BETWEEN FIVE WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN, PERU AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FIVE LANGUAGES

Fifty is a good round number, though the reality is somewhat longer. 

I first visited Japan in 1962 on my ‘do it yourself’ tour of Japan after visiting South Korea and before returning to Hong Kong. Enchanted by the people and the rural scenery (and being able to use my Hong Kong Chinese to read some of the language) I vowed to return. 

 I returned in 1969, first after a spells as anti-Vietnam war rebel and then as news correspondent (1969-74). After that it was an academic, book writer and finally as an in-demand speaker and commentator until well into this century. 

In sum, many chances to see something of how Japanese society functions.

I also set out to try to understand the mentality of the Japanese. For example, why were the Japanese so different from the Chinese about whom I also had some experience?

1. First Impressions 

Moving to live and work Japan in 1969, my first impression was simply the feeling of blessed peace. 

Finally I had escaped the noisy hawkishness and stupidity of the Vietnam War debate in Australia (‘Hanoi is a puppet of China’ etc.).  I had arrived in a country where commonsense seemed to prevail.

I soon came to meet up with some of Japan’s progressives, people who shared my feelings about that Vietnam war. One was Ohira Masayoshi, the intelligent LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) politician who later became prime minister of Japan (1978-80). 

Like many politicians in Japan, he liked to create committees to support him.  The one on which I found myself was his plan to create garden cities.

Since I rather liked the warm humanity in the multitude of the ‘villages’ that naturally come together to make up the mega city of Tokyo, I did not see much need for artificial  ’new towns’. But I liked his personality.

It was Ohira who, in the middle of the Vietnam War, said on the record that Japan should not be too critical of the US over Vietnam:  The US was simply making the same mistakes in Vietnam as Japan had made with its former attempts to occupy Asian countries. 

It had ignored the forces of local nationalism.

…

I was attracted also by the humility of the Japanese bureaucracy.  Bureaucrats padded around shabby offices in sandals. What in most countries would be called a War Ministry was relegated to the status of Department (cho). It had to work out of shacks with a single soldier guarding the weed-covered entrance gate. 

Alongside was a recruiting poster showing a cute dog in military. It gave me the headline for one of my first stories – The puppy-dog army.  (Now the ‘puppy dogs’ work out of a bureaucratic fortress with 10 soldiers guarding a entrance gate covered by an enormous granite span.) 

In those days one could walk into the Gaimusho (Foreign Ministry) without an appointment and go straight to the desk of the person you wanted to talk to.  (Today at the heavily guarded entrance gates, they demand full evidence of identity and appointments.) 

Among the officials I met it was possible to have genuine friends – those handling Australia especially (including the father of the empress in waiting, Owada Hisahi). 

Some of the Embassy people were impressive, with their good Japanese learned wartime or through experiences in areas of Japan occupied by Australian troops.

Japan was recovering from defeat in war and was open to ideas. People wanted to know what we thought of them and their future. Looking back it was extraordinary that I should be given ten-fifteen minutes to speak freely on the national radio, NHK, on any topic of choice. Print media were equally generous.

Requests for articles or comments in Japanese media were unending.

In short, I had almost the ideal entry to Japan. The opinion of the RSL (Returned Servicemen’s’ League), then strong in immediate postwar Australia, that Japan could be a future threat seemed absurd. 

Today we forget that it was fear of future Japanese militarism that led Australia to demand the ANZUS Treaty as a condition for agreeing to the US-brokered 1951 peace treaty with Japan.  Canberra felt the peace treaty was too lenient to the nation that had once threatened to invade Australia. 

2. The Rise of the Right

It was only when the Rightwing pundits began criticising the heiwa byo (peace sickness) of Japan’s  progressives that I began to realise that postwarJapan, for all its attractive war-hangover pacifism, still harboured people who had not moved very far from their prewar fascistic roots; that beneath the pacifism lay an ugly streak of revanchism.

