Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (32 page)

Even the most obsequious supporters of the pro-American position, however—such as Sat
ō
Eisaku, who succeeded Ikeda in 1964 and held the premiership until 1972—never planted both feet entirely in the American camp. From the earliest moments of the San Francisco System a fault line of disagreement and mistrust ran between Tokyo and Washington. While the conservative hegemony disagreed internally on a variety of critical policy issues beyond the appropriate speed and scope of remilitarization—including what policy to adopt toward China, Korea, Vietnam, and a nuclearized Okinawa—from the time of the Yoshida cabinets there was general conservative agreement that the U.S. vision of a bipolar world was inflexible and obsessively militaristic. As a consequence, in tactical if not fundamental ways there often occurred a convergence in the positions of the political left and right vis-à-vis the United States. One of the more amusing early examples of this convergence occurred in the very midst of the creation of the San Francisco System, when Yoshida—the great Red-baiter and bête noire of the left—secretly encouraged the Socialists to organize antirearmament demonstrations while John Foster Dulles was in Tokyo. For Yoshida and his conservative successors as well, the specter of popular opposition to U.S. policies was an effective, and indeed desired, bargaining chip.
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As a general rule, Japanese of every political persuasion desired greater autonomy and more genuine sovereignty for their country. They differed on whether this goal was better attained within the Security Treaty or outside it; and thus, in great confrontations such as the 1959–60 crisis over whether to revise the mutual security pact, there was indeed no common ground where policy was concerned. Both sides felt humiliation at the unequal nature of the original treaty. Whereas the conservative mainstream focused on the removal of inequality, however, the opposition argued that a more equitable treaty simply meant that Japan was committing itself to a larger military role. Nevertheless, the nationalist sentiments shared by participants on both sides of this struggle help explain the disintegration of the opposition over the ensuing years.
Nationalism was a bridge on which leftists could sooner or later cross to join the LDP or even the extreme right-wing advocates of an independent Japanese military capability. The well-known critic Shimizu Ikutar
ō
, who moved from being one of the most prominent intellectuals in the Peace Problems Symposium and 1960 protests to being an advocate of a nuclear-armed autonomous Japanese state a decade later, was but the most conspicuous example of this exodus of former radicals into the conservative camp. Even where dissidents of the 1950s and 1960s did not cross over to the other side, moreover, in later years many turned their focus of opposition further inward to concentrate on essentially domestic concerns.
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On a wide range of other contested issues the partial convergence in viewpoint of the conservative leaders and their critics was more straightforward. Despite their anti-Communism, for example, many conservatives desired closer relations with the two Communist giants, or at least with China. Similarly, the large number of U.S. troops and military bases that remained in Japan after the occupation, and after the Korean armistice in 1953, aggravated almost everyone. On a related issue, although the conservatives and their critics were in fundamental disagreement over whether Japan should rearm, conservative politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen as a whole (with the exception of certain vigorous defense industry lobbies) gave relatively low priority to defense spending into the 1980s. As a percentage of the total general accounts budget, military spending peaked in 1954. As a percentage of the gross national product, defense spending as commonly calculated was less than 1 percent for a full decade before Prime Minister Miki Takeo grandly proclaimed a “One Percent of GNP” guideline in 1976.
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Such points of partial convergence in the outlook of the conservatives and opposition are easily extended. There was no fundamental disagreement on the desirability of the reversion of Okinawa to full Japanese sovereignty, for example, and eventually little open disagreement on an early basic issue of contention: that Okinawa should be returned nuclear free. Neither the government
nor opposition welcomed U.S. nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, and apart from a few conservative advocates of a Gaullist-style nuclear
force de frappe
, there was general agreement that Japan itself should remain nuclear free. In December 1967, in response to a question in the Diet, Prime Minister Sat
ō
clarified this position as the famous “Three Nonnuclear Principles,” which held that Japan would not manufacture nuclear weapons, possess them, or permit them to enter the country. Also, although U.S. policy at the time of the peace settlement secretly had anticipated Japan emerging as a major supplier of war-related matériel to the anti-Communist camp, weapons production was not emphasized in subsequent years. Earlier in 1967, when public criticism arose concerning military-related exports to Vietnam, the Sat
ō
government responded with the “Three Principles of Arms Exports” prohibiting weapons sales to Communist countries, countries under arms embargo by the United Nations, and countries in or on the verge of armed conflict. Under the Miki cabinet (1974–76) the ban was extended to include all countries and cover parts used in military equipment.
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Although left and right remained in fundamental disagreement on the Security Treaty in general, until the end of the Sh
ō
wa period successive conservative governments took care to reiterate that Japanese self-defense forces were constitutionally prohibited from engaging in overseas missions or entering into collective security pacts. The latter position was explicitly meant to scotch any prospect of a NATO-type Northeast Asia treaty organization coupling Japan with the Republic of Korea and Republic of China. In addition, although LDP policy consistently called for constitutional revision, in actuality the conservative thrust in this direction tended to wither away beginning in the mid-1960s, after the Constitution Investigation Committee that had been created after the LDP was formed failed to come up with clear recommendations to revise the national charter. Although a majority of committee members did favor revision, it had become clear by 1964, when the group issued its report, that the public opposed this.
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These points of tactical convergence help clarify the low-posture external policies followed by conservative cabinets ever since Yoshida's time, as well as the sources of friction that always characterized relations between the Japanese and American managers of the San Francisco System. At the same time, they also help explain how, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the ruling groups succeeded in taking away much of the fire of the opposition. By the beginning of the 1970s many of the most contentious issues of external policy had been defused by a combination of policy changes and the effective use of symbolic rhetoric that associated the conservatives with restraint on issues of remilitarization. Complementary accommodations took place on the domestic front. The massive protests of the late 1960s against the environmental destruction caused by growth-at-all-costs economic policies, for example, were so successful that the 1970 Diet became known as the “Pollution Diet” because of the large number of environmental protection laws it passed. More generally, these developments coincided with Japan's emergence as a mature bourgeois society, increasingly preoccupied with consumerism within and great-power status abroad.

