Friendly Fire

As Japan remains mired in recession, one of its few growth industries is neonationalism. Among intellectuals, bureaucrats and politicians in the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, resentment of what they regard as American hectoring about Japan’s crimes against humanity during World War II and also U.S. economic dominance are making anti-American feelings run at an all-time high. Former Justice Minister Shozaburo Nakamura captured these sentiments when he declared to several hundred ministry officials at a New Year’s Party that the so-called “peace constitution” is an oppressive relic “handed down by the Allied forces to the Japanese people.” He further complained that globalization is really a U.S. plot to destroy the Japanese economy and society. Nakamura had to resign last week over his remarks--and alleged abuse of power--but his contempt for the United States is widely shared.

The Clinton administration’s bungling of Asia policy, by favoring relations with China, a dictatorship, over Japan, a democratic ally, has further inflamed tensions. Now, after decades of refusing to take an active foreign-policy role, Japan is reassessing its position as North Korea and China become increasingly truculent. The nationalist solution is to prepare the groundwork for a new Japan by rewriting the history of World War II, with the U.S. as the aggressor.

Yet, with China and North Korea flexing their muscles, the U.S. and Japan need each other more than ever. The aggressive nationalist solution would cut the two countries off from each other, weakening both. Unfortunately, neither the Clinton administration, which has studiously ignored Japanese national-security concerns in favor of cozying up to China, nor the new nationalists seem to recognize this.

The rise of the right in Japan signals a shift in the country’s thinking. During much of the postwar era, a kind of left-wing pacifist nationalism was the dominant ethos in Japan. The left saw Japan as the victim of U.S. aggression. The main centers were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where anti-American sentiment flourished in the form of pacifism. Even today, the Hiroshima peace park does not explain why the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan; instead, signs make it appear as though Hiroshima was vaporized for no clear reason. In Nagasaki, during last year’s U.S. attack on Iraq, a man ran from behind a table to press into my hands an appeal for the “Total Ban and Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.” The park is filled with statues from the 1980s donated from former Warsaw Pact countries on behalf of nuclear disarmament and peace.

But in recent years, the left has begun to focus more on issues such as Japanese war atrocities and the use of Korean “comfort women” to sexually service the Japanese army during the war. The right has made a comeback in response: It charges that U.S. feminism and liberal, Western guilt are prompting the Japanese to lose their pride in themselves. Coupled with the economic recession, they have an opening to explore.

One of the first signs came a bit more than a year ago, with the release of a film, “Pride,” by the major studio, Toei. The film centers on the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. It defends Gen. Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister, as a softhearted man who loved his wife and was hanged in 1948 by insolent U.S. victors. The film was a hit in Japan, and young people flocked to see it. The main person behind the film, Hideaki Kase, a prominent Japanese publicist and author, explained to me, “You have to instill in the mind of the people a bit of nationalism.” He added, “We fought a war for self-defense. The Tokyo trials were totally illegal. We were not like Nazis.”

Another leading nationalist is the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi. Cartoons, which often address serious historical and political topics, are serialized in book form and are perhaps the most popular reading matter in Japan. His latest effort, “War Theory,” has sold several hundred thousand copies. In it, Kobayashi maintains there is no documentary evidence that Korean “comfort women” were forced into prostitution during the war; he also defends the war. Pointing to stacks of letters from readers, he told me many young people wrote, “I cried when I read your book. Now I finally understand what my grandfather was fighting for.”

Most recently, nationalists prevented a Tokyo publishing house from translating Iris Chang’s U.S. bestseller “The Rape of Nanjing,” which focuses on the Japanese army’s murder of 300,000 Chinese civilians in December 1937. A month ago, the nationalists, who ride around cities in sound trucks blaring out pro-Japanese slogans, rammed their vehicles into a movie theater in Osaka to prevent the showing of the movie “Don’t Cry for Nanking,” by a Chinese filmmaker. Now, Chang’s book will not be available for a Japanese audience.

These nationalist attempts to deny the past have important implications for the present. When former Justice Minister Nakamura complained about the peace constitution, he called into question the entire U.S. occupation and the democratization of Japan. Japanese nationalists want to argue they have a “clean” past and the postwar decades have been a detour from a proud, strong and independent Japan that should always exist.

The Clinton administration has not helped matters with its high-handed lecturing to the Japanese about how to fix their economy, and its favoritism of China. As the prominent journalist Yoichi Funabashi recently noted in Foreign Affairs, the Japanese were thunderstruck that President Bill Clinton, when visiting China in June, praised the Chinese for managing their economy effectively and decried the Japanese performance, while standing beside Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

Nor has it gone unnoticed in Japan that there is no Japan expert on the U.S. National Security Council. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, who seems fixated on U.S.-China relations, has China experts dealing with Japan. But as North Korea, with Chinese backing, lobs new missiles over Japan, the Japanese government will feel increased pressure from nationalists to take a more aggressive stance, to rearm and go it alone. As tensions in Asia increase, the Japanese will be increasingly tempted to blame America first.*