Outside View: Japan's quiet nuclear debateBy Tetsuya Kataoka
UPI Outside
View Commentator
Published March 28,
2006
TOKYO -- Japan lost to
China in the most recent dispute over Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine for the
war dead, where the so-called Class A war criminals are
honored. But Japan won more than it lost -- a debate
over whether Japan should go nuclear seems to have
gotten off to a good start, thanks in good measure to
that defeat. Funny thing is neither side is crowing.
China's anti-Japan campaign
on "history consciousness," as they call it, is not
about indulging an old grudge. A communist dictatorship
is a lot smarter than that. Beijing had to substitute
nationalism for Karl Marx when he "died" with the fall
of the Soviet empire and when its own cold war --
suspended by the Nixon-Kissinger d騁ente -- came back to
life in the Taiwan Strait.
To neutralize the U.S.
military presence right next door in Okinawa, China
decided to split the U.S.-Japan alliance by harping on
the memory of Pearl Harbor, as Chairman Jiang Zemin did
on his visit to the USS Arizona Memorial in 1997. Never
mind that America fought Japan to build a "Christian and
democratic China," not a communist state.
In the meantime, Koizumi
came to power in 2001 with the vow to "destroy" his own
Liberal Democratic Party -- which he defined as the
"forces of resistance" to his reform -- and change the
war-renouncing constitution. Having in view a Japan in
full military alliance with the United States, he
anticipated the need to resurrect the Yasukuni Shrine to
honor the future war dead. But with Beijing objecting to
his scheme, all hell broke loose. When U.S. President
George Bush visited him the next spring as a
cheerleader, Koizumi proposed that they together visit
Yasukuni as a re-enactment of Ronald Reagan's visit to
the Bitberg military cemetery with German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl.
Bush instead proposed to
visit another shrine. At that point Koizumi should have
transferred Gen. Hideki Tojo and his company to another
shrine, as I had proposed, but he stuck to his
revisionist history, foregoing Bush's company. With
neither side giving in, the frosty stalemate lasted five
years while a parallel territorial dispute over China's
claim to a natural gas well in the East China Sea
reached boiling point.
The upshot was Bush's trip
to Kyoto to talk to the prime minister last November. In
view of the delicate nature of his message, Bush had to
deliver it in person so as not to undercut Koizumi. "The
United States and Japan at one time were sworn enemies,"
said Bush. "And now here we are sitting down as friends.
In other words, it's possible to forget the past, it's
difficult, but it is possible." China had won, it
seemed.
I suspect, however, that the
bottom line for Bush was not Koizumi's choice of shrine
so much as the fact that his feistiness was giving China
ample excuse to go tit-for-tat, leading up to what could
become a second war in Asia -- on top of Iraq -- that
Japan could not handle alone. China has already shown
its intentions more than once vis-・vis Taiwan and
vis-・vis Japan last year jointly with Russia. Koizumi
was forced into running risks comparable to Ariel
Sharon's but without his wherewithal, the Israeli
arsenal.
Vice-President Dick Cheney
addressed the problem on NBC's "Meet the Press" in 2003:
"It is also more important that our friends in the
region deal effectively with (North Korea) ... Japan,
for example, may be forced to consider whether or not
they want to readdress the nuclear question." Cheney was
referring to President Nixon's nuclear proposal to Japan
back in 1972, which was rejected by Prime Minister
Eisaku Sato.
A review of circumstantial
evidence since Kyoto leads me to suspect that Bush
opened a second front of his own against China by means
of a secret proposal while in Kyoto, a proposal that
reiterated Cheney's demarche. A month after the Kyoto
meeting, Koizumi's Foreign Minister Taro Aso declared to
his host Dick Cheney, no less, "Japan must also be
nuclear armed." He could not have made the remark, let
alone leak it to the media, idly.
Come to think of it, Koizumi
was incredibly jovial after his talk with Bush in Kyoto,
too jovial for a man asked merely to make amends with
China. With a broad smile, he turned to Bush in the
Temple of the Golden Pavilion and quipped, "Look, the
sun is rising."
--
(Tetsuya Kataoka is Senior
Research Fellow, retired, of the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. He is currently writing a book on
Japan's decline as a major world power.)
--
(United Press
International's "Outside View" commentaries are written
by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of
important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily
reflect those of United Press International. In the
interests of creating an open forum, original
submissions are invited.)
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