JAPAN: ECHOES OF WORLD WAR II : Next Step : A Reluctant Superpower Agonizes Over Military : The prospect of getting a Security Council veto doesn’t thrill Tokyo, which fears it may be forced to send its troops abroad.

For nearly any country, the prospect of winning a permanent seat, with veto power, on the United Nations Security Council would be a welcome symbol of international influence and power. Not so for Japan.

Here, the issue of whether to seek the U.N. seat has divided a nation that is still trying to bring World War II to a close 50 years after the fighting ended. Many Japanese, haunted by the memories of the war and the authoritarian military rule that produced it, fear that their country would be forced to engage in military operations overseas that it has avoided for half a century.

To outsiders and some Japanese as well, Japan often casts an image of a nation unable to confront its past and apologize openly to the victims of its aggression, thus creating suspicions that it once again might exercise military power over Asia as it did in World War II.

But the reality of present-day Japan remains a nether-nether land of heiwa-boke , or peace-senility--”a stupefied feeling of the last 50 years . . . that Japan has become divorced from military activities,” as the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, put it.

To the Asahi Shimbun, chief rival of the Yomiuri, that is the way Japan should be. “We want to aim at becoming a conscientious-objector nation,” the Asahi wrote in an editorial in May. An Asahi poll showed that 69% of the respondents feared that Japan would be asked to perform military roles if the nation took a permanent seat on the Security Council. If so, 57% said they didn’t want the seat.

Fear of being coerced into a military role has induced Japan to attach so many conditions to assuming a permanent seat that it has been accused by non-Japanese observers of “waiting for the seat to be served on a silver tray,” noted Yoshio Hatano, one of Tokyo’s former U.N. ambassadors.

Various formulas have been raised at the United Nations to bring Japan and Germany, World War II’s defeated Axis powers and postwar economic giants, to the Security Council as permanent members, joining the postwar Big Five--the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France--and perhaps others.

Only last year did Japan declare directly that it was “ready to assume the responsibility” of permanent membership on the Security Council.

That Japan is seeking support from other nations for a Security Council candidacy does, at least, mark a step away from the isolationist pacifism that dominated most of the postwar period.

As a result of the political humiliation Japan suffered from its inability to commit any personnel to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the nation approved a law in 1992 authorizing for the first time since 1945 the dispatch of troops overseas, but only for noncombat peacekeeping missions.

According to Kazuo Chiba, former ambassador to London, Japan adapted itself to the dictates of the United States during its postwar occupation of Japan.

“It was not just that we were fearful of the memory of the war but also because we wanted to assure . . . the United States. [It] wanted us to disarm, and have a disarmed mentality,” Chiba said. Only since the Persian Gulf War has Japan begun to adapt to a world in which it is no longer expected to devote itself to a strictly non-military role, he added.

“It took us a long, long time to get [to where we are today], and we still haven’t climbed Mt. Fuji,” he said. “We’re still about only 30% of the way from the bottom.”

Not until 1990 were schools required to display the flag and play the anthem at ceremonies. Despite the requirement, one in every four high schools still refuses to play the anthem, according to one survey.

Neither foreign policy nor security affairs has escaped.

Even the euphemism--”Self Defense Forces” instead of “armed forces”--has been given substance by Japan’s studied refusal to equip itself with offensive weaponry. For example, Japan has no aircraft carriers. Its fighter aircraft lack mid-air refueling equipment. And for half a century, alone among the major industrial powers of the world, Japan has exported no weapons.

Japan’s propensity to turn the other cheek toward constant criticism from China and North and South Korea is a result of its memories of the war on the Asian mainland and its 35-year colonization of the Korean peninsula.

Japan and China “have not yet reached the point where we can say to each other what we really want to say,” said a high-ranking Japanese diplomat.

In security policy, “Japan abandoned its military independence, pledging that it would not use its armed forces for national objectives and providing bases cheaply for the United States to pursue its Asian and world strategies. In exchange, the United States agreed to protect Japan completely,” Motono noted.

As a result, “diplomacy since the war has been marked by complacency,” he said. “We didn’t have the leeway to take an independent policy.”

Military issues remained so ultra-sensitive that in 1990, when Iraq seized Kuwait, Japan turned down nearly every request for its help made by the United States, Ichiro Ozawa, one of Japan’s leading politicians, wrote in his book, “Blueprint for a New Japan.”

