Japan is not innately militaristic
By Sam Jameson
The Japan Times
Aug. 23, 2001

At any time of the year, evaluating Japan and its military intentions is like looking through a telescope. From one end, everything appears bigger than it actually is. From the other, everything looks smaller.

Now, with the commemorations of the atomic bomb attacks, the war's end and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Class A war criminals are enshrined as "gods," the division of opinion is even sharper than usual.

From one end of the telescope, Japan, with the world's second-largest military budget, looks like it already is a military power and aims to become a military giant by ultimately arming itself with nuclear weapons. To some, American troops in Japan and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty are the only "cap on the bottle" that suppresses such a development.

Viewed from the other end, a Japan oblivious to military affairs appears to be doing next to nothing for its own defense. The Constitution's renunciation of war as a sovereign right inspires a "one-nation pacifism," seemingly giving Japan a permanent "draft exemption" from any danger outside its own borders.

The absence of a consensus among Japanese themselves makes it hard to judge where Japan really stands. Also clouding understanding is an over-emphasis on form and a neglect of substance in judging Japanese attitudes, especially in the case of Article 9 of the Constitution.

Too often, Article 9 is viewed as if it were a major restraint on Japanese military activity. In fact, Japanese actions have shown that it is only a tiny restraint, and one that is not immutable.

Japan has never upheld Article 9, which bans the maintenance of armed forces -- period. Instead, it has used Article 9 as an excuse not to do what it doesn't want to do, as former Ambassador Michael H. Armacost and Kenneth B. Pyle, a University of Washington history professor, noted in a paper they wrote in March 1999 for the National Bureau of Asian Research. Japan's leaders, they added, "covet the status of a major power but not its obligations and burdens."

When Japan does want to do something new, however, it simply concocts a new interpretation of Article 9.

Distortions began when Japan turned Article 9 on its head. The article reads: "Land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." Yet that wording was interpreted as allowing Japan to maintain "self-defense" forces (instead of "armed" forces) as long as they are restricted to a solely defensive role. A series of other distortions has gone all the way up to an interpretation that possessing nuclear weapons is constitutional if the weapons are for self-defense.

The contradictions that critics see in Japan saying one thing and doing another create much of the distrust of Japan that never seems to abate. But the important point is not that the government is ignoring the Constitution (which it is), or that it has opened the door to arming itself with nuclear weapons (which it has). The important point is that Japan is doing exactly what it wants to do.

What you see is what you get. Article 9 has not prevented Japan from doing what it wants to do. And the best way to judge Japan's intentions is to judge what Japan is doing -- and not doing.

Intentions, of course, can change. But the core of Japan's postwar attitude toward military issues has remained remarkably constant.
Japanese have not engaged in aggression because of any restraint imposed by Article 9, but rather because no politicians, bureaucrats or military leaders advocate territorial expansion, as former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa wrote in a July-August 1998 Foreign Affairs article.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has never spent more than 1.8 percent of its GDP on defense, and that peak came in the 1950s when Japan still had a tiny economy. Even Japanese military experts who want Japan to increase its defense budgets dramatically do not advocate spending more than 1.5 to 1.7 percent of the GDP. And not once since 1986 has the defense budget even reached the limit of 1 percent of the GDP that was supposed to have been lifted in that year.

For more than a half a century, Japan has remained one of the few Asian nations that has not been involved in any war or insurrection domestically or internationally. By contrast, U.S. troops have been dispatched overseas 34 times between 1949 and 1999, with 27 of those deployments in the last 10 years of that period, according to Casimir Yost, a former president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Contradicting every prediction that Western military analysts made in 1964 when China conducted its first nuclear bomb test, Japan has refrained for more than a third of a century from developing a nuclear arsenal of its own. Although Japan has nurtured the capability to go nuclear, its refusal to do so has kept a lid on a nuclear arms race in at least the rest of Asia.

Japan is probably the only nation in the world that could sell military weapons to foreign countries but voluntarily refrains from doing so. As a result, Japan's defense industry, upon which any ambitions to become a giant military power would be based, barely survives on the scanty contracts it receives from the Defense Agency. By contrast, the United States, the global "policeman," sells more weapons to the world it is supposed to be policing than anyone else.

Polls by the prime minister's secretariat dating back to 1969 detect no trace of latent militarism among the people. All along, only a minuscule handful has supported either extreme of Japan going it alone or choosing unarmed neutralism.

Japan is not as pacifistic a nation as Article 9 mandated that it be. But it also is not the innately militaristic country that some of its Asian neighbors and even some Americans believe it to be.

Now, piecemeal change is occurring. Defense is no longer a taboo. Formal revision of the so-called "Peace Constitution" -- an act that was unthinkable for most of the postwar era -- is now likely. And since 1995, when Japan marked the 50th anniversary of its defeat with a begrudging apology for its past "aggression and colonialism," calls for an end to apologies have expanded beyond the limits of small bands of rightists.

From a starting point far to the left during a quarter of a century after the end of the war, when Marxist-tinged pacifism made any discussion of security issues a taboo, Japan is moving to the right. But it still has not reached the center.