February 8, 2003	Saturday	Zul Hijjah 6,1423

TOKYO: The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, is no stranger to flak. He is often pilloried in the press for harbouring and airing what are widely regarded as ultranationalistic views. His latest outburst came in the shape of an article for the Newsweek in which he made an impassioned case for the scrapping of the Japanese constitution without further delay. His highly controversial book, titled The Japan that can Say No (co-authored with Akio Morita), earned him both accolades and odium all over Japan. While his detractors dismiss him as a maverick and take heart from the fact that there is little likelihood of his ever becoming prime minister, they grudgingly concede that the debate on the overly pacifist nature of the Japanese constitution is getting louder.

The debate — which previously raged only in high-minded academic circles — centres on Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, drafted hurriedly by the subordinates of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, in 1946. The new constitution, which came into effect on May 3, 1947, replaced the Meiji Constitution.

In the wake of Japan’s crushing defeat in World War II, the United States and Great Britain made arrangements to ensure that the vanquished country never entertained the expansionist and belligerent ideas which had prompted it to occupy Manchuria in China in 1931 and attack Pearl Harbour in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941, to mention only two instances. General MacArthur was tasked to draft a constitution that clipped Japan’s wings significantly. Fiercely independent-minded and somewhat over-ambitious, General MacArthur crossed swords with Washington as he framed a new constitution for a chastened Japan, already stunned into submission by the havoc wreaked on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb.

While the new constitution declared that sovereignty resided with the people, it allowed the wartime ruler of Japan, Emperor Hirohito, largely considered the architect of the Pearl Harbour atrocity, to carry on. Although under fire from conservatives in Washington, General MacArthur had successfully ensured that Emperor Hirohito was not executed for alleged war crimes.

In Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan 1945-1952, Howard S. Schonberger explains how the Americans held Emperor Hirohito culpable for the Pearl Harbour raid. He writes: “A Gallup poll taken in June 1945 indicated the depth of American support for the severe treatment of the emperor. It showed that 33 per cent of respondents favoured hanging Hirohito, another 37 per cent favoured putting him on trial as a war criminal, imprisoning him for life, or exiling him, and only seven per cent thought the emperor should be left alone or used as a puppet under United Nations supervision.”

The wartime Japanese prime minister, Tojo Hideki, who had been put on trial, was sent to the gallows despite the fact that the then British prime minister, Winston Churchill, had argued that by the same standards he and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt would have been executed had the Allies lost the war.

Smarting from the tough time given by Japan during World War II, the Occupation forces ensured that the new constitution, which otherwise placed a great deal of stress on fundamental human rights, bade farewell to arms once and for all. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution says: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat and use of force as means of settling international disputes.

“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

Around the close of the first half of the twentieth century, two events, which changed the ideological makeup of South-East Asia, forced the US government to befriend Japan. According to T.E. Vadney: “Two events clinched Japan’s future place in the Western Bloc. In 1949 the communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek in China and established the People’s Republic. This ended Washington’s hopes that the Nationalists would become a powerful ally in the Far East. And the next year, 1950, the Korean War broke out. Japan’s importance as a base of operations and as a source of supply was demonstrated beyond question.” (The World since 1945).

In view of altered geopolitical realities, the US government had no scruples about reversing its foreign policy vis-a-vis Japan. The December 25, 2002, issue of The Japan Times reports that former US president Richard Nixon had urged Japan as early as 1967 to consider revising its war-renouncing constitution to enable it to rearm and play a key role in preserving security in Asia. Quoting diplomatic records related to the Vietnam War released by the foreign ministry as part of its disclosure programme, the daily writes: “Nixon...indicated that the US is well aware that Japan has limits to what it can do militarily under the war-renouncing constitution and sounded out [then Japanese prime minister Eisaku] Sato’s views on the possibility of Japan revising the supreme law. Sato rejected the possibility of revising the constitution saying: ‘It is not easy to change the constitution based on peace and democracy.’”

Opting for the second-best option, the US government ordered the establishment of a National Police Reserve of 75,000 men to fill the gap created by the dispatch of the Occupation forces to Korea. (Over 40,000 US troops lost their lives in the Korean conflict). In 1952, its name was changed to National Safety Forces and, together with the Maritime Guard, it was administered by the newly established National Safety Agency. With the passage of the Self Defence Forces Law in 1954, the Safety Agency became the Defence Agency, and the existing forces were reorganized as the Self Defence Forces. According to an almanac brought out by The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s largest circulating newspaper, the defence budget for fiscal 2002 was 4.9 trillion yens, which accounts for 0.995 per cent of Japan’s GDP.

While the Japanese government wants to continue to play ball with the US, the people are not entirely comfortable with the idea that their security and defence hinge on American troops, whose presence often elicits protests by nationalists who see red whenever an untoward incident, such as the rape of a Japanese girl in Okinawa by the American troops, occurs.

To make matters worse, North Korea recently chose to challenge US might by going ahead with its much-dreaded nuclear programme. Apart from underscoring the need for offensive armed forces, the move gave the Japanese the jitters who uneasily recalled how Pyongyang had surprised its neighbours in 1998 by firing a medium-range ballistic missile that arched over Japan.

All the same, it is widely believed that it will be some time before Article 9 is ultimately repealed. In the meantime, the Japanese will do well to look for alternatives that might take care of existing military challenges and afterwards pave the way for a better rewording of the constitution that would enable them to be ready to meet any external threat to their security.

(The writer has lately paid a visit to Japan)