The Sea Of Futility

Read James Przystup in Comparative Connections -- on the hopeless back-and-forth between the governments of Japan and China since March, with some informative detours along the ways. (Link)

A tragi-comedy in all its glory.

Przystup highlights Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's declaration on August 12 that revision of the Constitution remains his historical mission (Link - J). For those keeping score August 12 was my guestimate of the date Abe would pay a private visit to Yasukuni. It was also the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Friendship.

Abe's declaration of a continued, unshakable commitment to constitutional reform ("Facing the future, facing the revision of the Constitution, I go onward. Revision of the constitution is my historic mission...") flies in the face of the conventional wisdom, which was and is that constitution revision is off the table, replaced by a near-term program of gradual expansion of the activities judged constitutional by the Cabinet Legislative Bureau. The announcement of the appointment of Komatsu Ichiro, the new more malleable head of the CLB, had indeed been announced a week before Abe's declaration. (Link)

One has to discount the seriousness of Abe's words, at least in terms of the PM's schedule for the rest of the year. According to reports, the vow was made at a private dinner at an inn in the PM's nominal hometown of Nagato, Yamaguchi Prefecture. Attending the dinner were top members of his support group (koenkai). Abe probably felt he had to provide, along with actual food and drink, some political red meat. Pledging loyalty to the cause of constitution revision has been one constant in Abe's limited repertoire of political tricks. It is not surprising he dragged the magic act out one more time for his most loyal and biggest fans.

The article ends with a calendar of significant days. One crucial date that is not mentioned, either in Prystrup's article or in Michael J. Green and Nicholas Szechenyi's update on Japan-U.S. relations, is April 28, 2013 -- the first official Return Of Sovereignty Day (Do not bother looking for the event in the previous edition's Green & Szechenyi -- it is not listed there either). At the official ceremony, the first ever, the prime minister intoned portentous piffle of the purest, highest incoherence (Link). The speech was eclipsed, however, by the incident at the end when the Imperial Couple were making their departure from the stage. An impromptu and jubilant chorus of "Long Live The Emperor" (Tenno heika banzai!) froze their Imperial Highnesses in mid-step like two jacked deer.

April 28 seems to mark both the zenith and terminus of Abe's dalliance with history issues. A week later, when asked to clarify his remarks about the definition of shinryaku (invasion, aggression) in Diet session, Abe demurred. When a week later still Liberal Democratic Party policy affairs chief Taka'ichi Sanae claimed that Abe rejects the judgments of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Murayama Statement, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide rubbished her statements, saying she was jawboning her own views, not those of the Abe Government.

After the provocative ceremony and the banzais, something snapped.


Later - As regards the prospects for reinterpreting the constitution, Yuka Hayashi has just posted an interview with a frank Komatsu-san on JapanRealTime. (Link)

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Image: Surfers waiting, hoping for the least wave. Kugenuma Beach, Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture on 6 December 2009.
Image courtesy: MTC

The Problem With Yasukuni - From A Company Man

All the brave soldiers
That cannot get older
Been asking after you.

- Stephen Stills, "Daylight Again/Find The Cost of Freedom" (1982)

I have been thinking for the past week about the controversies that rage over Yasukuni, of how the inclusion of the 14 Class A war criminals taints the place, or as Shigeru Shino of Katsushika City, Tokyo Metropolitan District wryly remarked in a senryu published in the Tokyo Shimbun of August 17:

英雄と
A雄が棲む
一つの屋根

Eiyu to
“A”yu ga sumu
Hitotsu no yane

The Spirits of Heroes (eiyu) and
the spirits of Class A war criminals (eiyu) dwell
under a single roof

Through the blunt pun the poet offers the conventional criticism toward paying one's respects at Yasukuni -- that while it is right to pay respect to those who heroically made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, the simultaneous presence of the kami of the Class A war criminals muddles the message, making a Yasukuni visit a protest against the judgment of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (a.k.a, "the Tokyo Trials"), the acceptance of which is demanded in the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty. Politicians, by their visits are issuing an implicit challenge to the underpinning to the postwar order and/or are revealing a wish to revive elements of the pre-1945 order.

