Japan, the West, and the World Order

...Elliott Abrams is Administrative Assistant to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan of New York...

...But the principles need defending nonetheless...

...Japan is pressured from four sides not to act in its own self-interest...

...Mishima himself spoke from a balcony to about 1,000 soldiers who had assembled below...

...Why is this our business...

...Sato addressed the Diet ( Japan's parliament) and recanted...

...Instead, permanent committees with set jurisdictions were established...

...Chiang Kai-shek, Sun's disciple, was a graduate of a Japanese military academy, when Japan was the base for Chinese revolutionaries...

...When foreigners do use the language, something is ethically and morally out of joint somewhere in the natural order of the universe...

...The significance of this event is revealed in the popular reaction to it...

...Such an arrangement, or anything like it, will have major consequences for Japan—for its food supplies, for its access to seabed mineral resources...

...But he retreated before the wave of national self-examination occasioned by the novelist's death...

...Signs of the Japanese origin of that system's demise can still be seen today...

...Taiwan, 1895...

...It is an enormous body, with 100 members, scores of committees and subcommittees, and thousands of employees...

...Japan withdrew from the League in 1933, thinking it a device for the preservation of western privilege and, as such, inherently anti-Japanese...

...some thought they had need of a Mishima among their own number...

...But their actions had revolutionary consequences nonetheless...

...Those selected for Japan by the United States were no doubt the choice the Japanese would have made for themselves...

...it is self-centered...

...Yet the changes within the Senate are only part of the story...

...Mishima's suicide...

...Professor Aida Yuji of Kyoto University, a forceful critic of the government's actions, said in an interview: "If I may speak in extreme terms, I would like those who made the decision not merely to resign but to kill themselves...

...Minister of Justice Fukuda Hajime resigned, saying that he did so not because he disagreed with the decision, but because he had responsibility for the decision even though he had not made it...

...Therefore, the ultimate failure of 1945—the loss of the empire, the virtual destruction of the homeland, the historically unprecedented foreign occupation—would have compelled a profound recasting of the domestic political system even if the victors had not insisted on it...

...It matters not that the coalition of the poor advances a theory which, even if implemented, will make it no richer in the long run...

...Its stake is material and, ultimately, practical...

...Their Japan is the only non-Caucasian, non-Christian country to become a prosperous parliamentary democracy...

...In its behalf, Red Army terrorists murdered 24 people at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in 1972, and in subsequent years they attacked the French Embassy in the Netherlands and the American Embassy in Malaysia...

...A more significant change came in 1846, when the Senate began to endorse party slates, rather than elect individuals, for committee membership...

...There might have been worse consequences of defeat...

...It is said that the monument serves as a "lasting tribute to those who know how to die cheerfully, transforming their self-immolation into an extraordinary form of art...

...But it was reborn in the 1950s out of military defeat, not political evolution...

...For these, the Senate was the locus of national debate...

...It seems ill at ease in such surroundings and circumstances...

...the unarmed economic superpower...

...Although this experience is incapable of explanation to the outsider, it remains meaningful beyond description to the members of the group...

...Its members are almost all obscure individuals....At a few yards distance is the door of the Senate, which contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America...

...The Japanese, Miller explains, speak of hazu, the ...natural expectation of ethical, moral normality and regularity, this standard of natural order—that is violated when foreigners give evidence that they understand Japanese by using it and speaking it...

...This is the way the Japanese establishment points out that, under its guidance, Japan has achieved spectacular and brilliant successes...

...Often there is not a distinguished man in the whole number...

...Yet for all Japan's conspicuous prosperity in the postwar system, the nation's emotional affiliation with the "Wilsonian world" is hesitant and tentative...

...Such views are those of an earlier century, and are seldom, if ever, heard today...

...The Japanese believed that they could lead Asia out of backwardness and humiliation...

...its protestations of innocence are disingenuous...

...China taught that its supremacy rested on its cultural superiority...

