunday.

Second, the pro-revision parties fell short of a supermajority. The pro-constitution revision parties needed to win at least 162 seats to be in a position to pass constitutional amendments in the HOC. Given that the pro-revision parties don't even share the same vision for the constitution, the road to revision is no less steep today than it was before the HOC election. That doesn't mean Abe won't try to cobble together some kind of revisionist alliance in the HOC, but I think the pattern I outlined in May will hold:

At the very least, we're probably seeing the emergence of what will likely be a persistent pattern should Abe remain in power. Abe and his lieutenants will talk about the need to revise the constitution, Kōmeitō will express its unease about revision, what's left of the left wing will sound the alarm, public opinion polls will reveal skepticism about revision, LDP grandees will suggest backing down...and rinse and repeat.

It is difficult to view the HOC election as public endorsement for a shift to the right.

Instead, we should view the HOC election as a sign that the Japanese political system is not "stable" or healthy. There is an emerging narrative that because the Abe government looks durable, the Japanese political system has achieved some stability after years of turmoil and ineffectual governments.  Abe may well be in a position to last, although we won't really know until he actually has to make a controversial decision (about, say, TPP or nuclear power or the consumption tax). But the election returns suggest that these will be trying years for Japanese democracy. The DPJ has more or less imploded, and seemed to spend more time during the campaign fighting amongst itself than against the government. The Communists soaked up anti-Abe protest votes and won eight seats, including three district seats, but the ability to win protest votes does not necessarily make for an effective opposition party. As Michael Cucek noted before the election, none of the opposition parties has anything constructive to say about the problems facing Japan. Abenomics is winning public support at least in part because it's the only policy program on offer. Kōmeitō is basically left being the opposition-in-government. I think there are votes for a center-left program, but no party or leader has articulated one in simple, easily understood terms. Whether a coherent, effective large party can emerge from the DPJ's wreckage is one of the most important questions in Japanese politics in the years to come.

Finally, policy challenges remain. With control of both houses, Abe has no excuses. He cannot hide behind the "twisted Diet" any longer. He is going to have to deliver results and make decisions with the potential to trigger major public opposition. The media, of course, will be waiting to pounce at the first sign that the government is slipping — to say nothing of Abe's rivals within the LDP. The public is still opposed to nuclear restarts and is still opposed to raising the consumption tax next year. While the public as a whole supports Japanese participation in TPP, the LDP still includes an unwieldy mix of representatives from across the country, suggesting the possibility of a postal privatization-like confrontation between the urban and rural wings of the party.

In short, the HOC election was not nearly as transformative as it may seem. By failing to win an independent majority in the HOC, the LDP will continue to depend on Komeitō to pass legislation. But by winning a majority for the coalition, Abe will now be expected to use his political power to follow through on his pledge to revitalize Japan's economy — with the public, the media, and rivals within the LDP ready to turn on him should he falter.

Is constitution revision actually possible?

Last week, the Sankei Shimbun reported that, in the face of mounting public opposition, the LDP would in fact not put revising Article 96 of the constitution at the heart of its upper house campaign strategy. (Naturally, the next day Sankei published an editorial arguing that the LDP should make revising Article 96 central to the campaign as a matter of course.)

But is the LDP — and, more importantly, is Prime Minister Abe — actually backing away from their determination to use the upper house election to gain a mandate for revising Article 96? More importantly, does it matter?

At the very least, we're probably seeing the emergence of what will likely be a persistent pattern should Abe remain in power. Abe and his lieutenants will talk about the need to revise the constitution, Komeito will express its unease about revision, what's left of the left wing will sound the alarm, public opinion polls will reveal skepticism about revision, LDP grandees will suggest backing down...and rinse and repeat.

Barring a dramatic external shock, it is difficult to see how the politics of constitution revision will change in favor of revision. The bid to put revising Article 96 before more substantive revisions has done nothing to defuse opposition to revision. It seems unlikely that Komeito will become more enthusiastic about revision. Depending on the now-toxic Japan Ishin no kai to pass amendments is a non-starter, not least because it is unlikely they will win anywhere close to enough seats to help the LDP. Defending the constitution may be one of the few areas in which the Japanese left is still be able to mobilize citizens. It will presumably take some event that reveals the constitution to be woefully inadequate for coping with the challenges Japan faces — one of the arguments used by revisionists — for these political obstacles to vanish.

As long as Abe doesn't pay any political costs for stumping for revision, there's no reason to think he'll back down entirely, even if from time to time constitution revision takes a back seat to other issues. But  no matter how much Abe talks about revision, for the foreseeable future I have a hard time seeing how it will ever get traction. There are just too many people either skeptical about or completely opposed to changing the postwar constitution. More importantly, Japan's conservatives are much better at preaching to (haranguing to?) the converted than winning new converts.

Abe's neo-statism

This week Prime Minister Abe Shinzō criticized right-wing demonstrations in Koreatowns in Tokyo and Osaka, stating, “The Japanese way of thinking is to behave politely and to be generous and modest at any time.” While it is, of course, good that Abe made a point of criticizing hate speech, it's important to recognize that Abe is pursuing a different program than some of the cruder conservative revisionists in his own party, the conservative media, or the right-wing demonstrators who terrorize the ears of Tokyoites with their sound trucks. The problem with the word "nationalist" is that it obscures more than it reveals.

In an astute article about Abe's program, the FT's David Pilling notes Abe's agenda can rightly be summarized using the Meiji slogan, Fukoku-kyohei (rich nation, strong army). What I wonder, though, is whether it is best to think of Abe as a nationalist or whether it is more appropriate to think of him as a statist, not unlike his Meiji forebears. The distinction is important. The right-wing demonstrators criticized by Abe are little more than chauvinistic ethnic nationalists, intent on showing the superiority of the Japanese people. Abe is interested in the survival of the Japanese nation in international competition, with the state as a kind of avatar of the Japanese people. His way of thinking is steeped in Hobbesian and social Darwinist conceptions of the state, in which the state and people exist in a sort of organic solidarity and in which the state is focused largely on protecting lives and property from enemies foreign and domestic. To compete with other nation-states, the state must be capable of organizing and drawing upon the country's resources and the people's energy in order to compete.

Accordingly, when Abe talks of breaking free of the postwar regime or creating a normal nation, it is with this idea in mind. Nationalism is a means to the end of strengthening the state. Encouraging national pride is useful to the extent that it makes Japanese citizens more amenable to constitution revision, more supportive of an assertive Japanese military, and more eager to stand up to provocation by China or North Korea, just as revitalizing Japan's economy is useful to the extent that it improves the state's fiscal position, swells its coffers, and bolsters national confidence.

The question is whether Abe's neo-statism poses risks to peace and security in East Asia. On the one hand, China arguably views the world along similarly social Darwinist lines, and one can therefore make the case that national survival for Japan depends on embracing a similar way of thinking, making Japan less vulnerable to bullying by China. However, the danger of Japan's embracing a social Darwinist conception of international competition is that it would make every problem between Japan and its neighbors harder to resolve, because every issue would become a question of status in the international hierarchy. When combined with fewer restraints on the use of force by Japan, the risk of outright war would surely increase.

There are still a number of hurdles Abe must overcome before he can remake Japan according to his neo-statist vision — and he must still convince the Japanese people of its wisdom, especially as far as constitution revision goes. But it is important to understand just what kind of nationalist Abe is, and to be aware that whatever short-term tactical concessions he makes, he has a long-term vision of where he wants to take his country.

Following the leader

Michael Cucek catches a comment from LDP Secretary-General Ishiba Shigeru at a public appearance in Kagawa. 

Ishiba said, "The Liberal Democratic Party is a party for doing what?...First and foremost, it a party for the revision of the Constitution." 

Cucek raises some useful questions about what this statement means, but I wonder whether Ishiba wasn't just being extremely literal.

After all, revising the constitution is right there in the party's founding documents. In the party platform of 15 November 1955, the sixth and last (but arguably not least) proposal says that the party will "plan for independent revision of the current constitution and reexamine Occupation-era laws, changing them to conform with national conditions." The same plank says "in order to protect world peace, state independence, and popular freedom," the LDP will create a self-defense force and prepare for the removal of foreign troops stationed on Japanese soil (i.e., the US military). 

