NEWS ANALYSIS : No Military Role for Japan Suits All : Diplomacy: Tokyo explains that its constitution rules out contributing combat forces.

In economics and trade, Japanese uniqueness has gone out of fashion. But in diplomacy, the Mideast crisis has shown once again that nearly everyone supports uniqueness for Japan.

It is the only advanced nation allied to the United States from which President Bush has not sought military help to cope with Iraq’s threat. And it is virtually the only nation that nearly everyone, Japanese and foreigner alike, agree should not send military forces.

U.S. Congress members who repeatedly call on Japan to underwrite more of the costs of stationing 50,000 American troops here never urge Japan to dispatch its troops overseas. And even back in the days when the U.S. government was urging Japan to spend more on defense, the refrain was always, “Spend more--but not too much.”

While Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu has pledged that Japan will come up with new measures--”not only money”--to support the Mideast international peace effort that is helping defend Japan’s oil supply, Japanese leaders already have ruled out contributing combat forces.

They insist that Japan’s 1947 constitution prohibits such action.

That interpretation suits nearly everyone because many distrust Japan, a situation that Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama acknowledged in a speech July 24.

“We must make efforts to create a country that is trusted,” he said.

“Japan must absolutely not take any initiative,” he said, “that raises suspicions that it still clings to its thinking of the past” when it staged invasions from the Aleutian Islands to India and attacked Pearl Harbor.

The fear--however irrational to many Japanese and to many students of Japan--is that if the Japanese do anything overseas militarily, the country will eventually revert to militarism.

So while the United States is pressing Japan to live up to the principle of free trade that is supposed to apply universally in economics, it treats Japan as unique on military issues.

Kaifu and other Japanese leaders attack so-called revisionist critics who charge that Japan operates under a unique economic game plan and, therefore, must be treated with unique rules. But they, too, insist that Japan remain unique in international diplomacy. Before the “revisionists” emerged, Japanese leaders themselves often stressed the country’s economic uniqueness.

Since the beginning of the year, Kaifu has said repeatedly that detente between the United States and the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe offer Japan a chance to play a major global role for the first time since the end of World War II.

“In the Cold War era of power,” Japan, whose constitution rejects war as a sovereign right, “could play no role. But Japan can make a contribution for freedom and democracy and prosperity. We want to participate in the creation of a new world order,” he told voters during a February election campaign.

The same thinking has swept through intellectual circles. In a New Year’s editorial, the Nihon Keizai newspaper declared that “the world is now in an era when economic power is more important than military power.”

The Iraq invasion rudely interrupted such arguments.

The ultimate humiliation came Monday when Kaifu canceled a trip two days before he was scheduled to leave to visit five Middle East countries.

It had been planned as a goodwill tour, but Kaifu realized that would not be enough. Although Japan did adopt anti-Iraq sanctions, Kaifu had to admit, in effect, that Japan had nothing more to contribute because of its non-military diplomatic policy.

The trip was canceled--Kaifu called it a “postponement”--to allow the prime minister time to come up with some new ideas.

Not only did “the cancellation . . . reveal the Japanese government’s lack of readiness to positively tackle” the crisis, the newspaper Tokyo Shimbun said in an editorial, it also proved that Japan’s appellation as “an economic giant with the political influence of a pygmy” was correct.

Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, adopted during the post-World War II American occupation, declares that “land, sea and air forces, as well as any other war potential, will never be maintained.” But Japanese constitutional lawyers have seized upon a clause renouncing “the use of force as a means of settling international disputes” to justify establishing so-called Self-Defense Forces for use on Japanese territory.

About 240,000 people are under arms. The defense budget of $28 billion a year is dwarfed by business spending on entertainment.

Yet, distrust and suspicion of Japan’s motives and future goals pervades Asia and even the ranks of American officialdom.

A Marine general in Okinawa in April called American forces stationed in Japan “the cap in the bottle” preventing the genie of a major Japanese military buildup from escaping to cause instability in Asia.

“No one wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan,” Maj. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole III, commander of Marine Corps bases in Japan, told the Washington Post. “So we are a cap in the bottle, if you will.”

Although Stackpole was rebuked by Washington, U.S. officials who have served in Tokyo over the years have often expressed the same sentiment--in more refined language. Ambassador Michael Armacost has described the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty as the basis for an active Japanese diplomacy.

Other Americans, like former President Richard M. Nixon, declare bluntly that the United States must keep Japan in tow militarily. Nixon has described China as a “card” against Japan.

Even as they reject such American logic, many Japanese agree that keeping the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty as a guarantee that Japan will never be called upon to act militarily overseas is a wise measure.

Kumao Kaneko, a Tokai University professor and a former diplomat, wrote in the Asahi newspaper that “however contrary to our own intentions, many Asian countries fear Japan as much or more than the Soviet Union.” Asians, he added, see the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty as tying Japan’s hands, militarily--and want that bond to continue. It offers a guarantee of Japan’s peaceful intentions that is far stronger than Japan’s peace constitution or its political pledges not to go nuclear, he said.