r.

taggart murphy

ON SHINZO ABES JAPAN

History and Legitimacy in East Asia

n 14 december 2014, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo

Abes Liberal Democratic Party won what appeared to be
a resounding victory in Lower House elections for the
second time in two years. But a closer look reveals that
these victories were rather odd. The ldp could not secure even 20
per cent of the votes of Japans total electorate in either contest. The
party had actually commanded a higher share back in 2009, when it
lost control of the Lower House and was obliged to turn over the reins
of government to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. That
was the only time voters had ever interrupted Japans so-called oneparty democracy, known locally as the 1955 system for the year in which
the ldp was founded. (The ldp had also briefly been forced into opposition in 1993 because of defections from the ranks of its own legislators.)
The ldps return to power in 2012, with a lower share of the electorate
than that which got it kicked out in the first place, is generally ascribed
in Tokyo to a boycott by the dpjs erstwhile supporters, an abstention
repeated last December.
The dpj had been swept into government in 2009 on the hopes of
millions of Japanese voters for real political change. But the demise of
the first dpj cabinet under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama in 2010
demonstrated that those hopes had been misplaced. Hatoyama was
sabotaged by parts of the bureaucracy and by a concerted campaign in
the serious newspapers. Such attacks dog all ambitious reformist politicians in Japan, appearing with the predictability of flies buzzing around
farm animals on hot days. But in Hatoyamas case, the bureaucrats and
pundits who brought him down were able to enlist the crucial help of the
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American foreign-policy establishment, dismayed by the dpjs promise

to overhaul Japans security set-up and foreign relations.
Since the end of the us Occupation in 1951, Japan has functioned effectively as an American protectorate rather than an ally. The 1951 usJapan
Security Treaty, amended in 1960, is effectively a base-leasing agreement, allowing the Pentagon to maintain a large network of military
bases throughout Japan, with much of the cost borne by the Japanese
taxpayer. For practical purposes, Washington has enjoyed veto power
over Japans foreign and defence policies. The dpj leaders had talked
of reducing the American military presence and negotiating improved
relations with Beijing. Japans spokesmen in the United Statesldp
partisans almost to a manused such talk to convince Washington that
the dpj was anti-American and threatened the status quo in the region.
Officials in charge of Japan at Hillary Clintons State Department, mostly
Pentagon alumni, fretted over the effects on the much-heralded pivot
towards Asia and the White House aligned itself with the ldp opposition. The Obama Administration proceeded to deal with Hatoyama in a
manner so insulting that, had it been directed at the leader of almost any
other country, millions would have poured into the streets demonstrating against the United States. In Japan, by contrast, this contemptuous
treatment of a sitting government gave the ldp and its mouthpieces in
the Tokyo media the ammunition they needed to demonstrate that the
dpj was damaging Japans most important foreign relationship.1
Hatoyamas two dpj successors, fearful of a similar fate, steered clear of
controversial foreign-policy initiatives, and a rift developed in the reformist party that became its undoing. Its last Prime Minister, the technocrat
Yoshihiko Noda, betrayed his party with a call for an early election in
2012 to secure the Ministry of Finance dream of higher taxes. Bereft of all
credibility, the dpj was punished by the boycott of millions of its former
supporters. Together with the disproportionate weight of more conservative and rural constituencies in Japans electoral set-up, plus the countrys
unique system of candidate-based first-past-the-post balloting and partybased proportional voting, the boycott has allowed the ldp to translate
its base of less than 20 per cent of Japans electorate into commanding
Lower House majorities. Its leader, Abe, had served once before as Prime
Minister, having taken over in 2006 from the show-bizzy Junichiro
For an account, see Gavan McCormack, Obama vs Okinawa, nlr 64, JulyAugust
2010.
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Koizumi. Abe thought that enough had been done in liberalizing the
Japanese economy during the Koizumi years to allow him to turn to what
was really important to him: the long-cherished right-wing agenda of
tearing up Japans postwar arrangements, with their supposedly alien
notions of democracy and constitutional government. The public greeted
these earlier efforts with a long yawn. Beset by a series of scandals and
pilloried in the press as tone deafkuuki yomenai, or cant read the air,
is the Japanese termAbe resigned after less than a year in office.
Six years later, in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the Fukushima
disaster, Abe appeared to have learned the lesson that if a government
appears unresponsive to peoples economic fears and aspirations, little else can be accomplished. On taking office for the second time in
December 2012, he announced three arrows to transform the Japanese
economy. He put a new man in charge of the Bank of Japan to shoot
the first arrow, a round of quantitative monetary easing to rival Ben
Bernankes: some 65 trillion ($350bn) in 2013, rising to 80 trillion
($450bn) in 2014. A 10.3 trillion ($116bn) binge of spending constituted the second arrow; Abe could rely on a legislature that would do
what it was told in matters of fiscal stimulus. The third arrow was an
ill-defined package of structural reforms. But the lack of concrete detail
really didnt matter since the first two arrows accomplished what Abe
wanted: goosing the stock market and trashing the yen. Corporate Japan
was ecstatic as its profits and export receipts surged in the wake of the
sharp currency weakening, although the quantities of exports barely
increased. The economic sugar-high lasted long enough for the ldp to
win Upper House elections in July 2013.
That gave Abe the freedom to do what he and the people around him
really wanted: set about restoring the openly authoritarian government
of the inter-war years. The ldp didnt have quite the super-majority it
needed to tear up the 1947 Constitution, which much of the party had
long pegged as an alien document imposed on Japan.2 So Abe acted as if
it were nothing but a piece of scrap paper, ramming a blatantly unconstitutional act governing the treatment of confidential information
through the Diet late in 2013 that gave the government the power to label
As Takashi Tachibana has demonstrated, substantial parts of the constitution were
actually lifted from a draft drawn up by liberal Japanese lawyers and journalists
during the 1920s: Tachibana, Watashi no goken-ron [My Constitution Theory],
Gekkan gendai, July 2007.
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anything it wanted classified and to prosecute anyone who attempted,