But to try to answer Cucek's questions, I don't know if the Westminsterization is really all that stealthy. If a prime minister knows what he wants to do, has the public behind him, and faces no real opposition from within his own party, one should not be surprised that even a politician with an independent base of support like Ishiba would have to follow the leader, right down to his rhetoric. 

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot standing in the way of Abe Shinzō's completing the work of his grandfather and the other fathers of the LDP.

Who's afraid of the conservatives?

Yamasaki Taku, perhaps the leader of the LDP's remaining doves, spoke at a Genron NPO meeting Thursday afternoon at which he addressed Murata Ryohei's revelations of the secret deal between the US and Japan that permitted the US to "introduce" nuclear weapons to Japan. (Previously discussed in this post.)

"It is appropriate to approve this kind of action for US deterrent power," he said, in light of the nuclear standoff with North Korea, this kind of action being a revision of the non-nuclear principles to permit explicitly the introduction of US nuclear weapons into Japan as in the 1960 secret agreement.

Yamasaki is no pacifist, so this statement is not exactly a bombshell, but it does suggest that there is more to this debate than suggested in Armchair Asia's discussion of Murata's revelations. The anonymous author of Armchair Asia outlines Murata's conservative motives in this post, arguing, "In reality, it is part of a convoluted Rightist strategy to repeal Article 9 and create a military independent of the United States."

I do not disagree that Murata has a number of affiliations that strongly suggest his political leanings. The Shokun! article cited in the initial post — Shokun! obviously triggers various red flags — uses a number of conservative code words, "pride," "independent country," and the like. A subsequent post includes a translation of an op-ed by Okazaki Hisahiko, the notoriously hawkish Foreign Ministry OB who was once known as "Abe's brain," defending Murata's actions. (Available in Japanese here.)

But so what? Why should it matter that Murata is a conservative nationalist? And why should it matter why he decided to reveal the secret agreement (or why Okazaki has defended him)? After watching the Abe government blow up, it is hard to muster up the same concern about the influence of the conservatives. The author writes that of how Murata's remarks will be used by those "who want to use any means to repeal Article 9 and advance Japan's rearmament." Events seem to have taken care of both causes. As I have written previously, the economic crisis has greatly diminished the power of the conservatives even within the LDP, to the point that constitution revision might not even be included in the LDP's manifesto this year (if the LDP ever gets around to writing one).

Is Article 9 really at risk? Even in the best of times, it was unlikely that the conservatives would get what they wanted on Article 9. Oh sure, they could get the article revised, but the need to assemble two-thirds of the members of both houses plus fifty percent plus one of the Japanese public would guarantee that the article would be amended but not abandoned. Revision would likely shift the yardsticks, ratifying changes that have been made that appear to depart from the letter of the law, without removing all limitations on Japanese security policy. And, incidentally, I see no problems with revision of this sort. No document drafted by human hands is beyond revision. My problem is with those obsessed with revision, like Abe Shinzō, not revision itself.

In any case, with the LDP in its death throes, it bears mentioning that constitution revision is even less likely under a DPJ-led government in coalition with the SDPJ. A DPJ government is likely to take its cue from public opinion polls that show the percentage of respondents interested in constitution to be under five percent. Raising constitution revision would only serve to weaken the coalition and sow dissent within the LDP, while strengthening an opposition LDP.

The same goes for "rearmament," the second concern voiced by the author of Armchair Asia. The conservatives have been ascendant for roughly the same period that Japan has let its defense spending stagnate, which suggests, of course, that for all their rhetorical might their reach exceeds their grasp. Their reach will only decline further should the LDP lose power this year. They have allies in the DPJ, but if the DPJ is able to deliver on its plans for a government that unifies cabinet and party, conservatives like Maehara Seiji will find themselves straitjacketed by government service. And there is no chance that a DPJ government elected on a platform of Seikatsu dai-ichi would, upon taking power, proceed to channel significant sums of money into defense spending. Elected on a platform stressing butter, butter, butter and facing skyrocketing pensions costs, it is highly unlikely that the DPJ will decide to invest in guns once in office.

There may be more to rearmament than defense spending, but as with some limited form of constitution revision, what is the problem with Japan doing incrementally more without drastically increasing its spending?

To conclude a discussion that has run longer than I intended, the conservatives should be challenged but their strength and influence should not be exaggerated. And if Ambassador Okazaki wants an open debate, then someone in Japan ought to give him his debate.

Meanwhile, as I wrote in my original post on Murata, I think that whatever his motive, it is good that the Japanese government will be forced to address the role of nuclear weapons in the US-Japan relationship openly. It is entirely possible that the Japanese public — with a nuclear North Korea next door — will recognize a revision of the non-nuclear principles that explicitly permits the US to do what it has been doing all along will strengthen Japan's security. Despite the wishes of the conservatives, the public isn't exactly pressing for Japanese nuclear weapons as a substitute for US nuclear weapons.

It is encouraging that the two governments will hold a working-level meeting this month to discuss the nuclear umbrella, a discussion that is long overdue. One meeting will not resolve the paradox of Japan's trying to be the world's conscience on nuclear weapons while being defended by US nuclear weapons but it will at least help call attention to the paradox and force the Japanese public and their representatives to address it. The US should not be forced into a position where it would have to use nukes to defend Japan (at the behest of its elites) even as the Japanese public condemns the US. Explicitly permitting US nuclear weapons in Japan would certainly help make both countries responsible.

Constitution revision back on the agenda?

Yomiuri has released the results of its annual poll on constitution revision and has found that once again a majority — a slight one, 51.6% — favors revising Japan's constitution. This marks a nine-point increase over last year's poll. Opposition to revision fell from 43.1% to 36.5%.

Interestingly, majorities among both self-described LDP supporters and DPJ supporters supported revision, 54% and 53% respectively.

Among respondents who support revision, 49% said that the international contributions are impossible because the current constitution didn't anticipate new challenges. Asked specifically about Article 9, 38% of respondents (up from last year's 31%) said that Japan has reached the limit to what it can squeeze out of Article 9 via interpretation and manipulation, and so it should revise it, 33% (down from 36%) said that there is still room for interpretation and manipulation, and 21% (down from 24%) argued that Article 9 should be strictly protected.

Yomiuri also asked about a possible revision that would make the Diet unicameral: 39% supported preserving the upper house, while adjusting the roles and powers of the two houses, while 28% support merging the two houses entirely.

Without seeing the whole poll, I don't know what Yomiuri has left out of its summary of the results. I don't know, for example, whether Yomiuri asked respondents who favor revising Article 9 what should take its place, given that there is a broad range of opinions on how Article 9 should be changed. Yomiuri explains the shift over the past year as a response to new JSDF missions and frustration with the divided Diet. Maybe so, but what this poll doesn't tell us is where respondents would rank constitution revision on a list of national priorities? As we saw with the collapse in public support for constitution revision once Japan actually had a prime minister who viewed constitution revision as a top priority, how many of the respondents who said they support revision actually believe that this should be a top concern for the government?

Meanwhile, will Aso Taro be tempted to reintroduce constitution revision as a major priority as the LDP goes about drafting its manifesto for the forthcoming general election? Constitution revision will obviously be a plank in the party's manifesto, but the question is whether it will look more like 2005 — when constitution revision was in the final grouping of proposals, "Changing Japan's foundation" — or more like 2007, when constitution revision was listed as number one in the LDP's list of 155 proposals. Nakasone Yasuhiro has announced the creation of a new non-partisan Diet members' league for the establishment of a new constitution, which will hold a convention on 1 May featuring Diet members from the LDP, Komeito, DPJ, PNP, and Reform Club and observers from business groups. Perhaps looking to 2011, when the moratorium on constitution revision that was included in the 2007 national referendum law expires, Nakasone demanded that constitution revision be on the agenda during this year's election campaign.

While Nakasone wants both major parties to have a discussion about revision, reintroducing constitution revision to the national agenda could potentially disadvantage the DPJ seeing as how constitution revision is perhaps the one issue that could unravel the uneasy settlement Ozawa Ichiro has imposed on the DPJ. The DPJ's 2007 manifesto fudges the issue, suggesting the revision needs to be a bottom-up process, but if the LDP forces the DPJ to address the issue in a campaign, the DPJ members who will be participating in Nakasone's new league (unknown for now, but easy enough to guess who they are) may feel obliged demand more from the leadership on the constitution. Talking about the constition would also shift the spotlight from the government's powerlessness in the face of the economic crisis.