Even so, the Rightwing only began to gain ground politically, and then by luck, when the illness of the progressive leader, Ishibashi Tansan(1956-57), allowed the ultra-Rightwing, wartime minister for munitions, Kishi Nobusuke, to form a government (1957-60). Some have since speculated how different Japan might have become but for that misfortune.

But even after Kishi, an unspoken rule said no politician overtly anti-China should gain the prime ministership: Japan still seemed to have some remorse for what it had done to that country and was reluctant to revive new antagonisms.

But after a brief lull the Rightwing began to consolidate further under Kishi’s half-brother, the deceitful Sato Eisaku, prime minister 1964 -72, who as late as 1972 could pretend friendship to China’s trade minister, Nan Han Chen, while promoting the large Taiwan lobby in the LDP and having secretly (but unsuccessfully) lobbied the Latin Americans to try to prevent Beijing’s 1971 entry to UN.  

The world, ignorant of what was really going on in Japan, continued to see Japan as peace oriented. The devious Sato was awarded the 1974 Nobel peace prize for keeping Japan out of the Vietnam War even as Japan’s Right-wingers were covertly helping the US in Vietnam.

In making the award, the Nobel peace prize committee also said ‘the Japanese Prime Minister had represented the will for peace of the Japanese people, and that he had signed the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970.’ 

He did sign the treaty. But strong Rightwing opposition to ratification led by Sato himself and his successors lasted six years and could only be overcome in 1976 by a move by ourselves in Canberra to back up the peace-minded Miki faction in the ruling LDP.  (See chapter 40 of Life Story on this website.)

Already the split between hardliners and progressives in Japan was being played out before our blinkered eyes in distant Canberra. 

…

Since then Japan’s progressives have continued to play a role. But their influence was already beginning to slip away. The hardliners were ascendant.  

The long-active Japanese Rightwing finally began to dominate under the hard Rightwing Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo (2006-7 and 2012-20).  We began to see a much more assertive and revanchist Japan. 

0ver territory even minor concessions came to be seen as quite unacceptable,   ‘traitorous’ even, with the bureaucrats responsible deserving punishment; even when the Japanese position was weak and concessions needed.

For 50 years, 70 years, 100 years – Japan would persist with its various weak positions, unchanging. To make sure they remain unchanging Tokyo will build a monument and designate a day of the year to mark their existence – hoppo ryodo hi Northern Territories Day, Februrary 7.

Any concession, it can be argued, would require the monument to be destroyed and the calendars to be reset – actions impossible by definition  

It is a very dangerous form of diplomacy.  Fortunately the opposite number,  usually China, is also willing to wait 100 years, but patiently.

Territorial possessiveness can be ugly, as we saw in Nazi Germany.

A book describing a hypothetical plan to recover those Northern Territories is also available, with a picture of armed parachuting soldiers on the cover. 

Hoppo Ryodo Dakkan Sakusen

from $46.79

Other Used from $46.79

Shin Chosha 

…

True, we also saw flashes of progressive recovery, under Hosokawa Morihiro, 1993-4. But inevitably his initiatives would be shot down by Rightwing snipers – by alleged exposes in that favourite magazine for conservatives, Bungei Shinju.

Since then it has been downhill all the way, culminating with the highjacking of the North Korean abductee issue by an Abe Shinzo bent on derailing the important Japan -North Korea 2002 Pyongyang Declaration. 

The Declaration was negotiated by a Foreign Ministry progressive and acquaintance, Tanaka Hitoshi. His opposite number was in direct contact with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il – a man much more progressive than the world realised.   

The aim was to resolve the issue of abducted Japanese citizens, with an omnibus agreement for better relations between the two countries  –  for normalisation of diplomatic relations, provision of significant economic aid, suspension of rocket testing and  the punishment of rogue elements responsible for the several abductions that had occurred. 

It promised nor just a new era in Japan’s relations with its communist neighbour, but a new role for Japan in the north Asian region. 

Abe simply decided Japan could ignore the document his predecessor, prime minister Koizumi Junichiro had signed four years earlier. 

