Another Use for American Soldiers

If the Pentagon has been worried because a majority of Japanese (particularly those on Okinawa) would like to see the 47,000 American troops still stationed there go home, they can relax. The Japanese establishment has just found a new, socially useful function for those unwanted Marines. All those who manage to get themselves killed in the line of duty (or because they got drunk and drove too fast), and who wind up dead at military hospitals, can soon donate their organs to Japanese citizens needing transplants.

The Japanese themselves have been debating a law that would permit their own citizens to donate body parts after death. But such a law would involve accepting the standard of “brain death”--the legal definition of death in the United States. A committee of Japanese legal, medical, religious and other experts met over several years to discuss this issue without coming to a unanimous conclusion.

A friend who was a member of this deliberation group once told me he had thought the major objections would come from the Buddhist clergy because of their belief that the soul takes three days to leave the body, by which time organs can no longer be harvested. But the major objection was raised by liberal Japanese lawyers who pointed out that Japan is still a group-oriented society with a strong sense of “inner” and “outer” groups. They raised fears that a definition of brain death might lead Japanese doctors to make socially convenient decisions, such as “pulling the plug” on a homeless person or on a carousing, ne’er-do-well teenager who had crashed his motorcycle.

In the absence of a brain-death law, rich Japanese who need kidney, cornea or other transplants have been traveling to the Philippines or the U.S. to get them. But now Japanese doctors would like to use organs that the five U.S. military hospitals in Japan are more than willing to make available. Well, I suppose it’s nice to know the Marines are considered good for something in Japan.

But the absurdities of the United States’ insistence that we must maintain these forward-deployed troops at all costs (rather than arranging for access to Japanese ports for our naval vessels) does not end here. A meeting was recently held in Washington to discuss Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto’s promise to develop Okinawa as a free-trade zone and turn it into “a second” (or perhaps a future replacement for) Hong Kong.

A State Department spokesman said at this meeting, “It would be an unnecessary complication to in any way raise U.S. commercial interests” as part of the ongoing U.S. effort to retain military basing rights on Okinawa. In other words, the U.S. continues to “delink” economic and military matters where Japan is concerned. This means, among other things, that we are defending a nation to which we are simultaneously going deeply into debt.

It also means that whenever we do finally get tossed out of Okinawa--and this is likely to occur much sooner than anyone in the Pentagon would like to think--we will have no economic leverage, no business concerns already in place to take a piece of the new action.

When President Clinton attends the APEC summit on Nov. 25, it will be at the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay. The Americans were ignominiously thrown out of Subic in 1992, after a large majority vote of the Philippine Senate. The Pentagon had said that the 7th Fleet could not survive without the Philippine facility, but it seems to have managed very well.

The Pentagon also swore that the Filipinos would be sorry when they lost all those base jobs. But instead, Subic Bay has become a thriving free-trade zone, an Asian hub for Federal Express and other international concerns. This is exactly what Gov. Masahide Ota intends to achieve for Okinawa.

But meanwhile, by all means let us supply body parts to the Japanese. They seem to be more acceptable than California rice, Washington apples, Florida oranges or Detroit automobiles.