All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Some Eric B. and Rakim for you.
And I guess I should tell you we're streaming live worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus.
He's the co-director there.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.www.fpif.org.
F-P-I-F for Foreign Policy in Focus dot org.
All right.
Good deal.
OK, so, yeah, I wanted to talk with you about Japan, a major part of America's empire.
They say that Hitler annexed Poland and America annexed the Pacific Ocean.
It's an American lake.
It belongs to us.
And they are the guards on the western edge of our lake.
Right?
That's correct.
They are our principal ally in the Pacific.
Now, when I was a little boy, my mom taught me that the difference between America and other countries was we went and kicked everybody's ass in World War Two.
But then we rebuilt them and made them our friends instead of, you know, just taking them over and making them part of our empire.
Is that really true?
Or is that sort of a that's kind of a nice democratic spin on what really happened, huh?
Well, it depends on the country, of course.
I mean, in Japan, we certainly went in, we rebuilt, we wrote their constitution.
And then when we didn't like the political direction the country took, well, then we interceded and we made sure that, well, they would have one party rule for the next 50 odd years, the liberal Democratic Party.
So, yeah, I mean, they we made them into kind of a friend, but we rebuilt them in our image.
And some of that was good.
The peace constitution was a good thing.
Some of it not so good, like all the military bases we have in that country.
Well, and even the peace constitution is dependent on the theory that America will protect you.
We are your security force and you're in charge of internal security only kind of.
Well, that's true, though.
You've got to look at it from the perspective of other countries in the region and other countries in the region were not enthusiastic about Japan re-militarizing.
They had had the experience of the Japanese empire.
And we're talking Korea, China, Taiwan.
And they did not want to see any kind of constitution that would allow Japan to have what was known at the time and today as well, a normal military.
So now Japan still spends a lot of money on its military.
Don't get me wrong.
But the peace constitution did serve as an important check on some of the residual imperial ambitions of the country.
And to a certain extent, it also was a check on what the United States could do.
And the evidence of that, of course, is that as we got later on into the 1970s and 80s, Washington put pressure on Japan to change its peace constitution to make it a little bit more amenable to U.S. military ambitions.
Now, so when you talk about the one party rule for, what, 54 years there, you say?
Well, basically from 1945 until just the recent elections in September, with one minor exception and that was there was a period of time in the early 1990s when you had the Socialist Party take over for a very, very brief 10 month period.
And was it, you know, basically, you know, wink, wink, the MacArthur government in effect over there this whole time where that that ruling party really was just a puppet of the CIA?
Or was there I mean, I'm asking this question from complete ignorance here.
I really know very, very little about Japan, but I want to understand exactly, you know, to what degree that one party state was inflicted on the people of Japan by the United States and to what degree it was actually kind of the result of the different consensuses and so forth that were built inside Japan.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
No, it's a tough question.
I mean, basically, in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, you saw the rebirth of Japanese civil society, the rebirth of Japanese unions, independent unions.
And when they started moving off in a left direction, the United States intervened.
And that was kind of the origins of the Liberal Democratic Party's tenure, its control of power.
This was known as the rightward turn in Japanese history.
And that was certainly in US interest.
I mean, it was during the Cold War, we certainly didn't want to see Japan move into either neutrality or worse into the Soviet sphere.
But it also was kind of congruent with Japanese culture to have a kind of consensus style of politics that did, you know, center around a single party and the kind of economic compromises that were made in the post-war era that basically encouraged a certain amount of quiescence in the labor realm in exchange for relatively equal growth.
Now, the extent to which, you know, the United States continued to intervene after that, well, of course, there was, you know, certainly before the Japanese economic miracle, the United States was very heavily involved in Japan, particularly around the Korean War.
We needed Japan as a base of operations.
We needed Japanese manufacturing and other assistance in order to prosecute that war.
And that war, in fact, became in some ways the basis of Japan's economic miracle.
After the Korean War, it's less clear the role of the United States in any direct manipulations of Japanese politics.
Of course, there were, you know, scandals involved with military contractors, the Lockheed scandal.
There were scandals, you know, involving corruption connected as well with the United States.
But I wouldn't say there was the kind of puppet government you would see in some other parts of the world.
