Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  One of the lengths to which it will go is to spend large amounts of public money to cover the costs of the bases, thereby turning the Pentagon into a central component of the Japan lobby in Washington, D.C. Japan is not obligated by any treaty to do this. The Status of Forces Agreement clearly states that “the United States will bear without cost to Japan all expenditures incident to the maintenance of the United States forces in Japan” except for the “construction of facilities.” But in May 1978, Shin Kanemaru, then chief of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of the legendary power brokers of the Liberal Democratic Party, arranged for Japan to donate ¥6.2 billion toward support of the U.S. forces. Kanemaru dubbed this the omoiyari yosan, or “sympathy budget,” because the American government had said to Tokyo that it was experiencing budgetary difficulties following the Vietnam War and could not cover all the costs of its bases in Japan. Initially the omoiyari yosan covered only the medical insurance of Japanese civilians working on the bases, but the Americans have asked for an increase in the sympathy budget every year since, and by 1997 it was ¥273.7 billion ($2.36 billion), more than forty-four times larger than the original sum.

  Needless to say, the American press has barely reported these developments; and the Pentagon certainly never uses the term “sympathy budget,” preferring instead the euphemism “host nation support.” According to a 1998 Department of Defense report on allied nations’ “contributions to the common defense,” Japan’s host nation support is the most generous of all. It supplied 78 percent of the costs of the 42,962 U.S. troops on its soil, while Germany paid only 27 percent of the costs of the 48,878 U.S. troops based there. Of the 1997 omoiyari yosan, a bit more than half, or ¥146.2 billion, went to pay the salaries of Japanese who provide some 1,472 separate services to the U.S. troops as translators, gardeners, waitresses, and manicurists, among other things; ¥95.3 billion went to improve American apartments, golf courses, and churches; and ¥31.9 billion, to pay the costs of the public utilities supplied to the bases.30

  The overall Japanese government budget for the bases in fiscal year 1997 was ¥647 billion, including rents paid to landowners for use of their land, investments in countermeasures against noise pollution, and funds to “realign” bases in Okinawa in fulfillment of promises made by the Americans after the rape incident (“realignment” was the official Japanese-American euphemism for moving bases around within Okinawa but not actually changing them in any substantial ways). The total national budgetary support for U.S. forces is ¥28 billion more than the entire 1997 budget of Okinawa Prefecture, 2.2 times greater than Japan’s expenditures for university subsidies, and 2.1 times the amount it spends for day-care centers. The United States has military bases in nineteen countries, but Japan is the only one that pays all the costs of local employees. Whatever economic interest some people in Okinawa might have in the presence of the facilities, one wonders why the rest of Japan puts up with this use of national tax moneys.

  In May 1997, 296 Japanese citizens from twenty-nine prefectures filed suit in Osaka District Court arguing that the omoiyari yosan violates Article 9 of Japan’s pacifist Constitution and asking that the amount of their national taxes spent for the bases be returned to them. This was the first suit to legally challenge the use of public money to maintain the American military, and its sponsors say that it was partly motivated by the 1995 rape incident. Given the length of time that Japan’s ultraconservative court system can take to resolve something it basically does not want to touch, it is extremely unlikely that this suit will ever be concluded. However, the global economic crisis that began in East Asia in 1997 may very well spell the end of the omoiyari yosan when it next comes up for reauthorization. Even Japan’s obsequiously pro-American government may find it has better things on which to spend its money in the coming century.

  Nonetheless, according to the Pacific Stars and Stripes, in 1998 the marines asked the Japanese to build them what would be, if completed, in 2003, the largest golf course on Okinawa. The new four-hundred-acre facility on virgin land at the Kadena Ammunition Storage Area would replace the 116-acre Awase Meadows Golf Course in urban Naha, which the Americans agreed to return to “civilian use” if Japan would supply them with equivalent facilities elsewhere on the island. The government has no desire to build the new golf course, noting that there is already an eighteen-hole course within Kadena Air Force Base. (Kadena also houses a twenty-six-lane bowling alley, two gymnasiums, two parks, two theaters, two libraries, three swimming pools, four tennis courts, seventeen baseball diamonds, four officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, a riding academy, a ballet studio, and a dog obedience school.) But these are Air Force facilities, as Lt. Col. Billy Birdwell, deputy director of U.S. Forces Japan Public Affairs, explained: “We want the public to know that this is not going to be another golf course on Kadena Air Base. This will be a Marine facility, Marine managed.”31

  In 1996, General C. C. Krulak, the marine commandant, became so worried that the rape incident might force his troops to give up Okinawa’s plush officers’ clubs and golf courses that he proposed moving the 3rd Marine Division to Darwin, Australia. This idea fell through when it became clear that Australia would not pay the same lucrative benefits to keep the marines happy.