The surreptitious enshrinement of the 14 Class A war criminals in 1978 is not what is wrong with Yasukuni, though. The Unforgivable Fourteen are a side show -- a profitable, cynical and self-perpetuating sideshow. The governments and civil society of China and South Korea -- and to a lesser extent counterparts in the United States -- work themselves into self-righteous, indignant lather over Japanese politicians directly or indirectly paying respect to the Unforgivable Fourteen. This festival of outrage in its flaming hypocrisy (the governments of all three countries having been involved in the killing millions, mostly civilians, in the period since 1945) in turns empowers self-righteous Japanese right wing, which harrumphs, not without reason, about Japan's innocuousness in security affairs over the last six decades.

Each side, after a florid show of umbrage, marches back to cheers and applause from their benighted and shallowly patriotic supporters.

"No!" I have wanted to say, "What is REALLY WRONG WITH YASUKUNI IS..."

...and had to stop for over a week now, since my visit to the shrine on the 15th.

One of the seductions of writing about policies and politics is a pretension of esoteric knowledge -- of becoming so confident about a country's culture and quirks as to presume to know what the real story is, or worse, what the story should be.

I confess I am not always successful at avoiding the pitfall of prescription. I do offer advice -- mostly of the trivial kind, such as suggesting to Finance Minister Aso Taro it is time to stop dyeing his hair black.

Jumping up and down as to what is really wrong with Yasukuni, beyond the 14 Class war criminals, seemed beyond the pale -- or at least beyond this pale's bailiwick.

However, on Saturday (August 24) my local newspaper published a letter to the editor (in a special box, so as to attract the eye) by a reader who shared the main elements of my disquiet, one who took issue with the whole concept of heroes being enshrined at Yasukuni:

[Dear Editor]

Last year my grandfather passed away. He served in the war as a merchant marine sailor. The story is that the ship that my grandfather was on was attacked by Americans and sunk. My grandfather, in the confusion inside the ship, grabbed ahold of a door. By holding tight to the floating door, he survived to be picked up by another merchant marine vessel, thereby escaping the fate of losing his life in the battle zone.

Many times did my grandfather say to me, "Had I died then, your father, and of course you, Tetsu, would never had been born." However, never did anything like "Ah, to fight for one's country is a glorious thing!" come to his lips.

Those wishing to legitimize Yasukuni or the Great War always talk about "heroes (eiyu) who died fighting for their country" or some such thing. But to make it sound like a Hollywood movie where alien life forms were coming to our land to unilaterally to attack us -- this is mistaken. Those whose lives were sacrificed in that war were sacrificed for the idiotic lusts and policy failures of the military leaders and the politicians, and the capitalists who insinuated themselves into their company.

In the first place, as was written in the Sanmen no kakushin article "Thinking about visiting Yasukuni" (Yasukuni sanpai o kangaeru) published in this newspaper on the 14th [of August], how much value should we be assigning Yasukuni? The shrine was built to honor the battle dead of imperial forces, those who died in the Meiji Restoration and other conflicts of the time, using Japan's tradition of imperial rule to political ends.*

If there are those who wish to believe that the spirits of their ancestors, who, unlike my grandfather, did indeed die on the battlefield, are honored at this shrine, fine -- I have no problem with that. However, the statement "They died fighting for their country" -- that I want revised. At the very least, it was not for these chest-thumpers in the present day who say "the honored dead (eiyu) are the pride of Japanese people and the State (kokka)" that those who sacrificed their bodies and lost their lives on the field of battle did what they did.

Kameda Tetsu
Age: 35
Occupation: company employee
Matsudo City, Chiba Prefecture

Thank you Mr. Kameda.

At some point I will have to write about the kind of persons I saw at Yasukuni on the 15th. Someday also I should examine the Prime Minister's assertion in Diet session in April this year that visits to Yasukuni by Japan's leaders should not be framed as excusing the pre-1945 order because visits to Arlington National Cemetery, where Confederate soldiers are buried, does not result in U.S. presidents being accused of honoring slavery. (Link - J)

But that will be for another day.

As for that purported rightward shift in public attitudes, it seems as though the wave has not swallowed up quite everybody just yet...

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* The implication being that far from being a place for honoring those who fought for the protection of Japan, Yasukuni was at its origins a shrine tasked with the placation of the spirits of those who lost their lives in domestic political violence.

Tell Me Something I Do Not Know

Every once in a while, in the course of wading through the effluvia, I come across a news article or news fragment that truly astonishes.

I would have never guessed, for example, that Togo Shigemori, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Class A War Criminal, though born in Japan, was ethnically Korean.

The story of the Togo family was already very interesting. To have the founder turn out to have been of Korean stock (assuming the Russian academic author knows what he is talking about) makes them all the more fascinating.

A tip of the hat to Japan Probe.