Base issues

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

DEMONSTRATIONS in Japan are generally ultra-polite affairs, and those in the southern island prefecture of Okinawa contain more than their share of greying residents who would normally abhor physical confrontation. Yet since the start of the year protests to stop construction work on a new airstrip for American marines at Henoko, a pristine beach on Okinawa’s main island, have grown heated.

On land, scuffles have broken out as security personnel remove protesters ever more forcefully. On the water, coastguard crews in rigid inflatables keep away protesters in kayaks who are trying to stop the drilling for the airstrip’s foundations. The island’s governor, Takeshi Onaga, was swept to office in December vowing to oppose Henoko. He recently ordered construction to stop because of the environmental damage. In Tokyo the government of Shinzo Abe swiftly overruled him.

Okinawan concerns about Henoko are heartfelt. But Mr Abe and his colleagues will countenance neither discussion nor a change of course. When the prime minister travels to Washington, DC, at the end of this month, both the Americans and the Japanese will try to sweep the long-running irritant in their relationship out of view. Okinawa, with nearly one-fifth of its land taken up by American bases, is a powerful symbol of that relationship. Neither side wishes any weakening of their close military ties. In fact, both want the alliance to adapt to long-running challenges, such as North Korea, and to new ones, above all the rise of China. In Washington Mr Abe will find an eager audience for his vision of a Japan less shackled by its war-renouncing (and American-imposed) constitution.

America’s military presence in Okinawa is central to that vision. The island, says Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University, is the “war state” to complement Japan’s “peace state”. Okinawans have reason to grumble about that. Their main island has borne a disproportionate share of America’s security presence in Japan ever since the second world war. Perhaps 120,000 Okinawans, or over a quarter of the population, were killed in the “typhoon of steel”, as the Battle of Okinawa was called, many forced by Japanese commanders to commit suicide.

But having liberated Okinawa, the Americans stayed. Three-fifths of America’s 49,000 forces in Japan are stationed on the island, even though it accounts for just 0.6% of Japan’s land mass. There are accidents and crimes, including rapes. Some 80% of Okinawans surveyed say that the bases, and much else about their lives, are not understood by other Japanese, for many of whom the American presence is invisible. Mr Abe would leave them to grumble: massing the bases on Okinawa leaves the rest of the country untroubled by a debate about burden-sharing.

The deferential national press ignores the growing acrimony on the island. Officials in Tokyo are contemptuous of Okinawans: the islanders are grasping, because for decades they have pocketed government money in return for American forces being based on their island; and short-sighted, even downright treasonous, because opposition to America’s military presence in Okinawa endangers Japan’s security and its alliance with America at a time when North Korea is developing nuclear-tipped missiles and China is rapidly expanding its military capability.

In Washington both Mr Abe and President Barack Obama would prefer to celebrate the way in which an alliance lasting more than six decades—by far America’s most important military alliance in the region—has underwritten peace and prosperity in East Asia (see Banyan). And Mr Abe will emphasise how Japan’s trade and security policies are being overhauled and re-energised to face new challenges.

Japan appears to be finalising bilateral negotiations with America to join a new free-trade arrangement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves a dozen countries and a third of world trade. Mr Abe will be cheered by legislation introduced by Congress which, if passed, will give the president “fast-track” negotiating authority on such deals.

As for security, at the time of the Soviet threat Japan could freeride on America’s defence guarantees while pursuing economic development. Those days are long gone. Though constrained by a pacifist constitution and a defence budget of just 1% of GDP, Mr Abe will lay out his strategy for Japan to do much more to bolster its own defence, reinforce the bilateral alliance and build closer security ties in the region with, among others, Australia, India, the Philippines and Singapore. China will gripe, but America will be pleased. It is all part of Japan’s new “proactive contribution to peace”, as Mr Abe will emphasise when he addresses a joint session of Congress on April 29th.

That a Japanese prime minister is being granted such an honour for the first time is striking. Presidents of South Korea, America’s smaller ally in East Asia, have addressed a joint session six times. It is in part a reflection of past trade frictions with Japan—as well as initial distrust of Mr Abe for his dubious views on Japan’s wartime history. But these days the Washington establishment likes Mr Abe, the most confident Japanese leader in years—and one who, unlike Yukio Hatoyama when he held the job in 2009-10, does not question the key tenets of the alliance. Mr Hatoyama was ostracised in Washington after suggesting that the presence of American bases in Okinawa should be reconsidered; the discord ultimately led to his downfall. In Washington Mr Abe will blithely insist that the base relocation is on course. And with Mr Obama he will sign a new agreement on defence co-operation, the first update since 1997.

In Japan’s heavily dynastic politics, policy can be inherited. Mr Abe’s own desire to update the alliance has a family dimension. It was his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who pushed through a revised security treaty in 1960. That has defined the alliance ever since. Mr Abe recalls sitting on his grandfather’s knee when crowds of left-wing students laid siege to the prime minister’s residence in protest. But then the motives for updating the alliance did not stem from a desire to be seen to be pandering to America—often a default mode among Japanese prime ministers.

