Asia Times: NIPPON: Nationalism isn't militarism


	March 10, 2000	atimes.com

Japan

NIPPON: Nationalism isn't militarism
By Bradley Martin

Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi this week caught some flak for getting a haircut. According to a Yomiuri Shimbun report, Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, criticized Obuchi for going to the barber immediately after receiving news of a train crash at Tokyo's Nakamegoro Station Wednesday morning.

At the time, Obuchi's aide still thought it was possible a terrorist bomb had exploded. That turned out not to be the case, but ''I have to say that you lack a sense of crisis management, having a haircut at a time like that,'' Hatoyama told Obuchi during a parliamentary session later in the day.

Hatoyama's outburst and his use of the buzz term ''crisis management'' illustrate the current movement in many quarters favoring a more proactive stance toward the security of Japan - a country that, since the Occupation, has tended to leave security matters to the United States.

This tendency is, of course, one that can qualify as an element of nationalism - but it doesn't have to set off alarm bells with those, inside and outside Japan, who remember the pre-1945 brand of nationalism.

Mike Mochizuki, a well-known Japan scholar in the United States, recently moved from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, to George Washington University's Eliot School of International Affairs. At GWU, his seminar attracts mid-career American diplomats and military officers who have returned to school for advanced study, as well as overseas students from Asia. They're all eager to discuss the direction of Japan's policies.

And what do they think that is? ''The students answer that there is a resurgence of nationalism in Japan, and that that is a good thing,'' Mochizuki says in the March issue of Gaiko Forum, a foreign affairs journal published in Tokyo. ''All are in agreement that it is a good thing for Japan to consider its national interests and contribute to the stability of the world, rather than being introverted.''

That doesn't mean all of Mochizuki's students favor a constitutional amendment to remove the limitations on use of military power. ''With regard to the constitution there are two sides to the debate,'' Mochizuki reports. ''There are quite a few students who believe it is better to work within the framework of the current constitution and emphasize contributions of a non-military nature.''

Mochizuki's remarks come in one of those transcribed dialogues that are beloved of Japanese magazine editors (because the approach is quick and easy and fills lots of space). In this case, his interlocutor is Masahiro Akiyama, formerly the top career bureaucrat in Japan's Defense Agency and now a visiting scholar at Harvard.

''When it comes to nationalism, the United States has the tendency to immediately be caught up with the image of Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara,'' Akiyama chimes in. ''So what you're saying represents a positive discovery, doesn't it? That's because the point is that nationalism does not mean militarism.''

It's an excellent point. A more assertive Japan does not in itself equate to a Japan returning to pre-1945 militarism.

And it's fortunate for Tokyo that more and more outsiders are beginning to understand this. Otherwise, the furor over the presence in the new Austrian government of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party might well have spilled over to inspire a new round of unfavorable scrutiny of Japan's leading parties.

After all, Haider's penchant for offering kind words to elderly Nazis - which apparently is his main offense in the eyes of the European Union - has been matched all too often by senior Japanese conservatives worshipping at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead including convicted war criminals are enshrined. In both cases, the domestic politics makes sense because there are plenty of still-voting descendants of the aged or dead warriors in both Austria and Japan.

Note that while the EU is making Austria pay for Haider's remarks, most Asian countries have pretty much compartmentalized their concerns regarding Japan's militarist past and the Japanese who continue to show signs of nostalgia for it. There's too much else to talk about, especially economics.

Those countries complain when occasions arise, but don't make those complaints the be-all and end-all of their relationships with Japan. The general feeling is that it would be counterproductive to hold up other, mutually beneficial matters in the rather far-fetched hope that Japan would distance itself from its Austria-like stance to become self-reflective and apologetic in the German mold.

But there remains one Asian country that's always ready at the drop of a hat to accuse an insufficiently repentant Japan. That's North Korea.

Big news in Japan this week is the decision to send 100,000 tonnes of rice to North Korea in the hope Pyongyang will negotiate sincerely a number of bilateral issues. But many politicians in Japan's conservative parties fear that the aid recipients will eat and run - as they did in the cases of three food donations between 1995 and 1997 - without giving satisfactory answers about 10 Japanese suspected of having been abducted and taken to North Korea.

Tokyo identified the 10 suspected kidnap victims after the most recent Japan-North Korea talks broke down in 1992. Those talks failed after Tokyo asked for information about a woman said to have become, following her abduction, a Japanese teacher - one whose students in Pyongyang included the female North Korean spy who helped bomb a South Korean passenger jet.

Many members of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Liberal Party ''think that North Korea will hoodwink Japan once again'' and fail to provide any information about the alleged kidnap victims, Yomiuri reported in its Thursday editions.

Asahi Shimbun's March 8 editorial advises against a hard-line approach on the issue. ''We fully understand how family members feel about their missing loved ones,'' the paper says. But a ''confidence-building endeavor may be the most useful way to find a solution''.

Certainly North Korean media offer no hints that Pyongyang is about to clear up the kidnapping suspicions. On the contrary, the party mouthpiece Nodong Shinmun on Monday scoffed at the Japanese claims.

According to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) the paper noted a case that recently came to light of a nine-year-old Japanese schoolgirl in Niigata Prefecture - scene of many of the suspected North Korean abductions - who had been abducted and held in a room for 10 years. The perpetrator was not a North Korean spy but a Japanese pervert.

Although 30,000 cases of abductions and missing persons were reported in Japan last year alone, Japanese authorities have the gall to ''slander'' North Korea with kidnapping allegations, Nodong Shinmun said.

And then the North Korean paper got to the matter of pre-1945 Japanese militaristic colonialism. ''In the past the Japanese imperialists invaded Korea like brigands and inflicted innumerable misfortunes and sufferings upon the Korean people,'' it says. ''They abducted and walked away about six million young and middle-aged Koreans and kidnapped nearly 200,000 Korean women in broad daylight and reduced them to sexual slaves for the Imperial Army.

''Far from making a thousand-fold apology and compensation for these crimes,'' Japan is pressing Pyongyang on alleged kidnappings. ''This is the height of effrontery.''

How long will Pyongyang continue to play the EU role to Japan's Austria? There's a clue in the Nodong Shinmun editorial: ''The Korean people will certainly make Japan pay a high price for this.''

Prices, of course, can be quantified.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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