The key moments at which hitherto inflammatory peace issues began to be detached from the agenda of public debate are fairly easy to identify. The aggravating presence of U.S. bases and troops in Japan was dramatically diminished between 1955 and 1960, when the so-called New Look (or Radford Doctrine) of U.S. strategic planners dictated that reliance on nuclear weapons made many overseas bases obsolete. Between 1955 and 1957 U.S. forces in Japan were reduced from 210,000 to 77,000 men, and by 1960 the number had dropped to 48,000. Simultaneously, the United States retreated from its extraordinary proposals to create a huge Japanese army immediately and began instead to direct military aid to creation of less conspicuous but more technologically sophisticated Japanese naval and air forces.
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Where the mutual security treaty itself was concerned, the failure of the mass protests of 1959-60 to block treaty renewal essentially marked the end of
this as a meaningful issue. Attempts to remobilize protests against the next round of treaty renewal in 1970 were ineffective. After 1960 the Security Treaty remained a convenient target of rhetoric, but a practical fait accompli.

The antinuclear movement in Japan began not in 1945 but in 1954. Until the latter part of the occupation, reportage and public remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were forbidden. It was the irradiation of Japanese fishermen by an American nuclear test in the Bikini Incident of 1954, and the death of one of the crew, that precipitated the postwar movement against nuclear weapons—and, on the left, against nuclear energy. Even while resting comfortably under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the conservative government did not hesitate to associate itself with antinuclear policies. Thus, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuiky
ō
), founded in 1955, initially was supported by the LDP as well as parties and organizations on the left and fell under Communist Party control only in the 1960s. In 1961 the LDP aligned itself with a new antinuclear federation, the national Council for Peace and Against Nuclear Weapons (Kakkin Kaigi). And in December 1967 Prime Minister Sat
ō
's “Three Nonnuclear Principles” were effectively introduced to suggest that the government shared the ideals of the popular antinuclear movement. Along with Article 9, the prohibition on arms exports first announced in 1967, and the “One Percent of GNP” ceiling on defense expenditures proclaimed in 1976, the Three Nonnuclear Principles became popularly identified as one of the four “symbolic constraints” on Japanese remilitarization. The government's ability to partially co-opt the antinuclear movement was further enhanced by an insular strain in the movement itself. To many Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became emblematic of World War II and thus symbolic of the unique suffering of the Japanese in that conflict. They became, that is, a way of remembering Japanese suffering while forgetting the suffering that the Japanese caused others. Such “victim consciousness”—already noted in the earliest statements of the peace movement—meshed well with the emerging neo-nationalism of the ruling groups.

