Why Asians fear U.S.-Japanese militarism

By Fred Goldstein

A steadily ascending campaign of provocations by the increasingly outspoken militarist wing of the Japanese capitalist ruling class has raised political tensions to the boiling point in East Asia and touched off a storm of anti-Japanese demon strations in China and South Korea.

At the instigation and with the encouragement of its overlords in Washington, a revived Japanese imperialism has moved to shed its so-called “pacifist” camouflage and bared its teeth in brazen defiance of the peoples of the region it once conquered and enslaved.

The immediate event which touched off the wave of mass demonstrations was the approval by the Japanese government of revised textbooks which removed references to the wars of conquest and the atrocities committed by Japanese imperialism during the period of 1895 to 1945.

The Japanese Embassy in Beijing was stoned and Japanese stores were attacked when thousands came out at a government-approved demonstration on April 9. The demonstrations spread to more Chinese cities the next day, “with a crowd of 10,000 chanting anti-Japanese slogans in Shenzen. Earlier in the day another 10,000 demonstrators surrounded the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou.” (Los Angeles Times, April 11)

Textbook written by militarists

The Chinese ambassador in Tokyo, Wang Yi, was summoned to the Japanese foreign ministry by Foreign Minister Nobutaka Mashimura, who asked for an apology and restitution for damages. Wang said that the Chinese government did not endorse the violence, but refused to apologize and would not shake hands with Mashimura. Wang was quoted as saying that “the Japanese side must earnestly and properly treat major issues that relate to Chinese people’s feelings, such as the history of invasion against China.”

In fact, the word “invasion” was not mentioned in the revised history textbooks approved by the Japanese Educa tion Ministry on April 5.

Japan invaded and occupied Korea in 1910 and held that country until 1945. The Japanese militarist regime in 1931 inva ded Chinese territory and seized what was then called Manchuria. Japan then steadily expan ded its invasion and occupation to the entire Chinese mainland, and remained until the end of World War II in 1945.

The current Japanese government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has refused to disavow the textbook revisions, which removed all references to “comfort women,” a term for women forced to become sex slaves for the Japanese military during the occupations. It is estimated that up to 200,000 women suffered this fate during the Japanese occupation of China and Korea.

All references were removed to the infamous “rape of Nanking” in 1937, in which up to 300,000 Chinese were systematically slaughtered by Japanese imperial troops when the emperor Hirohito ordered everyone in what was then the Chinese capital city to be killed.

All references to the forced labor of millions of Chinese and Koreans was omitted as well.

Chinese regard invasion
as holocaust

A glimpse of some of the atrocities in Nanking was given in a Dec. 17, 1937, dispatch to the New York Times.

After referring to “wholesale atrocities and vandalism,” the Times correspondent continued: “The killing of civilians was wide spread. Foreigners who traveled widely through the city Wednesday found civilian dead on every street. Some of the victims were aged men, women and children. ... Many victims were bayoneted and some of the wounds were barbarously cruel.

“The Japanese looting amounted almost to plundering of the entire city. Nearly every building was entered by Japanese soldiers, often under the eyes of their officers, and the men took whatever they wanted. The Japanese soldiers often impressed Chinese to carry their loot. ...

“Thousands of prisoners were executed by the Japanese. Most of the Chinese soldiers who had been interned in the safety zone were shot in masses. ... A favorite method of execution was to herd groups of a dozen men at entrances of a dugout and to shoot them so the bodies toppled inside.”

These accounts can be found online at The Modern History SourceBook, www. fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html.

This massacre went on for days and similar crimes were committed as the Japan ese imperial army advanced deeper into China. It is understandable that the Chin ese regard this invasion as their holocaust.

It has been an added source of outrage that Koizumi has gone to the Yasukuni shrine, a military burial ground that contains the remains of 14 condemned war criminals, to pay tribute. Furthermore, there is a move afoot to turn the emperor’s birthday, which was changed to Green Day, back into an imperial commemoration.

Previous Japanese governments have been more conciliatory about acknowledging Japan’s war crimes and previous textbooks have had references to them. But the Japanese Society for the History Textbook Reform, with right-wing nationalist and militarist politics, began revising the textbooks in 2001. The new revision goes further in obliterating references to Japanese war crimes and takes a new aggressive stance.

The largest newspaper in Japan, Yomiuri Shimbun, has applauded the textbook changes and declared that the “publishers had good reason to remove the references” to “comfort women.” (Interna tional Herald Tribune, April 7)

The weekly magazine Guoji Shengqu Daobao, published by Xinhua News Agency of China, ran an article accusing Mitsu bishi Motors, Ajinomoto Co., Hino Motors Ltd., Isuzu Motors, Chugai Phar maceu tical and Asahi Breweries, among others, of being supporters of the new textbooks.

But the demonstrations are about more than textbooks and more than history alone. It is about the present and the future plans of Japanese and U.S. imperialism in the region. The textbooks reflect a new aggressive posture by Tokyo, which is taking advantage of the fact that Washington is playing the Japan card against the People’s Republic of China.