Unwilling to deploy even a single person to the Persian Gulf region, Japan sought to get by simply by writing checks--for a total of $13 billion in contributions--but that action did not meet the U.S. expectation of “Japan to stand together against Saddam Hussein,” Ozawa wrote. “Japan betrayed that expectation.”

Like Germany, which also withheld major troop commitments to the Gulf War, Japan was accused of “checkbook diplomacy.”

The problem continues to haunt the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, raising questions about the reliability of Japan as an ally if a crisis emerges.

Successive Japanese governments have ruled that Japan’s postwar charter forbids any collective security moves by Japan. But U.S. actions to defend Japan are considered permissible.

Increasingly, that interpretation has fostered the idea that all of the dirty work under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty should be done by the United States. As Seiroku Kajiyama, an LDP leader, put it in November, any alliance mission likely to involve fighting “should be handled by the United States. . . . Japan is a peculiar country because of its war experience, and its contributions should be limited to peaceful methods.”

Yet, even Japan’s willingness to permit U.S. forces to carry out blockades or stage war sorties from bases here remains unclear. Last year, when the Clinton Administration was close to seeking economic sanctions against North Korea to persuade it to end its suspected development of nuclear weapons, U.S. diplomats here were not certain how far Japan might go in supporting U.S. moves.

“If the Korea situation goes bad, it would put the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty to its first real test,” one U.S. diplomat in Tokyo said at the time.

Despite Japan’s military timidity, a substantial number of Americans, and some Japanese, insist that removing Japan from the protection of its alliance with the United States would send the nation rushing into a major arms buildup, including nuclear weapons.

In March, 1990, Maj. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole III, commander of Marine Corps bases in Japan, expressed publicly an opinion that is still widely held among U.S. commanders here when he predicted that Japan would beef up “what is already a very, very potent military” if U.S. forces withdrew. “No one wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan,” the general said. “So we are a cap in the bottle, if you will.”

Hisahiko Okazaki, a former ambassador to Thailand, agreed that Japan would embark on a military buildup if it lost its U.S. alliance--”but not because Japanese are militaristic.”

“If Japan’s survival were at stake . . . because of a threat from the Russians, the North Koreans or the Chinese,” Japan would build a strong military force for itself, he said.

“If Japan had to do everything [for its own defense], it would go nuclear. That would come from necessity, not from the revival of militarism,” Okazaki said.

Meanwhile, the number of issues left over from World War II continues to grow.

More and more individuals, such as former U.S., Australian, New Zealand, Dutch and British prisoners of war, Asian and Dutch women forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for Japanese troops, and Korean and Chinese men conscripted into forced labor, are seeking redress, even though treaties Japan has signed relieve it of legal responsibility for such claims.

A U.N. commission is still investigating the “comfort women” issue as a violation of human rights, although Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered a rare apology July 18 to all women whom Japan forced into prostitution.

Just within the last year Japan agreed to remove from China remnants of chemical weapons, including about 2 million poison gas shells, that its troops left behind. It also agreed to pay costs of repatriation to South Korea for Koreans taken as forced laborers to Sakhalin island in what is now Russia. About 43,000 ethnic Korean residents were identified in a 1989 survey of Sakhalin.

Japan, however, still has no peace treaty nor diplomatic relations with North Korea. Japan and Russia also have no peace treaty, nor have they resolved a dispute over four northern islands seized by Moscow after World War II.

Years of negotiations with Taiwan residents over payment of colonial-era wages and military postal accounts worth about the equivalent of $2 billion in prewar terms have run into the wall of assessing a current value to the claims.

And last month, a band of 25 South Korean legislators launched a new “demand of all demands”--that Seoul scrap a 1965 treaty that re-established diplomatic relations with Tokyo and renegotiate a formal conclusion to the 1910-45 colonial era.

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Japan’s Armed Forces

Known as “Self-Defense Forces,” Japan’s military lacks offensive weapons. It has combat aircraft, for instance, but no aircraft carriers.

Defense budget (1994): $42.1 billion

Active troops: 237,000

Reserves: 95,800

Main battle tanks: 1,160

Combat aircraft: 440

Warships: 62

Submarines: 17

Source: The Military Balance: 1994-95 (International Institute for Strategic Studies)