The Japanese government acquired a great deal of independence in terms of the way it structured its economy.
Obviously, we went head-to-head with Japan in the 1970s.
And to a certain extent, there was some independence as well on regional relations as Japan kind of developed an autonomous relationship at one point with North Korea, certainly developed a different relationship with China.
So they weren't the kind of client that we would find in other parts of the world.
Well, and which makes sense being that it still is a very powerful country.
And it's not like, you know, Indonesia or something.
I mean, what's their GDP?
It's got to be, what, 100 times what Indonesia produces or something, right?
Japan is still, briefly, the second largest economy in the world.
I say briefly because the expectation is that China will surpass Japan this year.
Japan faces a lot of problems right now in terms of its economy.
It faces a demographic crunch because of its extremely low birth rate.
But regardless, Japan, you know, is the most powerful economy still in the region.
It controls a kind of regional production line.
And you know, it still plays an important role in terms of humanitarian aid, plays an important role in terms of international institutions, the UN.
So it is still a player even if its relative strength has declined in the last decade and a half.
How many American troops are stationed in Japan?
Well, we've had about 45,000 or so at this point.
But there are some asterisks there.
I mean, we're negotiating with Japan right now the transfer of about 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam.
And we have other soldiers that come in on a rotating basis.
But that's roughly around 45,000.
Do you think that the so-called terror war has had much of an effect on Japanese citizens' attitudes toward their relationship with the United States?
I wouldn't say that the war on terror has been a major factor in U.S.
-Japanese relations.
Japan, of course, as a U.S. ally, supported the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It supported the war in Iraq.
It largely supplied economic assistance for that, logistical assistance.
And more recently, up until the most recent change in government, a small contingent of self-defense forces.
But in general, I would say that the war on terrorism is pretty much a distant concern for Japan.
The more immediate concerns in terms of foreign policy would be in the region.
Certainly the issue that dominates Japanese foreign policy, particularly when it comes to civic concerns, is North Korea.
That has been the case for the last decade or so, ever since North Korea admitted that it had abducted Japanese citizens.
Well, and they must be really mad at us, then, for pushing them to nuclear weapons over the last eight years.
Well, I mean, that's a complicated question, because for several years, certainly, again, up until the most recent election, Japan actually took the most conservative position in the Six-Party Talks.
In other words, it took the most punitive position with respect to North Korea, in part because it was upset over the abduction issue and the non-involvement of that issue in the Six-Party Talks.
The obvious consequence of that, unintended, perhaps, from the point of view of the Japanese, was that this more punitive position pushed North Korea toward, ever more surely, toward developing its nuclear capabilities and testing those capabilities.
But, nevertheless, that was the position of the Liberal Democratic Party.
The new party, the new ruling party in Japan, takes a slightly different attitude towards North Korea, but nevertheless, that's been the prevailing sentiment.
You could say that, in the same way that you would find anti-Americanism in some countries around the world, in Japan, probably the most salient perspective is anti-North Koreanism.
Well, let me ask you this, specifically, do you know, back in 2002, when John Bolton and the rest of the liars at the State Department were making up this nonsense about a secret uranium enrichment program in order to break the greed framework and force the North Koreans out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, were the Japanese on board for that?
I mean, I'm sorry that's a loaded question, but I know that you know that that's right.
Yeah, well, 2002 was an interesting time, though, because you might remember that it was in October that Koizumi actually visited Pyongyang and sat down with Kim Jong-il, and it seemed as though they were going to have a breakthrough in Japanese-North Korean relations.
It was at that time that Kim Jong-il made the admission that North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens.
Koizumi returns to Japan expecting that he could sell a deal to the Japanese public, but he kind of misjudged.
It turned out that the news of North Korea's admission of abducting Japanese citizens swung public opinion so far against North Korea that it became virtually impossible to secure any kind of effective agreement with North Korea.
Now, at the same time, the United States was, as you say, putting out this notion that North Korea was pursuing a second path to nuclear weapons, the highly enriched uranium path.
Now, it wasn't so much that they had fabricated it.
In fact, the Clinton administration had known about the North Koreans' program.
It just had realized, and I think quite sensibly, that it wasn't an important program.