It was a move which would leave North Korea’s 27 million population in continuing deprivation and oppression, and Japan’s right-wingers with yet another victory under their belt. It should have been exposed for the atrocity it was. Yet it was hardly noticed in an unthinking West.

With Japan-North Korean relations thrown into deadlock, Japan’s progressives – including those who helped produce that remarkable Pyongyang Declaration – have been replaced by the militaristic and the ugly. 

 The framework of an unrepentant and revanchist Rightwing was already in place. One symbol of the change were the Rightwing politicians lined up to each year to pay homage at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, a monument unashamedly dedicated to the glories of past wars and praises for past war criminals.      

Naive Western observers, mesmerised into thinking Abe Shinzo was just the strong leader Japan needed, barely noticed as he went about demonising a peace-seeking North Korea, locking Japan into US militaristic Asian policies and breaking the postwar obstacles placed on Japan’s rearmament.  

The politicians who tried to lead Japan into more progressive policies have been silenced, or worse. Some – Tanaka Hitoshi for example – have had their houses threatened with attack as Japan’s ultra-Rightists gained more power.

Attempts at changing the war-renouncing Article nine in Japan’s postwar constitution resembled Germany’s post world-war one renunciation of the Versailles agreement. 

It has all been part of the sea change in Japan’s postwar posture – from attractive pacifism to a dangerous revanchism, encouraged not just by the US but also by an Australia seemingly ignorant even that Japan’s Rightwing exists. 

Abe Shinzo, despite the militarism, the exposure of his corrupt land deal and other corrupt deals, was regarded as the brave, new leader that Japan had to have for the 20th century.

The progressive leaders and bureaucrats that Japan needed so much in the postwar years were allowed to sink into obscurity – a fate I too had to suffer when front-page attacked by the Rightwing Sankei  Shimbun. 

For me, it was a blunt end to half a century of events, happenings experiences through a large cross-section of the nation I had tried so hard to like and to know. 

3. Moderate Japan?

The Japanese people were not an inherently Rightwing or reactionary minded nation. Given a choice at the individual level, they would probably be progressively inclined. 

In many respects – sensible acceptance of foreigners, welfare policies administered by careful bureaucrats, attention to social infrastructure, gender equality in the schools, restrictions on the outrageous salaries common in the West – Japan is a surprisingly progressive nation which we in the West could admire in some ways.

With more than 70 percent of the electorate voting without compulsion in postwar national elections (falling to around 50 percent today) the way would not seem to have been open to political parties advocating dangerously nationalistic policies. 

Blatantly militaristic political parties have been quickly demolished at the ballot box, with 2-3 percent voting counts in elections.

In the immediate postwar years Japan, briefly, even had a Socialist Party-led government.  Japan’s electorate was not in the mood to vote for the kind of people who had created that war. 

But since then the Socialist Party has only managed to come out on top once – for 18 months in 1974 following a LDP implosion, with a Socialist, Murayama Tomiichi, heading a shaky coalition. The party has since collapsed, almost completely.

The once-powerful Communist party is also in trouble,

4  Leftwing Factionalism 

So why the seeming turnaround?  Why has the moderately-minded Japanese electorate allowed conservative, or even Rightwing, governments to come out on top ever since? 

One reason is the factionalism of the ideologically-minded Left. 

The 1960 split of the mid-road, sometimes Rightist, Democratic Socialist Party away from the more leftist Socialist Party badly weakened progressive forces in Japan. As Wikipedia notes: ‘Declassified United States government documents later revealed that covert CIA funding had also helped encourage the founding of this breakaway party’. 

Even after the split, the Socialists would have been able to form a government if it could cooperate with the then powerful Communist Party. But once again, factional differences said no.

In election after election, electorate after electorate, the results would be roughly the same story: LDP (35 percent of the vote), Socialists (25 percent), Communist (20), Democratic Socialists (15), Others ( around 5).

The result, in a first-past-the-post voting system: Victory for the LDP candidate, despite having much less than 50 percent of the vote. 

