was so exhausted he had to be relieved. He had reattached the main bolt holding the rear rotor but had not yet installed the cotter pin, which prevents a bolt from becoming unscrewed due to vibration in flight, when he went back to his quarters. He failed to tell his day-shift replacement to do so. The bolt subsequently came off, sending the helicopter out of control.63
The helicopter accident and arguments over the Japanese SOFA were the context in which President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld introduced their grand plans for redesigning the United States’s military empire. The issues of local crime and criminal jurisdiction in Okinawa did not go away, but they were upstaged by the strategic implications of China s explosive economic growth, which is soon likely to challenge the United States’s status as “the world’s only superpower.” It has long been an article of neocon faith that the United States must do everything in its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly or hostile, which meant that after the collapse of the Soviet Union they turned their attention to China as one of our probable next enemies. In 2001, having come to power along with George W. Bush, the neocon-servatives had shifted much of our nuclear targeting from Russia to China. They also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan, China’s breakaway province, over defense of the island; ordered a shift of army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region; and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan.
On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use “the full force of the American military” against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.”64 This was American policy until 9/11, when China enthusiastically joined the “war on terrorism” and the president and his advisers became preoccupied with their “axis of evil” and making war on Iraq. At the time, the United States and China were also enjoying extremely close economic relations, which the big-business wing of the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize. The Middle East thus trumped the neocons’ Asia policy.
While the Americans were distracted, China went about its economic business for almost four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and the center of gravity for all Asian economies, including Japans. Rapidly industrializing China also developed a voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw materials, which brought it into direct competition with the world’s largest importers, the United States and Japan. By the summer of 2004, Bush’s strategists again became alarmed over China’s growing power and its potential to challenge American hegemony in East Asia. The Republican Party platform, unveiled at its convention in New York in August 2004, proclaimed that “America will help Taiwan defend itself.”
Toward that end, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what American officials call a “normal nation.” On August 13, 2004, in Tokyo, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated baldly that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council it would first have to get rid of its pacifist constitution. Bush administration officials would like to turn Japan into what they call the “Britain of the Far East”—and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. Another major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan’s active participation in their massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is seeking, among other things, an end to Japan’s ban on the export of military technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the technical problems of its so far failing Star Wars system. The Koizumi cabinet has not resisted this American pressure since it complements a renewed nationalism and xenophobia among Japanese voters—attitudes that the Koizumi government has fostered—and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan’s established position as the leading economic power in East Asia.
What the Bush strategists and the Pentagon do not seem to understand is that China has real grievances against Japan and that American policy is exacerbating them. During World War II, the Japanese killed approximately twenty-three million Chinese throughout East Asia—higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis—and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and American imperialism.65 In what for the Chinese is a painful act of symbolism, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo after becoming Japanese prime minister in 2001, a practice he has repeated every year since. Koizumi likes to say that he is merely honoring Japan’s war dead, but Yasukuni is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in domestic military campaigns aimed at returning direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country’s wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.
In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying only, “The winner passed judgment on the loser.”66 In a museum on the shrine’s grounds, there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that, according to a placard, made its 1940 combat debut over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly no accident that, during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals in Chongqing, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese national anthem.67
Yasukuni’s priests have always claimed close ties to the Japanese imperial household, but the late emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there. In July 2006, the Tokyo press reported on recently discovered diaries kept by a former high-ranking aide to Emperor Hirohito. They revealed that the wartime emperor objected to the 1978 decision of the Yasukuni priests to add the names of fourteen World War II leaders who had been convicted of crimes against humanity to the list of those honored at the shrine. According to the diarist, who died in 2003, Hirohito said to him, “That is why I have not visited the shrine since.” Hirohito died in 1989.
The Chinese regard Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni as insulting and somewhat comparable to President Reagan’s ill-considered 1985 visit to Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where SS soldiers are buried. The Chinese thus are not inclined to see the reorganization of American bases in Japan as a response to the Okinawans’ outrage over the SOFA or any other technical issue. Instead, Beijing regards the new deployments as part of a provocative policy of American imperialism to shore up its hegemony in East Asia.
On November 27, 2003, President Bush issued an official statement: “Beginning today, the United States will intensify ... our ongoing review of our overseas force posture.”68 The administration indicated that nations such as Germany, South Korea, and even Japan could see significant redeployments of military forces as the Pentagon focused more on the “war on terror.” China was not mentioned directly, but it was certainly on the minds of Bush’s advisers. If, in the cases of Germany and South Korea, the United States was retaliating—for German hostility to the invasion of Iraq and South Korea’s openly expressed feeling that including North Korea in the president’s “axis of evil” was a strategic blunder—Japan was still being touted as the “keystone” to America’s position in East Asia.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration had clearly not given much thought to how to sell its plans for “global force repositioning” to Japan. In their monthly meetings with Japanese defense officials, Pentagon subordinates began by talking about making Japan into a “frontline base” or an “East Asian Britain.” These trial balloons so alarmed the Japanese that they asked for further discussions to be delayed until after the July 2004 elections for the upper house of the Diet. While the United States complied, the Japanese press reported that “the Pentagon is irritated by Japan’s unenthusiastic response to U.S. plans.”69
