[A-List] Boots, Billions, and Blood

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Koizumi's Japan in Bush's World

By Gavan McCormack

Tomgram edited by Tom Engelhardt, Nation Institute (March 16 2004)

Boots

One week before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit to Japan this
February, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared it crucial for Japan
to show the United States what a "trustworthy ally" it was. After all,
he commented, if ever Japan were to come under attack, it would be the
US, not the UN or any other country that would come to its aid. No
further elaboration of his reference to a possible attack was needed.
All Japanese knew that he was referring to North Korea. When Japan
declared support for the US-led war on Iraq in March 2003, and when
Japanese forces were sent to southern Iraq to aid in the occupation the
following January, it was not the Sunnis or Shiites of Iraq who were in
Japanese sights but North Korea, a country on which its national fears
and hatred had in recent years been sharply focused.

Given its continuing psychological distance from its continental
neighbors, Koizumi's Japan sees no option but to cling to the now sixty
year-old American embrace, a stance that only emboldens the US to
squeeze harder, further blocking it from reconciliation and cooperation
with Asia. "I believe President Bush is right and he is a good man",
Koizumi told the Diet on November 25 2003. Because he is one of a
handful of world leaders for whom George Bush displays personal warmth,
he seems especially vulnerable to "friendly" requests. Although Japan's
economy is roughly equal to those of Germany, France, and Britain
combined, the prime minister would never risk offending Washington by
taking a "French" or "German" stance on major issues. It may even be
true to say that nowhere in the world does the Bush administration have
a more faithful follower than the Japanese Prime Minister.

After the attacks of September 11th, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage bluntly advised Japan to pull its head out of the sand and make
sure the Rising Sun flag was visible in the Afghanistan war, advice
Koizumi promptly took to heart. Despite being a country with a pacifist
constitution and no prior involvement in any Middle Eastern conflict,
Japan sent a substantial part of its Maritime Self Defense Forces (aka:
its navy), including an Aegis-class destroyer, to the Indian Ocean to
aid and refuel the allied forces.

Then, in March 2003, on the eve of war, Koizumi promised his
"unconditional" support for the invasion of Iraq. Pressed to translate
that support into "boots on the ground", Koizumi subsequently agreed to
supply troops as well. In January 2004, the advance guard of Japan's
Self-Defense Forces (SDF) flew off.

For the first time in 60 years, Japan had committed itself, albeit in a
subordinate and officially "non-combat" role, to an illegal and
aggressive war. Few recent votes have been taken in Japan's Diet under
such controversial circumstances. As the Diet convened at the end of
January to ratify the dispatching of troops to Iraq, the opposition
boycotted the vote en masse, insisting it was unconstitutional, and even
several heavyweights from the prime minister's own Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) absented themselves. One former conservative minister took
the government to court to have its actions declared unconstitutional,
and a senior Japanese ambassador was recalled and sacked for questioning
Koizumi's policies. When David Kay, head of the American Iraq Survey
Group searching that country for weapons of mass destruction, concluded
before a US congressional committee that it was "highly unlikely" any
such weapons existed, Koizumi never faltered. For him, "trustworthiness"
to Washington seemed to outweigh Japan's constitution, the law, or
morality.

The constraint on Japan's possession or use of armed force, the famed
Article 9 in the country's postwar constitution, written during the
American occupation of the country, is now given short shrift in the
West. In Asian capitals, however, it is seen as a key element in the
post-war regional security system. The domestic mood of hostility and
fear towards North Korea, and the US pressure for "boots on the ground"
in Iraq combined to present Koizumi with the perfect opportunity to set
aside half a century of constitutional principle and transform the SDF
into a regular army.

Although his decision to send the SDF to Iraq was taken in the teeth of
strong popular opposition, within a matter of months he was able to
release a flood of patriotic sentiment that would overwhelm
constitutional qualms and turn public opinion around. Where opposition
to any dispatch of troops in early to mid-2003 was running at 70 to 80
per cent, by early 2004 a small majority (53 per cent) was in favor.
Koizumi's gamble had paid off, at least in the short run. His task was
made that much easier by the way it was reported in the United States
and to some extent in Europe as well: Japan was being "realistic",
"assuming its global responsibilities", shedding its "hypocritical
moralism", behaving as a "true partner" of the US Koizumi found himself
basking in domestic and international approval.


Billions

As the US economy strains under the weight of the chronic deficits and
growing burden of administering its global empire, Tokyo's aid grows in
importance. Since the end of the Cold War, Japan has contributed a
staggering sum in subsidies for imperial America, including more than
$70 billion in "support costs" for the American bases in Japan
(especially on the island of Okinawa) and another $90 billion in post
September 11 "rear support" for the anti-terror coalition.

When Washington demanded additional "billions" for rebuilding Iraq,
Koizumi promised $5 billion, far in excess of the amounts pledged by any
other ally. Under ever greater pressure from Washington the Japanese
government indicated its readiness to forego the recovery of a large
part of the vast debt, somewhere between $3 billion and $7 billion, owed
it by the government of Iraq.

A similar Japanese cooperativeness was evident in massive bureaucratic
interventions in global currency markets to try to prevent the value of
the dollar from sliding or the yen from appreciating. During 2003 the
Bank of Japan poured 20 trillion yen ($180 billion) into the task of
propping up the dollar, and thereby the US economy. In 2004, the process
only accelerated, half of that sum going into the markets in the first
two months of the year alone. As foreign demand weakened for US
Treasuries, bonds, and stocks, the Bank of Japan strove mightily to hold
the line. Early in 2004, the International Monetary Fund noted that,
with its foreign debt levels heading towards 40% of GDP, the US deficit
was "a significant risk" for the world, but nowhere did confidence in it
remain greater, or readiness to support it stronger than in Tokyo.