Any coalition of the Socialists with either the Communists or the Democratic Socialists would have spelt the defeat of the LDP candidates.  But intense factional disputes, often over minor problems, would keep them apart. 

…

Factional differences did not worry the LDP which embraced all, from a weak pro-China faction to a powerful pro-Taiwan lobby. The main problem for the LDP was how to divide up the funds, licit and illicit, guaranteed once its power had been consolidated. 

The large business groupings – Keidanren, Doyukai for example – have been a consistent source of funds. And it was no secret that the CIA too was a prolific source, at least through to the end of the 1960s.

More recently it has been squalid deals with gouging religions – funds and votes from devotees in exchange for allowing the more bogus of those religions to continue to gouge. 

Meanwhile the opposition parties, denied power for decades, have gradually weakened to the point where their only chance of power came in 1993 when they all came together to change the unfair electoral system.

But the Hosokawa Morihiro government which they formed (and in which I had a minor role as member of Hosokawa’s Action Committee) soon fell apart once the electoral reforms were in place. 

They have managed to keep themselves out of power ever since, even though later the much weakened Socialists finally picked up the courage for electoral cooperation with the Communists.

The LDP is now so firmly entrenched, and the electorate so firmly bombarded with Cold War, anti-China propaganda, as to make an Opposition win almost impossible. 

Even the revelations, via the assassination of Abe Shinzo, of ugly LDP ties to the South Korean Unification Church (Moonies) operating in Japan, followed by revelations of funds corruption within the LDP itself, can probably be papered over enough to rescue that party from self-destruction. 

4. The Rightwing Danger Emerges – via Foreign Policy 

The speed with which Japan’s hawks have come to dominate foreign policy and obliterate progressives has been alarming. 

It is backed up by an ultra-right, fascistic activism – the lines of sound trucks blaring insults and threats, sometimes using the name of the emperor, roaming the streets broadcasting their messages of hate against favourite enemies, usually Russia and China, says something very disturbing.

A mere hint from the imperial palace to cease using the emperor’s name for political purposes would stop these political cockroaches dead in their tracks.  Others certainly could not hope to have similar freedom. But the message never comes, from the large bureaucracy charged with protecting the regal name. 

Foreigners coming to Japan see this activism and shrug it off as a harmless Japanese foible. But the Chinese have suffered from these foibles in the past.  They do not need to suffer them again. 

The very toleration of these sound trucks, not just for their noise but also for their claim to regal authority (at least for those of us who can read the kanji), is alarming. 

…

Japan’s calendar system is another dinosaurial inconvenience we all have to suffer in the name of the emperor.

With the demise of an old emperor and the arrival of the new (and now we do not have to wait till they die; they are allowed to retire) everything is thrown into chaos. A new era is supposed to begin (Showa, Heisei, Reiwa), the dates all have to go back to zero (I end up having to remember and write two birthdays-Showa 11 and 1936), computers have to be reset, the financial year has to change.

There is the assumption that says what is Japanese should stay Japanese, even inconvenient calendars. China does not cling to inconvenient hangovers from the past. Even when it is territory lost by treaty or though defeat in aggressive war – that too has to reman  Japanese. 

At any moment, for example, the Right-wing could decide to escalate anti-Russia sentiment to give themselves the right to send troops to take back the southern Kurile Islands the Japanese used to own and believe they still own. With Moscow preoccupied with some other dispute – with Ukraine for example – one shudders to think of the chaos that would result. 

Equally dangerous is the deep and continuing dislike of China, and the willingness to join any alliance that threatens China, as if Japan has not done enough harm and insult to that nation in the past.   

…

True, Japan’s population is declining and the flabby new generation lacks fighting spirit. The Japan Times of July 30, 2024, reports how in the past Navy recruits would be beaten and yelled at, but ‘these days they cry often.’  The ‘puppy-dog army’ has become the ‘cry-baby army?’