...In the traditional, Confucian, hierarchical view of international relations—a scheme which Japan accepted and which China upheld prior to the western intrusions of the mid-19th century—China was the "Middle Kingdom" to which all other civilized nations were subordinated...

...For these scholars, Japanese is not simply a language but an ineffable sociolinguistic experience...

...its role as a check on the follies of democracy is ended, and in any case would today be considered illegitimate...

...the nation of consequence that eschews militarist trappings...

...prevailed decisively in the test of arms throughout the nineteenth century...

...In prior writings and in his pre-suicide speech, Mishima had denounced Japan's loss of its true spirit...

...Can it be that, like the House of Lords, the Senate has outlived its usefulness...

...The decision to meet the terrorists' demands proved highly controversial...

...If the newly independent nations of Asia do not applaud the Japanese as the real destroyers of western colonialism, perhaps it is because their memories of a cruel Japanese occupation or their requirements for national myths of their own obscure what the rise of Japanese power did to the West...

...Of course, parliamentary government of a kind was not unprecedented...

...These post-1945 international agreements constituted the third "world order" of modern Japanese experience, and the Japanese had to come to terms with it...

...The prestige of the Senate declined as its 12 The American Spectator February 1978...

...Universal values have hardly overcome Japan's mystical sense of its own uniqueness...

...the nation with a special role in the nuclear era...

...And in what sense is the "world order" under new stresses sufficient to concern us...

...Essentially, the underdeveloped majority seeks a regime which would place all deep-sea resources under the control of the UN General Assembly...

...From that time on the importance of party grew...

...The "new international economic order" is to be very much different from the current one...

...What generations of Japanese had sought to prevent had nonetheless come to pass...

...Japan became an inspiration, and many Japanese activists went out into Asia to restore the continent to its original owners...

...Much as we must discuss the American commitment to Japan, we must also develop a better understanding ofJapan's commitment to the world system, to "our" system of collective security and liberal economic cooperation...

...Korea, 1910...

...Consider language alone...

...It seemed that Western Europe (and its North American offshoot) had replaced China as the center of the world...

...The "Golden Age" of the Senate is now more than a century behind us...

...it had existed in the 1920s...

...Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career...

...There was "concern" among high government officials and journalists "that the old stereotypical view abroad of a strange and barbaric Japanese society would be reinforced by the publicity given Mr...

...Gladstone spoke of it as "that remarkable body, the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics...

...When, after eight years of American occupation, Japan reacquired its sovereignty, those responsible for foreign affairs could rightfully draw two conclusions: the right to govern is closely connected to the management of foreign affairs, and the management of foreign affairs must be cautious, conservative, and prudent...

...he must have gone crazy," was his initial reaction...

...at the least, western military technology Charles Horner is Special Assistant to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan of New York...

...and they will spawn international organizations, established in the name of "equity," but functioning to the detriment of all free-enterprise democracies...

...A trading nation like Japan will ponder the more general question: Can the essentially free-trade rules of the postwar period survive a protectionist movement of an intensity unknown in the past 30 years...

...Forcible conscription into the post-World War II "international community" —a world so utterly different, a world of Anglo-American principles and American-guaranteed security—was another consequence of defeat...

...Professor Roy Andrew Miller of the University of Washington writes of prominent Japanese scholars ...who so stoutly maintain that it is now, and will continue forever to be, impossible to establish any convincing data concerning the genetic relationship of the Japanese language to other languages in the world...

...it thrives only by its ties to the world...

...A Filipino official explains that, "as Orientals, there is one memory that will linger in our minds for many years to come: the incomparable display of loyalty to an Oriental philosophy as exemplified by the kamikaze warriors...

...One must instead take seriously any individual's stated purpose for his own acts—especially if the act is self-destructive...

...in the sovereign equality of trilateral, ism, some are more equal than others...

...Its rules permitted unlimited debate, and its small membership made it possible for individual senators to be heard at length, and to be heard throughout the nation...

...He wanted his death understood as a protest against official pacifism, excessive materialism, the soulless prosperity and meaningless affluence of Japanese society...