It was a very, very low level of development, and compared to their plutonium program, it wasn't even worth discussing.
Okay.
Well, now, pardon me.
Let me stop you there, because I want to make sure that I understand this correctly.
Because the way I understand this is, yeah, they bought some centrifuge equipment from AQCon, but no, there's not an atom of evidence anywhere in the world, despite what the New York Times says, that they ever enriched a single bit of uranium hexafluoride to any level of 235.
There's still no evidence at all of any enrichment program, maybe some bench test level stuff.
Well, that's correct.
We have no evidence.
I just want to make sure that there's still nothing that says that they were, even though we know they have nuclear weapons now.
Those are made out of plutonium.
There's still no evidence.
In fact, there was something in the Times last week saying that South Korea says that they have an advanced uranium program, and always have, and all this.
But there's still no evidence of that.
Well, we have no public evidence.
That's correct.
And the best evidence that we have is that whatever program they had in 2002 was not an important program.
As you said, it was unlikely that they had enriched anything of significance, that they had enough centrifuges even to make a credible program.
The Bush administration was mostly interested in getting rid of the Six-Party, getting rid of the Agreed Framework, which had been negotiated in 1994, and this was a convenient way of doing so.
Now, they did not brief Koizumi on this before he went to Pyongyang, and so it was kind of egg in the face when Koizumi found out about it.
I don't think that the Japanese were on board in the immediate aftermath of that.
They were still, the government at least, they were still reeling from the revelations about the abductions.
But as it developed over the next couple of years, Japan, as I said, took a rather more hard-line position, in part in response to a very well-organized campaign on the behalf or by the families of the abductees, and that dominated Japanese foreign policy.
In turn, in the Six-Party talks, even during the Bush administration, after 2006, Washington basically took a more conciliatory position, a more compromising position.
Japan was the most reluctant to go along with that.
So, it was an interesting reversal.
It happened very quickly.
Well, and it makes sense though, right?
Because when we go and put them in more danger, then they're going to want more hawkish people to protect them.
It's sort of like the polls in Palestine, or in Israel, where they say that they're kind of for the peace process.
But as long as they don't believe that the United States is pushing for a real one, they want Benjamin Netanyahu to protect them with a security wall.
That's correct.
But the issue does go back a little bit further into the past.
Because you remember in 1998, North Korea launched a long-range rocket that went over Japan, the Taepodong, and that freaked the Japanese out.
Because, you know, whatever they might think about the DMZ and the number of Japanese, rather the number of North Koreans in the military, that rocket revealed to them how close they were to North Korea and what potentially could happen if North Korea decided it was angry enough or wanted to make a point and attack Japan.
And that was the first kind of defining sign or defining indication of what Japanese foreign policy would be like toward North Korea.
It also pushed Japan into the arms of the United States, to be quite frank, on missile defense.
Prior to 1998, Japan was very, very skeptical about missile defense.
It was not interested in paying for research.
It was not interested in working together in alliance with the United States and developing such a system.
And after 1998, after the rocket launch, they became the biggest boosters of the program and to date have invested approximately $10 billion.
They've essentially amended their arms export ban in order to be full participants in this program.
So this is, you know, in other words, the development of Japanese foreign policy and its relationship with the United States is dictated more by what North Korea has done than anything that takes place in the Middle East or is connected to this so-called war on terror.
Well, yeah, I mean, the war on terror thing, I was thinking more the minds of the average Japanese citizen about rather than the opinion of the government, what policy they want to take.
I've brought this up a couple of times on the show.
I remember seeing a missionary, a right wing Christian missionary on Fox News.
And I forget the man's name, but he used to be a regular on Fox News.
And he came back from Asia, from East Asia, I believe.
And he said that everywhere he went to tell people about Jesus, they would say, that's the religion of the Americans that invaded Iraq.
Get out of my face.
And he said he was trying to tell the Fox News guys, we got to call this off, man.
This is really bad.
And, you know, that's kind of what I'm getting at is, you know, what America does in the Middle East really does have an effect on people's opinions about their own government's compromises with our government, the way, you know, certainly the people of Japan have got to be looking at America like we've gone nuts right now.