That said, I think constitution revision would be as much a loser for the LDP in 2009 as it was in 2007. There is nothing inconsistent about a majority supporting revision — leaving aside the question of whether Yomiuri's poll accurately captures public sentiment — without wanting it to be number one or even in the top five on the ruling party's list of priorities. As noted previously, voters are frustrated with Japan's leaders for failing to take their views into account. I don't think the public would be amused by the government's changing the discussion from how best to save Japan's economy to constitution revision. As in 2007, this year's election will be about livelihood issues and governance. Seeing as how Japan's governance problems have little to do with formal institutions as outlined in the constitution, constitution revision will barely figure in the campaign, notwithstanding the efforts of Nakasone and other conservatives to make it an issue.

Finally, to return to the question of why a majority of respondents once again favors revision, I suspect that it has less to do with any specific event or action taken during the past year than with a general, directionless desire for change. The public sees a broken system, and has concluded that systematic change is needed — and systematic change ought to include constitution revision. At this point, however, constitution revision would be a waste of time and effort on the part of the Japanese people and their representatives. Japan's governance problems do not lie in its constitutional arrangements. They rest with the informal arrangements that have emerged around LDP rule. The constitution, after all, says nothing about the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians other than that the Diet is the highest organ of state power and that the Cabinet is the source of executive power. Around those two articles have emerged a complicated set of informal institutions that manage the relationship between the Diet, the prime minister and cabinet, and the bureaucracy, which is only mentioned in the constitution to stress its subordination to the prime minister.

The bureaucracy's power is derived from the cabinet, and returning power to the cabinet — widely agreed upon as the key to fixing Japan's institutions — depends not on constitution revision but on enforcing what the constitution actually says.

The foolish crusade against the House of Councillors

In May 2008, I wrote about the creation of an LDP study group with the goal of eliminating the House of Councillors — the Diet's upper house — and moving to a unicameral system, a proposal that I suggested was an anti-democratic temper tantrum in response to DPJ control of the upper chamber.

This proposal and its advocates, however, are still at work trying to undermine Japanese democracy. The study group is working hard to introduce a plank demanding a unicameral system into the LDP's manifesto for the next general election. As Yamamoto Ichita, a member of the study group, explains, the proposal is not just to dissolve the upper house but to dissolve both houses and create a new unicameral legislature with significantly fewer legislators. The plan calls for the number of legislators to be cut by thirty percent and for single-member districts to give way to prefecture-wide multi-member districts. He claims it isn't simply a response to the DPJ's control of the upper house.

As I noted last year, given that such a radical change would require Japan's first ever constitutional amendment (Article 42: "The Diet shall consist of two Houses, namely the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors"), and given that the days of the government's supermajority are almost certainly numbered, this proposal is singularly farfetched. It is doubtful whether this proposal would receive majority support, let alone supermajority support. Prime Minister Aso is circumspect; Komeito is favorably disposed to cutting the number of legislators but opposed to removing the upper house; and the DPJ's Ozawa Ichiro thinks this should not be a subject for discussion at all before a general election.

So why am I writing about this proposal?

Only because it shows how batty some LDP members have gotten as their party has decayed. Not only do this proposal's proponents — including the past four prime ministers — ignore the steep obstacles standing in the way of ever making a unicameral system a reality given present political circumstances, but they are so short-sighted that they fail to realize that given the probability of the LDP's going into opposition, the upper house will be a useful tool for crafting an LDP revival.

The DPJ, the upper house's largest party but not the majority party, needs every vote it can get in order to control the upper chamber. For now, it is dependent on the Social Democrats and the People's New Party. Even if the DPJ wins an absolute majority in the lower house and forms a government, it will still have to cobble together working coalitions in the upper house. In this situation, the LDP will be powerful both as a potential partner and as a potential spoiler of DPJ plans. The same will apply to Komeito. Surely the members of the coalition parties, surrounded by signs of impending collapse, have begun thinking about what life in opposition will be like. Surely they know all too well that the upper house can be a useful platform for disrupting government business.

But the unicameralists not only exhibit a shortsightedness on the part of LDP members, they show how LDP members have looked to attribute policy failures to anyone or anything but their own party. Naturally there are exceptions, most notably Mr. Koizumi and his followers. But the desire to blame structural forces — the electoral system, the parliamentary system, the policymaking system — is persistent, and unconvincing.

How can the same structures that in many ways sustained LDP rule now suddenly be contributing to the LDP's demise? For example, if the much-vilified bureaucracy, Nakagawa Hidenao's bete noire, has misgoverned Japan, the obvious question is why the LDP has allowed the bureaucracy to make such a mess of things. Mr. Nakagawa would answer that the bureaucracy is an all-powerful complex — which Mr. Nakagawa explicitly describes as akin to Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" — that is capable of manipulating the LDP, the media, the universities, and so on.

Not good enough. At some point the LDP, accountable to the public for policy, must pay the price for failures. No more excuses. No more scapegoats.

What's normal?

William Gibson (previously discussed here) gave an interview to the science fiction site io9 recently in which he discussed the politics of his latest book, Spook Country.

One comment in particular caught my eye. Asked about Canada, his adopted home since fleeing the US to escape the draft, he said:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

This got me thinking about Japan's "normal nation-ists." While Gibson's characterization is a bit too simple — ideology obviously "bled" into the twentieth century, technology had as transformative an impact on the nineteenth as the twentieth — a "normal" nation in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries is not the same as a normal nation in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

A normal nation in the late nineteenth century, the salad days of the nation-state, was obsessed with national power, constantly looking to enhance its own power and sizing itself up against other nation-states. It shaped its domestic institutions to enable it to draw on the wealth and bodies of its citizens to build up a modern army and navy and conquered weaker nations for reasons of wealth and honor (and to compete with others, of course). War was the great proving ground of the nation. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in The Strenuous Life, "If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world."

In their thinking about war and Japanese society in the twenty-first century, Japan's conservatives — the "normal nation-ists" — still see the world through these eyes. To be a normal nation is to compete with other nations, to not "shrink from the hard contests." This is why so many of them want, as Abe Shinzo said, to leave the postwar system behind. In their eyes the postwar system is abnormal, as it led Japan to opt out of the contest for power. It weakened the resolve of the Japanese people for competition internationally. (At least military competition, the only competition that matters; to be a merchant nation, to exert power through money is ignoble, hence the shame of so many Japanese over the country's response to the Gulf crisis in 1990.)

Japan as it exists today is a normal nation. It is peaceful, has abstained from intervention in the internal politics of other countries, and is non-nuclear. It is a signatory to major international treaties and an enthusiastic participant in international regimes. This is normal behavior for a country in the twenty-first century. Japanese, like Europeans, are from Venus (in Robert Kagan's formulation), but Venusian behavior is increasingly normal, even in East Asia, which, despite the persistence of dangerous flashpoints and despite the stirrings of an arms race, is still remarkably peaceful.

Accordingly, the program pushed by the conservatives is the road of an abnormal nation. Perhaps because they take the United States as their model, they assume that US behavior is normal. It isn't. (MTC implies this in this post.) Martial America is almost unique in its adherence to nineteenth-century norms of behavior. American power has played a positive role in supporting international order — there is no denying that. But the motive power behind it is straight out of the nineteenth century, leading to abnormal behavior like the invasion of Iraq. (That the US launched the invasion despite the opposition of much of the world would suggest that the war was "abnormal," i.e. in contravention to a prevailing norm against aggressive, preventive war.)

So it is a misnomer to describe the revisionist advocates of a more robust Japan free of constraints on the use of force as advocates of a normal nation. Prime Minister Fukuda's emphasis on, in MTC's words, "contributing to world security through leadership on disease control, global warming, combatting poverty" looks increasingly like the foreign policy of a normal nation in the twenty-first century. It is also a mistake to describe them as nationalists. Nationalism need not be associated with military power, although nineteenth-century nationalism is. Why can't a twenty-first century nation be proud of more pacific achievements, whether domestic (a society with a low crime rate or high literacy) or international (a commitment to creating a more peaceful, orderly world)? The revisionists do not have a monopoly on pride in their country. Defenders of Japan's postwar system have plenty of which to be proud.

