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Bullet-Drilled Skeleton's Rattle as Japan's
New Prince Hails the Rising Sun
Goodbye
Koizumi, Hello Abe
By CHRISTOPHER REED
Tokyo.
No matter what the world's second economy,
modern super-tech Japan, attempts these days, even when ushering
in the first prime minister born after World War II, there comes
an ominous rattling of old wartime bones -- in this case literally.
Tokyo and the world's media
are agog as a week-long process begins today in which chief cabinet
secretary and heir apparent Shinzo Abe, (52 years old on Thursday)
and known as The Prince, will be installed as premier. He replaces
the departing and ludicrously labelled "Lionheart"
Junichiro Koizumi, 64, the Elvis fan with the permed hairdo who
five years ago began his term amid enthusiastic but unfulfilled
acclaim.
Both are career apparatchiks
of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled
Japan, with one tiny interruption, for half a century of numbing
dreariness. So we may ask: What's new? Koizumi was different,
they said, but he showed it in a way his fans did not expect.
He failed to install numerous
promised reforms to Japan's only-just recovering economy, which
is now however burdened with the world's highest debt-to-production
ratio. Instead Koizumi demonstrated a consistent ability to alienate
his nearest neighbors, China and the two Koreas, with brash demonstrations
of neo-nationalism through five annual visits to a Tokyo shrine
that honors 14 of Japan's worst war criminals.
Foreign relations in east Asia
deteriorated amid these manifestations of the Rising Sun's high-flying
dreams of former national glory. For those clinging to dwindling
hopes that it might be an aberration, the Abe succession ensures
a more belligerent conservatism that ignores Japan's unpaid debts
to its former victims.
Then, on cue, these same victims
made their appearance. Just before Wednesday's first vote to
confirm Abe's lead over his two fading party rivals, and thus
ensure parliamentary endorsement next Tuesday, the old bones
emerged -- under a neighborhood apartment block in Toyama, Tokyo.
An AP reporter published around
the world the creepy story of a nurse, aged 84, who had confessed
to burying 60 to 100 bodies at the site in August 1945, to conceal
them from incoming American occupation forces. The need for secrecy
was because the corpses and body sections, some with holes drilled
in bones and skulls, almost certainly came from Japan's human
vivisection laboratory, Unit 731, which had a secret morgue in
Toyama.
As I reported in CounterPunch
[May 27-29, 2006, "The Pentagon
and the Japanese Mengele"], Japan's bacteriological
warfare research unit, run by army general and physician Dr Shiro
Ishii from 1932-45, was larger and more extensive than anything
in Nazi Germany. The main lab occupied 60-square kilometers in
Pingfan, Manchuria, where the Imperial army invaded in 1931 to
start its 14-year war on China. Here, and in other units such
as the Toyama morgue, unknown thousands of civilians and captured
soldiers, mostly Chinese but also Russian and probably some Allied
prisoners of war, were subjected to experimental surgical operations
without anesthesia. None survived.
China claims the Japanese killed
10 million of its citizens and that Tokyo has never made proper
amends for this or the destruction of its cities. Japan has apologized
several times -- Abe made a half-hearted one earlier this month
-- but fails to manifest much conviction about its remorse. One
example: Tokyo refuses to perform DNA tests on any Unit 731 victims'
remains, despite repeated requests from next-of-kin.
So here they came again, the
gruesome ghosts and relicts of Japan's brutalities in Asia. But
perhaps this is not fair. Should we forgive and forget the vanishing
past? Perhaps, except Abe himself brings unseemly reminders of
it all.
He was born to rule, they say,
and his patriotic conservatism suits Japan's resurgent nationalism
and continuing refusal to bow to Asian demands for recompense.
Abe said recently: "Over the past 60 years Japan has developed
into a peaceful and democratic country while reflecting honestly
on the fact that many Japanese have suffered great misery and
that Japan caused great suffering and left scars on people in
many countries."
