Growing National Debate Over Arms Spending : Japan Torn Between Pacifism, Defense

In 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor, Japan spent 23% of its gross national product on the military. In 1944, the last full year of World War II, it raised its arms spending to 52% of the GNP. Today, it is quibbling over whether to allow defense expenditures to exceed 1%.

The modern controversy often puzzles foreigners.

One American commented that Japan is the only place in the world where the difference between a “dove” and a “hawk” is 0.003% of the gross national product. That’s how close this year’s defense budget of 3,137.1 billion yen ($13.1 billion) has come to the sacrosanct 1% limit, which was fixed in 1976.

Military’s Goal Modest

The furor is all the more puzzling because not even the military itself or its strongest supporters are calling for defense budgets larger than 1.5% to 1.7% of the GNP. In all of the postwar era, the figure has never gone above 1.8%.

The armed forces, which at their wartime peak reached 8,263,000 members, are now authorized 272,162 people. Only 244,977 of the slots are filled.

The 1% furor, however, is real. And as Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone appears to be moving toward lifting the limit, the debate is becoming passionate.

Not even 40 years of pacifism have changed the fear of many Japanese, on both the left and the right, that if Japan starts moving militarily at all, it might once again move too far.

Even the United States, which is asking Japan to do more for its own defense, says in effect: “Do more--but not too much more.”

Real Shortcomings

Only a few Japanese fret about the perennial neglect of the Japanese military, the holes that remain year after year in the capabilities of the country’s so-called Self-Defense Forces, and the absence of strategic planning. The vast majority perceive no threat to Japan but, just in case, are content to rely on assurances of American help under the U.S.-Japanese security treaty.

The roots of the paradox lie in the crushing defeat in the war and in the reformist American occupation, which imposed a “peace constitution” on Japan. Both helped create an Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere around the military.

Some examples:

--The very fact that the armed forces are not called armed forces but rather Self-Defense Forces confuses people, especially foreigners, about their role.

--As the name of the forces would imply, “self-defense,” which is defined to include accepting help from the United States, is permitted. However, “collective defense,” which means Japan helping the United States, is unconstitutional.

--Manufacture, possession or introduction into Japanese territory of nuclear weapons is not permitted. (However, care is taken never to ask the United States whether its ships and airplanes bear nuclear weapons when they visit Japanese ports or pass through Japanese airspace.)

Article 9 of the “peace constitution” reads:

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based upon justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. . . . 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.”

One-Way Wars

Successive conservative governments have interpreted it to mean that Japan may not start a war but may defend itself.

Just last month, former Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda warned Nakasone not to exceed the 1%-of-GNP limit on defense budgets that the Cabinet fixed in 1976.

Both during his 1976-78 term in office and afterward, Fukuda has often reminded Americans pressing Japan to spend more on defense that Japan had once built one of the world’s three strongest navies while maintaining one of the five strongest armies.

“Now, with the economy 25 times bigger than (in those days) and great advances in scientific and technological capacity, Japan could very quickly become a great military power--indeed, a super-great military power,” he told the Americans. “Would that meet your wishes?”

The 80-year-old Fukuda recalled in an interview that his lecture always silenced Americans--including, on one occasion, Vice President George Bush.

Henry A. Kissinger, when he was serving as President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser, once told reporters in Washington that if the only reason that the United States should keep troops in Asia were to prevent Japan from rearming, that reason alone would be sufficient.

Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and other Pentagon officials, while urging Japan to increase its defense efforts, have been careful to spell out the limits of what they would like to see Japan do. For Weinberger, that limit is Japan’s defense of two of its own sea lanes, but only out to a distance of 1,000 miles.

Weinberger’s call for Japan to achieve that capability by 1990 was backed up by resolutions passed by the Senate in June and the House of Representatives in July.

Aware of U.S. Worries

The Americans’ apparent lack of trust in their ally has not gone unnoticed in Tokyo.

“I do believe the United States opposes Japan possessing attack power,” said retired Gen. Hiroomi Kurisu, 65, a former chairman of the Japanese joint chiefs of staff. “The United States says Japan is the cornerstone of the Orient, but I think the United States feels Japan would become hard to handle.