even unwittingly, to find out what might actually be going on. Then on 1
July 2014 the Cabinet announced, at Washingtons urgingand without
legislative approvalthat Japan would henceforth engage in collective self-defencemeaning that Tokyo could dispatch troops to take
part in conflicts that did not threaten Japan itself. Since Article 9 of the
Constitution renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation, specifies that land, sea and air forces will never be maintained and states
that the right of belligerency will not be recognized, the Cabinets
announcement was tantamount to a declaration that Japan had become
a lawless state, governed by executive decree.
Meanwhile, Abe had also stacked the management of nhk, the staterun television network, with far-right appointees, led by the conservative
businessman Katsuto Momii, and began worshipping at Tokyos Yasukuni
Shrine. This former spiritual centre of Japans wartime nationalist cult
not only memorializes the souls of millions of Japans war dead, but
also those of convicted war criminals who were enshrined there in
1979 by rightist prieststhe reason why official visits to Yasukuni have,
since then, provoked fury in China and South Korea, and why Japans
emperors stopped going to the shrine.

Washingtons perceptions
Abes attacks on institutions that stand in the way of his rightist agenda
need to be seen in the context of assaults on the rule of law in the us and
the ongoing collapse of political oversight of the organs of the American
national security state. An America in which the fourth, sixth, and eighth
amendments to the Constitution have effectively become dead letters is
hardly in a position to upbraid another country for ignoring its own Basic
Law. Nor does a Washington that permits a lawless cia to thumb its nose
at its nominal legislative overseers have any grounds for remonstrating
with a Tokyo that contemplates the establishment of unaccountable
secret panels to determine who might or might not have compromised
confidentiality. It is in President Obamas country, not Prime Minister
Abes, that whistleblowers in the National Security Agency have faced
draconian and vindictive prison sentences for exposing crime and
corruption in the government for which they worked.3 This very drift of
3

Obamas Crackdown on Whistleblowers, The Nation, 15 April 2013.

