Colonel Jessup Blues

We Can't Handle The Truth

Pleiades rang me up a couple of days ago to tell me he was in support of the protesters. I didn't even know they were protesting.

Yet, over in Japan, they're having a hell of a time passing a law allowing Japanese troops to be sent to help allies. Partly because it seems to fly in the face of the Peace Constitution to send troops anywhere if they're called 'Self Defence Force'. It is hard to imagine self defence going on anywhere outside of the country - so the argument goes - that it would be an utter change of national direction to make such amendment to the law. To this end, there have been protesters camped outside of the Diet in to the wee hours morning, which is the sorptive spectacle unseen in Tokyo since the student protests of the 1960s.

The origins of this current draft of the law can be sheeted home to the USA who basically want Japan to stop being so peaceful on somebody else's security budget. The USA want Japan to step up and part of an international group that maintains the peace. You can cue the Team America theme song here. As dutiful an ally to the USA as ever, Shinzo Abe and his cabinet are simply passing into law something that Japan's not been doing for a good 70 years - but nobody seems to want to discuss what that 70years has meant.

It's 70years in which the USA had to shoulder the geopolitical problems Imperial Japan was dealing with prior to 1945. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were wars that likely would have fallen to the Japanese to fight had World War II never happened. Instead, America found itself at the edges of its hegemony fighting these wars. In both cases, the leadership of the USA had great difficulty explaining to its own population what they were doing there. If you're the Japanese, you're saying, "thank you!" or "lucky miss". Those were some pretty brutal wars being fought as a rearguard action for 19th century imperialism and hegemony being rolled back. It's a good thing to not be on the wrong side of history with those things.

With the rise of China, America does not want to be doing it all alone in the Pacific. It wants all the island nations to chip in on the effort to maintain international security. To this end, it's been sending delegates to ASEAN meetings, but basically America's been getting bupkis from ASEAN while China's been camel-nosing its way into the tent, building island bases on atolls in the South China Sea. The louder China rattles its sabres, there's more call for Japan from America, to step up. Of course, for the better part of the 70years, Japan's been playing passive aggressive to the hilt with its Peace Constitution, which of course was drafted up in General Douglas MacArthur's GHQ offices and not in the Diet at all. The argument has always been, "you gave this thing to us, you can't very we'll complain about it when it doesn't work out for you. We've been Peaceful Percy just as you've asked."

The passive aggressive argument worked satisfactory for all concerned until the point at which America found itself in two wars at once, in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In the mean time, the legitimacy of the Peace Constitution would only grow because 70 years is a long time not fire a shot in anger, for any government. And that brings us up to the point where this century, America has wanted the Peace Constitution to be amended to allow Japan to send troops to support its allies.

And that also brings us to this bill that is being vigorously challenged. The ramifications of which are meant to be simple, but the those aligned against it insist the law of unintended consequences will lead Japan to a war it doesn't want. The realistic appraisal of just how it might be implemented and what that would look like, therefore must be made. Judging from the geopolitical faultiness, it is highly unlikely the Japanese troops will be sent to places her troops weren't sent to during World War II. It is far more likely her troops will be sent to places like the Philippines or the South China Sea or for that matter the Korean Peninsula than anywhere else. And that being the case, it is going to reopen old disputes, layering them on with new ones.

The cleaner option is simply to not go.
It's long been observed that the countries that complain the most about the alleged re-militarisation of Japan - North and South Korea, and China - are the least likely to come to its rescue.  The fact that Japan wants to weather that risk of incessant misguided complaints probably means the post-WWII consensus is finally breaking apart.

It's a bit like a 70 year 'sin bin' time-out has come to an end and Japan will have to resume being a nation that will guarantee security in its own waters as well as send armed troops as part of international peacekeeping missions. It's also probably time that the exceptionalism in Japan to do with its stance on peace and war was made to reassess its viability. These aren't difficult notions to digest, but are hard truths to handle.

They Can't Handle The Truth

So just how is it being reassessed? In Japan, the bill only has 15% popular support. If you allow for 10% being the average size of any minority interest in any electorate, it's only about as popular as 5% more than the smallest single issue party. Like, say the Greens in Australian politics, or UKIP in the UK. The lack of appeal across the broader spectrum of society has resulted in a great deal of scepticism right across the rest of society that doesn't support it. Namely, they're complaining they don't understand the need for it. And if it's something that requires special pleading by the Prime Minister, then isn't it more likely it is just a case of pleading a special case? 15% for and everybody else either against it or undecided is a big obstacle.

This fact alone explains the strength of the voices arrayed against the bill, and many of them argue the contradiction of amending the Peace Constitution with technicalities about how to go to war. Most people in Japan clearly don't see the "clear and present danger" that deems it necessary to abandon the central plank of the Peace Constitution - that you forever don't go to war - for the dubious opportunity of supporting actions of the USA.