The fantasies of "true conservatism"

For a glimpse into the twisted thinking of the Japanese right — the revisionist right — in the aftermath of the downfall of Abe Shinzo, there is no better place to look than the conversation between Sakurai Yoshiko and Hiranuma Takeo published in the January 2008 issue of Voice.

The bizarre, distorted facts and outright fictions published in this article brought me to the point of laughter on more than one occasion, although I didn't laugh nearly as much as the discussants apparently did, judging by the little parenthetical laugh marks that followed all too many of their remarks.

The discussion did, however, give me another reason to be glad that Mr. Abe was forced to resign (for whatever reason — these two think that fault for Abe's resignation lies not with Mr. Abe himself, but with his secretary, Inoue Yoshiyuki, who Ms. Sakurai describes as being "like [Koizumi secretary] Iijima," apparently a bad thing). It's not that their ideas are especially dangerous, it's that they're so irrelevant. They continue to insist that what they know what the Japanese people want, and that is the abductees brought home and the constitution revised. Ms. Sakurai at one point castigates Prime Minister Fukuda for failing to act on constitution revision, which, she reminds us, has been one of the core principles of the LDP since its founding in 1955. True, but so what? Why should a government in 2008 by following an agenda formulated before 1955 when it has to deal with the problems of 2008 and beyond?

How many elections does the LDP have to lose before they recognize that the Japanese people don't share their priorities? Did the July 2007 defeat not register?

Of course, the discussion inevitably turned to Mr. Hiranuma's planned "true" conservative party, because both the LDP and the DPJ are rotten (even if, they say, there are capable individuals within both parties). When asked about the timing of its formation, Mr. Hiranuma was reluctant to say whether it would occur before or after a general election. Undoubtedly he will have to make that decision with the cooperation of his friends within the LDP, who I suspect would prefer to wait until a general election before acting. Instead of forming a new party, it seems to me that the ideological right is starting to hope openly for an LDP defeat in a general election that will take down Fukuda and give them an opportunity to retake control of the party, purging "fake" conservatives in the process.

Towards the discussion, Mr. Hiranuma very nearly veered into relevance when he broached the question of economics, but it turned out he only wanted to castigate the Finance Ministry before directing the conversation back to more familiar ground, puzzlement over the reaction to Nakagawa Shoichi's 2006 calls for a debate about the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

I don't want to linger too much longer over this, but there was one more nugget worth mentioning. The two of course talked at length about the US about-face on North Korea and had a good laugh about Christopher Hill. Mr. Hiranuma also spoke about his recent trip to Washington along with other Diet members and the abductee families, where they spoke with members of Congress about resolutions in the House and Senate calling for a linkage between the abductions issue and the removal of North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list. For some reason, these ideologues really take congressional resolutions seriously. Mr. Hiranuma spoke with pride about how Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-18) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) promised to push for these resolutions, and was impressed that the House resolution already had a whopping twenty-eight co-sponsors.

That said, they acknowledged the shortcomings of Diet members' diplomacy, thanks in part — wait for it — the influence of the Chinese in Washington, whose embassy has ten times more political specialists in their embassy than Japan's and who have significant numbers of Chinese-Americans whose support Beijing can apparently mobilize at will, as in the case of the comfort women resolution.

You would think from reading this interview that Japanese society was healthy and that there was not a long list of problems facing the government for years to come. And you would be wrong, just as the ideological right is wrong. The decisions made by the Japanese government in the coming years will determine whether Japan remains influential regionally and globally, whether it remains an economic power with a voice in shaping East Asia. Its power will not rest on a new constitution that enables Japan to send its robust military to fight abroad. It will not rest on its children being proud of being Japanese. It will depend on Japan's becoming a country that is more open to the world, more willing to take risks, better able to provide security for its aging citizens, and better able to educate Japanese children for the world in which they will live.

The vision of Mr. Hiranuma, Ms. Sakurai, and their compatriots in the mass media and the Diet is a vision from 1950. (I guess that's what they mean by "true conservatism). Too bad it's 2008.

A necessary revision

In light of the ongoing speculation about the probability and timing of a snap election, it is worthwhile to step back and consider structural flaws in how Japanese governments are formed.

Why, after all, should Mr. Fukuda's government function on the basis of a parliamentary majority secured more than two years ago under his predecessor before last? What mandate does Mr. Fukuda have to govern? For that matter, what mandate did Mr. Abe have to govern? This is a flaw of parliamentary systems. Why should executive power be handed from one leader to another, like an heirloom, without the people being consulted whether they're still content with the governing party?

While constitution revision is, for the moment, off the table, perhaps the Japanese constitution needs an amendment that will give the public some oversight over the process of selecting prime ministers. In place of the occasionally suggested direct election of the prime minister, which is inconsistent with Japan's (admittedly incompletely) Westminster democracy, a revised constitution could approximate direct election by making a general election compulsory within a given period of time following the election of a new prime minister in the Diet.

A prime minister should earn his own governing majority, and the composition of the House of Representatives should reflect prevailing political conditions. If asked, the public may always accept the Diet's choice of prime minister and give the new government a majority, but the Japanese people should at least be consulted.

I am not automatically against constitution revision — no document should be so sacrosanct that it cannot be altered to reflect new realities. A problem with contemporary Japanese politics is that the idea of constitution revision has been hijacked by the ultra-nationalists, who have prioritized revisions that will have little practical impact on the workings of the Japanese government. There is a dire need for political change — including constitution revision — that will make the Japanese political system more open and more reflective of the concerns of the public.

Of course, it's probably too much to expect the political elite to push for this manner of constitution revision. And as a practical matter, Mr. Fukuda and the LDP are in no hurry to ask the Japanese people for a new mandate for governing.

Abe's new role

Mr. Abe commented about constitution revision in an answer at a press conference at the Kantei on Thursday.

"For these three years, my thinking is unchanged that we must, together with the people, have a wide and deep debate about the new constitution."

This was reported in a minute article on pg. 4 of Yomiuri, together with a cartoon that portrayed a shell-shocked and disheveled Mr. Abe emerging from the wreck of building labeled "Upper House election" clutching a placard labeled "constitution revision" to his breast. The caption reads, "Only this is always carried?"

And that's how it feels. After the ideological excesses of the first Abe Cabinet — and the reaction that was the Upper House election — the old slogans just don't seem all that relevant. This seems to be the basis for a new division of labor in the post-reshuffle Abe government. Every once in a while Mr. Abe will be placed in front of a microphone to talk about creating a beautiful country and to admonish the country to consider constitution revision, while in the meantime his cabinet full of serious men will go about the business of governing the country.

Viva the lifestyle restoration!

Jun Okumura gives a thorough fisking to a BBC article that completely misses what's actually going on in this election campaign. In fact, the article seems to be little more than a bundle of cliches strung together with, as Jun notes, a few illustrative anecdotes.

All the BBC had to do to get this story right was look at the Yomiuri Shimbun's editorial today. Yomiuri complained, once again, about the supposed inadequacies of the national debate leading up to the Upper House elections. About the constitution, Yomiuri asks in its headline, "Why are we not debating the country's image in the future?"

The fact that this election hasn't been about the constitution, despite Prime Minister Abe's solemn declaration in January to make the election about revision, actually gives me hope for the future of Japanese democracy. In opinion poll after opinion poll, in every newspaper, the Japanese people have said "Thanks, but no thanks — we would rather talk about our pensions, education, and health care systems."

No one is spared Yomiuri's wrath for this intervention of the people's mundane concerns into an election that ought to be about the figure cut by Japan on the international stage. Prime Minister Abe? "Prime Minister Abe, who floated the idea of 'getting rid of the postwar regime,' simultaneously declared, 'constitution revision is the point of contention of the Upper House election.' The promise at the start clearly expressed the aim of proposing constitution revision to the Diet in 2010. But during the election campaign, it appears there has been a weakening of his attitude." Ozawa and the DPJ? "We also have doubts about the stance of the DPJ President Ozawa," due to his history of taking a firm stand in favor of constitution revision in the past but now backing away because of political opportunism (i.e., the desire to see power in the Upper House change hands).

It seems that the only party talking about constitution revision — judging from their campaigning outside the station on my way home tonight — is the Japan Communist Party, and obviously they are resolutely opposed to the idea.