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the us away from its political moorings in democratically accountable

institutions has helped soothe the inherent tension that besets rightist
elements in the ldp, long forced to square their championing of the
usJapan alliance with their loathing for the legacy of the American
Occupationabove all, its regrettable legitimation of the notion of the
accountability of the governing to the governed.
Official Washington rejoiced in the ldps return to power in 2012, not
just because the ldp is partly a cia creationthe Agency had channelled
funds to Tokyo in 1955, financing a merger of conservative parties to
forestall a leftist electoral victoryor because its ties with the American
defence and foreign-policy establishments are so deep and long-standing.
The Pentagon wants a beefed-up Japanese war machine along with socalled inter-operability in East Asia, meaning that the two militaries
there would essentially function under one command. Abe held out the
promise of overcoming the largest obstacles to this inter-operability: the
Japanese Constitution and the festering opposition on the small island
of Okinawa, where much of the American military presence in Japan is
concentrated. Abes government threw so much money at Okinawa that
its governor flipped his stance and announced his support for a new us
Marine base that had been agreed between Tokyo and Washington but
is bitterly opposed by most of the local population. Legislation has been
passed to prohibit protests against the new base and, as of this writing,
preliminary construction work has begun.4
Washingtons jubilation was not only premature, but demonstrated
how little the real dynamics of power in Japan are understood there.
The rightist politicians and intellectuals who cluster around Abe blame
the Americans and their occupation of Japan for the supposed softening
of their country, which has sapped the moral fibre they deem essential
in any future confrontation with the belligerent new superpower on the
Asian mainland. While they may have precious little real affection for
the United States, neither can they conceive of any ready alternative to
the us alliance other than submission to a Beijing intent on recapturing the regional hegemony China enjoyed during dynastic times. Since
Washington also manifestly sees a genuinely democratic political order
in Japan as a problem for the American imperium, Japanese rightists
Whether it will ever be finished is not clearamong other things, a new governor
opposed to the base has since been elected.
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for the time being put up with and even welcome their countrys
subordination to Americas national security state. The subordination
is palatable to the Japanese right since it has learned through long
experience that it can enlist Washingtons help in dealing with any challenge it faces by dressing up the problem as a threat to the Pentagons
plans for East Asiamost recently demonstrated in its ability to pin the
anti-American label on the dpj.
But the agendas of official Washington and the Japanese right are not
the same. The American national security state sees Japan as simply
another vassalalbeit an important oneexpected to do what it is told
and not make trouble. The Pentagon and the Japanese right may hold
similar views on the need to contain China and on the inevitability of
an ultimate confrontation, peaceful or otherwise, but Washington is not
about to allow Tokyo to choose the timing and nature of that confrontation. Whats more, Washington wants Tokyo to have good relations
with Seoul, so that both can play the respective roles the Pentagon has
mapped out for them in coping with an unpredictable North Korea
while balancing and containing the rise of China. Other things being
equal, the Japanese right would also prefer to get along with Seoulbut
not at the price of giving up its long-cherished goal of rewriting the history of the 1930s and ridding Japan of the alien institutions and ideas
forced on their country by the Occupation.

Historys shadows
Perhaps nothing mystifies Washington so much as the continued obsession in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing with events that happened so long
ago that scarcely anyone now alive remembers them. But the domestic
political legitimacy of all three governments grows directly out of their
respective interpretations of those eventsand those interpretations
cannot be squared under any conceivable scenario. In Beijing, the morphing of a self-proclaimed revolutionary workers and peasants regime
into a Confucianesque bureaucratic mandarinate has entailed the construction of legitimizing foundations beyond Marxist-Leninist theory.
The Chinese Communist Party has effectively replaced the latter with
Confucian ideals of a benevolent mandarinate at the hub of a properly
ordered society. Thus, accounts of class struggle, the Long March and the
war against Chiang Kai-sheks Kuomintang have largely been replaced
in the ccps founding myths with preening over the partys ability to