It is not that Japan has funds to spare. The excess liquidity it had in
the bubble era of the 1980s has long since evaporated. It faces the
prospect of large government spending cuts and tax increases, the
collapse of its current public welfare and pension systems, and a
steadily aging population. The budget for 2004 projects tax revenues of
just under 42 trillion yen and expenditures of 82 trillion yen: in other
words nearly half would be dependent on bonds or borrowing. Education,
welfare, and overseas aid costs are being shaved and small and
medium-sized businesses cut loose to fend with "market forces" by
themselves. In response to the mountain of debt that has accumulated
since the end of the bubble era, a mere mouse of growth has been born.

For that matter, the governments of both the United States and Japan are
prodigiously in debt, each for approximately the same amount, roughly $7
trillion. The US population and economy being more than double those of
Japan, the Japanese problem is far more serious. Japan's debt problem is
perhaps the worst in modern history. The pathology of the Japanese
system, half-hidden under the "reformism" Koizumi has proclaimed and
publicized, remains intact.

Japanese savings thus become a major fund subsidizing America's global
imperial stance and, at the same time, the primary source of finance for
US debt, supporting the consumption patterns, lifestyles, and military
designs of the global hyperpower. The world system balances precariously
on the twin peaks of US and Japanese debt, with the terminally ill
Japanese economy taking every possible step to prop up the seriously
ailing US economy.


Blood

Japan in 2003-4 made a series of historic choices. Casting its lot with
the Bush administration, it sent its armed forces to support American
operations in an explosive part of the world in whose historic disputes
it hitherto had no role and where it faced no enemies. Watching the
Japanese scramble to comply with various cascading American demands,
Deputy Secretary Armitage remarked that his government was "thrilled"
Japan was not "sitting in the stands any more" but had come out as "a
player on the playing field".

The American pressures are relentless. Proconsuls from Washington
regularly fly into Tokyo with new instructions. Japan is called upon (in
the words of the "Armitage Report" of October 2000) to revise its
constitution, to expand its defense horizon in order to support
"coalition" operations as a fully-fledged NATO-style partner, and to
become the "Britain of the Far East". While the relationship is
conventionally represented simply as one of US "protection" for Japan,
from Washington's perspective the emphasis is actually somewhat
different. For the Bush administration, what remains fundamental and
vital is that Japan "continue to rely on US protection". Any attempt to
substitute for that "protection" an entente with China and a degree of
independence would, in the words of a RAND corporation report, "deal a
fatal blow to US political and military influence in East Asia". The
thought that Japan might one day begin to "walk its own walk", intent on
becoming not the Britain but the Japan of the Far East is an
inside-the-Beltway nightmare comparable to, if not worse than, the
assaults of September 11.

If, for the time being, Japan has indeed become a "player" in the
American game, there can be no mistaking who the captain and coach of
the team is, and no doubting the deadly seriousness of the game. Asked
about Japan's position as war with Iraq loomed in February 2003, the
head of the LDP's Policy Research Council, Kyuma Fumio, said, "I think
[Japan] has no choice. After all, it is like an American state." Sooner
or later, Koizumi and his government must understand that a price will
have to be paid for their commitments. Armitage made that quite clear,
though in terms of Australia not Japan, back in September 2001. Speaking
to an Australian audience, he suggested that what he meant by "alliance"
was a relationship in which "Australian sons and daughters ... would be
willing to die to help defend the United States. That's what an alliance
means." Armitage, or for that matter Koizumi, has yet to spell out a
Japanese version of that bottom line. But after the boots and the
billions, will certainly come the calls for blood.

In February 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Tokyo and
addressed the Diet. For Annan, whose authority had been defied by the
Anglo-American attack on Iraq and who was just then involved in complex
negotiations to restore some of it in Iraq, the year had been full of
trials. Annan praised Japan, which contributes 20% of UN budgets but has
no seat on the Security Council, for its global citizenship. Without
uttering a word of criticism of Koizumi's policies, he nonetheless
managed to call into question the Koizumi agenda and appeal over the
prime minister's head to the Japanese public to play a more independent,
internationalist role in world affairs.

So long as Japan's "North Korea problem" remains unresolved, its
dependence on the US will continue. Put differently, if relations
between Japan and North Korea, as well as between North and South Korea,
ever began to be normalized and the tension drained from them, the
comprehensive incorporation of Japan within the American hegemonic
project would be difficult to justify. If peace broke out in East Asia
the justification for the American military presence in either South
Korea or Japan would be difficult to sustain. Japan might then be able
to turn its attention towards its Asian neighbors, and to shift its
policy priority from being a "trustworthy ally" to the United States to
being a trustworthy member of a future Asian commonwealth. In the
meantime, the Japanese public waits nervously, wondering how long it
will be before a price in blood has to be paid for Koizumi's decision to
extend Japan's "self-defense" line to southern Iraq.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1322

Gavan McCormack is the author of the just-published Target North Korea
(Nation Books). A professor at Australian National University in
Canberra, he is currently a visiting professor at International
Christian University in Tokyo and has written numerous studies of modern
East Asian history and politics.

Copyright 2004 Gavan McCormack

Please also see this interview of Gavin McCormack concerning North
Korea:

"Making Sense of the Korean Crisis", ZNET Japan Focus Interview
(February 15 2004)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=4992