Then he added: "With regards
to the evaluation of the war, however, I think that should be
left to historians." This is a familiar Japanese right-wing
maneuver to avoid blame and perpetrate Japan's argument that
the Pacific war was self-defense against aggression from the
U.S. and Britain. Indeed, this exact rationale appears beside
exhibits in the war museum adjoining the Yasukuni ("peaceful
country") memorial shrine that Koizumi visits.
So how about history and this
college-educated prime minister who studied politics at the University
of Southern California? As Japanese critic and Asian economics
specialist Hiroyuki Saka said: "I question whether a person
who cannot even declare his own view of history is fit to be
Japan's next leader."
Abe is also a hypocrite, for
it was he who led recent promotion of new school text books in
Japan that describe the Pacific war as self-defense. He already
has the history sewn up to his satisfaction. This kind of attitude
understandably infuriates Japan's Asian critics.
Yet despite his professed withdrawal
from history, Abe intends to seek abolition of the historical
and unique U.S.-imposed constitution's Article 9 that created
a pacifist Japan by banning war and permitting only genuine self-defense.
He also plans to follow Japan's recent military, but non-combat,
foray into Iraq with more overseas expeditions by its perhaps
renamed "self-defense forces". Lebanon is mentioned.
As he said in his book published
in July, Toward a Beautiful Country (or should it be Dutiful
Country?): "Yes, your own life is precious. But I wonder
if postwar Japanese have ever imagined that there are values
to be protected even by sacrificing their lives to defend the
homeland." Abe has never experienced military service.
Yet as he seems to agree he
was born to rule, what are his birth origins?
His grandfather was Nobusuke
Kishi, an unindicted war criminal imprisoned by the U.S. occupation
for his role as munitions minister during the Pacific war --
Japan's equivalent of Germany's Albert Speer, whose similar Nazi
post earned him 20 years in Spandau prison. Kishi was released
as Americans put Cold War considerations above justice. His response:
to declare the Tokyo War Tribunal he so narrowly escaped a "farce"
whose effects he then worked strenuously to undo.
And he could, for Kishi became
Japan's prime minister in 1957. He also cemented the 1960 U.S.-Japan
Mutual Security Treaty, something his grandson heartily supports
today, while pushing for more vigorous Japanese military participation.
Yet Kishi, who helped the Imperial army loot Manchuria, continued
his dark past by cultivating a trio of millionaire fellow looters
who helped finance the LDP, which Kishi largely founded.
Abe's father Shintaro Abe was
foreign minister under LDP premier Yasuhiro Nakasone, who in
1982 became the first prime minister to actively advocate remilitarization.
His foreign minister eagerly supported him, and again son Shinzo
inherits that enthusiasm.
So World War II lingers in
Japan through its nepotistic politics. Koizumi's father, Junya,
was a second generation member of the Diet (parliament) elected
in 1937. He served under the wartime militarist extremists and
in 1944 supervised consrtruction of an airport where kamikaze
pilots took off on their suicide missions. The occupation purged
Junya in the late 1940s but he returned to the Diet and became
a close supporters of -- guess -- premier Kishi who, after finishing
his term, helped Junya Koizumi become chief of the Defense Agency
in 1962.
Son Junichiro as prime minister
furthered the wartime connection by appointing as his foreign
minister in October last year Taro Aso, whose father owned eight
coal mines, including one in the southern island of Kyushu where
enslaved thousands of Koreans and 300 British and Australian
prisoners of war toiled in dangerous underground work during
the war. Taro Aso, a failing rival of Abe for the premiership,
ran the mining company in the 1970s and apparently permitted
concealment of the remains of dead laborers during that time.
He has still not acknowledged his slavery connection.
Will he be retained by Abe?
Will others with wartime lineage join Abe's government? We will
soon know. Meanwhile some cynical foreign observers already describe
the new regime as the "Manchurian clique".
In a Japanese context perhaps
the Manchurian Candidate is THE analogy for the war baggage that
Abe brings with him, though its brain-washing story goes too
far -- although Unit 731 would qualify as sinister enough. The
new prime minister's other antecedents, however, offer speculation
of a disquieting kind.
Christopher Reed is a British freelance journalist living
in Japan. His email <christopherreed@earthlink.net>
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