  The prefecture of Okinawa is, in fact, forced to pay many other costs that are incidental to housing the bases. There are an estimated ten thousand children of mixed parentage—offspring of unknown or longgone American fathers and Okinawan mothers—whom the prefecture is obliged to support and educate. During his 1998 visit to Washington, Governor Ota indicated to Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific, that “we have a situation in Okinawa where children with dual citizenship and one parent who is American are not receiving an adequate education.” He asked that they be allowed to attend schools on the bases free of charge. Campbell, who was three years old when the revision of the security treaty was signed in 1960, fobbed off the seventy-three-year-old Ota with a standard response that disguises the nature of the de facto American colonialism in Okinawa: he urged the governor to take up such issues with the government in Tokyo. Since Okinawa is part of Japan, the United States now pretends that its military bases are there as a result of Japan’s allocation of base sites. This amounts to a permanent collusion of the United States and Japan against Okinawa.32

  What does the U.S. government say it is doing in Okinawa fifty-five years after the end of World War II? Throughout the postwar period, the United States has vacillated between two basic arguments: the forces are there either in order to defend Japan or in order to contain Japan. Though one contradicts the other, each is alternately resurrected, depending on the current situation in East Asia, and used to justify policies that were first formulated to deal with conditions that existed in 1951, when the peace treaty and the security treaty were negotiated, and that ceased to exist at least two decades ago. Even in 1951, Japan was in no danger of being attacked by another nation and even less capable of attacking one of its neighbors.

  According to Article 5 of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, the purpose of the treaty is to defend Japan. Needless to say, the document did not explain whom Japan was to be defended from or dwell on whether Japan needed America’s help in defending itself. No attempt has been made to invade the main islands since a Mongol fleet dispatched by Kublai Khan was dispersed by a “divine wind” in A.D. 1281. After the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Americans essentially gave up on the idea of an invasion and turned instead to defeating Japan through the use of nuclear weapons, strategic bombing, and a blockade.

  Since World War II, only the former Soviet Union could conceivably have mounted such an invasion, although there is no evidence that it ever seriously considered doing so. American and Japanese defense officials love to say that Okinawa’s excessive burdens in the Cold War are a result of the island’s “strategic location.” But Okinawa was hardly well located to anchor a defense against the USSR, which in any case self-dest
ructed a decade ago.

  The Pentagon regularly suggests that Japan faces potential threats from North Korea and China. But North Korea is a failed Communist regime unable to feed its own people and still engaged in a barely repressed civil war with South Korea, which is twice as populous, infinitely richer, and fully capable of defending itself. The Japanese government has strongly expressed its own fears of a potential North Korean missile assault ever since Pyongyang in August 1998 fired a rocket over Japan in the process of launching a small satellite. The real threat, however, is that a suicidal North Korea—itself feeling threatened by the might of the United States—could deliver some kind of terror weapon (if it has one) to Japan by boat and detonate it there as a final, if futile, act of retaliation for Japan’s brutal colonial rule of and postwar hostility toward it. This would be more than half a century late, the worst blowback nightmare and a horrific reminder that the acts of empire are seldom forgotten by those who have suffered them. To date, however, there is no evidence that North Korea is suicidally inclined. Public opinion in Japan, in fact, remains deeply suspicious of American claims that North Korea is a threat. In 1994, when the possible existence of a North Korean nuclear arsenal first surfaced in the media, in a four-nation poll of attitudes, the Japanese named the United States as “the biggest threat to world peace,” followed by Russia and only then by North Korea.33

  The notion that the main thrust of the security treaty was to defend against Chinese expansionism, or to “contain” China, or to provide a platform from which the United States could intervene militarily in the Taiwan Strait to defend Taiwan, Japan’s former colony, from attack by mainland China is a very embarrassing and dangerous one for Japan. In Japan’s own peace treaty with China ending World War II, Japan clearly acknowledged Taiwan as a part of China. Chinese leaders regularly remind Japan that enlarging the scope of the security treaty to include Taiwan directly violates commitments Japan has long made to China.

  The Japanese public (and even the conservative ruling party) do not in any case believe that their country is threatened by China. It is widely accepted that Taiwan’s highly modern defense forces effectively deter any form of military takeover by the mainland. For the public, given what Japan did in China during World War II, a serious conflict with that nation over Taiwan is unthinkable. The Japanese also applaud the evolution of the previously revolutionary People’s Republic from its emphasis on opposition to its former imperialist oppressors to domestic development through commerce with them. Japan’s policy is to do everything in its power to adjust to the reemergence of China on the world stage. It also appreciates that China, while resurgent, still has only a gross domestic product of $560 billion, compared to Japan’s $5 trillion and the United States’ $7.2 trillion; a defense budget of $31.7 billion, compared to Japan’s $47 billion and the United States’ $263.9 billion; and perhaps as many as 149 strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the United States’ 7,150.

