Is Japan Still a Pacifist Society? Asia Rising podcast

Transcription

1 Is Japan Still a Pacifist Society? Asia Rising podcast Welcome to Asia Rising, the podcast of La Trobe Asia where we examine the news, views and general happenings of Asian States and Societies. I'm your host In the wake of World War 2, Japan adopted a new Constitution including Article 9, the general gist of was that Japan aspires to international peace and should not have an army. Here to discuss the lasting impact of this Article, the rise of Japanese pacifism and what a recent 20/14 reinterpretation could do to the Japanese military action is Professor, Executive Director of La Trobe Asia. Welcome to you Nick. Professor Thanks Matt. Nick, what were the implications of Article 9? Well Article 9 of the Constitution which was enacted in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War did a number of things. Externally it said very clearly to the countries of East Asia, 'Japan is down and it's not coming back up, Japanese militarism is not going to come back because it's enshrined in the legal edifice of post occupation Japan'. Internally, it said also 'Militarism's not coming back', i.e., that group that ceased power from a democratic Japan in the '30's was not going to be in a position ever to return. But it also allowed Japan, and really created a culture in Japan of saying 'Never again, we suffered for what we did', the politics of all of that which we've talked about in a previous podcast is slightly fraught, but essentially the Japanese population had inflicted on them through the fire bombings of Tokyo, Kyoto, the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima utter devastation. Plus they'd been living in privation under rationing and that sort of thing for at least 5 or 6 years so that A lot of fatigue had set in? Ah, I mean this is a very, very, serious war weary nation. What this represented was an ability to turn you back on all of that and of course the other thing, and this is kind of controversial, is that it allowed the creation of the idea that the Second World War was not the fault of the Japanese people. The Japanese people by embracing pacifism, could say 'What happened in the Second World War was because a militarist clique took over and fooled us and gulled us into this conflict that we ordinarily wouldn't have had any bar of. But because they somehow fooled us into all of this that that occurred'. And Article 9 allows us to go 'We were victims' and embrace a pacifism that occurred (very, very, quickly it must be said), allowed the Japanese people to sort of. well the Chinese people would say, 'The Japanese hide away from their responsibilities'. So you've got about 70 odd years that have followed since, so about three generations. In the grand scheme of things it really isn't a long time, but it seems to be a very imprinted ideal of what it is to be Japan now, is to be very pacifist?

2 The remarkable thing about the pacifist sentimentality, (if you want to call it that), was how quickly it grabbed hold in Japan. So that in 1961 the Japanese and the Americans signed a security treaty which is a fairly typical, kind of neutral security treaty. It was massively controversial, you know hundreds of thousands of people on the street, - this is 15 years after the Second World War. So this idea very rapidly becomes hugely entrenched in Japanese culture. It's all encompassing, it's across the political spectrum, the far right doesn't like it but for certainly the bulk of the post war period, they are seriously marginal figures in the ones and two's, you know single digit percentage of the electorate at best. And so it becomes this idea, certainly for children growing up in Japan today, the idea of being a unique country, not just every country's different, but we're unique because a) we've been attacked with atomic weaponry, the only country to have suffered from that and b) we're the only country to have a constitution that forbids the use of force. And so there's this sense of identity of what it means to be Japanese is pretty deeply rooted. So how can the new legislation reinterpret Article 9 then? Ah, Article 9 is a funny one because if you read it and you look at and it says very blankly, 'The right of belligerency is forbidden, that war fighting material will never be allowed to be held'. And then you look at Japan's defence budget, it's the fourth or fifth highest defence budget in the world, it's in Asia after the US, the most sophisticated military in the region. So how do you reconcile that, the capable fighting force with a constitution that says you can't have any of this stuff? And the way they do it is essentially to reinterpret the Constitution and to say through fairly tortuous, at times legal reasoning, they say: 'See that first part in the Constitution, it says aspiring to an International Order based on peace and justice. What that means is a UN Centred Order, and the UN says 'We have a right to defend ourselves', the UN Charter says in Article 51: 'All states have the right to defend themselves'. So by making that connection which itself if fairly, I think, not quite the spirit of Article 9, but it says all states have the right to defend ourselves, we're in part of this system to we have a right to defend ourselves. If we defend ourselves we need weapons to do it and then you can take these steps. The key thing is, rather than having legislation, the decision to reinterpret it, the courts have decided to step away from that and not take part in that in the way you might expect a Constitutional Court to do so. It's defaulted into the hands of this Cabinet Secretary and they interpret the Constitution and have this sort of sit down and go, 'Ok what we think this means now is the following activities are allowed', and up until last year what's been allowed has been very, very, narrowly defined, so that Japan can use force to defend the territory of Japan, the Japanese people when they are being directly attacked, and that's it. Yeah, so that's the reasoning behind all this military spending that they've had in the past and the establishment of, sorry what's it's called?