Taiwan and the
anti-China alliance

On Feb. 19, Secretary of State Condo leezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with their Japanese counterparts to renew U.S.-Japanese military ties. For the first time the two imperialist powers included the security of Taiwan as “a common strategic objective.” According to the Feb. 21 Washington Post: “In addition, the U.S.-Japanese statement drew attention to China’s rapid military modernization program, calling it a matter of concern. ...”

This aggressively challenging statement represents a sharp departure for the Japanese government, which has up until now avoided taking a position on the military defense of Taiwan.

The island of Taiwan was part of China for centuries before a rising Japanese imperialism, in its first major colonial war—the so-called Sino-Japanese War of 1895—annexed Taiwan and made it a prefecture of Japan. The fact that Taiwan was part of China was recognized by all the imperialist powers after World War II, when it was returned to China.

Only after the U.S-supported counter-revolutionary armies of Jiang Jieshí (Chiang Kai-shek) retreated in defeat to the island in 1949 did Washington make Taiwan, then called Formosa, into a U.S. protectorate and a base from which to threaten the newly formed People’s Republic. In fact, Washington demanded that its puppet government in Taiwan be diplomatically recognized as “China.” It forced the UN Security Council to give China’s seat to the Jiang clique instead of to the one-fourth of the human race represented by the Chinese socialist government. This arrangement lasted until 1971.

The current demonstrations in China are also aimed at blocking Japanese membership in the United Nations Security Council. To that extent they are also directed against the U.S.

Condoleezza Rice, speaking at Sophia University in Tokyo on March 19 in her first visit to Asia as secretary of state, declared that “the United States unambiguously supports a permanent seat for Japan on the United Nations Security Council.”

Rice demanded that China pressure North Korea to reenter six-party talks on its future. She spoke of U.S. “concern” about a “Chinese military buildup” and said that the best way to deal with this “is to keep strong alliances and make certain that America’s military forces are second to none.”

Rice added, “On both the regional and global levels, the U.S.-Japanese alliance
is modernizing, most recently through our agreement on Common Strategic Objectives.”

After talking about how the U.S. military will keep forces in the Pacific second to none, she then vowed to uphold the Taiwan Relations Act, which declares U.S. intention to defend Taiwan militarily and told the Chinese to restrict themselves to peaceful means.

Japan has the second-largest navy in the Pacific, after the U.S. Its so-called Self Defense Force has a military budget larger than England’s. It is ordering new helicopter aircraft carriers and is working on a joint missile-defense system with the Penta gon. And there is a movement afoot to revise the famous Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution which forbids Japan from settling international disputes by force.

For the secretary of state of U.S. imperialism to go to Tokyo, the seat of Japanese imperialism, and brazenly bask in a new military alliance while lecturing the government of one-fifth of humanity on how to conduct its affairs is the height of imperialist arrogance. It took the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history, the Chinese socialist revolution of 1949, to gain independence from the two imperialist powers that have now formally moved to “contain” China.

After dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, Washington rapidly moved to revive Japanese imperialism as a base to contain the Chinese Revolution and to threaten the Soviet Union in the east. Japan, with all its U.S. military bases, was known as a virtual “U.S. aircraft carrier” in the Pacific.

Since the collapse of the USSR, China has emerged as a growing power that is challenging the U.S. and Japan economically in Asia, Latin America and Africa. It has signed major pacts with Brazil and Venezuela. It is becoming a dominant force among the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries. It has assisted the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Rwanda and is modernizing its navy and military to meet the growing threat of U.S. and Japanese imperialism.

Despite Iraq, Bush looks East

In addition, China has just signed an historic agreement to settle its border dispute with India and an accompanying set of pacts on trade. If this new partnership can sustain itself, it will defeat a 40-year campaign by the U.S. to manipulate India against China and set the two most populous former colonial peoples against each other. This would be a major blow to U.S. imperialist geo-strategic policy.

When the Bush administration first came into office, it turned its aggressive intentions to the East and to China. It embarked on setting up a Theater Missile Defense System encompassing South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. It equipped Tai wan with advance missile destroyers. It carried out provocative spy flights into Chinese air space and created an international crisis.

It was after Sept. 11, 2001, that Wash ington had to shift its attention to the Middle East and seized the opportunity to try to reconquer that oil-rich and geostrategic region, where three continents converge.

While trying to manage the crisis in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are now also returning to their original aggressive orientation towards China, which has grown more urgent in light of world economic tensions: the crisis of declining U.S. exports, the loss of markets to China, China’s growing political influence and the implications of all this for U.S. capitalism as a whole.

The Middle East, while certainly a vitally strategic region of the world, is too limited an arena for the adventuristic, expansionist militarists in the Pentagon and on Wall Street. While they hope to reap vast oil profits there and get great military and economic leverage, the gigantic productive forces of U.S. high-tech capitalism require a much larger arena.

This is why the growing threats to China and North Korea must be taken seriously. This is why the drive to the East is so fraught with danger and why the anti-war movement must carefully watch U.S.-Japanese provocations in the Pacific and be ready to expand the anti-militarist, anti-imperialist struggle.

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