— Sendai telephone operators, exploring Occupation-borne labor rights, 1945 (William Chapman, Inventing Japan)
Late last month, nearly a thousand Japanese troops disembarked from three warships onto the shores of Indonesia's Aceh Province. Soldiers of the Self-Defense Force intend to stay for at least a month delivering humanitarian aid by air, sea and land to a local populace struggling amidst the destruction left by December's massive tidal wave.
The deployment is only one of many unprecedented actions the island nation has undertaken over the past eighteen months. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has sent a small Ground SDF contingent to aid the southern city of Samawah, Iraq; he has brought Japan into the Proliferation Security Initiative, President Bush's contribution to successful multilateralism; he has refined his country's posture towards despot North Korea to one of no-nonsense vigilance, entering into a joint ballistic defense agreement with the United States; and most notably, he has spent many months offering support to a substantive revision of the Japanese postwar constitution's war-renouncing Article 9. That a nation democratic for sixty years should reserve the right to defend itself by means already available to every one of its colleagues in the free world is reason enough to recognize and abandon Japan's anachronisms, and Koizumi seeks to do just that.
But like any postwar Japanese politicians Koizumi and his progressives in the Liberal Democratic Party are cautious, quite aware that because painful national memories fade slowly, Japan's efforts to acquire the full status of a free country — to be respected and trusted and admired, not feared — will appear to select groups as Japan's having come full circle. Consider the January 24th deployment to Aceh: it is characterized as the largest military operation since the Second World War, so the last time the Japanese came ashore it was for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. Providence determined not to be a good sport, SDF ships — flying the radiant naval ensign — appeared on the Indonesian horizon not two weeks after the invasion's sixty-third anniversary. Publicly, the Indonesian government was more than happy to receive help from the children and grandchildren of the men who ruthlessly occupied the Indies half a century ago. But some of Japan's neighbors — from the Communist Chinese to democratic South Koreans — would indefinitely prohibit the second-largest economy in the world from exercising a right to assertive military self-protection if the question were left to them. For skittish Seoul and malevolent Beijing, Japan's departure from the Cold War era through the door of constitutional revision draws crowds out to burn red-and-white flags. Even in the West, it is not too difficult — though thankfully more difficult than years ago — to find a non-leftist whose first thought, after being told Japan intends to arm itself properly, is of Pearl Harbor.
Fear of Japan is patently ludicrous. It is a cross between incondite superstition and ignorance, like having not read a single word about the country since its formal surrender to Allied Powers on the deck of the USS Missouri. Its cultural trajectory was forever altered when the emperor was made man. Japan spent much of the first two postwar decades wreathed in domestic shame in doused in foreign contempt. According to chroniclers, the Japanese visting a nearby Asian Pacific country on business was a wary, worried, obsequious, apologetic man who would prepare for hostility to his presence. Japan has faithfully observed its constitutional prerogative for a military, muddled by the United States State Department's "Reverse Course" repealing of reforms from General Douglas MacArthur's administration, maintaining a fastidiously named Self-Defense Force. Great pains are taken not to offend. During some of the most routine military maneuvers Tokyo insists on taking deferential precautions, like actually stripping commandos in a public demonstration of their weapons, exceptions that most free nations would find humiliating and — in a time of war — operationally detrimental. A recent television campaign for the promotion of Maritime Self-Defense Forces — featuring seamen dancing on a flight deck — speaks volumes for the country's desire to be seen as irenic, however sharply inappropriate.
None of this should diminish the horrifying world power that was militarist, Imperial Japan. Only by substituting the phobia of Japan with the phobia of America and the West, revising and excising history, can one possibly conclude Japan's aggression was unexceptional or its atomic defeat unjust — or its polity anything but despotic. Authoritarians manipulated the dictatorial country's Meiji Era prosperity and modest liberalizations to drive a war machine, from government to intellect to the market. Power was concentrated in the hands of a very few, remnants of Meiji elected institutions bound by Imperial loyalty. Family-owned zaibatsu industrial giants answered to central planning of military conquest. The government raised children to sacrifice, hate and kill for the empire; schools were spigots of propaganda, boys taught like jugend to be soldiers and girls instructed like jungmadelbund to be conservators of racial purity.
What was neither a pluralist nor democratic society in its best prewar times became a familiar national concentration of disinformation, fear and brutality, where truth and right were claimed as exclusive property of the emperor's ruling elite. When defeated in August of 1945, the militarists' final lie to the Japanese people was that the Americans, whom the people had been encouraged to hate and distrust, intended to occupy in the same manner as the empire. From former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman's narrative on postwar Japan, Inventing Japan:
[Lieutenant Senior Grade Kiyohisa] Mikanagi thought their [fear] a natural reaction. "They had been taught for years to expect the worst," he recalled years later in an interview. Military leaders had drilled into them the lesson that if the enemy landed there would be rape and killing and looting. The tonari-gumi, or neighboorhood associations, had been told to prepare for hand-to-hand fighting, and women were handed sharpened bamboo stalks to use as spears. "So after the emperor had spoken," Mikanagi continued, "I thought it was natural that they should run away when they heard the Americans were coming. They expected to be treated very badly."...Americans were puzzled at the undemonstrativeness of the conquered people and thought them strangely sullen. In fact, the Japanese were caught in that most primitive and stunning emotion: an overwhelming relief at having been spared. Almost all expected to perish.