3 Self Defence Force. The Self Defence Force. It's a euphemism for 'the army', for the military. But calling a spade a spade, it's an army? Three bits, it's an army, a navy and an air- force which are rather unimaginatively called The Air Self Defence force, The Ground Self Defence Force and The Maritime Self Defence Force. But under the enforcement of Article 9, they can't be deployed overseas can they? They're just defence? Absolutely and up until this reinterpretation of July 1 st last year, that was very strict. And not only could they not be deployed overseas and this is what caused some tension, is that they couldn't even help the Americans who are their allies, an ally that has very significant military presence on Japan or on Japanese territory. They couldn't even help the Americans if they're involved in some other conflict, even just to refuel them. So let's say the US and China are nuking it out over Taiwan, not too far from Japan, the Japanese Self Defence Force is not allowed to do anything to assist the United States in any capacity. So now with this reinterpretation they could? Yes. There's a potential to send your troops overseas because you are protecting your interests or your ally's interests? So there's two big things. The principle point around this reinterpretation is to say 'Self- defence should also mean not just the narrow defence of ourselves, but participation in collective self- defence. So that's to say, we can work with others to defend ourselves. The idea was basically one that the Americans have been pushing for a while, which is to say 'You guys should be able to do a bit more to help us and to help our collective efforts, whether it's in your own defence or in what we're trying to achieve in Asia'. To which the Japanese would say, 'We can't, we're Constitutionally forbidden from doing this. Oh and don't forget America, you wrote this Constitution and you forced it upon us at the end of the Second World War'. But that's sort of by the by. That was seen certainly by Shinzo Abe the Prime Minister, as both embarrassing and also demeaning. So it was something of a bit of an embarrassment that a country that's the third

4 largest economy in the world is dependant and cannot contribute to upholding regional security, seeing off the Chinese threat, or you can't help your friends, you can't help your allies and the other is you know threats to Japan in a globalised world can emanate from a distance a long way from Japan. So that Japan should be in a position to see- off acute challenges to itself, even if they're not happening by the navy landing troops on the islands. So that if there's a missile attack that's coming from North Korea, or if you citizens are being threatened or kidnapped or having their heads cut- off in the Middle East from ISIS, which is what happened to one guy last year, then the Japanese self- defence force should be able to take some steps. So that triggered a sense of 'Ok well just what can we do?' In one hand you've got the US being a slightly demanding ally and I guess you can see that they've always been that way post World War 2 because Japan is a helpful buffer between them and the Soviet Union, but you've also got the Japanese being, maybe slightly a bit antsy for example about Chinese activity in the South China Seas? Yeah and not the South China Seas but in the East China Seas. Yes The islands the Japanese call the Senkakus Islands and the Chinese call the Diaoyu Dao. Plus you've got this political leadership under Abe which is nationalist, which feels that Japan has been weak for too long, that it's been a shadow of the United States and it's been flogging itself with a sense of guilt it shouldn't feel anymore, and that it should be able to behave like a state like any other. And critics of Abe say 'You know this is the slippery slope to Redefine the constitution and once again you'll be marching on the oil fields of South East Asia'. To which the Abe defenders say 'No, no, it's not that at all. We are a democracy, we're International Rule of Law, we're part of the UN and this is about being like any other worldly developed country that takes part in multi- lateral peace keeping operations, that's an ally of the United States and others, close security partners with a range of other countries like Australia. We, the Japanese, should be in a position to carry out defence and security policy like anyone else.' But two thirds of the country thereabouts, are against this reinterpretation. There's going to be a danger in politics moving too far away from the will of the people isn't there? And Abe is paying that absolutely, there's no question that what he has done in reinterpreting the constitution in this way is not popular. I think he's been surprised by that. He is, in the Japanese context up until quite recently, a very successful prime minister, you know there was a long period in the '90's in what's come to be known as the 'Great Karoke Prime Ministership'. Everyone had a go. I think the average length of time was fourteen to eighteen months; which incidentally Australia is not echoing. Whereas Abe has had a sustained period, he's won a slippery election, so 2013 he called a snap