  In polls, the Japanese public has repeatedly expressed a greater concern about oscillations in U.S. policy toward China than about anything China has done or has the capability to do to Japan. Given the large military expeditionary forces the United States maintains in Japan, the real fear is that increased American belligerence toward China might invite Chinese retaliation against the bases in Japan. This is one reason why former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa advocates maintaining the Japanese-American alliance while eliminating permanent U.S. forces from Japanese territory.34

  The Japanese, too, have the ability to defend themselves from any likely nonnuclear threat to their security. With the second largest navy in the Pacific, more destroyers than the United States, and 120 F-15 fighter interceptors, Japan is quite capable of meeting any challenge that might arise, including one to its merchant fleet. Shunji Taoka, the military correspondent for the Asahi newspaper, argues that Japan has long been fully capable of supplying its own air, naval, and ground defenses and need rely on the United States only for its “nuclear umbrella.” According to Taoka, if the United States withdrew its forces, Japan would not need to add anything further to its defense expenditures in order to maintain its security.35

  If, then, American troops are not in Japan to defend Japan, could they be there to contain it? Is their role that of an “honorable watchdog” (gobanken-sama), as many conservative Japanese politicians have contended in the postwar years? The most famous expression of this came from Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, in a 1990 interview with the Washington Post.36 His forces, he claimed, were like a “cap in the bottle,” preventing the monster of revived Japanese militarism from jumping out and, as in the first half of the twentieth century, threatening other East Asian countries. Versions of this view are often seen in the American press; a typical example also from the Post: “Neighboring countries, with a particularly vivid memory of Japanese aggression during World War II, also worry that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, Japan would almost certainly build up its own military power.”37

  One problem with this theory is that the United States has long pushed Japan to build up exactly the military power it is supposed to be containing. The government sells more advanced weapons to Japan than to any other nation or territory except Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. It has allowed the licensing of the technology of General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter plane (a derivative of which in Japan became the FS-X); it has sold Japan advanced Aegis ship missile-defense systems, ultrasophisticated AWACS command and control aircraft, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and with highly publicized threats about the dangers of the “rogue state” of North Korea has even gotten the Japanese to agree to help fund research for an antiballistic missile system. And that only scratches the surface of U.S. arms and technology transfers. In addition, administration and Pentagon officials have urged their Japanese equivalents to be strategically bolder in deploying Japanese defense forces in Asia—far bolder, in fact, than most Japanese would like their country to be.

  The Pentagon is today the most important political force inside or outside Japan calling for a greatly expanded Japanese military role in world affairs. In a public-opinion poll conducted by the Asahi newspaper, 43 percent of the Japanese public opposed and only 37 percent approved the expanded Guidelines on U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation that the two countries signed in 1997.38 These commit Japan to supporting American troops in times of “emergency” with many forms of assistance—opening up Japan’s civilian airports to American military operations, collaborating with American forces in removing mines, enforcing naval embargoes, and other types of direct military operations. These guidelines, as the Asahi newspaper declared editorially, have, in effect, rewritten the security treaty without consultations either with the Japanese Diet or Congress.39 Such ongoing American policies undoubtedly serve to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific but bear no relation to a supposed “watchdog” role.

  As former Okinawan governor Ota commented, “What’s actually happening in Japan is that, with practically no public debate, hypothetical enemies are produced one after another, and potential threats are loudly proclaimed. People talk of the need to maintain an American military presence and to pass legislation to deal with national security emergencies, without making any move to accept bases in their own communities.”40 The Pentagon understands that it cannot come up with a credible threat to Japan or any other nation in East Asia that would demand the forward deployment of American troops. As mentioned in chapter 1, it has therefore decided to rely on something comparable to the old domino theory used to justify the war in Vietnam. According to that theory, nations all over Asia and elsewhere would “go Communist” if North Vietnam were allowed to win its civil war. With communism long gone as an enemy, the new, abstract danger is “instability.” Grave dangers, it is said, will result from the “destabilizing” act of withdrawing American troops from Asia. This new, exceedingly vague doctrine indirectly acknowledges that the purpose of American forces in Japan is neith
er to defend nor to contain Japan but simply by their presence to prevent the assumed dangers of their absence. The Japanese are being propagandized to believe that in these unknown future conflicts they will have a huge if unspecified stake.

  In 1995, this new domino-like theory was given a classic formulation in a series of essays by former assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye. With very little in the way of specific scenarios or threats, he argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that “security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice it until you lose it.”41 In the Washington Post, he put it this way: “Our forward presence provides for the stability—the oxygen—that has helped provide for East Asian economic growth.”42 And in a Department of Defense publication, he offered, “Having United States forces in Asia also promotes democratic development in Asia, by providing a clear, readily observable example of the American military’s apolitical role.”43

  Such formulations have since entered official Washington culture and are now served up as catechism. On March 24, 1997, for instance, Vice President Al Gore told American troops and their families at Yokota Air Force Base near Tokyo, “The peace and security of the Pacific region rest on your backs.”44 And the Pentagon has come to like this idea so much that it has announced its intention to keep troops in Korea indefinitely, even after North and South Korea have been unified. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has also defended the continued presence in Japan by insisting that any pullout would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.”45