The Japanese were said to be avid readers. And on a train you will find some deep into serious books. But a glance at cell-phones will tell you that most are absorbed with comics and games.  

The idea that the Japan of today could create an army to match China is far-fetched. Instead, the current hope of Japan’s militarists is to link up with Taiwan and piggy-back on a militaristic US which will do the hard work of trying to defeat or divide China ― a task even Japan’s prewar armies failed to complete despite use of massacres, plague germs and scorched earth policies. 

The job now for Japan’s militarists is to keep the US fired up over the need to confront a mythical China ‘threat’ as Beijing seeks to recover some of its properties  stolen by the Western and Japanese militaristic depredations of recent decades.

They are helped greatly by the US neocon obsession with global domination, or the needed for US ‘primacy’ in world affairs.

Taiwan will provide the excuse for this operation. It will be based on the very tendentious Taiwan Relations act, effective as from January 1,1979, by which the US in effect denied the very terms of its formal agreement for the recognition of China, also effective from January 1,1979. 

Despite having just recognised Beijing as the sole legal government of China, the US had passed a law allowing itself to go to war with China.

And it talks about a rules-based international order. 

….

Fuelling the revanchism of Japan’s rightists is the not entirely inaccurate belief that Japan’s Pacific War was forced upon it by a hegemonistic US seeking to expand into Asia and the Pacific – that its partly nuclear-imposed defeat was unfair, and that it was occupied by the US to promote further US hegemony.

The more informed of Japan’s revanchists also realise US responsibility for the postwar loss of some territory, the Kuriles especially, in order to promote US interests elsewhere. (I was made to realise this by former Tokyo governor in the seventies and eighties, Shunichi Suzuki, as he went out of his way to publicise my ideas of this issue and even grant me some kind of award.)

(If anyone is interested a copy it is still hanging on the living room wall of my house, in Japanese.)    

But this time Japan’s militarists will have the US hegemonistic desires on their side. US growing belligerence will compensate for Japan’s growing physical weakness, even with Australian and now, it is hoped, even with NATO forces on their side. Their aim is not so much to defeat China (something impossible to achieve) but at least to see it split into components.

…

The crudity with which those attempting in 1980 to solve the territorial dispute with Russia were pushed aside showed how firmly Japan’s Rightwing are now in control.

The crudity and completeness with which Japan’s foreign policy progressives involved with the 2002 attempt to normalise relations with North Korea were pushed aside by the Abe Shinzo Rightwing hinted at something even more unpleasant in the state of Japan – deep amnesia combined with dangerous passivity.

But the world was not interested in these details, or even the ugly revelations that emerged from Abe Shinzo’s assassination. 

Japan is a very rare example of a nation that has reached economic maturity while still on relying instinctive or ‘tribal’ values in its diplomacy. It lacks the intellectual consistency found in other mature nations. 

North Korea will be another possible pivot for the next Pacific War. I urge all readers to study Japan’s handling of territorial disputes, and the bogus abductee issue with Pyongyang. They may begin to understand why I have devoted the best part of a lifetime trying to understand the Japanese mentality, and why I have  concluded Japan under a forceful leader like Abe Shinzo could in future be prone to fascism.    

Progressives still exist. One is the current prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru.  But a close second to Ishiba was an Abe confident and deep conservative, Takaichi Sanae. 

One false step, (and Japan’s conservative forces are adept at creating false steps,) and we could well be back in the Abe Shinzo years.

…

I admit that for the most part Japan has treated me well, more than I deserved.  If Japan operates by feelings rather than cold logic then by an accident of circumstances the good feelings have moved in my direction more than I was entitled to. 

And when they suddenly reversed I was not as dismayed as I should have been. My theories about the dangerously emotional and irrational nature of Japanese values had finally, and personally, been proved.

Meanwhile I continue to enjoy life in my small wooden house, facing the blue Pacific and the warm Boso sun, with my two sons nearby, surrounded by the gardens I have planted over the years while writing memoirs.   

Japan has at least given me that option. I should not complain.