And neither do they today. Indeed Mr Abe is probably among those in Tokyo who do not always trust Mr Obama’s assurances of an American “pivot” or “rebalancing” (the administration’s preferred term) towards Asia. The American president’s own defence budget is under pressure, and he is distracted by the Middle East. Japanese officials see China upsetting the established regional order by, for example, challenging Japan’s control of the Senkaku islands (known as the Diaoyu islands in China) and building airstrips on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. They believe that America’s supremacy in East Asia can no longer be taken for granted—nor, perhaps, even its commitment to the region. That is why, in the words of one senior Japanese diplomat: “We need to play our own part in ensuring the pivot is not a sort of one-off, short-term policy.”

Japan is revising its joint-defence guidelines with America to foster “seamless and effective” co-ordination between the two countries’ armed forces in areas such as logistics, intelligence, missile defence and cyber-warfare. This summer it is also pushing legislation through the Diet (parliament) that will radically change what its army, known as the Self-Defence Force, is allowed to do. The new rules would legitimise collective self-defence, allowing the armed forces to come to the aid of allies, America in particular, in situations that have nothing to do with rebuffing direct attacks on its own territory.

Best friends forever

At present, if an American naval ship comes under attack in international waters a Japanese maritime self-defence vessel may not help it by opening fire on the aggressor. Japan and America want that to change, and want to abandon the idea of narrowly defined “non-combat” zones to which Japanese forces have to restrict operations if they are deployed outside Japan. (Japanese policymakers still smart at Australian troops having had to defend unarmed Japanese ones in Iraq in 2004.)

Debate rages within the ruling coalition over how far such changes should go. Komeito, the pacifist coalition partner of Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), is cautious about overseas deployments. Some in the LDP want the Japanese navy to patrol with South-East Asian countries, Australia and India to counter Chinese assertiveness and guard sea lanes as far as the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Abe, at the time of the beheading of two Japanese nationals by Islamic State in Syria earlier this year, seemed openly to regret that Japan did not have a military mandate to retaliate.

An infantilised embrace

Mr Abe’s passions, however, go beyond bolstering security. He is fervent about Japan becoming what some call a more “normal” country—that is, one shorn of externally imposed constraints on autonomy in foreign and even domestic spheres. Although hardly anti-American (not even the protesting Okinawans are that), he often speaks of wanting to overturn what he calls the “post-war regime” and of bringing about the “rebirth of Japan”.

By this he does not mean weakening the American embrace. He is suggesting frustration with the supposed domination for much of the post-war era of left-wingers (teachers, in particular) who have, as he sees it, played up Japan’s war guilt and undermined any sense of national pride. Japan, Mr Abe insists, must project a strong image, in part by boosting patriotism and even harking back to an imperial idyll. His fondness for the militaristic Yasukuni shrine should be seen in this context. On April 21st he sent it a gift of a potted tree, angering China and South Korea. The Americans wish Mr Abe would avoid such gestures, but do not berate him much for them. He will be careful to say the right things in Congress about Japan’s mistreatment of American prisoners-of-war and even the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

There is much that is odd about Mr Abe’s views of the post-war era, above all the notion of a left-wing conspiracy. American tutelage gave rise to a right-wing political and bureaucratic establishment, with the LDP at its heart, that has dominated Japan almost without a break since. Mr Abe himself is a chief product of that. Yet his obsessions point to underlying realities both sides have been reluctant to acknowledge.

The first is that the alliance with America has always been an odd and unequal one, with a proudly pacifist state sheltering under America’s nuclear umbrella. America has always insisted on strategic control of Japan, mainly through Okinawa. Even after it handed control of Japan back to the Japanese in 1952, it made an exception of Okinawa, which it kept under military control for another two decades. Then it insisted on keeping the bases.

During the cold war, the alliance was a comfort blanket for Japan’s leaders. But today heightened regional uncertainties, especially the rise of China, are fuelling the resurgence of nationalism, including Mr Abe’s. It is unhelpful that the protective nature of the alliance has given Japan too little cause to form deep and constructive relationships with neighbours and former enemies—one reason for its difficulty in dealing with China and South Korea today. “Cocooned by our big brother,” says an Abe adviser, “the Japanese ceased thinking strategically about their own future.”

Another consequence—a domestic politics that is unresponsive to people’s wishes—is nowhere more evident than in the fate of Okinawa. Once an island kingdom balanced precariously between Japan and China, it has drawn the short straw ever since Japan’s annexation of it in the 1870s. Okinawans, says Kurayoshi Takara, a historian and recent vice-governor of Okinawa, suffer from a double occupation: both America’s and Japan’s. But, though “talk of neocolonialism describes the situation, it doesn’t promise the solution.”

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