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deliver economic growth and its supposedly central historic achievement in throwing the Japanese out of China. (In fact, the Kuomintang
bore the brunt of the fight against the Japanese.) Among other things,
the ccp hopes that by stressing the role of all patriotic Chinese in antiJapanese struggles, rather than harping on the Chinese civil war, an
eventual formal accommodation between Taiwan and the mainland
will become more palatable to the Kuomintangstill the ruling party
on the islandif not to the broader population there. But all this antiJapanese posturing makes it difficult for Beijing to do business directly
with Tokyo, particularly when the latter is now under the control of the
direct descendantsgenetically and otherwiseof those who raped and
pillaged their way through China.
Meanwhile, though South Korea may be one of the worlds great economic success stories, problems of legitimacy have plagued the regime
since its inception. Whatever one may think of the dprks sorry record
of oppression and brutality, the credentials of its founder, Kim Il Sung,
as a guerrilla soldier against the Japanese occupation of Korea are not in
doubt. By contrast, Syngman Rhee, the first President of South Korea,
was placed in office by Washington and forced into exile in 1960 by a
student uprising. Less than two years later, Park Chung-hee, the father
of the current President, took power in a military coup. More than any
other single person he can be credited with Koreas economic miracle,
but his socialization and thinking about issues of power and development
were almost entirely Japanese. He was educated in colonial Manchuria,
studied at Japans top military academy, served in the Japanese army,
adopted a Japanese name and, when he seized power, drove forward the
industrialization of his country with a rule book that could have been
written by Japans kakushin kanryo, or reform bureaucratsthe men
who put the Japanese economy on a war footing in the 1930s, administered Manchuria as a showcase colony and would, in the postwar world,
form the nucleus of the legendary miti, the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry.
This history restricts the political space available to Parks daughter for
any accommodation with a Japanese government intent on rewriting
accounts of the 1930s and 40s. Any narrative that portrays the Koreans
as other than pure and righteous victims of brutal Japanese imperialism
is intolerable to the present government in Seoul. No room exists in
official circles for any nuanced discussion of Korean collaboration with

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their occupiers, or any genuinely comprehensive account of what led

to the comfort womenthe euphemism for the thousands of young
Korean women herded by the Japanese military into sexual servitude.
The Japanese may have taken the systematization of sexual slavery in
Korea and elsewhere to unprecedented levels, but the full story of the
institutionalized exploitation of poorer young women throughout East
Asia, which long predated Japanese colonization and would long outlive it, interferes with the myth of evil Japanese and virtuous, victimized
Koreans. Perhaps the ugliest aspect of colonialismand the hardest to
face up to lateris the moral collapse it engenders in the colonized: the
countless small (and not-so-small) betrayals of ones friends, neighbours,
family, and ultimately ones own self-respect, in order to survive. Most
people trapped by foreign oppression understandably like to conceive
themselves as Danes pinning yellow stars to their chests out of solidarity
with their Jewish compatriots; the sordid record of Vichy France is closer
to what usually happens. But that leaves the child of a collaborationist
with an Achilles heel.

Violating tatemae
Meanwhile, what of Abe and the people around him? Where does
this obsession with rewriting the past come from? Any attempt to airbrush out of history the Rape of Nanjing, the systematic enslavement
of Korean, and other non-Japanese, women, the terror-bombing of
Chongjing, the deliberate murder of some 70,000 ethnic Chinese after
the fall of Singapore, or the medical experiments carried out on human
subjects by the infamous Unit 731to list only the most notorious of the
atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Armyis a fools game
by any standard of evidence or objective truth. A Japanese leader who
took an unsentimentally realist attitude towards his countrys national
interests would instantly grasp the problems of legitimation facing his
counterparts in Seoul and Beijing; he would recognize that attempts to
rewrite history threaten to block the two obvious strategic paths available to Japan: either a restructured relationship with China, or a tacit
balancing against Chinese power via alliances with South Korea and
the United States.
Most Japanese do not share the rightist dreams that appear to motivate
Abe and his advisers. They are barely awareif at allof what actually

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happened in the 1930s. Schools skip over it, while a veritable tsunami
of novels, films and television programmes portrays the Japanese of
the timeincluding soldiers, political leaders and generalsas decent
people caught up in horrific events through no fault of their own. Even
the most liberal and well-meaning Japanese find it almost intolerable to
face up directly to the scale of what took place. If forced to do so, they
fall back on a vague sense that this is what war inevitably brings in its
wakeone reason why pacifism is so deeply entrenched in Japan.
What particularly irks ordinary Japanese is the sense that the past is
being used selectively as a bludgeon with which to beat them. They view
the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the firebombing of Tokyo by Curtis LeMays us Army Air Force, as atrocities on
the scale of anything committed by the Japanese Imperial Armyand
justifiably so. But Washington, for all its arrogance and condescension
towards Tokyo, usually manages to avoid rubbing Japans face in the
events of the time. Not so Seoul and Beijing. A ccp that presided over
mass starvation and a vast system of black jails, that appears intent
on subjecting Tibet and the Uighur lands of Chinas northwest to what
amounts to cultural devastation has, in the view of most Japanese, little moral standing to say anything about Japans war-time behaviour.
Meanwhile, what appears to many in Tokyo to be Seouls endless harping
on the comfort women sticks in the Japanese craw. For every Japanese
male of a certain age knows what a kisaeng house is; in the early postwar
decades, South Korea was practically a byword among Japanese men as
a paradise for sex tourism. The infrastructure of that tourism was not
run by Japanese.
To many Japanese, it all seems a kind of free-floating malevolence
against which they feel defenceless. Much of this sentiment stems from
unthinking extrapolation of what goes on in Japanese society to the level
of international relations. Two parties in Japancompanies, individuals,
government bureausthat have to get along with each other will tacitly agree to a kind of fictional construct to describe their relationship,
for which the Japanese word is tatemae. Violating tatemaeblurting
out the truth, as it wereis thus usually interpreted as an intentionally
aggressive act, and that is the way most Japanese reflexively see Beijings
repeated references to the Rape of Nanjing or Seouls constant bringing
up of the comfort women. If these governments had genuinely good

