Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (29 page)

As counterpoint to the permissive agreements on remilitarization reached between the U.S. and Japanese governments in the early 1950s, Article 9 thus survived as an ambiguous but critical element within the San Francisco System. It was reinterpreted cavalierly by the government to permit piecemeal Japanese rearmament, but at the same time it was effectively utilized to restrain the speed and scope of remilitarization. Successive Sh
ō
wa-era cabinets repeatedly evoked the constitution to resist U.S. pressure not merely for large troop increases but also for participation in collective security arrangements and overseas missions. As Prime Minister Sat
ō
Eisaku stated in 1970, “The provisions of the Constitution make overseas service impossible.”
⁷
Because revision of Article 9 would open the door to conservative revision of other parts of the national charter as well, especially concerning guarantees of individual rights and possibly also the purely “symbolic” status of the emperor, debates over constitutional revision became the most dramatic single example of the intersection of postwar concerns about peace and democracy.

The text of the peace treaty was not made public until it was signed in September 1951, and details of the U.S.-Japan military relationship were worked out between the two governments only in the months that intervened between then and the end of the occupation in April 1952. Nonetheless, the general policy of incorporating Japan into U.S. Cold War policy was clear well before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and opposition within Japan mobilized accordingly. The political left was factionalized in
its analysis of these developments, but many of the basic principles that would underlie criticism of the San Francisco System in the years to follow were introduced by the left-wing parties and liberal and “progressive” (
kakushin
) intellectuals between 1949 and 1951. In December 1949 the Socialist Party adopted “Three Principles of Peace” for Japan: an overall peace settlement with all former enemies, opposition to bilateral military pacts or foreign military bases in Japan, and neutrality in the Cold War. In 1951, after hard wrangling between the right and left wings of the party, the Socialists added, as a fourth peace principle, opposition to Japanese rearmament.

By far the most influential intellectual endorsement of these principles came from the Peace Problems Symposium (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai), a loose grouping of highly respected academics who first collaborated in November 1948 to issue a general statement on war, peace, and social justice signed by fifty-five scholars in the natural and social sciences. In a “Statement on the Peace Problem” released in January 1950 and signed by thirty-five intellectuals, the group elaborated on the three peace principles, warned that a separate peace could contribute to war, and emphasized the importance of avoiding dependency on the United States. The third Peace Problems Symposium statement, drafted largely by Maruyama Masao and Ukai Nobushige and published as usual in the monthly magazine
Sekai
, was issued in December 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War and open commencement of Japanese rearmament. So great was the response that
Sekai
was said to have doubled its circulation.

The long third statement, signed by thirty-one intellectuals in the Tokyo chapter of the Peace Problems Symposium and twenty-one in the Kyoto chapter, dwelled on the flawed vision of those self-styled “realists” who adhered to a rigidly bipolar worldview and anticipated inevitable conflict between “liberal democracy” and “Communism.” The United States and Soviet Union both came under criticism, while the Cold War premise of the emerging U.S.-Japan military relationship—the argument that the Soviet Union
was committed to fostering world Communism through military means—was rejected. Japan, it was argued, could best contribute to peaceful coexistence by adopting a strict course of unarmed nonalignment under the United Nations. The final section of the statement was devoted explicitly to “the relationship between peace and the domestic structure” and argued that Japan's contribution to a world without war, as well as its best opportunity to attain economic independence, could be most effectively furthered by promoting social-democratic domestic reforms that were guided by neither Soviet ideology nor American-style cold-war objectives. The language was guarded here, referring in general and quite idealistic terms to fairness in the sharing of wealth and income, creation of a mature level of democracy, and supplementing the principles of a free economy (
jiy
Å«
keizai no genri
) with principles of planning (
keikaku genri
).
⁸

These statements survived over the years as probably the best-known manifestoes of the Japanese peace movement. Neither then nor later was much attention given to undercurrents within them that seemed to run counter to a truly internationalistic and universalistic outlook. The famous third statement, for example, adopted terms faintly reminiscent of Japan's pan-Asian rhetoric in World War II by praising the neutrality espoused by India's Prime Minister Nehru as representing “the very essence of the Asian people's historic position and mission.” At the same time, the statement introduced a subtle appeal to nationalism in arguing that neutrality represented “the only true position of self-reliance and independence for Japan.” Most striking of all, however, was the attempt of the Peace Problems Symposium intellectuals to nurture antiwar sentiments in Japan by appealing directly to the suffering experienced by the Japanese in the recent war. “In view of the pitiful experience that our fatherland underwent during the war,” the third statement declared, “it is only too clear to us what it can mean to sacrifice peace.”
⁹
From the perspective of Japan's Asian victims, of course, such an appeal would seem shockingly parochial rather than internationalist. In the Japanese milieu, however, it tapped an
almost instinctual strain of “victim consciousness” (
higaisha ishiki
) that cut across the political spectrum.

As the precise nature of the San Francisco System unfolded between 1951 and 1954, it became apparent to conservatives as well as the opposition that Japan had paid a considerable price for sovereignty. It now possessed a military of questionable legality and a bilateral security treaty that was unquestionably inequitable. “Preposterously unequal” was the phrase used by Foreign Minister Fujiyama Aiichi in 1958, and when treaty revision came on the agenda in 1960, U.S. officials agreed that the 1951 Security Treaty with Japan was the most inequitable bilateral agreement the United States had entered into after the war. It also became painfully clear to the Japanese that the price of peace was a divided country—indeed, a doubly divided country in the sense of both territorial and spiritual division. The detachment of Okinawa from the rest of Japan turned Okinawan society and economy into a grotesque appendage to the U.S. nuclear strategy in Asia. Edwin Reischauer, ambassador to Japan in the early 1960s, later characterized Okinawa as “the only ‘semi-colonial' territory created in Asia since the war,” and the resentments generated by this territorial division persisted until the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and even after. The spiritual division of the country was manifested in the political and ideological polarization caused in considerable part by the San Francisco System itself. As Yoshida put it, with another graphic military metaphor, this time from the Allied division of Korea at the end of World War II, the occupation and its Cold War settlement drew a “thirty-eighth parallel” through the very heart of the Japanese people.
¹⁰
This was hardly a trauma or tragedy comparable to the postwar divisions of Korea, China, Germany, or Vietnam. It suggests, nonetheless, the emotional and politically charged climate of the years that followed Japan's accommodation to American Cold War policy.