In fact, it was Japan's tradition of rule by the strong that would perish, and the Japanese common man would be empowered by idealistic, assertive and sweeping reforms of a nearly seven-year occupation. Allied forces, mostly American in constitution and command, would spend millions of dollars through the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of men and women bestowing on Japanese the means to enjoy their natural right to liberty.
A populace largely ignorant of America and freedom progressed further in one decade than one millenium. The malignance of despotism was reversed, the accompanying dearth of liberalism remedied. Sixty years later we find Japan as a benign, fascinating, moral, industrious nation striving to accomplish out of the philanthropic ambition native to every robust democracy. The Japanese face their own doubt — and bigotry from foreigners who generally live less freely than they do. But little else.
What matters is that the old Japan, with the old Germany and others, was put down and interred beneath a liberal foundation. Dictatorship's perversion of man is as primeval as it is impermanent.
But the rule of force is primeval — when a nation begins to govern itself by popular consent, it must abandon a culture thick with traditions of strength, bloodline and violence. And dictatorship perverts. As I recently argued, false worlds created by strongmen can seem very real indeed, or at least the prime of public opinion: enforced in thought by repeating propaganda while shutting out all external sources of information, enforced in deed for those who suspect otherwise by the calculated application of violence. As with the Japanese, the first step taken by the emancipated is into a reality of which they knew little or nothing. On March 24, 2003, the West discovered another despot's captive population made to fear their liberators:
Iraqi soldiers have been told they will be injected with poison if captured by British or American troops, it emerged today. US forces have tried to counter Iraqi propaganda by carrying out mass leaflet drops, saying anyone who surrenders will be treated well.But a British medic who has been acting as an interpreter for injured prisoners of war said the men were still "completely terrified" and believed they would be executed. They could have been kept in sanitised barracks and never shown the US leaflets, he said. Captain Wassim Slim, who was born in Saudi Arabia but educated in Britain and speaks fluent Arabic, said: "They are completely terrified, they have been fed a lot of stuff about what will happen to them if they are captured."
The analogy between Japan and Iraq is not a close one, nor does it need to be. Germany was as unlike Japan as either Axis nation is to Iraq; both postwar reclamations succeeded. Conceptually, democratization is universal. I have contended that there are two campaigns in Iraq; one that resembles reconstruction following the Second World War and one that is unique, thanks to the basest form of thuggery that resides in most of the Near East. The first is a matter of the Iraqi people simply embracing the tenets of liberalism, the second a matter of the Allies and Iraqis defeating the enemies they now share.
Unfortunately, those responsible for the second campaign have long been conflated with the protagonists of the first. The whole of Iraq has often been blamed for terrorism and sabotage; when thugs would accomplish some especially noteworthy act of carnage, a number of voices would introduce a non sequitur, wondering aloud if Iraqis were capable of living like civilized men.
Month after month of growing security forces, broadening culture and new construction should have answered that question; the June 30, 2004 transfer of administrative power to an interim Iraqi government should have answered that question with an exclamation.
Theories of Savagism persist. Volleyed about by greying academics is the claim that Saddam Hussein's Stalinist prison was a force for sectarian unity, a canard on the level of cold-blooded absurdity as "Mussolini kept the trains running on time." Saddam Hussein contributed to cultural appreciation — how? By elevating Sunni Islam to an ethnicity, a sort of master race, at the expense of Shiite Muslims, two-thirds of Iraq's population? By forcibly relocating Kurds when he didn't simply wipe them out? By obliterating the habitat of Iraq's gypsies, the Marsh Arabs? By making exceptions for Christians while Ba'athist stormtroopers murdered Jews and Communists by the grave-full? Yes, high-level Saddamite flunkey Tariq Aziz was born into a Christian family as Michael Yuhanna. He became "Tariq Aziz" because a ranking henchman's religious devotion to the New Testament was strictly prohibited by the Arab Socialists. Besides, Aziz's reliance on Scripture while doing clerical work for butchers is a bit suspect, as if Joseph Goebbels' rise to the Nazi inner circle were Hitler's outreach to Catholics.
Saddam exploited the many identities of Iraq's people for every ounce of ruinous worth, identities that now provide in their medley a fibrous support for the new state. A jingo cannot be mistaken for a nationalist freeman; the first invokes pride in one people, the second pride in one flag. Pluralism celebrates the distinct origin and common horizon.
