A February meeting in Washington between the American Secretaries of State and Defense, and the Japanese Foreign Minister and Defense Agency Director produced a string of joint statements including bilateral military and political policy once inconceivable. Most statements were confirmations of shared principle; regional and global safety, security, diplomacy. A few, like the delicate handling of atomic North Korea and the unprecedented Tokyo pledge to "encourage the peaceful resolution" of Taiwan's Beijing-vexed sovereignty, described matters in which action might be taken by the pair over months and years to prevent disaster but whose ends relied on antagonists ceasing to be; since the Taiwanese would never surrender their hard-won freedom to the fascist Chinese and Pyongyang's Kim regime would turn macerative without the stuff of agitation.
One mutuality was very concrete in its purpose and realization, that of "realignment of U.S. force structure in Japan." Parties would see staff "report expeditiously" on how to accomplish this, and six weeks later they have done just that:
Japan and the United States are negotiating a military realignment that could move some or all of the nearly 20,000 Marines off the crowded island of Okinawa, close underused bases and meld an Army command in Washington state with a camp just south of Tokyo...."The United States wants Japan to assume a role very much like the one it has vis-a-vis the British," said Tetsuo Maeda, professor of arms reduction and security at Tokyo International University. "The Self-Defense Forces would be regularly deployed overseas for military operations if this kind of realignment were realized."
The title of the Associated Press article, "US Wants Japan to Boost Military Role," might be thought misleading if not for this speculation near the end of the piece:
Koizumi is under pressure to lighten the burden borne by Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the U.S. troops, and any troop reduction would be a political coup for him and offer a chance for Tokyo to use its own military to fill the void.
As before, a Japan assuming its own watch would gradually lend America back its forces and establish by example Tokyo's military privileges. From the next sentence onward the article becomes unhelpful, conflating militarist conquest — helpfully euphemized as "expansionism" — with a democracy's geopolitical participation, the most recent and noteworthy of Japan's in Iraq and Afghanistan and Indonesia totally divorced from tyranny's subjugation. The article closes on a point of conflict between bureau and lay, drawing from the notion that Japan's population is fiercely devoted to neutrality and deference in world affairs. That understanding is based in fact — but if the rightist newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has done its polling right, fact from a Japan that no longer exists:
Sixty-one percent of respondents to the latest opinion poll by The Yomiuri Shimbun said the current Constitution should be revised. This is the second-highest figure since this newspaper started surveying public opinion on the nation's basic law in 1981. ...Nearly 60 percent also said Japan cannot play an appropriate role in international peace cooperation activities under the current Constitution.
As a reflection of the country's national character, this is astounding, hardly short of rebirth. At the very least it is evidence that wounds from belligerence, defeat and a largely self-imposed humiliation have healed without disfigurement. This is not the work of highly visible and highly placed ideologues running cross-current to the people, where actions are taken not in answer to popular will but elite license, as some — including myself — would suggest is the case with American judicial misfeasance. In answering as they did the Japanese equate sovereignty with raising an army, and that army with the responsibilities of protection, jurisdiction and ministration. As for Japanese lawmakers, a constitutional rewrite may not afford in letter the right to solve "international disputes" but the spirit is there, alongside the will to amend:
[O]pinion trends among respondents supporting Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), the largest opposition party, are noteworthy. Of them, a record-high 67 percent said they supported revising the Constitution, while 64 percent of supporters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party backed revising the basic law. Forty-nine percent of Minshuto supporters also replied that Article 9 of the Constitution, the most controversial, war-renouncing provision, should be revised, while 50 percent of LDP supporters agreed with this proposition.Both figures show that opinions of LDP and Minshuto supporters on the Constitution have converged.
A political majority can address and enact change but only an electoral majority can sustain it. Well, here it is. Oddly enough, the Liberal Democratic Party has been the constituent driver; until recently Minshuto had been opposed or otherwise uncooperative to settling Article 9's contradictions. According to the Yomiuri, support from a public that one year ago was split on an Iraq deployment has galvanized Junichiro Koizumi's majority. The prime minister himself may be looking to win more than he's requested — he's been coy over the last year and now wishes only that "issues of unconstitutionality" are ironed out — especially possible with the last week's stunning turnover of postal privatization reform in his favor.
Disproportionate political pressure from Minshuto voters may be the leverage LDP and other progressives need in debate, for some skeptical observers reckon amendment might hang in the Diet's stiff wind for far longer than advocates expect. But that, and Japan's slight reversion to old custom — a nod to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's idea of administrative spit and shoe polish in a direct effort to gain admittance to the Security Council — seem vestigial to the sixty-year-old democracy, and of little significance to the matter on which governed and elected now agree.