Most fundamentally, the San Francisco System subordinated Japan to the United States in psychological as well as structural ways and ate at Japanese pride, year after year, like a slow-working
acid. In official U.S. circles it was acknowledged frankly, if confidentially, that the military relationship with Japan was double-edged: it integrated Japan into the anti-Communist camp and simultaneously created a permanent structure of U.S. control over Japan. Even passionately anti-Soviet politicians like Yoshida did not regard the USSR as a direct threat to Japan and reluctantly accepted the continued presence of U.S. troops and bases as an unavoidable price for obtaining sovereignty along with assurances of U.S. protection. The primary mission of U.S. forces and bases in Japan including Okinawa was never to defend Japan directly but rather to project U.S. power in Asia and to “support our commitments elsewhere,” as one high U.S. official later testified.
¹¹
To many observers the argument that this U.S. presence also acted as a deterrent to external threats to Japan was less persuasive than its counterargument: that the external threat was negligible without the bases, but considerable with them. If war occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union, Japan inevitably would be drawn into it. At the same time, the U.S. military presence throughout the Japanese islands established an on-site deterrent against hostile remilitarization by Japan itself. Subordination of Japanese military planning to U.S. grand strategy was another and more subtle way of ensuring long-term U.S. control over Japan. So also was the technological integration of the U.S. and Japanese military forces—a process of institutionalized dependency that actually deepened after the mid-1950s, when priorities shifted from ground forces to the creation of a technologically sophisticated Japanese navy and air force.

Early critics of the San Francisco System characterized Japan's place within it as one of “subordinate independence” (
j
Å«
zokuteki dokuritsu
), including economic as well as diplomatic and military dependency. Although the phrase arose on the political left, it was echoed throughout Japanese society—and at top levels in Washington and Tokyo as well. When U.S. planners in the Army, Navy, and State departments first turned serious attention to incorporating Japan into Cold War strategy in 1947, for example,
they rejected not merely the premise that Japan could be neutral but also that it could ever regain an “independent identity.” In this fiercely bipolar worldview, Japan realistically could be expected to “function only as an American or Soviet satellite.” In November 1951, two months after the peace conference, Joseph Dodge, the key American adviser on economic policy toward Japan, bluntly told representatives of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) that “Japan can be independent politically but dependent economically.” When Japan was forced to participate in the economic containment of China and seek alternative markets elsewhere, especially in Southeast Asia, fear that Japan was doomed to an exceedingly precarious economic future was palpable throughout the country. At this stage almost no one anticipated that Japan had a serious future in the advanced markets of the West. Thus, as we learn from “Top Secret” records of the U.S. National Security Council, in September 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles “told Yoshida frankly that Japan should not expect to find a big U.S. market because the Japanese don't make the things we want. Japan must find markets elsewhere for the goods they export.”
¹²

Such comments may be amusing in retrospect, but they remind us that Japan's emergence as a global economic power came late and abruptly and astonished almost everyone concerned. It involved a great deal of skill and hard work, to be sure, but also a large measure of good fortune. In the long run U.S. Cold War policies abetted Japanese economic growth at home and abroad in unanticipated ways. In return for acquiescing in the containment policy, for example, Japan received favored access to U.S. patents and licenses and technical expertise, as well as U.S. patronage in international economic organizations. At the same time, despite American rhetoric about free trade and an open international economic order, these remained ultimate ideals rather than immediate practices. In the early postwar decades U.S. policy actually sanctioned import restrictions by the Western European allies as well as Japan to facilitate their recovery from the war, and these
trade barriers were tolerated longer in Japan's case than they were in Europe. Also tolerated, until the early 1970s, was an undervalued yen exchange rate—that is, an overvalued dollar, which benefited Japanese export industries. Japan, more than Europe, also was permitted to retain tight restrictions on foreign exchange and capital investment that had been approved as “temporary” measures during the occupation. The closed Japanese domestic economy, which grew so rapidly in the late 1950s and 1960s and became a source of great friction between Japan and the United States and Europe by the end of the 1960s, reflected these protectionist policies sanctioned by the United States in the naive days when Japan was believed to have no serious future in Western markets—and when, by U.S. demand, Japan also was prohibited from establishing close economic ties with China. Although it is doubtful that the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” ever really protected Japan from a serious external threat, it is incontrovertible that the U.S. economic umbrella was an immense boon to Japanese capitalism.
¹³

The Japanese economy also flourished within the San Francisco System in two additional unanticipated ways. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War brought great profits and market breakthroughs to Japan. U.S. offshore procurements stimulated by the Korean War and thereafter routinized as “new special procurements” (
shin tokuju
) held Japan's balance of payments in line through the critical years of the 1950s. The Vietnam War boom, in turn, brought an estimated $1 billion a year to Japanese firms between 1966 and 1971—the period now identified as marking the opening stage of economic “maturity” for Japan and the beginning of the end of America's role as hegemon of the global capitalist system.
¹⁴