Page 2 of 5 CHINA AND THE
US Part 11: Japan's strategy to be a
'beautiful nation' By Henry C K
Liu
reconstruction. The party
characterizes itself constitutionally as "(1) a
national party, (2) a pacifist party, (3) a
genuinely democratic party, (4) a parliamentary
party, (5) a progressive party, and (6) a party
committed to creating a welfare state". On these
principles, the LDP has ruled postwar Japan as a
one-party political system since its founding.
While the LDP led Japan to postwar
prosperity with close government support of big
business during the Cold War, it is
however completely clueless
as a political institution about how to
restructure the economy to deal with the onslaught
of globalization of unregulated financial markets
after the Cold War. The LDP has remained in power
for more than five decades through electoral
gerrymandering and hefty subsidies to
special-interest groups, particularly its power
base in rural farming electorates and the
zaibatsu, giant industrial combines buoyed
by export growth subsidized by government
industrial policy; but it fell into conceptual
menopause and policy paralysis two decades ago
with regard to the urgent task of restructuring
the economy to meet the destructive onslaught on
economic nationalism by finance globalization.
Sharp disputes within the LDP over
political reform to meet the new financial
globalization produced a seismic split in the
party in 1993, causing it briefly to lose power
and control of politics for the first time in 38
years. A series of relatively short-lived LDP-led
coalition governments followed, including an
alliance in 1996 with the largest postwar
opposition party, the Socialist Party of Japan.
But instead of the SPJ revitalizing the ruling LDP
with bold domestic socialist programs, the
alliance ruined the SPJ, now known as Social
Democratic Party, by forcing it to support the
distressed export sector with anti-labor policies,
thus failing to increase domestic consumption
demand, the key to prosperity in an economy
plagued by overcapacity.
None of the
fleeting coalition governments since the mid-1990s
was able to overcome solid popular opposition to
the conservative agenda of reviving militarism,
forbidden by the postwar pacifist constitution.
Nor could these coalition governments overcome
special-interest opposition to proposals to
restructure the economy to respond to emerging
globalization. The traditional system of
keiretsu, a close-knit structure that
vertically integrates manufacturers, suppliers,
distributors, traders, banks and insurance
companies working closely with government
bureaucracy to gain overseas market share, was too
structurally embedded to allow radical reform
without dismantling the entire socio-economic
system or rejecting the delicate balance between
rights and obligations in traditional culture.
Desperate gamble on Koizumi The
installation of Junichiro Koizumi as prime
minister in 2001 was a desperate gamble for the
troubled LDP.
His father, Junya Koizumi,
had been director general of the Japan Defense
Agency and a member of the Diet (parliament) and
was purged from politics for war crimes by the
Allied occupation government but returned to the
Diet in 1952. Junichiro's cousin died as a
kamikaze pilot.
Junichiro's grandfather,
Matajiro Koizumi, was an early advocate of postal
privatization when he served as minister of posts
and telecommunications under prime minister Yuko
Hamaguchi (1929-30), who pursued a conciliatory
policy toward China and compromised with the US in
the London Naval Treaty of 1930, measures that
were unpopular with the militarists. Hamaguchi was
shot by an ultra-nationalist in 1930 and died from
the wounds a year later. Baron Reijiro Wakatsuki
succeeded Hamaguchi but he failed to control the
army, and was unable either to prevent the
military-instigated Manchurian Incident or to rein
in the army from further escalation of hostilities
in China afterward. In retirement, Wakatsuki
opposed the war against the US.
Junichiro
Koizumi fashions himself as Japan's male Margaret
Thatcher to promote all-out neo-liberalism in
Japan, similar to how the wartime Emperor Hirohito
fashioned himself after Queen Victoria to promote
Japanese imperialism in Asia.
With his
unorthodox image of being a champion of the needy
to remold an obsolete Japan, Koizumi had
previously been dismissed as a cultural maverick,
a derogatory term also used against the likes of
Sony founder Akio Morita, who enjoyed more respect
overseas than at home in Japanese society, where
individualism is viewed as a social disease.
However, imminent electoral defeat forced
the LDP elders to back Koizumi despite his refusal
to accommodate the factional bosses as required by
the traditional route to top office. Koizumi
exploited his unconventional persona by posturing
as a political rebel and opponent of the staid
establishment to win support from disaffected
voters, particularly among the alienated youth
coming into voting age who, as a generation, were
victimized by financial globalization without
having personally enjoyed any of the
pre-globalization benefits, such as shushin
koyo, the lifetime guarantee of employment by
the employer corporation and other benefits of
corporate welfare.
Behind Koizumi's
neo-liberalism in economics, however, was a
neo-conservative agenda in geopolitics. As prime
minister, Koizumi immediately began his annual
public visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to honor not
just war dead but convicted war criminals.
In May 2005, Japanese legislators
overwhelmingly, by a vote of 202-14 in the Upper
House, approved a controversial bill, a month
after the Lower House's approval, creating a
national holiday to honor wartime Emperor
Hirohito. The holiday took effect last year as
Showa Day, after the official name for Hirohito's
six-decade-long reign, which lasted from 1926 to
1989. It was a ritual that critics identify as the
latest in a series of symbolic gestures to glorify
Japan's militarist past and shift away from its
postwar pacifism. The US has had its Martin Luther
King Day since 1986 to commemorate passive
resistance to racism; meanwhile Japan now has its
Showa Day to idolize the glory of former empire.
Japanese opponents of the Showa Day bill
condemned its passage. "The ruling Liberal
Democratic Party wants to promote chauvinism
through this," said Seiji Mataichi, an Upper House
lawmaker from the Social Democratic Party and one
of a handful of legislators who opposed the bill.
He noted that debate continues over Hirohito's
responsibility of militarism and war.
The
Koizumi government also authorized revisionist
school history textbooks that are unapologetic
about and in denial of Japan's wartime record of
inhumane atrocities. He dismissed mass protests in
China and South Korea against such revision of
history, declaring the issues matters of Japanese
internal affairs, even though the atrocities were
committed beyond Japanese territory on the soil
and the persons of compatriots of the protesters.
September 11 provides opening for
militarism The September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on the US homeland provided a
timely opening for the revival of Japan
militarism.
Koizumi immediately threw
Japan solidly behind the US administration's "war
on terrorism", endearing himself personally to
President George W Bush. The US-led "war on
terrorism" was viewed by Koizumi as a golden
opportunity to restore Japan as a "normal nation",
one able to use its armed forces to assert its
national interests uninhibited by a pacifist
constitution. He pushed through legislation to
allow the dispatch of Japanese warships to support
the US invasion of Afghanistan, decisively
breaking with his foreign minister and key ally
Makiko Tanaka, who was critical of US
neo-conservative militarist transformational
foreign policy and who advocated a more
independent path for Japan.
In 2003,
despite overwhelming popular opposition of 88%,
Koizumi dispatched troops to Iraq, the first time
Japanese military personnel had been sent to an
active war zone since World War II. Japanese
troops were also sent to Indonesia to assist with
relief work after the December 2004 Indian Ocean
tsunami.
The defense minister of the new
administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,
successor to Koizumi, is Fumio Kyuma, former
chairman of the LDP General Council. The outspoken
defense
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