...The contemporary Japanese writer Oe Kenzaburo remembers the 1945 broadcast during which the Showa Emperor, known to us as Hirohito, announced the nation's surrender: The adults sat around their radios and cried...

...Madison stated at one point that, as he was young and ambitious, he could not afford to accept a seat in the Senate...

...As George Haynes wrote in The Senate of the United States, "In the history of Senate organization few periods have been of more interest and significance than the ten days at the opening of the second session of the twenty-ninth Congress, December 7-17, 1846," when party became the organizing principle in committees...

...There was, first of all, the tone of the official response...

...On entering the House of Representatives at Washington, one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly...

...This is an important question...

...The Senate reached the zenith of its prestige during the years between the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the Civil War...

...To ignore it is to reveal both a failure of cultural imagination and a gap in strategic analysis...

...But the West's trading counteroffensive obviously bespeaks a fundamental, not merely a tactical, hostility...

...Indeed, since 1868 when the feudal order had been overthrown in the name of Hirohito's grandfather, it had seemed that the gods favored Japan's undertakings...

...Indeed, since the early 1900s the Japanese had backed nascent nationalist movements throughout western-occupied Asia, and Tokyo became a center of pan-Asian, nationalist sedition...

...The Japanese proclaimed as their purpose the creation of a "new order" in Asia...

...Professor Bell rightly calls the obscure and turgid UN document containing these calculations the " 'Communist Manifesto' for the next hundred years...

...For example, Japan is wholly dependent upon imported natural resources and petroleum...

...Yet this would be overstating the case, for the Senate retains a good measure of distinctiveness and, thereby, of special value...

...Mishima was taken at his word...

...Japan exports too much, imports too little, must revalue its currency and reduce its trade surplus, lest its continued economic successes menace the economies of the European Community and the United States...

...But whatever economic effects such proposals may produce, they originate in an antithesis to liberal political and economic thought...

...It differs from its idealistic and violent predecessors of the modern Japanese era in that its deeds are considered revolting, not inspirational...

...III Thus does Japanese culture retain enormous powers to call up a "Japanese" sensibility...

...I hope the public will understand that I have fulfilled my mission," he said after resigning...

...As these masterless samurai had wandered the country looking for new masters, so do these demoralized youths look for a cause worthy of their willingness to engage in acts of self-destruction...

...They had failed to preserve the Kokutai, the "national essence...

...Sixty miles from Manila there is a memorial to Japanese kamikaze pilots...

...Such flouting of the natural order (here to be understood in general and historical Confucian terms, with nature as a synonym for morality and ethical culture) can only result in natural retribution...

...By 1945, the Japanese had wrecked the western imperial system in Asia...

...Its small, acoustically fine chamber was populated with the likes of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, as well as many others well trained for discussion of legal and moral principles...

...the only nation to have experienced atomic attack...

...In 1911 the Democrats, and in 1913 the Republicans, first formally elected a leader...

...Alone, Japan is poor...

...In fact, that the "Golden Age" of the Senate is over may well be cause for satisfaction, rather than regret...

...They created an impressive empire: Okinawa, 1874...

...To expel western power from Asia, to supplant China as the leading nation of Asia—this was the crude expression of Japanese foreign policy, a policy obviously opportunistic and self-serving...

...They thus supported the efforts of Sun Yat-sen to establish a republic in China...

...In fact, Japan bends, sometimes breaks, the rules...

...We were most surprised and disappointed by the fact that the Emperor had spoken in a'human voice....We looked at one another in silence....How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day...

...It is clear that the Senate of today is a very different institution from that which its founders envisioned...

...But there The American Spectator February 1978 is a connecting thread, if not in the organization's eccentric and obscure ideology or its severe asceticism, then in the historical precedent of ronin...

...What, then, should Japan think of the United Nations, of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, of the whole panoply of international organizations and devices—all creations of the western mind, all incomprehensible in terms of that "national essence" in whose defense hundreds of thousands had given tfreir lives...