Let me say it again: I think it's a cause for hope that the parties, especially the LDP, have been forced, in no small part due to the DPJ's questioning in the Diet, to bend to the will of the people and address the issues that are the source of widespread insecurity among the Japanese people. An election based on constitution revision, an abstract matter far removed from the lives of 127 million Japanese, would be a travesty, a sign of the moral bankruptcy of the political class in the face of mounting challenges. It's not entirely clear to me why an election grounded in strong doubts about political corruption and government failures in Tokyo is somehow removed from a consideration of Japan's "image in the future." Arguably, it has more to do with how Japan will be governed over the coming decades; the idea of Japan's being a regional or a world power with the aging Japanese public living in fear that they won't be properly cared for in their old age and with an attenuated LDP trying to hold power at all costs is laughable.

And so with nine days to the election, the DPJ has gotten its wish: this is a lifestyle election. Will the Japanese people take this golden opportunity and actually turn out to punish the government? And if given a stake in the leadership of the Upper House, will the DPJ be able to parlay that into a serious run for control of the Lower House?

After the Yoshida Doctrine, what?

Over at Shisaku, MTC notes in a thoughtful post on the Yoshida Doctrine, "Yet even now, sixteen years down the line, the Yoshida tradeoff rules as the master narrative underpinning all discussion of Japan's security options."

Yet I wonder if the Yoshida Doctrine lives on only as a function of the institutional and constitutional constraints that were devised to establish its position as strategic framework by which Japan acted in the postwar world — less master narrative than default option in lieu of a new consensus.

As I have argued before, for the past fifteen years the debate on Japan's security posture has been wide open. Questions that were answered in the late 1950s and early 1960s are once again on the table. Japan has yet to reach a new consensus, of course — in part for reasons identified by MTC. With the "lost decade," the casual assumption that Japan would become an economic superpower, in the process redefining the very meaning of power, has been shattered. On the home front, meanwhile, the bursting of the bubble dealt a critical blow to the other part of the postwar consensus, the "structural corruption" by which the LDP ensured that the fruits of growth were distributed throughout the country. (After all, it was Yoshida and Kishi, who, despite their antagonistic relationship, built the postwar order, with Yoshida laying out the principles and Kishi consolidating the system — this argument is made by Richard Samuels in this JPRI working paper and expanded upon in Machiavelli's Children, this month's recommended book.)

What role is Japan to play in the world? And how is Japan to be governed? Two disparate but intertwined questions, neither of which has been satisfactorily answered in the post-cold war era.

For some, the answer is more dynamic, executive leadership from the premiership, coupled with a "normal" alliance with the US in which Japan is the Asian anchor of a global democratic posse, but on this front, the rhetoric has undoubtedly ran far ahead of the reality. Indeed, for all the talk about creating an arc of prosperity and freedom across Eurasia, when it comes time to take risks to create it, Japan is as reluctant as ever: the Japan Times reports that James Shinn, incoming deputy under secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific security affairs, has had his request for a JSDF dispatch to Afghanistan rebuffed by LDP legislator Yamasaki Taku.

Despite the rhetorical commitment to Japan's becoming a significant global actor willing to put boots on the ground, Tokyo's focus remains unremittingly local, obsessed with developments in its potentially dangerous backyard (the need to guarantee US support regarding North Korea being the implicit reason for Japanese contributions in Iraq — guess Christopher Hill never got that memo). Japan is arguably more concerned with its own region than ever before, but local threats have still not been enough to solidify a new security policy consensus.

And yet even as it looks at a more uncertain regional environment — check out a good discussion of this at Coming Anarchy — constraints on Japan developing a new organizing principle for its security policy remain, at least more constraints than meet the eye. Beyond the obvious constraints of the CLB's prevailing interpretation of Article 9, the three arms export principles, the three non-nuclear principles, popular sentiment that has shown no desire or willingness to support JSDF activities abroad that might involve the use of force and the loss of life, and a defense budget that has shrunk over the past decade, the balance of forces between revisionists and defenders of the status quo may not be as lopsided as it seems.

Of course, as I wrote previously, the revisionists are ascendant within the LDP. Whereas in the past revisionists like Kishi and Nakasone were able to rise to the presidency of the party, once they got there they were reined in by the LDP mainstream's defenders of the prevailing Yoshida consensus. Beyond that, for most of the 1955 system's existence the LDP had been commanded by mainstream politicians, who worked to implement constraints consistent with the Yoshida Doctrine. But now, after Hashimoto, Koizumi and Abe, the revisionists are the mainstream, defenders of the status quo the anti-mainstream. (Incidentally, Asahi's coverage of the death of former Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi was redolent with longing for the days when the reverse was true.) At the same time that the LDP's revisionists became dominant, however, the party became dependent on coalition partners — most recently the conservative pacifist party New Komeito. The role once played by Yoshida conservatives is now played by Komeito.

Such is the argument of Jun Okumura in an article at National Interest Online.

For the moment, I think Okumura is right to point to Komeito's role in serving as a brake on the revisionists' ambitions — in part because Komeito has not yet been asked to choose between power and principle. But what happens when the government completes its study for a reinterpretation of Japan's ability to exercise its right of collective self-defense? (The study group has already concluded that it would be permissible for Japan to shoot down a missile that appeared to be headed for the US.) Will Komeito go so far as to pull out of the government to protest any changes, or will it follow meekly along?

Meanwhile, although obstacles to institutional change remain, there is nothing stopping Japanese policymakers, politicians, and intellectuals from debating the fundamental questions of Japan's global role. While debates over the overarching goal of Japanese security policy — national security strictly defined as territorial defense versus a more active role in shaping the regional security environment versus acting as a global civilian power versus becoming the Britain of East Asia (or some combination of all of the above) — and the means by which to achieve this goal have raged for more than a decade, Japan remains saddled with a security policy regime suited for a different age. But that set of policies cannot be abandoned until Japan figures out the new end of its security policy — change for the sake of change is a waste of time and energy. (And Japan's policy making process is still in need of reform to ensure that whatever consensus Japan reaches is executable.)

In fact, Koizumi's "hug the US close" approach, largely embraced by Abe, is more indicative of the absence of a new security policy organizing principle than of the existence of a new organizing principle. Cooperation to what end? With what means? With what division of labor? The allies are not much closer to answering these fundamental questions than they were in the immediate aftermath of the cold war, because until Japan knows what role it wants to play, these basic questions are unanswerable — and Japan has provided mere intimations of its strategic intentions.

Constitutions east and west

In his Sunday interview on NHK, Prime Minister Abe reiterated the importance of constitution revision as a point of contention in next month's Upper House election.

Meanwhile, in Brussels this past weekend the European Union's member states concluded a treaty that wraps up the questions that were intended to be addressed by the nixed constitution. The treaty, however, arguably retains a number of the constitution's substantive changes while jettisoning troublesome symbolic changes.

What do Japan's and the EU's constitutional debates share in common?

Without even considering the content of the documents, both drafting processes are wrapped up for the democratic development of both polities. For Japan, the process by which constitutional amendments are debated and presented to the public for approval will be an important test of the strength of Japanese democracy. Will the process be elite-driven, as every other epochal change in the Japanese political system, or will the Japanese citizenry stake a claim in the process and demand that elites respect their wishes and introduce amendments that reflect public desires? In the EU, which is struggling to craft a democratic polity out of more than two dozen democratic polities (i.e., the democratic deficit), the changes envisioned by the constitution — and now the reform treaty — constitute a substantial change in how the member states, their peoples, and the EU interact, but it is unclear the extent to which the new EU will reflect the wishes of the governed. As George Washington University's Henry Farrell wrote at Crooked Timber in a post reviewing the treaty: "It's a shame and a disgrace that the EU member states have responded to the 2005 defeat by going back to their old practice of seeking to achieve integration by boring the general public into submission, and a very substantial backward step. If people aren’t willing to sign up to major changes in the EU system of governance, then too bad for the EU system of governance."

This comparison only goes so far, of course, given that the Japanese people recognize themselves as a polity — whereas it is as of yet unclear if Europeans really think of themselves as European citizens, as far as governance is concerned.

