Progress can be be measured great and small in Japan. First, small but great: as discussed by panelists advising lawmakers in April to end the constitutional discrepancy between a country designed barely a year after Allied victory and today's second-richest and most discreet liberal democracy, Japan's military will receive under a ruling Liberal Democratic Party amendment outline a name slightly more representative of what it actually is. Currently known as "Jiei-tai," "tai" roughly translating to "a group of soldiers," the title could be altered to "Jiei-gun," "gun" meaning "armed forces." Rest easy, you English-speaking wary: the Hinomaru and Naval Ensign shall still wave over Japan's "Self-Defense Force."
Second, great but small: on Friday the Group of Four that is Japan, Brazil, Germany and India spoke as one against the London terrorist atrocity before announcing its forthcoming resolution for a reconstitution of the United Nations Security Council, namely each member nation's ascension to it. Despite Washington's advice against and the machinations of rival caucuses in the General Assembly, G-4 will put their Security Council expansion to a vote in one week. Only horsetrading is for certain: the African Union and a faction led by Italy, South Korea and Pakistan will submit their own proposals. All of this means extra risers for a largely tone-deaf chorus, and the United States hopes to see Japan as one of "two or so" additional permanent members. China, however, opposes Japan's entrance altogether.
Why? For less compelling reasons, we can be sure, than those of our own government. "Six-Party Talks" convene in less than two weeks and North Korea's Kim Jong Il will be invited for the fourth time in two years to drop out of character for the sake of a "nuclear-free" Korean peninsula. The talks will take place in Beijing again. Many of those attending Freedom House's conference "Freedom for All Koreans," held in Washington about a week before the talks, would likely suggest that if more attention were paid to a free Korean peninsula a nuclear status would no longer matter.
Of the five, Russia and China would be the least moved by liberal talk — and according to Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, North Korea is not the only business Beijing wishes to bring up. This August marks sixty years since Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies, ending the Second World War. China remembers Japanese invasions and occupations; and it wants Tokyo to remember, again and again and again. Stay away from the Yasukuni Shrine, said Wu, and tell us how sorry you are for the old Empire's deeds. Pyongyang aside, talks in Beijing could be uncomfortable, and Japan's rightful induction into geopolitical leadership — for now, the United Nations Security Council — might be, thanks to China, a little rough.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi should be careful how deeply his country invests in a morally inert world body and the concomitant paradigm under which Chinese rulers can regularly join hands, summon the ghosts of Hideki Tojo and his cabinet, and accuse Tokyo of haunting Beijing. Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan's military dead, is as inscrutable to the Japanese memory as the Second World War itself. Freeman nationalism is birthright like citizenship but for the Japanese it has been disfigured by black years of postwar shame. In his 1991 book Inventing Japan William Chapman described the shrine as a variable and an even undesirable prospect for statesmen expected, every Fifteenth of August, to visit or not visit — and explain why to the press and public. China's call for apologies is shrewdly disingenuous: Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's angrily rejected obeisance in 1972 Beijing was retold by Chapman as just one attempt at unobtainable forgiveness.
Who encouraged blaming the atoned living for sins of the dead — who, the Chinese people? This past April's vandalism in Beijing, purportedly over Japanese history books, was as much instigated by Chinese authorities as it was directed at them. For those distracted by China's place on the elect council Japan is anxious to join, the People's Republic is a restless totalitarian state constrained only by its military inferiority to the combined free world. The victory whose sixtieth anniversary will be observed this August was Chiang Kai-shek's, not the Politburo's.
Four years after Japan's surrender and three years after Occupied Tokyo ratified a democratic constitution, Kai-shek and his militarist Kuomintang fled from Mao Tse Tung's Communist forces to the island of Taiwan. Progenitor of today's uprightly concerned People's Republic, Chairman Mao murdered in multiples of Tojo's toll and made possible a countrywide, six-decade rolling series of disasters. In 1987, two years before the Chinese military annihilated student protests in Tiananmen Square, Kai-shek's onetime refugees established a functional democracy, and Japan was on its fourteenth popularly elected prime minister.
For natural law tyranny is tyranny, degrees of mass execution irrelevant between one another, so while the crimson legacy of Communist China could be said as no worse than that of Imperial Japan, it is no different — save that the Empire is gone and totalitarian China is still here. In February of this year Japan subtly pledged with Washington to protect the Taiwanese from PRC aggression. That we can call turnabout. What authority, then, has the People's Republic to berate a society having long-since abandoned its imperious tradition, to display half-century old torture devices at Beijing's "Anti-Japan War Museum" while keeping silent on similar public policy instruments used just this morning? Authority that is wholly political, and seated in Turtle Bay.
In Taipei earlier this month, Taiwanese observed the Sino-Japanese Wars through a photography exhibition. Taiwan can be mindful of the past without falling into it, explained the capital city's mayor, quoted as saying, "The exhibition is not being held to celebrate victory in the War. Mistakes can be forgiven, but we cannot forget our history." Japan will need to choose its associations wisely.