Time for the sun to rise: how a newly confident and engaged Japan would help the United States, and the world

National Review, July 4, 2005 by Richard Lowry

PACIFISM has never been so silly. In an East Asia featuring both one of the world's most irrational states and a rising dictatorial power bent on changing the region's strategic balance, it is a crucial ally of the United States that labors under a constitution that could have been written by Quakers. Of course, it was an American team put together by Douglas MacArthur after World War II that wrote the Japanese constitution imposing pacifism as state policy. That was understandable 50 years ago. Now, the constraints of the Japanese constitution--and the Japanese attitudes that preserved them all these years--are senseless anachronisms.

Japan has slowly been emerging from its shell over the last decade, and it is one of the diplomatic triumphs of the Bush administration that it has helped accelerate this process, strengthening the U.S.-Japanese bond and enhancing its usefulness. The Japanese will proceed at their own pace, but our response to every step they take toward becoming a more "normal" country should be nothing but encouragement: "More, please." The goal, although it will never be fully achievable given historic, cultural, and other differences, should be to make Japan as reliable a partner of the U.S. in Asia as Britain is in Europe.

"There is no fear of Japan. The old cork-in-the-bottle theory is dead," says an administration official, referring to the former fear in the U.S. government that any Japanese step toward rearmament would mean an inevitable slide toward aggressive militarism. "The old saw is that Japan is just an aircraft carrier, a jumping-off point for American forces. Well, we want to make it a jumping-off point for both U.S. and Japanese forces."

The alliance is a natural. Japan broadly shares our values. The U.S. is the world's number-one economy and Japan is number two, a powerful combination. We want to check China, and Japan feels threatened by China. Japan provides the basing the U.S. needs at a time when we have lost our bases in the Philippines and our relationship with South Korea looks shaky. We want to stay in East Asia, and the Japanese want to keep us there, in a dangerous neighborhood. Japan is surrounded by three nuclear countries that would make anyone nervous: North Korea, China, and Russia.

After the Cold War, the alliance seemed headed for a breakdown. Japan provided only financial support for the first Gulf War and refused to give the U.S. intelligence and logistical aid during the 1993-1994 showdown with North Korea. The Clintonites, meanwhile, were obsessed with banging on the Japanese on trade issues, to the exclusion of national-security considerations. They talked up a "strategic partnership" with China.

But nothing concentrates the mind like a few missile launches. In 1996, China tested ballistic missiles off Taiwan, with a few landing near Japanese shipping lanes. This led to a joint U.S.-Japanese statement pledging Japanese logistical support to the U.S. during "regional contingencies" and stipulating that the U.S.-Japanese alliance includes "situations in the areas surrounding Japan." The Chinese screamed--accurately--that "situations" was meant to cover a potential conflict over Taiwan. Two years later, the North Koreans launched a missile over northern Japan, spurring Japanese interest in cooperation with the United States on a missile-defense system.

Politically, Japan has become more conservative. Its Left has effectively collapsed. The Socialist party was never serious about governing, but existed as an obstructionist force in parliament (sound familiar?). After electoral reform in the early 1990s, it all but evaporated. Japanese politics has become more populist, and Japanese society more open and less risk-averse. A new generation of politicians both in the ruling Liberal Democratic party and in the opposition Democratic party is not so wedded to the old pieties. "Japan is tired of constantly apologizing, and it wants a place in the sun more than in a pure economic sense," says former State Department official Jim Kelly.

North Korea is enough to shake anyone's pacifism. Besides its nuclear adventurism, it abducted Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, outraging ordinary Japanese. The Japanese realize that the North Koreans just might be telling the truth when they say they would never attack other Koreans; similar assurances are never made about Japan. Meanwhile, the Chinese have stupidly provoked Japan at every turn. China scholar Arthur Waldron calls Beijing's alienation of Japan one of its great post-war blunders. "Japan was a pacifist country, with a sentimental view of China," says Waldron. "It was ideal for the Chinese."

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took office in April 2001 determined to strengthen the U.S. alliance. The Bush administration shared the same goal, acting on an influential October 2000 National Defense University report--led by soon-to-be deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage--calling for an alliance modeled on our relationship with the British. Bush and Koizumi--a maverick reformer attracted to the American model of political leadership-have a warm relationship. "When Koizumi looks Bush in the eye and says he's going to find a way to do something, he always has," Kelly says.