...Less predictable, but nonetheless explicable in the Japanese context, was that the far left also found Mishima's act inspiring...

...It is an "understanding" deepened by the refusal of the United States to sell surplus Alaskan oil to Japan, even though that oil cannot yet be fully utilized in the United States...

...The defeat of Japan was complete...

...Prime Minister Sato Eisaku (the Nobel Peace Laureate in 1974) had dismissed the act...

...How much should Japan pay to keep the system going...

...the efforts since 1868 were now as nothing...

...Elliott Abrams The Senate Since Yesterday Though the Senate today is quite unlike what the founders envisioned—absent so many of its original tasks and so much larger than when it first met—it maintains a distinct utility to our system...

...Equally important was the transformation of the issues the nation addressed after the Civil War...

...Like the Middle Kingdom, the West taught that its supremacy rested on the superiority of its culture...

...There is no straight line, surely, between the "embarrassment" of a Mishima and the far greater embarrassment of a deadly Japanese export, the Sekigunha ("Red Army Faction...

...The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment...

...It is therefore all the more likely that Japan's responses to that order under stress will be drawn from its own experience, in ways hard for us to imagine...

...Professor Miller describes an ingrained Japanese view, that ...the mastery and utilization of the Japanese language by foreigners implies an upset of the natural order of things....A foreigner speaking Japanese amounts to the public performance of an unnatural act...

...There we find a Japan that has no real historical, cultural, or psychological stake in the western system...

...Japan, to insure its own status in the world, came to oppose both these systems of international relations...

...Yet even in those years the Senate had begun to change and to become more like the House and less a collection of distinguished individuals waiting to curb the occasional excesses of the other, more powerful body...

...But, even so, the Japanese response to the Red Army's mini-war against the world order is instructive...

...It is the elaborate way that the Japanese governing elite links its future to the success of its foreign policy, to its continued ability to make the American-inspired order of things, domestic and foreign, work for Japan...

...As much, then, as we discuss America's commitment to Japan, we must also come to terms with the unique nature of Japan's commitment to the West...

...The Japanese do not want to be, nor do they think they can be, spoken to in their own language...

...More and more, issues were settled not by floor debate, but in party councils...

...How fragile is the liberal order...

...In 1816 the press of legislative business forced the Senate to give up electing an ad hoc committee to study each bill as it was introduced...

...Deeds, words, and events enter the political milieu in puzzling ways...

...The Sekigunha probably has no more than a hundred followers inside Japan, and no more than two dozen operatives outside the country...

...For the association rests on an order that is strange and uncongenial, at variance with much of Japanese history, tradition, culture, and sense of personal worth...

...It is worthwhile tracing the development—"progress" might be an inappropriate term—of the Senate towards its present condition...

...In the Japanese view, their successes abroad were a vindication of arrangements at home...

...If there is any basis for such concerns in Europe, should not those concerns be extended to Asia...

...After all, the order has been under direct Soviet assault for 30 years, and the Japanese must certainly be accustomed to that...

...As Chinese power decayed, the West built its own Asian imperial order on the ruins of the Confucian system...

...One of the most significant public events in Japan in the past decade was the 1970 suicide (at age 45) of the brilliant Japanese writer Mishima Yukio...

...The newspapers report on strained trading relations among Japan, North America, and Europe—the "Trilateral...

...The Justice Ministry, especially, was upset by the decision to release, among others, two convicted murderers...

...relations with China were those between superior and inferior, described and conducted in accordance with Chinese norms and nomenclature...

...The American Spectator February 1978 9 II ome sense of this esoteric history is necessary in S order to grasp the impact of Japan's forced warping into a new political and spiritual universe...

...Japan finds itself also cast as an "enemy" by the poorer countries of the world who seek to exploit their UN majorities and their natural resources to short-circuit the process of economic development...

...IV Our discussion of Japan and the world order must now be brought back down to earth...

...Such long-term national enterprises, however, are never sustained without some sense of mission or high purpose, a sense that is genuine, never wholly cynical...