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intentions towards Tokyo, they would be content to wrap all discussion

of the past in clouds of euphemisms about unfortunate history and
building peaceable frameworks to prevent any repeat.
But neither Seoul nor Beijing are prepared to engage in any such dance,
and certainly not with a government in Tokyo that appears to be such a
direct descendant of the regime that made war upon their countries and
inflicted untold suffering on their ancestors. That the ccp could never
have seized power had the Imperial Japanese Army not first crippled
Chiang Kai-sheks military; that the South Korean regime, dogged from
its inception by the shadow of collaboration, has had to wage a sixty-year
struggle with fellow Koreans in Pyongyang, advertising themselves as
the true Korean patriots, makes it even harder for either Seoul or Beijing
to ignore what Abe and the people around him are intent on doing.

Guardians of kokutai
Unlike the great majority of Japanese, Abe and his advisers have an
acute, if blinkered, understanding of the past that amounts to an obsession. That obsession goes back to the roots of the modern Japanese state
in the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1868in reality, a coup dtat staged
by low-ranking provincial samurai from western Japan. Distraught at the
erosion of samurai privilege and the disarray and weakness of a visibly
declining Tokugawa shogunate in the face of peremptory demands
from Western imperialists, they cloaked their seizure of power with two
mutually contradictory sets of legitimizing notions: direct rule by the
emperor, on the one hand, and notions of constitutional government
floating in from the West on the other. They proceeded to force-march
their country into the ranks of the industrial powers so effectively that,
in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, they defeated a European state and,
from that point on, could compel Westerners to treat them as something
close to equals. Their success naturally buttressed their legitimacy.
But a gap remained between the fiction of Imperial rule and the reality
of government by self-appointed oligarchs, and that gap set the stage for
a century of power struggles. The bureaucratized oligarchy that inherited power from the Meiji leaders after the latter began dying off in the
early decades of the 20th century had no formal means of adjudicating
disputes, since it theoretically governed in the name of an emperor who
almost never actually made decisions. The result was colossal political

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irresponsibility that would culminate in the prosecution of a land war in

Asia that lacked any plausible scenario for victory, and in a direct attack on
an overseas power with an industrial base ten times larger than Japans.
The United States began the Occupation of Japan intent on purging the
power structure of those who, in the American view, were responsible
for the war. Scores of insiders were arrested and hauled before the Tokyo
War Crimes tribunals, which soon degenerated into something close to
a farce, since the Americans made any discussion of the involvement
and culpability of the Emperor off-limits. (Douglas MacArthur, Supreme
Commander of the Occupation and obsessed with burnishing his reputation as a benevolent viceroy, had convinced himself that the Emperor
had to be shielded from any demand for accountability; that the alternative would be widespread disorder.) Faced with a resurgent Japanese left,
an increasing drain on the us Treasury and the startling loss of China,
where Mao Zedongs guerrillas were on the verge of power, Washington
reversed course, in the jargon of the time, and effectively handed the
keys of power back to those elements of the Japanese elite that had survived the immediate postwar purges.
This elites return to power had to be rationalized with an update of the
contradictory political fictions constructed during the Meiji period: the
fiction of parliamentary government, the fiction of direct Imperial rule,
and the reality of control by the low-ranking provincial samurai who had
seized power in the 1860s. The American-imposed Constitution of the
postwar era transposed these constructs into keys that were, to be sure,
less audibly jarring. Among other things, much of the postwar Japanese
population wanted their country to be what it claimed to be: a democracy
with sovereignty vested in the Japanese people. But while most of Japans
power holders were content to use this construct to render their government legitimate in the eyes of the worldthe Occupation, and the terms
on which it ended, really gave them no choicethey have never fully
accepted the constitutional-democratic basis of their right to rule. They
continue, without being explicit in the matter, to fall back on notions
of Japan as a unique, holy land centred on the Imperial House as the
ultimate source legitimizing their political power; kokutai, or national
essence, was the prewar term. This is particularly true of elements in the
elite that were the direct beneficiaries of the reverse course of the late
1940s and who, with cia help, brought the ldp into being in 1955 to help
secure their hold on the key pillars of the Japanese power structure: the