What have the purveyors of civil war, both the "ever-looming" and "ever-present" varieties, to show for the first two years after Saddam? Precious little. Reports continually describe an enemy consisting of terrorists, out-of-work Saddamite brownshirts and common thugs. At the same time, while the few hundredths of a percent of the Sunni population engaging in sabotage and murder do not remotely represent Sunnis, however sullen, the grace and restraint espoused by Ayatollah Ali Sistani is followed by nearly all Shiites — who, to their eternal merit, stood up against Khomeinist patsy Muqtada al-Sadr and his gangs nearly one year ago. Life under a government that requires tolerance and demands equality of opportunity will irrevocably change an authoritarian culture.
One the finest accomplishments of the January 30th election was the creation of broad-based coalitions, tickets representing nearly every kind of Iraqi living in and out of the country today. The coalition with the strongest electoral showing, the United Iraqi Alliance, was built on the mutual objectives of over a dozen distinct parties including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Turkomen.
So finally, in the days after the January 30, 2005 election, only loons, partisans and loony partisans will even ask the question of Iraqi civility. Though the terrorist presence in Iraq was physically unaffected by the country's watershed vote it had, by exposing its currency of fear as worthless, lost its sense of purpose while Iraqis who defied authoritarianism with honor gained a very powerful one. Credit cards, ration cards, Mesopotamian Nazi hunters, bankers fresh from schooling in Amman and a coalition government in the making: Iraqis carry the deed for their country. From this point forward, Americans and other foreign powers will provide guidance and inspiration. What remains to be seen is how quickly Iraqis will coalesce around a constitutional, federal state; work as one national body and crush the violent traitors and seditionists once known as "insurgents."
And so in the West another trench of doubt is dug. For what reason? Not once has the Iraqi character flinched from modernization.
But doubt will be begged. We should anticipate some impolite spasms of Iraqi national pride as it matures, from public slights to operational impediments to unilateral actions from Baghdad, all of which reactionaries and enemies will spin as signs of failure. 
We should view these incidents as natural and necessary. Several months ago, uBlog reader M. Schwenk wrote to ask about my thoughts on how foreign "gratitude" to America is often "short-lived." The unifying principle I see among liberated nations is that those structurally influenced by the United States will still pass through a sort of cultural adolescence, interpreting its lessons from American and Allied proctors as it wishes. The Iraqi election saw the first reasonable demands for autonomy. The Dawa Party's "timetable" for American military withdrawal was brash but the Future Iraq Assembly's campaign for proud sovereignty, "We'll Remain; They Won't," was not. Sentiments like that are blunt and helpful to all. Now that the Cold War is over, the promise of liberty can only be actualized when a free nation chooses rugged self-determination in industry, culture and defense: only countries confident in free discourse and markets can properly ally. Foreign troops will leave Iraq when asked, since a learned Baghdad will be entrusted with the best interests of all. I was once told that a leftward acquaintance working in a liberalizing African country could "understand voting Republican" after she realized how deeply lethargy, brought on by dependence on foreign aid, permeated regional culture.
Turn back to Japan, where self-reliance finally commands the national conversation. Where did this germ come from? America. How did it grow in Japan? William Chapman obliges:
The reason that so many of the Occupation's changes survived and flourished was that most of them were popular. Despite the conservative government's hostility and obstructionism, the reforms that most affected people's daily lives were accepted and approved, often overwhelmingly. Farmers did rush to claim their land from dispossessed owners, and the concept of land reform was endorsed in every public-opinion poll of that era. Workers did pour into new legal unions, and the great majority remained even after the American-sanctioned retrenchment. Virtually every organized reading of the public mind in the postwar years registered approval. Eighty-five percent endorsed the emperor's new symbolic status as defined by MacArthur's constitution. Seventy-two percent agreed with the renunciation of war. Two out of every three approved the new legal equality of the sexes. Four out of ten even favored abolition of the ie system, which had regulated family life. In the closing months of the Occupation, several newspaper polls inquired whether the Japanese, on balance, felt they had benefited from its experimentation. Nine out of ten said yes....What survived from MacArthur's tenure in Tokyo was what the Japanese found acceptable.
Conservative forces did what they could to blunt the edge of Occupation reform and, under the leadership of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, often succeeded. Yet what might be mistaken by the Orientalist as a parochial resistance to "Western" concepts was instead living proof that asserting consistent principles of freedom produces culturally unique results. Until recently, it could be argued that Japanese public opinion was indifferent to their rebirth under Occupation. That assessment, however, drew more from emotional manifestations than practical ones. In national character, it is far less important to be "liked" than it is to be emulated. Although the first day of Japan's postwar independence, April 28, 1952, is described in Takemae Eiji's Inside GHQ to have been colorless, the country was even then by form and function a resounding acclamation to American work — and liberty itself. During the early years of the Occupation, Japan's embrace of liberty was sometimes naive, awkward or wrong-headed; but it was sincere.
On the second-last day of January, millions of people who lived their entire lives bereft of natural law voted to reclaim its rights. They are well on their way to aligning themselves with the humble architects of worldly good, following those like the Japanese. Anthropologically, one culture — English, thereby American — would have to arrive at democracy more or less naturally to conceive of its practical application. But once invented, such a constitution has been denied to the less fortunate only by circumstance. There is a word for "freedom" in every language.