“Americans don’t understand the psychology of the Japanese people so they think that events of the past could recur,” he added.

Tamio Kawakami, 60, chairman of the international bureau of Japan’s Socialist Party, said his party’s advocacy of unarmed neutralism has played a major role in curbing military spending. The party has built its entire postwar policy on opposing real--and often imagined--”shifts to the right” by successive conservative governments.

Takashi Hosomi, 65, who after a three-decade career in the Finance Ministry now heads the government’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund, is typical of the conservatives who share the Socialists’ fears, if not their policies.

“Japan is a country where self-restraint doesn’t work,” he said. “If one element gets strong, it grows bigger and bigger. Before the war, military power was very strong. Various Cabinets tried to suppress it but couldn’t.”

If the military once more grew powerful, Hosomi said, “Japanese politics could not withstand it. Those of us who know prewar Japan know this must not be allowed.”

History of Extremes

Such fears stem, in part, from the extremes into which the Imperial Armed Forces led the country during World War II.

In the final meeting on Aug. 14, 1945, of Japan’s supreme leaders, at which Emperor Hirohito himself decided to surrender, Army Minister Korechika Anami and the army’s chief of staff, Yoshijiro Umezu, demanded that Japan commit itself to gyokusai (death for honor)--fighting to the last man, woman and child rather than accepting an unconditional surrender that would not guarantee the emperor’s position.

At the time of that meeting, two atomic bombs had already been dropped on Japan, and 2,517,406 Japanese, including 658,595 civilians, had already died in the war. The armed forces, nonetheless, had begun preparations for a fight to the finish.

Hiroshi Takeuchi, now research director of Japan’s Long-Term Credit Bank, recalls being forced at age 14 in the waning days of the war to dig trenches “to repel the enemy invasion” and practice how to sabotage tank treads with bamboo spears. He and his fellow ninth-graders were also trained to hurl themselves against American tanks with armloads of explosives. When the war ended, “it was a good feeling,” Takeuchi said recently, “to know I did not have to die. Until about 10 years ago, I frequently had dreams of being in bombing raids and running away from bombs.”

According to Hosomi’s memories, the men he fought with as an army lieutenant for nearly three years, first in Manchuria and then on the island of Rota in the Mariana Islands near Guam, survived at a rate of something like only one in 10,000. Yet even after Hirohito ordered Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945 (Aug. 14 in U.S. time zones), some of his fellow officers wanted to continue fighting.

“I had a terrible time stopping them,” Hosomi recalled. “At one point, I had a rifle thrust at my head and was threatened with death.”

Fukuda spent the war years in the Finance Ministry’s budget bureau trying to scrape up funds for a government that spent as much as 80% of its revenue on the military. After the war, he remembers, he tried to deal with a food shortage that threatened 30% of the people with starvation.

Undiscussed Subject

For years, such memories have made security issues virtually a national taboo.

“Our country has made no preparations to deal with the Soviet Union at all,” said Kurisu, the retired chairman of the joint chiefs. “We would be suppressed with no problem at all.’

So many taboos still exist that Japan cannot really think strategically of its defense needs, Kurisu said. And it doesn’t, acknowledged a high government official, who asked not to be further identified.

The government’s own defense experts have been so inhibited by postwar taboos “that even to talk about security was to suggest going back to the 1930s and ‘40s,” the official said.

“Only since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, have we been able to start talking about security issues. But on strategic issues (such as U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks), the level of sophistication of our defense establishment is still very low. We can’t really assess what the SS-20 (a Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missile based in Asia) means . . . . If you give us another three to five years, we’ll be able to talk about such strategic issues,” he said.

For years, the Japanese mass media fostered the taboo on serious consideration of security issues.

“The activities of the Soviet air force and navy around Japan aren’t played up in the mass media,” Kurisu said. “Therefore, the people don’t know about them.”

He also complained that the nation’s political leaders, even the civilian bureaucrats who run the Defense Agency, seldom listen to the opinions of uniformed officers.

“(During the occupation), the American military taught the people that all Japanese thinking until the end of the war . . . was evil, that everything that went before was bad and that the worst of all were the military people,” Kurisu said.