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great bureaucracies and the interlocking corporations and banks. They

may not use the word much any more, but the mystical nature of kokutai
and the notion that its preservation is the fundamental task of Japans
rulers underscores their belief in their right to rule. Since their legitimacy in the prewar set-up stemmed directly from their self-appointed
roles as guardians of kokutai, a dispassionate examination of what had
led Japan to disaster became impossible, for it would undermine their
need in the postwar world to set their claims to power beyond challenge.

Heirs and challengers

More than any other single figure in Japan, Abe embodies the continuity
of Japans modern power elite since it coalesced in the late 19th century.
He grew up at the knee of his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who had not
only been one of the most important leaders during the fascist years
economic czar of Japans showcase colony of Manchuria and Minister
of Munitions in the Tojo cabinetbut emerged as the key architect of
the postwar political order in Japan: both the ldp and the usJapan
alliance. Since boyhood, Abe has been obsessed with bringing about
an interpretation of the events of the 20th century that would clear his
grandfathers name and cement the notion that the war was forced on
Japanthat its leaders had had no choice. Abes triumph amounts to
more than the electoral humiliation of Japans organized opposition. It
represents the return of his grandfathers original idea of an ldp that
would serve to pre-empt the possibility of future challenge to the control
Japans bureaucratized oligarchy had just reasserted over its core political
and economic institutions, after the hiatus of the Occupation. The political infrastructure built by Kishi and his allies did succeed in blocking
any leftist takeover of Japans parliamentary machinery, something that
looked highly probable in the immediate postwar decade. But the ldps
architects failed to take comparable measures against an insurrection
within the ldp itself. Until 1971, ldp prime ministersincluding Kishi
himselfwere mostly mandarins who had risen from within Japans
great bureaucracies. But the machinery of electoral politics allowed for
the possibility of capture by a populist from within the ranks of the ldp
who could master the intricacies of its power balances, and that is what
happened in 1971 when Kakuei Tanaka became Prime Minister.
A political genius who hailed fromand spoke forJapans rural
hinterlands, Tanaka had little interest in rightist fantasizing about

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Japans national essence. He sought to cut dealsand he was very good

at it. Among other things, he negotiated the establishment of diplomatic
relations between Tokyo and Beijing with Zhou En-Lai. The bureaucracy
made its peace with Tanaka, since he never really challenged the basis of
oligarchical rule; what he wantedand gotwas more for the millions
of farmers and small businessmen throughout Japan who formed his
political base. The situation was tolerable to Japans traditional power
elite as long as the economy was growing. But the slowdown after the
implosion of the so-called bubble economy of the late 1980s exposed
a rift in the ldp between the bulwarks of oligarchical rule and the disciples Tanaka had left behind him. The most able of these disciples, Ichiro
Ozawa, announced in a bestselling book his intention to use Tanakas
methods to transform elected politicians from servants of the bureaucratized elite into its masters, in the process turning Japan into what he
called a normal country. He led the 1993 walk-out from the ldp that
briefly forced the party into opposition. After this first failure to construct an alternative to rule by the ldpbureaucrat nexus that had run
Japan since 1955, Ozawa went on to ally himself with the founders of
the dpj. His brilliance as a political tactician led directly to the dpjs
victory in 2009.
That election frightened Japans traditional power elite. It wasnt just
the ldps defeat. For implicit in Ozawas notions of political competition and rule by those answerable to voters was the democratic
bridling of the formal and informal bureaucracies that have ruled
Japan since the Meiji leaders began dying off. This alone explains the
determination of Japans power elite to ensure nothing similar to 2009
can ever happen again. That means more than just neutering the existing opposition. The example of Tanaka and Ozawa shows that as long as
the infrastructure of electoral politics offers the possibility of ambitious
politicians actually seizing the reins of power, it constitutes a threat to
continued control by Japans bureaucratic oligarchs. The basis of their
legitimacy thus cannot be allowed to reside in votes and elections but
rather in the right to rule of a wise, self-perpetuating mandarinate. It is
here that we can pinpoint the compulsion to rewrite history: in the need
to put the right to rule beyond challenge.
Beijing and Tokyo thus end up converging on the same historical
Confucian definition of a just political order: rule by a benevolent elite
whose claims to power rest on their superior education, insight, and

