Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

What does the U.S. government say it is doing in Okinawa fifty-five years after the end of World War II? Throughout the postwar period, the United States has vacillated between two basic arguments: the forces are there either in order to defend Japan or in order to contain Japan. Though one contradicts the other, each is alternately resurrected, depending on the current situation in East Asia, and used to justify policies that were first formulated to deal with conditions that existed in 1951, when the peace treaty and the security treaty were negotiated, and that ceased to exist at least two decades ago. Even in 1951, Japan was in no danger of being attacked by another nation and even less capable of attacking one of its neighbors.

According to Article 5 of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, the purpose of the treaty is to defend Japan. Needless to say, the document did not explain whom Japan was to be defended from or dwell on whether Japan needed America’s help in defending itself. No attempt has been made to invade the main islands since a Mongol fleet dispatched by Kublai Khan was dispersed by a “divine wind” in A.D. 1281. After the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Americans essentially gave up on the idea of an invasion and turned instead to defeating Japan through the use of nuclear weapons, strategic bombing, and a blockade.

Since World War II, only the former Soviet Union could conceivably have mounted such an invasion, although there is no evidence that it ever seriously considered doing so. American and Japanese defense officials love to say that Okinawa’s excessive burdens in the Cold War are a result of the island’s “strategic location.” But Okinawa was hardly well located to anchor a defense against the USSR, which in any case self-destructed a decade ago.

The Pentagon regularly suggests that Japan faces potential threats from North Korea and China. But North Korea is a failed Communist regime unable to feed its own people and still engaged in a barely repressed civil war with South Korea, which is twice as populous, infinitely richer, and fully capable of defending itself. The Japanese government has strongly expressed its own fears of a potential North Korean missile assault ever since Pyongyang in August 1998 fired a rocket over Japan in the process of launching a small satellite. The real threat, however, is that a suicidal North Korea—itself feeling threatened by the might of the United States—could deliver some kind of terror weapon (if it has one) to Japan by boat and detonate it there as a final, if futile, act of retaliation for Japan’s brutal colonial rule of and postwar hostility toward it. This would be more than half a century late, the worst blowback nightmare and a horrific reminder that the acts of empire are seldom forgotten by those who have suffered them. To date, however, there is no evidence that North Korea is suicidally inclined. Public opinion in Japan, in fact, remains deeply suspicious of American claims that North Korea is a threat. In 1994, when the possible existence of a North Korean nuclear arsenal first surfaced in the media, in a four-nation poll of attitudes, the Japanese named the United States as “the biggest threat to world peace,” followed by Russia and only then by North Korea.³³

The notion that the main thrust of the security treaty was to defend against Chinese expansionism, or to “contain” China, or to provide a platform from which the United States could intervene militarily in the Taiwan Strait to defend Taiwan, Japan’s former colony, from attack by mainland China is a very embarrassing and dangerous one for Japan. In Japan’s own peace treaty with China ending World War II, Japan clearly acknowledged Taiwan as a part of China. Chinese leaders regularly remind Japan that enlarging the scope of the security treaty to include Taiwan directly violates commitments Japan has long made to China.

The Japanese public (and even the conservative ruling party) do not in any case believe that their country is threatened by China. It is widely accepted that Taiwan’s highly modern defense forces effectively deter any form of military takeover by the mainland. For the public, given what Japan did in China during World War II, a serious conflict with that nation over Taiwan is unthinkable. The Japanese also applaud the evolution of the previously revolutionary People’s Republic from its emphasis on opposition to its former imperialist oppressors to domestic development through commerce with them. Japan’s policy is to do everything in its power to adjust to the reemergence of China on the world stage. It also appreciates that China, while resurgent, still has only a gross domestic product of $560 billion, compared to Japan’s $5 trillion and the United States’ $7.2 trillion; a defense budget of $31.7 billion, compared to Japan’s $47 billion and the United States’ $263.9 billion; and perhaps as many as 149 strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the United States’ 7,150.

In polls, the Japanese public has repeatedly expressed a greater concern about oscillations in U.S. policy toward China than about anything China has done or has the capability to do to Japan. Given the large military expeditionary forces the United States maintains in Japan, the real fear is that increased American belligerence toward China might invite Chinese retaliation against the bases in Japan. This is one reason why former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa advocates maintaining the Japanese-American alliance while eliminating permanent U.S. forces from Japanese territory.³⁴

The Japanese, too, have the ability to defend themselves from any likely nonnuclear threat to their security. With the second largest navy in the Pacific, more destroyers than the United States, and 120 F-15 fighter interceptors, Japan is quite capable of meeting any challenge that might arise, including one to its merchant fleet. Shunji Taoka, the military correspondent for the Asahi newspaper, argues that Japan has long been fully capable of supplying its own air, naval, and ground defenses and need rely on the United States only for its “nuclear umbrella.” According to Taoka, if the United States withdrew its forces, Japan would not need to add anything further to its defense expenditures in order to maintain its security.³⁵

If, then, American troops are not in Japan to defend Japan, could they be there to contain it? Is their role that of an “honorable watchdog” (gobanken-sama), as many conservative Japanese politicians have contended in the postwar years? The most famous expression of this came from Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, in a 1990 interview with the Washington Post.³⁶ His forces, he claimed, were like a “cap in the bottle,” preventing the monster of revived Japanese militarism from jumping out and, as in the first half of the twentieth century, threatening other East Asian countries. Versions of this view are often seen in the American press; a typical example also from the Post: “Neighboring countries, with a particularly vivid memory of Japanese aggression during World War II, also worry that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, Japan would almost certainly build up its own military power.”³⁷

One problem with this theory is that the United States has long pushed Japan to build up exactly the military power it is supposed to be containing. The government sells more advanced weapons to Japan than to any other nation or territory except Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. It has allowed the licensing of the technology of General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter plane (a derivative of which in Japan became the FS-X); it has sold Japan advanced Aegis ship missile-defense systems, ultrasophisticated AWACS command and control aircraft, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and with highly publicized threats about the dangers of the “rogue state” of North Korea has even gotten the Japanese to agree to help fund research for an antiballistic missile system. And that only scratches the surface of U.S. arms and technology transfers. In addition, administration and Pentagon officials have urged their Japanese equivalents to be strategically bolder in deploying Japanese defense forces in Asia—far bolder, in fact, than most Japanese would like their country to be.

The Pentagon is today the most important political force inside or outside Japan calling for a greatly expanded Japanese military role in world affairs. In a public-opinion poll conducted by the Asahi newspaper, 43 percent of the Japanese public opposed and only 37 percent approved the expanded Guidelines on U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation that the two countries signed in 1997.³⁸ These commit Japan to supporting American troops in times of “emergency” with many forms of assistance—opening up Japan’s civilian airports to American military operations, collaborating with American forces in removing mines, enforcing naval embargoes, and other types of direct military operations. These guidelines, as the Asahi newspaper declared editorially, have, in effect, rewritten the security treaty without consultations either with the Japanese Diet or Congress.³⁹ Such ongoing American policies undoubtedly serve to maintain