The USA of course has lost quite a lot of prestige since George Bush's Gulf War. Back in 1991, legitimacy was easily granted by the international community to swing into action. Indeed, it was expected of it to do so. Yet since Clinton's 'Desert Fox' (which took place the same week the Lewinsky scandal broke the news) and George W. Bush's Iraq War, many people in Japan find it hard to equate American military action as having the automatic legitimacy that they had in the Gulf War.

The fact that America has lost credibility, combined with the fact that it was the American GHQ which dictated the drafts of the Peace Constitution in the first place, makes it immensely harder of US interest to suddenly assert that Japan should become the sort of country that joins Team America on those wayward military misadventures. As a citizen of a country that does automatically send troops  to any old coalition of the willing led by the USA, I think it's a wise choice to balk at such a notion.

Nonetheless I can imagine the equivalent of Colonel Jessup from 'A Few Good Men' working in the base in Kadena Okinawa, ready to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese or North Koreans or God-Forbid-The Russians, and protect the FREE WORLD™; yet right around the base are local Okinawan people carrying on wanting them to leave and Yankee-Go-Home - but also at the same time expect them to be protected by the very same Colonel Jessup and his marines should the Chinese, North Koreans or God-Forbid-The-Russians come invading. That too would be a hard truth to handle.

Still, at 15% it's really not likely Japan wants to go to war on any kind of pretext or principle. The USA would be better advised to note that very single fact before trying to drag Japan into some misadventure.

Nobody Can Handle The Truth

Back in the late 1580s, Hideyoshi Toyotomi united the warring states of Japan and united Japan as a state with a central government. Having done so, he had found his population was more warrior and far fewer farmers, merchants and craftsmen. And so he went on the misadventure known as the Ming war. This is the origin of the invasion of Korean Peninsula that Korean people resent so much, because it was on Korean soil that most of this war between Japan and the Ming Dynasty China was fought, and by all accounts it was as brutal as any proto-modern war.

Fortunately Hideyoshi died, and the war came to an end with complete withdrawal of decimated forces. The war was so costly it brought about the early end of the Ming dynasty, which was the last of the Chinese dynasties headed by the Han people. The next dynasty that arose, the Qing, was led by the Manchurians, and China would crash into modernity without Han leadership. Something their historians still blame on Hideyoshi. They may even have a point, but China, like the rest of Asia opted to go slow on technology to keep the peace. It was the Neo-Confucian way to suppress progress to maintain the status quo - and if there ever was a system of thought that was very much the Ming, it was Neo-Confucianism.

After 1598, Japan wasn't found fighting the Chinese until 1894. That's close to 300years of peace right there. If you add the 70 since WWII, that's 366 years out of 415 years of peace going back to 1600. If you go on the most recent record, it's probably true Japan has no designs on China, and if you go back far enough, there's enough historic data to show that in most part, Japan is not interested in invading China. It's the kind of record that stands in stark contrast to the relationships between the UK, France, and Germany. Even America and Canada have fought a war in 1812. The weight of historic evidence says it is far more anomalous for Japan to be fighting with any of its neighbours.

Why Japan might have fought the wars it did in the 20th Century would be a long discussion so I'm going to skip it today. A lot of people think they were unjustified wars of colonialist invasion but others have found cause to see them as the first wars to roll back Western colonialism. It's far more of a mixed bag. It's interesting to note that when thrust into the cauldron of modern warfare, Japanese officers and soldiers reverted to cultural practices of war that date back to Hideyoshi Toyotomi. That is to say, the seeming barbarism of the Japanese troops had a great deal to do with culture shock on both sides. I would hazard a guess and say for all the talk of the warrior, Japan had stopped being a martial kind nation by 1868, and had to find that fire again, belatedly, in the context of 19th century imperialism.

The truth is, apart from some short stretches, Japan sucked at prosecuting its wars. World War II was a grind where all these valued tactical positions got wiped out by strategic carpet bombing. They spent more the time fighting the wrong war getting whacked. The next time Japan goes to war, it is equally likely that it would be very much out of practice when it comes to war. They're liable to bring forth the ghosts of 1944 as well as the ghosts of 1589 in a tight spot. It's amazing America wants them to come out of historic retirement.

By the same token, China after the Ming dynasty wasn't great shakes in any war either. They lost to the Manchus which gave rise to the Qing dynasty; they fought Russia badly several times and was on the losing end of the stick on several occasions. Of course there was the Opium War which was decisive in sending China to the ranks of the third world. They of course fought Japan badly, and then descended into a civil war. Since then they've been a military junta disguised in business suits, but they've really not distinguished themselves in many wars going back to the time they fought Hideyoshi Toyotomi's Japan. They might want to prove a point, but they're not exactly good at it.
Nobody's really talking about it, but it's true.

I'm so inclined to think that the historic mission of war itself is over in Asia. They should, in all instances, just talk. Because, they can. And that's the simple truth.