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morals. After flirting with models of legitimacy imported from the

Westrespectively the leading role of properly socialized Marxists, and
the victors of free and fair electionsboth are reverting to historical type.
But that does not make an accommodation any easier since, as we have
seen, the founding myths of the two mandarinates cannot be squared.

Myth and miscalculation

So where does that leave us? China does not view Japan as an independent polity but as a proxy for Washington and American intentions to
prevent the restoration of what Beijing sees as the proper state of things:
a benevolent, China-centred order in East Asia. Neither Washington nor
Tokyo have done anything to allay Beijings suspicions of who it is they
are actually talking to when they negotiate with Tokyo. Beijings sudden
pushing of claims to a small group of islets in the waters between the two
countries is usually depicted as part of a wider thrust to restore Chinas
historic hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. But it bears remembering
that the Chinese provocations began only in the wake of the destruction
of the first dpj government, in which Washington played such a crucial role. That government had dispatched some 600 top business and
cultural figures to China, led by Ozawa, with the announced intention
of renegotiating the basis of the relationship between the two countries. The contrast between the warmth accorded this delegation and
Washingtons insulting and contemptuous treatment of Hatoyama gave
rise to widespread media speculation in Tokyo of a fundamental realignment in Japans foreign relations, as well as spasms of hysteria in the
us foreign-policy establishment. Hatoyamas downfall happened soon
thereafter, followed by the beginnings of the dispute over the islets.
Many Japanese, right-leaning or otherwise, fear Beijings intentions.
The majority do not support Abes right-wing agenda, but the drastic
deterioration in relations with Beijing since Hatoyamas resignation has
played directly into the hands of those who argue that there is no alternative to Abes plans, if Japan is not to be swallowed up by a resurgent
Chinawhich is why most either voted without enthusiasm for the ldp
or stayed home. Certainly there is today no credible opposition around
which they could coalesce. Among other things, only the existing power
structure in Tokyo is seen as capable of ensuring the continuation of
the American support that most Japanese regard as their only hope for
counterbalancing China. But the situation has the makings of a tragedy,

murphy: Japan

127

for it leaves the American national security state and the Japanese right
hostage to each other. Elements of the Japanese right that openly crave
some sort of showdown with China helped fan the flames of the islet
dispute. Those voices may have been stilled for the time being, but the
impossibility of squaring the rights foundation myths with the necessary preconditions for peaceable relations with China increases the
potential for miscalculation. Beijing, for its part, might conceivably seek
to provoke a crisis that would be severe enough to humiliate and embarrass Tokyo, but remain just this side of bringing the us military into
the picture, thereby demonstrating to Japan that the us security guarantee is ultimately unreliable and forcing a restructuring of JapanChina
relations on Beijings terms.5
The alternative is a Japanese government enjoying the full legitimacy
that stems from majority popular support, a government that could
negotiate with both Washington and Beijing as a sovereign, independent entity. Only when it has this will China take Japan seriously. Even
for the United States, an ally that takes responsibility for its own security and foreign relations, rather than a sullen protectorate governed
by backward-looking revanchists, is far less likely to blunder into the
sort of confrontation that would force the us to act or be seen as the
proverbial paper tiger. For the time being, no such ally is anywhere in
sight, since no credible scenario leading to the preconditiona fully
legitimate Japanese government enjoying wide popular supportis
imaginable. One can only hope for Japans sake, and for the sake of the
wider world, that the next time the possibility emerges it will be encouraged rather than squelched.

See, for example, Howard French, Chinas Dangerous Game, The Atlantic,
November 2014.
5