Well, they certainly, you know, the Democratic Party did run on a platform that, you know, basically opposed the refueling operation that Japan was participating in, in the Indian Ocean that was helping, you know, support U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
And there was, there's a lot of skepticism in the U.S., in the Japanese public about these ventures.
I mean, generally speaking, I would say that the Japanese public is one of the more pacifistic publics you can find in the world.
The peace constitution is not just a document.
I mean, it is really subscribed to by many, many people.
And it's not just a question for them of Japan being pacifist, of Japan renouncing war, but really of trying to get these principles applied universally.
That's one of the reasons why Japan has been such a strong promoter of peacekeeping, of the U.N. in general.
And we've seen some erosion of that, of course.
I mean, there are voices in Japan, particularly in the ruling LDP party, liberal Democrats over the last decade before they were kicked out of office.
There were quite a few conservative hawkish voices in that party that called for basically rewriting the peace constitution so that Japan could participate not only in U.N. peacekeeping more robustly, but actually side by side with the United States and its operations in East Asia and in the Middle East.
And I think that notion of the U.S.
-Japan alliance extending beyond Asia was particularly upsetting to a lot of voters, to the extent that foreign policy made a difference in the last election.
I think that was a contributing factor.
Well, you know, in David Vine's book about Diego Garcia, he talks about how the Pentagon sees the writing on the wall about how badly they've alienated the populations of the world and how they need to really, in looking toward the future, they need to look, I guess, more to air power and plans.
I think he says, run the world from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, which means be able to threaten the world with bombing, from just those isolated island bases out in the middle of the ocean and kind of back off from the populations.
This is something that Chalmers Johnson talks about in his book Sorrows of Empire, and I think again in Nemesis as well, is the consequences of occupying Okinawa all these years, for example.
This has engendered a lot of harsh feeling among the occupied there.
Absolutely.
I think that the United States has encountered the kind of resistance to its bases, not only in Okinawa, but in South Korea earlier, in the Philippines, and the Pentagon realizes that it faces a very strong NIMBY phenomenon, not my backyard, and it's going to be chased from one place to another by a public that is not willing to put up with this, even if they are getting in return significant economic investments, shall we say.
The challenge, of course, is that between now and 2025, the Pentagon wants to continue to have what it calls a rapid response capability, and it doesn't think that it can have a rapid response capability from Guam or Diego Garcia.
They're simply too far away.
That's what the Pentagon refers to as the tyranny of distance.
It wants to have helipads, so it can have helicopters, it can move rapidly.
It wants to have Marines nearby, so the Marines can move rapidly.
So this is the Pentagon's technological challenge, I suppose, up against the political challenge posed by anti-base movements within these countries.
The question is, which will win first?
Will we be able to kick those bases out of Okinawa, etc., before the Pentagon develops the technological capability to control everything from places like Guam and Diego Garcia?
All right, now, I'm sorry because we only have about three minutes left here, but I saw in your bio that you used to live in Japan for a while, and I saw where you've written about Hiroshima, and I was just wondering whether when you went to Hiroshima, you learned anything that you might want to share with the audience?
Well, I actually didn't go to Hiroshima.
I went to Nagasaki, but I would say that it's absolutely incumbent upon the American president, President Obama, to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki for symbolic reasons, and also to, I would hope, extend an apology for what we did during World War II.
That would have important ramifications and resonance within the region, but internationally as well.
If we really want to restructure our foreign policy, if we want to engage the world in a fair and equitable manner, we have to take responsibility for actions we took in the past, which were contrary to international law, and which were essentially crimes against humanity.
Yeah, it seems to me, I think it was Pat Buchanan actually on this show, said that arguably there's no more important issue in the world than nuclear weapons, and I guess it's not as interesting and sexy to people as it was when they were brand new.
Sort of like going to the moon got boring for people, and stuff like that, you know what I mean?
But we're still talking about thermonuclear weapons exist all over this planet, and that means there's a probability greater than zero they'll be used at some point.
Something's got to be done about this yesterday.
Absolutely, and we do have the president on the record.
For the first time, any American president backing disarmament, and I think we have to hold him to his word on this.
Right on.
Everybody, that is John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus.
The website is fpif.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
