Who has been Bush’s most faithful follower on the world stage, Koizumi or Blair? Both men can make a strong case. Blair’s enthusiasm for Bush’s wars has been well documented: he can boast not only the 13,000 British soldiers currently battling in Iraq, but the dismissal of two bbc chiefs for broadcasting doubts about the government’s dossier on Saddam’s wmd, and the promotion of that document’s author, John Scarlett, to head of mi6, with barely a squeak of complaint from the Labour Party or liberal press. Koizumi’s contribution has been less reported outside his own country, but in some ways it is more interesting. Unlike Blair, he has effected a major transformation in his country’s security policy over the past three years, accompanied by a significant shift in domestic opinion.
Despite the geographical symmetry of the two Eurasian-rim archipelagoes, geopolitically the pair occupy very different positions. Only one was a frontline Cold War state. Abutting the Red Continent, Japan’s situation was more comparable to that of Germany in the west—face-to-face with the Soviet superpower, the People’s Republic of China and the dprk, with thousands of miles of ocean at its back. The American conquerors of 1945 had equipped the Constitution which they rapidly drafted for Japan with a permanent renunciation of the nation-state’s right to war, or to the maintenance of a national military force of any kind. Article 9 famously states that, in the unvarnished prose of its uniformed drafters:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Instead, us ‘land, sea and air forces’ were installed across Japan, as Washington’s forward base in Asia. With the loss of China, however, the us began to have second thoughts about Article 9. Washington started pressing for it to be rescinded, so that Japanese troops could be deployed in ‘free world’ causes, almost before the ink on the Constitution had dried.footnote1 For large sections of the Japanese population, however, Article 9 had come to stand for the adamant rejection of the military-imperialist programme that had brought the country to such ruin, a constitutional ‘never again!’. Although the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party was committed, from its foundation in the 1950s, to the American goal of deletion of this troublesome clause, it was unable to muster any substantial political or popular support for its amendment. Instead, the establishment of Japan’s Self-Defence Force in 1954 had to be justified on convoluted, extra-constitutional grounds: Article 9 could not have been intended to cancel the country’s inherent right of self-defence. The sdf was therefore legitimate regardless of what the Constitution said, as the minimum necessary force ‘to protect the peace and independence of Japan against direct or indirect threat’.footnote2 The sdf thus exists without constitutional warrant, on the basis of this higher principle, something akin to natural law. The Japanese public slowly came to accept the compatibility of the sdf with the Constitution, although the ‘peace camp’ position on Article 9 retained its overwhelming popular legitimacy and it was unthinkable—as even the most reactionary of prime ministers agreed—for the sdf ever to function outside Japan.footnote3 Within the logic of the Cold War, therefore, Japan’s only national defence in a hostile neighbourhood was the us military shield.
By the 1990s, this entire landscape had been transformed. The Soviet Union had vanished from the map, and the Russia that had replaced it was not a Pacific power. Above all, the People’s Republic of China had emerged as a booming capitalist economy, rapidly forging trade and diplomatic links throughout the region. The dprk alone could still be claimed to pose a conventional Cold War threat. Japan too had changed. By the late 1980s, its economy—though not, of course, its diplomatic or military weight—seemed set to overtake that of the us. Washington was at first slow to formulate a new East Asian policy; initial thinking suggested a tilt to China, to ‘balance’ a Tokyo that, in 1990, had been publicly (if briefly) grudging in its support for the first Gulf War. American arm-twisting had been necessary to extract Japan’s eventual $15bn contribution.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, however, a new us strategy was beginning to take shape that clearly aimed at the eventual containment of China. As Zalmay Khalilzad outlined in 2001, its central objective was: