Customer Reviews

Client State: Japan in the American Embrace

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Zbigniew Brzezinski, senior advisor to several US presidents, once spoke of a world divided into three kinds of countries : vassal, tributary, and barbarian. The "three grand imperatives of imperial strategy", he said, are "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together".

According to Gavan McCormack, Japan clearly ranks among the vassal states, although he also uses the expression "client state", or even "puppet state", to characterize its subordination to the US. The expression "puppet state", or kairai kokka in Japanese, refers of course to Japan's treatment of Manchukuo until 1945, where the "last emperor" Pu Yi was put on the throne in a process that the author compares to General McArthur's decision to maintain emperor Hirohito as the symbol of the Japanese state in the 1947 constitution.

Indeed, the analogy with the war and the post-war period runs further. According to McCormack, US officials who, like Richard Armitage, lecture Japan on its need to become "the Great Britain of East Asia" are modern proconsuls who keep treating the Japanese like twelve-years old children, as General McArthur once allegedly said. US hegemonic imperialists share with war-time Japan the same disdain for international rules, the same belief in the superiority of military might, and the same urge to remodel an entire region (then East Asia, now the Middle East) according to their own plans. And Japan is following a path of political violence and nationalist hyperbole that might present "a replay of the collapse of parliamentary politics in the 1930s".

Australian academic G. McCormack uses such hyperbole that I sometimes wonder whether he describes the same country that I have studied and lived in for more than fifteen years. He begins his book by describing a wave of media campaigns and terrorist assaults conducted by ultra-nationalists groups that sends shrills down the spine of his uninformed readers. According to his creed, Japan has fallen into the grips of a neo-nationalist, revisionist, and reactionary clique that sets back the clock to the worst pages of its history. It has become a plutonium superpower that puts nuclear weapons (American, but it could very well produce its own) at the core of its defence strategy. Under prime minister Koizumi, it has embraced neo-liberalism with the enthusiasm of a late convert, dismantling the protective welfare state along the way. And it has become a useful servant in Bush's world, casting away its commitment to peace and its efforts at regional integration in favour of reckless foreign adventures in Iraq and sabre rattling against North Korea.

At the heart of McCormack's argument lies what seems to me a basic historical mistake: the idea that the US occupation forces, aided by anthropologist Ruth Benedict and other proponents of the culturalist approach, imposed on Japan the idea of a distinctive, deeply-rooted and homogeneous culture in order to distance the country from Asia and to keep it firmly into America's embrace. But China was a staunch ally of the US until 1949, was offered a permanent seat at the UN security council, and figured prominently in US strategic plans for the region until the communists took over. It makes therefore little sense to argue that the US deliberately separated Japan from Asia by insisting on its non-Asian identity. Truth is, US occupation forces tried to extirpate the remnants of militarism and feodalism from Japanese society, and it is a distortion of facts to see a continuity between war-time proponents of the "kokutai", American culturalists, and modern conservative thinkers preoccupied with "Japaneseness".

I nonetheless found some useful snippets in the book, provided one is informed of the author's bias. The chapter on Okinawa is an interesting case study of a province whose distinctiveness is seldom reported. There are valuable quotes of some Japanese liberal intellectuals, such as Tokyo University philosophy professor Tetsuya Takahashi or Hokkaido University political scientist Jiro Yamaguchi. But I would recommend direct access to their writings, some of which are available in English, rather than to rely on such a inflammatory diatribe.