But what both share is a concern about the role of their state/supranational-confederal organization of states in a world of new rising powers (read China and India) that already dwarf both demographically and are prepared to surpass both in economic performance. Hence the debate about article nine, which is not simply about one-country pacifism but signifies a range of questions about how Japan will relate to the US and other powers in the region. And in Europe, the provisions in the treaty about a European president, a de facto foreign minister and foreign service, and mutual defense clause hint at an EU desirous of a proper place at the table alongside the great powers. Niall Ferguson makes this argument in the Daily Telegraph:

The world is a big, bad place and the relative importance of Europe's individual states is declining economically and demographically with every passing year. As Mr Mandelson has found, it is hard enough to sustain the momentum of trade liberalisation even when Europe speaks with one voice. In other spheres, the EU is simply a negligible quantity. What would have been more absurd than to leave foreign policy divided between yet another set of twins, the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (Javier Solana) and the Commissioner for External Relations (Benita Ferrero-Waldner)? The choice is no longer between national foreign policies and a European foreign policy, but between national irrelevance and collective influence.

(Interesting that Henry Kissinger disparaged both Japan ["little Sony salesmen"] and the EU ["who do you call when you want to talk to Europe"] for their inadequacies as great powers; it seems that they have taken his criticism seriously.)

But those in Europe and Japan who would rush to answer fundamental governance questions to enable the pursuit of power internationally must not be allowed to run roughshod over the rights of their citizens. Power must not be an end in itself; it must be grounded in democratic legitimacy. And so the content of constitution revision (or formation) is less important than the process. Will the voices of peoples be heard?

(I suppose this is a good test for the relevance of realism: if responding to changes in the international distribution of power takes the highest priority, then expect both Japan and the EU to run roughshod over popular opposition and implement constitutional settlements that best enable them to cope with changes in the international environment.)

What a time to be alive, for political scientists anyway.

Into the realm of the symbolic

While I obviously recognize that Asahi and Yomiuri approach public affairs from drastically different perspectives, I have never thought that they were living in different worlds.

Until today.

In Asahi, prominently featured on the front page, was an article on a Japanese Communist Party report suggesting that a special Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces (JGSDF) unit conducted surveillance against citizens' groups and political parties opposed to the dispatch of JSDF troops to Iraq. On the editorial page, where normally there are two editorials, Asahi devoted the entire space to this report, and there were two more articles on the subject in the Society section.

In Yomiuri, there was a single, tiny article buried on p. 33.

It seems that both can't be right. Either this incident is of tremendous importance, and Yomiuri is playing it down to protect the government, or it is of little significance, and Asahi is exaggerating it to attack the government.

As the Japan Times reports, the JCP received two documents, including one entitled "Activities of Domestic Forces Opposing the Dispatch of Self-Defense Forces to Iraq." Asked about the documents, Defense Minister Kyuma prevaricated, admitting that the GSDF conducted the alleged surveys but questioning the authenticity of the documents possessed by the JCP.

The significance of this program seems unclear, but to Asahi, there is little doubt that the documents are authentic — and that the revelations are pregnant with significance, especially because the JCP's report suggests that the program also monitored opponents of other government policies, and all opposition parties. The conclusion of the editorial is worth citing in full:

Shaking civilian control

The Self-Defense Forces are an organization that protects the nation, but it is because it is a democratic country with freedom of speech and press that it is truly deserving of protection. It is deplorable that this basic precept is not heard.

The Defense Ministry, regarding this intelligence gathering, has stated the position that this work was to protect JSDF personnel and their families from the Iraq dispatch opposition movement. However, this is not an acceptable reason.

The historical lesson that the armed forces can easily be converted to an institution of public order directed internally must not be forgotten. In the prewar period, the Kempeitai, police within the army, before long spied on the people and became an organization that suppressed liberty.

We certainly do not think that what happened before the war is the same as today, but we must pay very close attention. If one thinks about the present constitution revision draft published by the governing LDP, whereupon the Self-Defense Forces are called an "army," we must be all the more careful.

At this time, only one part of the whole of these activities has become public. Regarding these activities, the government should make a detailed disclosure.

Moriya Takemasa, vice-minister of defense, said, "Since it has been decided to reveal our intentions, comment is not appropriate." It is extremely difficult to understand this defiance. It is the height of irresponsibility.

The fact of the matter is that with the government's murky actions, we cannot have faith in civilian control. It is also the Diet's role to ask questions.

To the lingering remnants of the Japanese left, and others besides, the symbolism of these reports of the government's monitoring of opposition parties, religious groups, and citizens' groups opposed to Japanese participation is unmistakable, harking back not only to the prewar period, but also the concerns of the immediate postwar, when many Japanese citizens feared that the alliance with the US would undermine Japanese democracy and lead to Japan being forced into a war against its will, with US forces being called in to suppress domestic unrest (under the terms of the 1951 security agreement). While the US had no hand in this affair, it seems that one cannot discuss Japan's actions on the Iraq dispatch without some reference to the alliance (which Asahi, surprisingly, does not do). But this action by the government must surely resemble the worst nightmares of many Japanese: their government, in the course of seemingly doing Washington's bidding (or more specifically, the bidding of Bush the warmonger), undermining democracy at home.

Of course, in the scheme of things, the practical impact of the GSDF program was (is?) undoubtedly small. There is not the slightest indication that the GSDF interfered with or tried to prevent organizations from opposing government policy. But then the debate surrounding Japan's postwar identity is not grounded solely in reason and matters of practicality. This affair could potentially have sentimental resonance among citizens already skeptical about the government's plans to revise the constitution and otherwise abandon the postwar regime, with citizens coming to see something more sinister in Abe's appeals.

Asahi is right to demand vigilance on the part of the Japanese people — and questioning from the Diet. At the very least, this is yet another example of the incompetence of LDP government, even if it is not indicative of something rotten in the Empire of Japan, as Asahi would like to believe.

So whose world is closer to reality? Asahi's, which sees this as a serious concern for Japanese democracy? Or Yomiuri's, which sees this as a trifle barely worth mentioning? And if Asahi is right, could this be the final straw that breaks the Abe Cabinet's back?

Asking old questions anew

(This is the second post discussing George Packard's Protest in Tokyo; see the first here.)

When I last discussed Packard, I spoke about how his exploration of Japanese thinking behind the first US-Japan security treaty revealed that independence was the dominant theme in Japanese foreign policy thinking throughout the 1950s. Independence has, of course, been a consistent thread in Japanese security policy since the opening of Japan by way of "unequal treaties" made Tokyo acutely aware of its weakness compared to the Western powers.

Occupation and aftermath reminded Japan once again of its low position in the global hierarchy, with the alliance with the US and the accompanying status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) serving as the postwar period's unequal treaties.

Accordingly, as the 1950s progressed and the contours of the cold war in Asia coalesced, Japan once again began to consider how to square the need to ensure its security at the front line while maximizing its independence as much as possible without jeopardizing security. As such, while one can look at the struggles surrounding ratification of the revised Mutual Security Treaty in 1960 as grounded in ideological struggles in Japanese domestic politics, it is essential to recognize that battle was another episode in modern Japan's pursuit of an optimal security strategy that maximizes security and independence. As Packard wrote, "It is well to remember, in looking, at the great struggle of 1960, that it was much more than a battle between left and right—between the free world and neutralism or Communism. The underlying question was: how to provide the greatest security for Japan—and on this question, the Japanese nation was deeply divided."

Packard saw that debate as hinging on three "dilemmas": (1) doesn't an alliance with the US that involves hosting US troops make Japan an inevitable target in the event of a hot war?; (2) won't alliance with the US inevitably result in the introduction of nuclear weapons to Japan, either in US hands or in the hands of the JSDF, while burdening Japan with an expensive defense establishment?; and (3) by allowing US troops to have bases in Japan, near Asia's potential conflict zones, aren't we making it easier for the US to escalate crises in the Taiwan Straits or Korea? The 1960 treaty obviously did not resolve these questions — compromises came later, if at all. Rather, the debate on the treaty was whether Japan should opt for east, west, or Nehru-style neutralism. The outcome was not foreordained: a poll cited by Packard showed that the Japanese people, insofar as they had an opinion on the matter, seemed to prefer Bandung-style nonalignment.

The outcome was not even foreordained within the LDP. Prime Minister Kishi, architect of the revision, had to maneuver among factions in the nascent LDP, playing rivals — who preferred alternative courses in foreign policy — off one another. There is no doubting that Kishi, in contrast to his bumbling grandson, was an adept politician; I do not see how else he could have served in Tojo's cabinet, been purged, served prison time as a Class-A war criminal, and still emerged as prime minister in 1957 (the phoenix in the above Time cover may have been referring to Japan, but it could just as well have referred to Kishi).

Then, as now, what mattered within the Diet was intra-LDP politics. As documented by Packard, the key to guiding the treaty through negotiations to approval by the Diet was management of the LDP — and for all of Kishi's adroitness, the process still consumed him, as public disagreement among LDP factions (and the return of former Prime Minister Yoshida to politics after a short retirement) undermined Kishi's efforts to present the treaty to the public as a fait accompli.

The Japanese left, meanwhile, a bumptious mix of communists, socialists, union organizers, student radicals, and intellectuals had few tools with which to shape the legislative process short of physically trying to prevent votes from occurring, and thus turned to extra-parliamentary measures, demonstrations that grew in scale until the May demonstrations against the passage of the treaty.

While Packard argues that the clash between left and right was over security policy — and it was — security policy was wrapped up with fundamental questions of Japan's identity, and thus encompassed domestic policy as much as security policy. One important disagreement among the left was whether protests should be directed at the Diet and Prime Minister Kishi, the symbol of state capitalism, or the US Embassy, symbol of US imperialism. Similarly, the debate within the LDP was as more about Japan's priorities in the postwar era — domestic reconstruction or a rapid resumption of the duties of a "normal" nation, a question which encompassed but was not limited to Japanese security policy.

We all know, of course, what happened. The LDP, despite internal disagreements, rammed the treaty through the Diet, which both reduced some of the inequality in the initial treaty by scaling back extraterritorial rights and shored up Japan's place in the ranks among the anti-communist allies, shielded by American extended deterrence. The left's attempts to block the treaty fizzled, and it was forced to renew its opposition within the Diet. But in the process, the revisionists within the LDP were stymied; Japan might enjoy an alliance with the US, but it would be an unequal alliance. Japan would adhere to Article 9, even as the JSDF was gradually strengthened, meaning that the alliance would remain focused on the defense of Japan. The Far East provisions would remain largely inoperative. Meanwhile, during the following decades successive governments addressed the dilemmas listed above, issuing the three non-nuclear principles, the principles on arms exports, and the one-percent ceiling on the defense budget, which made the Yoshida Doctrine more robust: Japan would not waver from its determination to rebuild, develop, and prosper.

And so Japan rode out the cold war, with the occasional moment of doubt (the "Nixon shock," for example), but overall the framework held.

Not so since the end of the cold war. While there were murmurs in both Japan and the US during the 1980s that Japan should revisit the security consensus in light of its prosperity, the consensus was not completely blown apart until the end of the cold war, when the alliance's static defense became largely irrelevant. And since the Gulf War, when Japan was asked and failed to contribute to an international coalition, Japan has been asking many of the same questions it was asking in the 1950s. How can we maximize security and independence? Is the alliance with the US still the best choice for Japan? Whereas the US commitment was fairly reliable during the cold war, does it have the same reliability in an era in which the threats are more uncertain (and in which US and Japanese threat perceptions differ in more than slight ways)?

MIT's Richard Samuels, in an essay excerpted from his forthcoming book Securing Japan printed in Journal of Japanese Studies (and reprinted here at Japan Focus), provides an excellent guide to Japan's post-cold war security policy debate, dividing the field into "neoautonomists," "normal nation-ists," "pacifists," and "middle-power internationalists." They differ according to their attitudes to the US and the use of force, and while there are some fundamental differences between them, there is considerable overlap between the schools of thought (excluding the pacifists). I will not summarize his essay in great detail here, but I should note that his essay makes clear the extent to which the debate that was essentially closed in 1960 with the passage of the Ampo has been entirely reopened, and each of these positions has antecedents in earlier debates. As Samuels writes, "Contexts change, but ideas endure."

Of particular note is Samuels' remarks on history and bases. I found his comments on US bases of particular interest, because he implies that a sizable US presence in Japan may be unsustainable over the long term, given that no segment of the debate is unambiguously supportive of the US presence as it exists today — and further cuts, beyond those already agreed, may be inevitable. (For more on this, Gavan McCormack's essay on Okinawa rebasing — also at Japan Focus — is well worth reading.) Meanwhile, the interplay of schools of thought suggest that some new military role is inevitable, but the strategic thinking behind it remains to be decided.

If Japan is more uneasy with the alliance today than ever before, a large portion of the blame must be laid at the White House's doorstep. The Bush administration has managed to exacerbate Japan's fears of both abandonment and entrapment. US bellicosity has sparked fears that Japan will be pressured to follow the US into future wars following on the heels of Afghanistan and Iraq; failure in Iraq has subsequently sparked fears of abandonment, especially vis-a-vis North Korea and China, as the US, suffering in Mesopotamia, looks for ways to stabilize other trouble spots. Accordingly, as the Bush administration slouches to its demise — just as revisionists, whatever their persuasion in Samuels's taxonomy, rise behind the banner of Abe — these questions about Japan can best defend itself in a rapidly changing region are being asked ever more loudly.

As a final note, it is interesting to note that, as before, these questions concerned not only Japan's foreign policy but the composition of its domestic institutions. As this post by Amaki Naoto, who would probably be classified as a "neoautonomist" by Samuels, suggests, those who chafe at Japan's "dependence" on the US are as concerned about the impact of US economic ideas on Japanese society as they are concerned about depending on the US for Japan's security. Samuels quotes Nishibe Susumu, a former Tokyo University professor, as remarking, "As a Japanese, I feel deeply ashamed that we praise the concept of markets, an American idea...[If we continue,] our system of government and our lives will come crashing down." And so Amaki, who resigned over Koizumi's support for the Iraq War, also rails against "neo-liberal" reforms pushed by Koizumi, Takenaka Heizo, and Japanese financial leaders.

And that, of course, is why it is naive to think that constitution revision is just about Article 9 and Japanese security policy. The debate about "securing Japan" is as much a debate about what kind of society Japan is at home — how it secures the lives of individual Japanese — as it is about securing Japan's place in its region and among the family of nations.

Reading Packard on the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty

On my way back to Japan, I began reading Protest in Tokyo, a classic account of the crisis surrounding the approval of the 1960 revision of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty by George Packard, president of the United States-Japan Foundation.

As Prime Minister Abe forges ahead in his campaign to abandon the postwar regime, I think it's worthwhile to look back at how exactly the postwar regime came to be. How did Japan shape its future in the years after independence was restored, when Japan became the anchor of US policy in the Asia-Pacific region? Arguably the cleavages rent during those formative years of Japan's postwar democracy were the fundamental battle lines in Japanese politics throughout the cold war, and while the end of the cold war deprived those cleavages of some of their potency, the debates of the 1950s and early 1960s remain relevant to understanding Japan today — both in terms of the unresolved questions about Japan's place in the world, and the impact they've had on Japan's current leaders.

Consider what Prime Minister Abe wrote about the anti-treaty demonstrations in 1960 (forgive my rough translation):

The encircling of my grandfather's house by demonstrators

On June 18, 1960, the day before the automatic passage of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the Diet and the Kantei were surrounded by demonstrators whose numbers approached 330,000.

My grandfather, confined at the Kantei, was conscious of death, but said while drinking wine with my great uncle (Sato Eisaku, at that time finance minister), "I am by no means mistaken. Even if it kills me, I am satisfied." Immediately after signing to begin the work of revision, forces of opposition around the Socialist Party intensified conflict inside and outside the Diet.

At that time, I was still six years old, and it was before I had entered primary school. To my grandfather, I was, together with my older brother, who was two years older, very cute. We would always go to play at my grandfather's home in Shibuya's Nanpeidai district.

But, there too was often surrounded by demonstrators. "Ampo, hantai!" was shouted in unison repeatedly, and stones, screws, and burning newspaper were thrown at the house. At that time, my father, who was a member of the House of Representatives, was also confined there, and my grandfather, who could not go outside and was bored, summoned us.

My brother and I, with our mother, boarded a newspaper company's car flying the company flag and went to my grandfather's house.

My brother and I, as children, heard the voices of the demonstrators from afar, and thought that it sounded like the band at a festival. We stamped out, as a joke, before my grandfather and father, "Ampo, hantai, ampo, hantai!," to which my father and mother joked, "You should say, 'Ampo sansei.'" My grandfather, while smiling at that, seemed happy.

I asked my grandfather, "What's ampo?" I dimly remember that thereupon he answered, "The Mutual Security Treaty [ampo] is a treaty so that Japan will receive protection from America. Why everyone is opposed to it, I don't understand."

(Utsukushii kuni e, pp. 21-23)

For the prime minister, for all Japanese politicians, the questions surrounding the constitution and the alliance are fundamental to their identities as politicians, not to mention Japan's identity as a nation. It is a mistake for Japan to rush into revision — and for the US and foreign observers to urge Japan on — without a clear sense of what's a stake and what the participants bring to the table.

One point that comes out early in Packard's book, in his discussion of the 1951 ratification of the initial US-Japan treaty and the debates on Japan's foreign policy that followed, is that the pursuit of independence was the fundamental goal shared by all participants in the debate, even as they differed tactically. (Conservatives, whether of a pragmatic or revisionist variety, felt that independence could be achieved via alliance with the US; socialists sought de jure independence via unarmed neutrality and rapprochement with Beijing and Moscow.)

While the rhetoric might lead observers to think otherwise, I think there's good reason to think that independence has been the consistent goal of all Japanese governments throughout the postwar era right up to today, even as successive prime ministers have talked about how valuable the US-Japan alliance is to Japan. While Japan has evinced fears of abandonment often and continues to do so today, fears of entrapment, if voiced less frequently, are just as real and are perhaps more important as a determinant of Japanese alliance policy over the long term.

All of which goes to say that American alliance managers should approach revision with a sense of caveat emptor: alliance managers may think that a Japan that has accepted collective self-defense via revision of article 9 will result in a kind of "roles-and-missions plus" arrangement (roles and missions being the new ideas about an alliance division of labor pushed in the early Reagan administration), but the US may be getting an ally that is eager to break out of the old framework and flex its muscles. That need not be a disaster for the alliance, if the US is prepared for a Japan that might become more like De Gaulle's France after revision. If the US is unprepared for a more independent Japan, however, the alliance could break at the first sign of a crisis during which the US expects Japanese support — which Tokyo fails to provide.

I will be writing more about this as I read through Packard, especially his notes about Prime Minister Kishi.

The revisionists ascendant

Western commentators who only intermittently pay attention to Japan seem to be befuddled by the Japanese constitution. They seem to have a hard time grasping the difficulties associated with changing it, the totemic significance it has been made to bear by both pacifists and revisionists — and thus tend to assume that revision is easy, right, and only a matter of time. One example is Thomas Barnett's glib comment about the inevitability of revision, discussed here. Another is this post at Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog by Gordon Chang, who tells readers that "article nine has not been enforced for decades." True, perhaps, but missing the point entirely. Citing one of Japan's "most prominent journalists," [I have a hunch; do readers have any guesses?] Chang argues, "The constitution stigmatizes the past and...prevents Japan from becoming 'a normal country.'"

Think about that: people don't stigmatize the past, the constitution does. In other words, if the constitution were revised, Japan would be able to have an honest debate and there would be no more obfuscation or outright denial regarding atrocities committed by Imperial Japan during World War II.

Rather than continue to pick apart Chang's argument, however, I would rather call your attention to an excellent monograph that spells out the history of Japan's constitution revision debate and tries to answer the question of why, despite persistent pressure from revisionists, the constitution has gone unrevised to this day.

Written by J. Patrick Boyd and Richard Samuels in 2005, Nine Lives?: The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Japan outlines, in a mere sixty pages, the contours of Japan's contested constitution (a book by that name, collecting primary sources related to revision, is this week's book of the week [see link at right]). The Boyd and Samuels monograph is available from the East-West Center here.

What I especially liked about their argument is that it cuts through the flighty rhetoric that all sides have employed when talking about revision. Their rather elegant, parsimonious argument is that while pacifist norms and the global and regional balance of power have played a part in the revision debate, the constitution — and Article 9 in particular — has survived unchanged due to a balance of power among political forces within Japan during the postwar era.

Boyd and Samuels show that a triangular balance between revisionists, pragmatists, and pacifists has prevented the revisionists from succeeding, with the pragmatists — the school of Prime Minister Yoshida and his successors — holding the balance against revision in tacit alliance with the pacifists throughout the cold war. In other words, while for some Japanese the importance of the constitution has been its deeming Japan a "peace state," the pragmatists defended it — sometimes by rejecting revision entirely, other times by pushing re-interpretations or compromises that preserved the essence of the amendment — as a means of avoiding the costs of alliance with the US that other "normal" allies had to bear. Accordingly, throughout the cold war, the pragmatists and revisionists battled for primacy in the LDP and thus in the Japanese political system, with the pragmatists holding the upper hand for much of the postwar period. Even during the Gulf War, when revisionist LDP Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro wanted to commit Japanese soldiers to the coalition, the pragmatist wing managed to defeat him and commit only funds to the campaign (with the perverse consequence that international backlash against Japan's checkbook diplomacy fed into the revisionist argument that a newly wealthy Japan had to contribute more internationally).

Moving into the 1990s, Boyd and Samuels note that the pragmatist-pacifist dam holding the revisionist flood waters in place collapsed, with the Japanese left breaking down and the pragmatists in the LDP outmaneuvered and isolated by revisionists, who were encouraged by the more uncertain post-cold war international environment. Symbolic of this was the end of the "YKK" trio of Yamasaki Taku, Kato Koichi, and Koizumi Junichiro, an alliance between the pragmatic Yamasaki and Kato and the revisionist Koizumi. The pragmatists are not gone, of course — Yamasaki criticized the collective self-defense study group the other day — and with the Komeito an essential coalition partner for the LDP, pacifism still has a voice within the government. But the balance is undeniably shifted.

And so we see the revisionists ascendant, first under Koizumi, and now under Abe. Disagreeing with Graham Webster, slightly, I think the difference between Koizumi and Abe is not so much a matter of "sentimental" versus "practical": it's more a matter of political style. As in Isaiah Berlin's useful (but perhaps over-used) dichotomy, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Koizumi was a classic fox, jumping from subject to subject, sometimes seeming to care more about style and image than substance. Abe, meanwhile, is obsessed with the constitution (and the "post-war regime) — his "one big thing." Accordingly, although both Koizumi and Abe have seen disorder grow among opponents of constitution revision grow even as revisionists consolidated their control of the LDP, Koizumi abjured from striking directly at Article 9. Obviously, Abe has not, thanks in part to the LDP majority assembled in the September 2005 "postal reform" election.

Interestingly, as Boyd and Samuels note — and as I've argued before — that with the collapse of organized opposition to revision within the political system, the only potential source of opposition is from the Japanese people themselves. Whether they can or will is another question entirely, but the push for revision is an opportunity for the Japanese people to raise their voices and claim the process for themselves.

Another point they raise relevant to the situation today is that even as the revisionists gained power during the 1990s, they opted to hold off from re-interpreting Article 9 to permit collective self-defense, arguing that it was a waste of political capital to push for re-interpretation — reversible by a future government — when revision, a more permanent change, was so close at hand. And yet we see Prime Minister Abe pushing simultaneously for both revision and collective self-defense in limited cases. Is his ambitious agenda simply a function of his obsession, or is it a natural product of fifteen years of revisionist ascendancy? With Abe, are the revisionists not merely ascendant but triumphant?

Samuels and Boyd, wisely, hesitate to predict if and when revision will occur, arguing simply that Japan's political dynamics over brought Japan to a critical turning point.

Meanwhile, they make an interesting point about a potential consequence of revision. Namely, if Abe succeeds, if Japan embraces collective self-defense and revises Article 9, Japan's long-standing fears of entrapment by the US — an important part of the pragmatist position — will be more justified than ever. It becomes that much harder to say no to a US determined to go to war with Japan by its side without having Article 9 to hide behind. Given the tremendous unease with the alliance and with the prospect of Japan contributing to America's wars that I've seen evinced by the Japanese people time and time again during my time here, changing Japan's constitution to enable Japan to be a better ally of the US may have the unintended consequence of leading Japan to balk when asked (with all the attendant consequences).

With three years of debate to come, I strongly hope that if and when revision occurs, it will take into account the doubts and questions outlined by Boyd and Samuels — and that the ultimate form of any proposed revisions reflect the input of actors other than the revisionists.

Hopefully now that the Diet has passed the referendum bill, Samuels and Boyd will do some revising of their own and release a new version of this monograph that reflects the changes under Abe.