That, he added, plus “the shock of defeat, put in the minds of politicians a fixed concept that ‘if you listen to military experts, you will make a mistake.’ ”

Insufficient Response

Kurisu and a handful of other defense specialists worry that Japan’s present military goal of fending off an invader for up to 30 days until U.S. troops can come to the rescue is a policy of too little, too late. Even the 30-day capability has not been achieved, and little planning has been conducted for what Japan might do in a global or regional war.

“Japanese think of the U.S.-Japan security treaty as an o-mamori (a protective good luck charm), a feeling that ‘as long as we have this, we don’t have to do anything,’ ” the retired general said. “Psychologically, Japan still feels, partly, that it is a protectorate” of the United States.

Change, however, is occurring, if in glacial terms.

“When you look at defense policy from one year to the next, not much change occurs, but if you look at it over a period of 10 or 15 years, there has been dramatic change,” said Masashi Nishihara, 48, a professor at the Defense Academy.

“Until 10 or 15 years ago, it was somewhat immoral for scholars to get involved in defense debates,” he said.

But in the last two or three years, several of the major mass media have come out in favor of paying more attention to national security--creating, for the first time, a division in the ranks of this major opinion-forming institution.

Change is also seen in the steady decline of support for the Socialist Party, the torch-bearer of unarmed neutralism.

Party official Kawakami indirectly acknowledged that by noting, “The class of people that supports the Socialist Party today has four common experiences: the war, including removal of schoolchildren from the cities into the countryside; the defeat; the postwar democratic reforms, and the Korean War, which once again raised the fear that war would come to Japan.”

Such people, however, are dying out, Kawakami acknowledged, and the party has yet to come up with a new appeal.

From control of about one-third of the seats in both houses of Parliament in 1960, the Socialists have plunged in popular appeal to the point where they now have only a fifth of the seats.

Different Approach

Nishihara of the Defense Academy noted that 10 years ago “it would have been unthinkable” to have even proposed defending Japan’s sea lanes out to a distance of 1,000 miles. Although Japan, at current defense spending levels, remains more than 10 years away from achieving the capability merely to perform patrols over such a distance, the 1,000-mile sea lane defense objective has become official policy, he noted.

Nakasone’s 1983 decision to permit exports of weapons technology to the United States--as an exception to Japan’s ban on all exports of lethal weapons--also represented a major change, Nishihara noted. The ban might be eased even further in the next 15 years, he predicted.

Defense Agency director Koichi Kato, 46, who as a young man participated in the demonstrations in 1960 against the U.S. security treaty, is now talking about procuring an over-the-horizon air-defense radar system--another former taboo, Nishihara noted.

The thought of the Self-Defense Forces conducting joint military exercises with the 60,000 U.S. military personnel based in Japan, which has now become regular practice, would also have been unthinkable 10 years ago, he said.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 helped spur the change. It forced Japanese defense planners to revise their view that Moscow would never use its own forces for outright aggression but rather would try to expand its influence through the armies of other nations, the high government official said. And it brought home the fact that America’s psychological deterrent power had eroded.

“Had pax Americana been what it was 20 years ago, the Soviets would never have dared to invade Afghanistan,” he said.

Higher Outlays Soon

Both Nishihara and Kurisu predicted that defense budgets exceeding the 1% GNP limit will be approved in the next year or two, at the latest.

And, they said, by the year 2000, Japan might be willing to accept openly, rather than covertly, port calls by U.S. ships bearing nuclear weapons.

“I think we will go to the point of recognizing outright the right of collective defense in the next 15 years,” Kurisu said. Nishihara agreed that the ban on collective defense “will break down” by the turn of the century.

Nakasone, after taking office in November, 1982, began chipping away at the collective defense ban by citing a number of theoretical cases in which Japan would defend U.S. military forces on their way to aid Japan. This did not create an uproar.

The one pillar of current Japanese defense policy that promises to remain unchanged for the rest of this century is its reliance on the United States as its ultimate protector.

Kurisu, asked if he thought Japan might break its American alliance and go it alone by 2000, responded flatly, “There is no possibility Japan would break the treaty.”

His only qualification was an afterthought: “But I don’t know about the United States.”