In Asia, Another Rising Star Is Born

One of the great cliches commonly accepted in this country is that China is the rising power in Asia. You can hear this fashionable belief everywhere, whether in academic seminars, political debates or working-class bars.

Yet within the depths of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, one hears a contrary argument, It goes like this: There are two rising powers in Asia.

Two? You guessed it. China and Japan.

Japan’s attitude toward its military is quietly transforming. For the last few years, it has been reducing both its dependence on the United States and the political and constitutional restraints that have long limited its exercise of military power.

This month marks yet another step for Japan in this important evolution. A week ago, a special commission of the Japanese parliament held its first meeting to discuss the possibility of changing Japan’s Constitution.

That Constitution was adopted in 1947 under the sway of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. occupation forces. Historian Michael Schaller has recorded that when Japanese officials balked, one of MacArthur’s aides, Gen. Courtney Whitney, invited them to step outside and “enjoy your atomic sunshine” while an American B-29 roared overhead.

For more than half a century after that, the idea of changing that post-World War II Constitution was considered taboo in Japan. The review that has just been launched is the first formal step the parliament has ever taken toward reopening the issue.

The top item on the agenda is what is, for Americans, the best-known of all: Article 9, which says that the people of Japan “forever renounce war as a sovereign right” and that air, sea and land forces “will never be maintained.” This clause was later reinterpreted to permit what are euphemistically called Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, but it has never been revoked.

Please don’t overreact, American World War II veterans. Virtually no one who studies Japan thinks this development is a sign of renewed Japanese militarism.

Constitutional revision may take up to five years. No one knows how far it will go. And for now, at least, Japan remains cautious about deploying its forces overseas.

Last year, when Australian and American officials suggested to Tokyo that Japanese personnel might take part in the peacekeeping operations in East Timor, Japan politely declined.

Nevertheless, Japan is moving away from the last half a century of pacifism. Its Navy fired on North Korean ships last year to drive them from Japan’s territorial waters. Japan recently decided to build its own spy satellites, rather than relying on American ones.

A U.S. intelligence study last year concluded that while preserving its alliance with the United States, Japan is trying to develop its own military capability.

And it is hardly starting from scratch: Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. While Japan is not a nuclear power, most experts believe it has the know-how to become one quickly, if it wants.

In Washington, these changes have sparked a subterranean debate. Inevitably, U.S. defense and intelligence officials are quietly asking themselves whether a more assertive Japan will be good or bad for the United States.

The majority view is optimistic. Let’s call this the “strong right arm” theory of Japan’s future. Japan will remain a close American ally, and the changes now underway will enable Japan to be more active and powerful in teaming up with the United States.

“It’s good that there will be fewer political constraints on Japan participating in peacekeeping and playing a larger security role,” says Michael Green, a Japan specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. In an upcoming article in the National Interest magazine, Green argues that “a strong and active Japan is central to U.S. strategy in East Asia.”

However, some of Washington’s Japan-watchers are more pessimistic. We might call their views the “diversion” theory. Its adherents predict that as Japan concentrates on developing its own independent military capabilities, it will give less attention to its alliance with the United States.

“The benefits of the alliance to the United States may have peaked,” asserts Paul Giarra, a former Pentagon official now with the consulting firm Science Applications International Corp. “We’re not going to get what we want from Japan in the future.”

These two views of Japan’s future are not entirely in conflict. Green and Giarra offer similar prescriptions: The United States and Japan need to try to forge a new kind of military alliance, unlike that of the last half-century, in which the two countries work side by side.

America’s old Cold War security relationship with a compliant Japan is finally on the way out. Japan is starting to behave like a “normal” big country once again. The important question for America and for Asia’s future is: What’s “normal”?