Okinawa and China, two of the most blatant symbols of subordinate independence, were detached from the peace agenda between 1969 and 1972. By the end of the 1960s the United States had become persuaded that reversion of the Ryukyus to Japan was both feasible and wise. The development of intercontinental missiles reduced Okinawa's importance as a forward nuclear base. Pressure for reversion within Okinawa and throughout all Japan was becoming irresistible. Perhaps most interesting, the discrepancy in living standards between Japan proper and semicolonized Okinawa was becoming so conspicuous as to pose a potential serious embarrassment for the United States.
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Thus, in the Sat
ō
-Nixon communiqué of November 1969 the United States defused this issue by agreeing to return Okinawa to full Japanese sovereignty by 1972.

Where China was concerned, Washington's unexpected rapprochement with the People's Republic in 1971 embarrassed the Japanese government, which had long adhered reluctantly to the containment policy. Nonetheless, it paved the way for Japan's own restoration of relations with Beijing, thereby removing one of the most galling features of the San Francisco System. China, obsessed by its tensions with the Soviet Union, accompanied its embrace of the United States and Japan by renouncing its previous expressions of concern about Japanese rearmament and the U.S.-Japan military alliance. This Chinese volte-face was also a severe blow to the Japanese peace movement, which hitherto had argued that Japanese remilitarization under the Security Treaty was a destabilizing factor in Asia. Moreover, the agony and madness of China's Cultural Revolution, which became apparent to the world a few years later, by indirection further discredited the left.

By 1972 the left thus had lost hold of many of its most evocative peace issues: U.S. bases in Japan, the Security Treaty, nuclear weapons, arms production, Okinawa, and China. A year later, with the armistice in Vietnam, the last great cause that had provided a modicum of common purpose among the opposition was removed. The average citizen turned inward, to bask in Japan's
new international influence as an economic power and become consumed by material pursuits, exemplified in such mass-media slogans as “My Home-ism” and “My Car-ism.” Concerned citizens redirected their “citizens' movements” or “residents' movements” toward particular grievances. The violent wing of the New left turned its fury as well as its tactics of armed confrontation (the so-called
geba
, from
gebaruto
, the Japanese rendering of the German word
Gewalt
, “force”) inward to engage in theoretical disputes and self-destructive factional violence (
uchigeba
). Beheiren, the broad-based and charismatic People's Organization for Peace in Vietnam, which had effectively reconciled many of the Marxist and non-Marxist protest groups between 1965 and 1973, disbanded in January 1974. No comparable coalition—eclectic, populist, both humanitarian and radical, nonviolent, genuinely internationalistic and individualistic in outlook—ever took its place.

In retrospect it is apparent that the early 1970s marked a major turning point in Japan's position within the international political economy. It is from this point that we can date Japan's emergence as a truly global power—and the corollary and irreversible decline of U.S. hegemony. At the time, however, this transformation of power was by no means clear. On the contrary, the 1970s were a traumatic decade for Japan's elites, marked by a succession of crises. Twenty years of slavish adherence to the U.S. containment policy were rudely rewarded by the “Nixon shock” of July 1971, when the American president unexpectedly announced U.S. rapprochement with China. One month later the Nixon shock was recharged with the “dollar shock,” as two decades of low-posture Japanese neomercantilism seemed thrown into jeopardy by the unilateral U.S. decision to reevaluate the yen-dollar exchange rate. Already in the late 1960s the United States had begun to withdraw the economic umbrella that sheltered Japanese protectionism at home and economic expansion abroad. The 1971 dollar shock accelerated
this process, and in 1973 the yen was allowed to float. This floating exchange rate coincided with the “oil shock” of October 1973, which brought an end to Japan's remarkable period of high growth rates and dropped the country into its most prolonged postwar recession. Production levels did not return to the 1973 level until 1978—just in time to be confronted with the “second oil shock” of January 1979. The scale of the 1979 shock was registered in a $25 billion shift in Japan's balance of payments from a $16 billion surplus in 1978 to an $8.6 billion deficit in 1979. Whereas the annual growth rate had been an extraordinary 10 to 11 percent between 1955 and 1970, in the 1970s it dropped to somewhat less than 5 percent. Concurrent with all these traumas, the country's quiet penetration of U.S. and European markets suddenly crackled into controversy, like a string of firecrackers that stretched through the 1970s and 1980s as well: over textiles in 1969–71; steel, television sets, and electronics beginning around 1977; automobiles from the turn of the decade; semiconductor chips and computers from the mid-1980s; purchase of U.S. properties from the late 1980s.
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