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

American university campuses in the late sixties and early seventies were not ideal places for anyone who doubted that Mao Zedong was a true scourge of bureaucracy or who questioned whether there was any wisdom at all in his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Campus Maoism was everywhere, fueled by the general euphoria over China that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed. (Let us not forget that even seasoned journalists like James Reston and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times went a little gaga over the China they thought they saw.)

It was clear to me, however, that the Chinese “revolution” had degenerated into a Herodian horror show, destructive to the lives of all honest Chinese—fascinating to monitor, perhaps, but no longer of great significance to the global balance of power. In Japan, on the other hand, something interesting was going on to which no one in America seemed to be paying serious attention. In the summer of 1972, I returned to a Japan well on its way toward becoming the most advanced industrial nation on earth. The contrast with my earliest naval experiences there or with the Japan of 1961, when my wife and I had set up a household in a Tokyo suburb, was stark indeed. Japan’s economic “miracle” (a term used by Westerners to denote something attractive but from their point of view unexpected) was everywhere becoming obvious. Its economy had been growing for fifteen years at an annual rate of around 10 percent, and the results were starting to come in. Japan was producing a line of automobiles that American and East Asian consumers were beginning to buy in large numbers, thanks to their low price, reliability, fuel efficiency, built-in air-conditioning, and compact size. In design, its cameras, consumer electronics, and ships, among many other products, rivaled in simplicity and elegance the traditional designs of its houses and ceramics.

To a China specialist disillusioned by the savageries of the Cultural Revolution, Japan looked like a unique case of successful socialism in one country. A state bureaucracy guided the economy, setting social goals but avoiding the misallocation of resources, loss of incentives, and extreme rigidity that were hallmark features of the Soviet and Chinese economies. How had it done this? Americans were largely uninterested in answering such a question, even though Japan’s trade surpluses were starting to irritate their government. Americans were not even curious about the new institutional structures that Japan had forged to engineer high-speed economic growth, structures that would prevent any quick or easy solution to the trade imbalance. We still saw Japan as a “little brother,” learning from and emulating its postwar mentor. The idea that Japan could be experimenting with a different form of capitalism was, if even imaginable, certainly heresy. That they were beating us in manufacturing and marketing certain major products had to mean they were cheating.

Americans defined Japan as a democracy organized around a free-market economy, just as the United States itself was said to be. In his memoirs, Edwin O. Reischauer—the best-known American specialist on Japanese history and ambassador to Japan during the 1960s, at the height of that country’s “income-doubling plan”—hardly bothered to mention the economy. The truly amazing thing about such American myopia and condescension was that it would last well into the late 1990s, when it would suddenly turn into contempt for Japan precisely because it had a different kind of capitalism.

In the summer of 1972, one of my mentors and a preeminent political scientist, Professor Junnosuke Masumi, urged me to consider the then-emerging economic miracle. American scholars like me, he pointed out, tended to focus on left-wing and protest politics in Japan; virtually none of us had devoted any attention to its ruling elites. There were only a few studies in English of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been continuously in power since the country had regained its independence in 1952, and nothing at all on the vast bureaucratic state apparatus that supported and guided the economy in much the same way the Department of Defense supported and guided the military-industrial-university complex in the United States.

We talked specifically about the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Among knowledgeable Japanese in the Tokyo of that moment, it was the openly acknowledged author of the economic miracle. Much as Professor Levenson had suggested that I look into Japanese-occupied China to find the roots of the Chinese Communist Party’s success, so Professor Masumi suggested that I look into the roots of MITI to find the basis for his country’s “successful socialism.” I spent the next decade on this project, writing a history of an economic ministry that I thought might interest a few public policy specialists who did not read Japanese, as well as the usual group of Japanologists. I did not realize then that my research would inadvertently lead me to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported.

I have already indicated the main intellectual debts I owe. For help in conceptualizing and writing this particular book, I would like to acknowledge the following people, who gave me ideas, told me I was wrong, or otherwise provided inspiration: Sumi Adachi, Kozy Amemiya, Ron Bevacqua, Steven C. Clemons, Bruce Cumings, Jim Fallows, Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, George Hicks, Jim Impoco, Sam Jameson, Andrew Janos, Barry Keehn, Andrew Maclntyre, Gavan McCormack, Yoshihiko Naka-moto, Masahide Ota, Murray Sayle, Tim Shorrock, Patrick Smith, Odete Sousa, Koji Taira, Norman Thorpe, Chikako Yoshida, and Eiji Yutani. The monthly papers and conference presentations of members of the Japan Policy Research Institute over the past six years have also contributed greatly to my thinking. Sandra Dijkstra, my agent, was instrumental in causing me to write this book. At Metropolitan Books, Tom Engelhardt was the best editor an author could imagine, meticulous in challenging and sharpening my ideas and my writing; publisher Sara Bershtel encouraged me with her unflagging commitment to the book. Sheila K. Johnson has been my constant companion in trying to understand the world we live in.

Cardiff, California

July 1999

BLOWBACK

BLOWBACK

Northern Italian communities had, for years, complained about lowflying American military aircraft. In February 1998, the inevitable happened. A Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler with a crew of four, one of scores of advanced American jet fighters and bombers stationed at places like Aviano, Cervia, Brindisi, and Sigonella, sliced through a ski-lift cable near the resort town of Cavalese and plunged twenty people riding in a single gondola to their deaths on the snowy slopes several hundred feet below. Although marine pilots are required to maintain an altitude of at least one thousand feet (two thousand, according to the Italian government), the plane had cut the cable at a height of 360 feet. It was traveling at 621 miles per hour when 517 miles per hour was considered the upper limit. The pilot had been performing low-level acrobatics while his copilot took pictures on videotape (which he later destroyed).

In response to outrage in Italy and calls for vigorous prosecution of those responsible, the marine pilots argued that their charts were inaccurate, that their altimeter had not worked, and that they had not consulted U.S. Air Force units permanently based in the area about local hazards. A court-martial held not in Italy but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone involved, calling it a “training accident.” Soon after, President Bill Clinton apologized and promised financial compensation to the victims, but on May 14, 1999, Congress dropped the provision for aid to the families because of opposition in the House of Representatives and from the Pentagon.¹

This was hardly the only such incident in which American service personnel victimized foreign civilians in the post–Cold War world. From Germany and Turkey to Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been common—as has been their usual denouement. The United States government never holds politicians or higher-