...In West Germany, measures taken to combatterrorism trigger speculation about the durability of democracy in the country of Goethe and Mann...

...it is directly elected...

...After all, Japanese foreign policy is not made by historical linguists, disaffected writers, anomic intellectuals, or amoral criminals...

...And with each successive move to a larger chamber, the Senate has adopted a location less conducive to debate...

...Bryce called the Senate the "masterpiece of the constitution makers...

...They emulated their samurai fathers who had, in the overthrow of the feudal regime in 1868, "restored" the "rightful order" inside Japan itself...

...World revolution," whatever it means, is surely one such cause...

...Or, sadder yet, can it be that, unlike the House of Lords, the Senate has in its much shorter lifetime lost its distinctiveness and much of its value...

...A third source of pressure is the "developing world" itself...

...Mishima's ideology seemed less important than the selflessness and symbolism of his uniquely Japanese act...

...But the Japanese face yet another kind of challenge to the order, for they have perceived how the discussion of "global issues" within the non-Communist world is developing in a manner that they, by their very powerlessness, must appear to endorse, even though they do not endorse it...

...They saw an essential harmony and a necessary continuity between a properly ordered Japan and a properly ordered world...

...Carter Glass, who served in Congress for a total of 44 years, could state in mid-career that, "In the twenty-eight years that I have been a member of one or the other branches of Congress, I have never known a speech to change a vote...

...they were doing their duty...

...Mishima and four devoted followers seized the office of a Japanese general in a military headquarters building in Tokyo...

...Fundamental moral and constitutional issues, which the background of most senators well suited them to debate, were replaced by economic questions such as the regulation of industry...

...And Japan wrested these by force, first from China, then from the western imperium in Asia...

...Yet who defends those international principles, especially those of economic openness, to which we committed Japan in 1945...

...One can plausibly argue that today the main differences between the House and the Senate are the Senate's smaller number of rules and greater number of presidential aspirants...

...But in much the same sense that the Japanese prefer that foreigners not speak their language, so they hoped that foreigners would not notice Mishima's death...

...The new century brought with it the fundamental moral and constitutional clashes which culminated in the Civil War...

...Violence must be avoided," he said, "but we should respect his motives...

...Besides, the competing system of international relations, the "proletarian internationalism" of Stalin's empire, was hardly appealing...

...Craziness," then, is not an explanation that many Japanese will readily accept for political behavior...

...it is the most "interdependent"—the most vulnerable—of the industrial democracies...

...The Algerians refused, saying that they had accepted the group on the basis of an understanding that Japan would not make such a request...

...They reappeared this past October as hijackers of a Japanese DC-8, diverted to Dacca, then to Algeria...

...It therefore has shown the greatest "understanding" of the OPEC and "third world" positions on regional and world issues...

...Article IX of that constitution, wherein Japan renounced war as a sovereign right of the state, became a forced renunciation of a theory about the entitlement to honor—the "samurai" ethic—and of long-held notions about the governance of the nation...

...So wrote de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and his view of the Senate was not idiosyncratic...

...Is this the respect due for exemplary anti-militarism, for being the "Switzerland of Asia," for being the only nation in the world whose constitution, as we have noted, renounces war as a sovereign right of the state...

...Instead of saving, investing, and working, they seek instead to extract direct transfer payments from the more successful states...

...Here then, in microcosm, one discovers a powerful dilemma in contemporary Japan: Evocative symbols and models of virtue are somehow sensed as an embarrassment before the outside world...

...His 25-year-old second lopped off the master's head (as tradition prescribed), took his own life, and was himself decapitated by his own second...

...The terrorists, the criminals, and the ransom were, by now, all in Algeria...

...It is made by tough foreign affairs professionals, by corporate executives, by determined careerists...

...Previously, the Japanese had been more than bold, and Japanese expansionism had acquired a new and explicit self-definition by the time of the "Great Pacific War...

...As Daniel Bell noted in these pages last December, the "developing countries" want 25 percent of world manufacturing output shifted into their hands by the year 2000...