5 election, late last year when he didn't need to, he won re- election. He doesn't have to face the polls in the lower house for a few more years, like politicians who get voted in largely because of the disarray of the opponents, not because of the mandate for themselves, they tend to not quite be able to disconnect that. They tend to be a bit hubristic and they read the message the way they want to read it and go 'I've been talking about this stuff for a while, they voted for me, therefore, they must like this'. And what we have found is firstly with the issuing of the reinterpretations that happened in July last year, opinion polls dropped, then he introduces the legislation in April for the first time it was released, opinion polls dive again, and then September of 2015 he pushed the legislation through the Parliament, he's in the 30s or below the 30s. And you know I was talking to my colleague from ANU yesterday who is a very close watcher of Japanese domestic politics and I said "How's Abe looking?" And they said, "Well if the LDP can find someone to push him out they will", Yeah, The problem is at the moment there doesn't look to be that and he's plainly overplayed his hand. So that while it may be the region is insecure, while it may be the US wants to do more, clearly the electorate is not supportive for this more expansive vision for what Japan should be doing militarily in the region. With a very active and long established defence force, "The change in how Article 9's been interpreted and just a general right wing politics kind of drive this is a kind of pacifism that Gandhi would find shocking". Is it fair to say that Japan have never really been a pacifist society? See I certainly think if you were to take a Political Theory 101 Class and have a definition of what pacifism is, Japan would never tick that box, at really any point since the Second World War. Maybe in the first couple of years, but by the early 50's, after the Korean War and we suddenly realised communism is on the march and Japan really needs to be in a position to literally defend itself, from there on you're not a pacifist society in any proper sense of the term. But I think it's become a shorthand to refer to a widely accepted sense in Japanese society that they don't want to be militarily like everyone else, that they want to be a civilian power. "Yes we can defend ourselves and do so to a very high degree of technological sophistication" But at the moment there is no appetite in Japan to become a country like the United Kingdom or France and that's often held out as the kind of path that someone like Abe wants to take Japan down. That's to say, a country that's large, has a big defence force, that is independent, that can project force at considerable distance, it has nuclear weapons, hugely controversial in Japan, but it is also an ally of the United States. And I think that's something that it's often left critics of Abe let the analytical house down, because they sort of go 'Well that is militarism on the rise', and I don't think under any circumstances Abe envisages a future. You know - if the fairy godmother dropped out of the sky and said: "Shinzo you have three wishes, what will they be?" None of those would be 'Let's go back and replay the '30's.' But they would

6 be a Japan that looks and acts and behaves and has a confidence militarily on the international stage that's more like Britain. The problem is as you said, there's just no public appetite for this. a) it throws all of this culture in the past and b) it's sodding expensive, you know if they were to do that it's going to cost an enormous amount of money and P.S., the Japanese economy has the highest debt to GDP ratio of any developed economy in the world. If this is a move that Abe feels comfortable with making, why is it counting against him then? Why is it something that he's gone on with despite public opinion? I think he thought at the start and probably continues to do so, that history was working in his favour, so there's long been thought that essentially the further you got from 1945, the greater level of indifference with war, indifference with the pacifist sentiment. As you get further from that, as it recedes from living memory; so the thinking that you'd get reversion to the norm if you like. And then when you add to that a China that's threatening, a North Korea that's threatening and all of this sort of stuff and, I've been to Japan shortly after North Korea's launched missiles into the Sea of Japan and people are genuinely jittery because, if the missiles come flying over you know exactly where they are going. But, all of that experience so far is not moving people. The underlying sentiments in Japan do seem to be, 'So far and no more.' If Abe persists in this and I think he's going to, partly because he has to, he has positioned himself domestically as the strong man. And the strong man who backs down is a dead duck politically, but if he persists with this I think he's going to go down the political gurgler and I think that, plus the fact the economy isn't recovering in the way it needs to, to, give him the political capital to do all of this, then I think he'd probably on borrowed time. That's all we have time for, thank you Nick. Pleasure Matt. And if you'd like to follow on Twitter You've been listening to Asia Rising the Podcast from La Trobe Asia. If you like this podcast you can subscribe in itunes or Soundcloud. Thanks for listening.