Yet under intense pressure from Washington, Tokyo became the war’s cash dispenser, donating $13 billion to achieve Iraq’s defeat. Nonetheless, Japan’s failure to dispatch troops “put us in the same category as Iran, Jordan and Syria (countries that opposed the allied campaign),” says security expert Yukio Okamoto, a former Foreign Ministry official. “The U.S. didn’t even invite us to the victory parade.”
Ten years later the slight still burns. And it underlies Tokyo’s recent desire to join Washington’s new war on terrorism. Just days after hijackers commandeered airliners and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and attacked the Pentagon, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed sending Japanese forces to abet the American-led retaliation. His plan, submitted for parliamentary approval last Friday, could mandate the largest Japanese military deployment since World War II. “If we say, ’no, we can’t do this and that’ at a time when everyone is gearing up to crush terrorism,” Koizumi told parliament last week, “Japan will never get respect among the international community.”
Proponents say prestige isn’t the issue. “We are talking not of interests but of obligations,” says Okamoto, who on Sept. 20 became a special adviser to Koizumi’s cabinet. “Image plays a small part in what we are doing.” In fact, image-building is at the heart of Koizumi’s plan. He has seized upon the current crisis to bolster Japan’s flagging prestige and, in the words of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, “show the flag” in support of the American-led antiterrorism campaign. To do that he must bend rules that for 50 years have rooted the SDF on Japanese soil, unable to join multinational forces or to engage in offensive operations.
His major obstacle: Article 9 of the Constitution, which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right … and the threat of use of force as means of settling international disputes.” If approved by the Diet, Japan’s parliament, Koizumi’s draft legislation would enable the SDF to provide logistical, medical and humanitarian support to the U.S.-led coalition, but only in “noncombat” areas and with the permission of host countries. Warships could ferry material, including guns and ammunition, to U.S. forces deployed in the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf. Army medical teams could staff field hospitals near the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Air force and other SDF units could be deployed into refugee camps, or sent on search-and-rescue missions for missing American fighters. Although missions would avoid defined combat zones, rules of engagement would allow Japanese soldiers to carry weapons, return hostile fire and defend their posts if attacked.
The Japanese have put their pacifism on hold. Outraged by the Sept. 11 hijackings, seven in 10 of them support limited SDF deployment in a noncombat capacity. But Japan’s two leftist parties, the Communists and the Social Democrats, both oppose Koizumi’s plan outright, and the largest opposition group in parliament, the Democratic Party of Japan, wants to cut the implementation period from two years to one, and to prohibit Japanese ships from hauling weapons or ammunition.
Some critics say the missions are ill-conceived, even unnecessary. “Dispatching the SDF to assist U.S. forces based on our image of the gulf war is like showing up at a soccer game in a baseball uniform with a bat,” writes Shunji Taoka, senior defense writer for the Asahi Shimbun, in its weekly magazine AERA. Asian neighbors, in particular China and South Korea, fear a rearmed Japan. But in deference to Washington’s antiterrorism initiative, they’ve muted criticism of Tokyo’s proposed participation. Koizumi’s allies recognize the rare opportunity. “Reluctantly or not, our neighbors will understand our position,” says a senior Liberal Democratic Party foreign-policy expert. “This is a probing process to see whether, by our actions, we can convince China and Korea that we do not intend to revive militarism.”
Still, the new law paves the way for eventual revision of Japan’s pacifist Constitution, a process Koizumi and other LDP hawks have long advocated. Drafted during America’s six-year occupation following Emperor Hirohito’s 1945 surrender, the document evokes a country without any military whatsoever. That literal interpretation was abandoned after the Korean War to allow Tokyo to raise a purely defensive force. Since the cold war’s denouement, observers both at home and abroad have suggested the need to reinterpret yet again to make the SDF a normal army better able to cope with modern threats like rogue states and terrorism. But pacifism remains a deep-seeded value, and, until Sept. 11, passions ran so hot on both sides of the issue that it looked to be a political nonstarter. No longer. After taking up his post as U.S. Ambassador to Japan in July, Howard Baker told foreign journalists: “I’m sympathetic to the view that the time may come when Japanese wish to [change their constitution].” Then he predicted: “The reality of circumstance in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9.”
Little did he know that those circumstances would include heinous acts of terrorism targeting American cities, or an international military campaign that from Tokyo’s vantage bears a discomforting likeness to the gulf war.