...And fourth, and always hovering, is the Soviet Union and its strategic designs...

...Japan's stake is material and, as such, ultimately practical...

...The Japanese government paid $6 million ransom and freed six convicted criminals, the hijackers' terms for the release of passengers and crew...

...Japan is again a model—the "Switzerland of Asia...

...Forcibly opened to the "world" in 1853 by Commodore Matthew Perry, the Japanese had learned much from their western imperial tutors...

...Defense Minister Nakasone, who had first termed Mishima's act "fanatical," later said that it might yet prove to be a "milestone in the evolution of Japanese political thought...

...For world order is much dependent on a continued will to pragmatism by this brilliant and formidable people...

...Two of these pressures originate in the West—both the new protectionism and the apologia for the "moral" claims of the "underdeveloped...

...One can hardly expect the newest member of the "group," Japan, to be a source of intellectual and political vitality in these matters...

...Most Americans are unaware, for example, of the ongoing negotiations, under UN The American Spectator February 1978 11 auspices, to write a new law of the sea...

...What matters is that in propounding a new economic arrangement, these poor countries are arguing for a new political arrangement on a global scale...

...But as the foregoing discussion has suggested, Japan's relationship to the other prosperous democracies is different from that of any other member of the group...

...western notions of sovereign equality were absent...

...One Japanese commentator, very much disgusted by the Red Army, said nonetheless that in making this request for extradition, the Prime Minister had "apparently lost all sight of reason....It gave the impression of double dealing....This [request] shows a lack of pride and self-respect...

...The Japanese government thereupon requested that the Algerian government return the released criminals and the ransom...

...The contemporary Japanese polity may have unusual origins, but it is hardly unusual in defining a worthy role for Japan in world affairs...

...It was predictable that pro-rearmament "rightists" would seize on Mishima's suicide for purposes of their own...

...France and Italy, parts of the western world, are thought vulnerable to "Eurocommunism" or "Finlandization...

...Manchuria, 1931...

...And the weakness of the Senate lasted for some years: The great debates over the War of 1812, for example, were held in the House...

...They had failed before the gods and their incarnation, the Emperor...

...Japan had now been doubly shamed—and was to be shamed again when commentators around the globe noted the difference between West Germany, which struck against the terrorists in far-away Somalia, and Japan, which paid ransom, released criminals, and then went back on its bargain...

...The notion was assuredly vague, though it originated in a clear rejection of two well-known "old" orders—a "traditional" Confucian one, and a "modern" western one...

...Yet quickly the Senate began to gain power...

...Japan's new constitution, written by Americans, could be seen therefore as a proper punishment for failure, for the Emperor's now having to speak in his "human" voice...

...Membership in this group, however, is available only by the accident of birth.* 'The Japanese Language in Contemporary Japan, AEI-Hoover Policy Studies, 1977...

...Then, in the traditional warrior manner, he committed seppuku, ritual self-disembowelment...

...At its inception, it was decidedly the weaker house, as had been planned...

...Now these men might not have thought of themselves as revolutionaries, for in the Japanese view their actions were traditional and customary...

...Asians and Europeans alike had been shocked by Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, by the stunning demonstration that the Caucasians—the "barbarians"—were not all-powerful...

...large parts of China and Southeast Asia, 1937-1945...

...The challenge, even within the non-Soviet world, to the American-inspired international system underscores Japan's anomalous position...

...Achieving this target without disruption would require a steady growth of 11 percent per annum in world industrial output, or more than twice the five percent annual growth rates of the unprecedentedly prosperous years from 1947 to 1973...

...Japan sought "resources" and "markets" and "security" and "honor" comparable to those of the other powers...

...Park Chung-hee of Korea, Suharto of Indonesia, and Ne Win of Burma are all the products of Japanese military training, the latter two of Japanese-sponsored "independent" regimes...

...Leftist militants expressed their admiration for his courage...

...Japan's participation in an earlier, Wilsonian, experiment, the League of Nations, had been turbulent and futile...