After NEWSWEEK first reported on the course’s sensitive theme in October, leftist groups went on a rampage. They raided the dean’s office, besieged the law school and, holding banners reading stop homicide and don’t force our students into war, demanded the class be canceled. “The seminar’s aim is to recruit our students to commit the same horrors as the Americans have,” shouted one activist. “They want Japanese to hunt human beings!” Under pressure, the university refused to host the SDF. “We’ve taken this seminar off campus to prevent chaos,” explained Air Force officer Shogo Nakamura during the ride to the parking garage. “It was for the students’ safety.”
That the course went ahead, even covertly, is a benchmark of sorts for Japan. After avoiding the issue for more than half a century, the country is starting to analyze, discuss–even question–its lofty “Peace Constitution,” which asserts that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right.” Last month a powerful Diet commission established to study possible revisions released an interim report filled with 700 pages of opinions, pro and con. In it, members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party expressed a strong desire to clarify the SDF’s legal status. “The right of self-defense should be clearly written into the Constitution,” said LDP lawmaker Hiroshi Mitsuzuka in his statement to the committee, adding that Japan must “put an end to the ’theological debate’ surrounding Article 9,” the Constitution’s so-called peace clause.
Revisionists insist Japan isn’t reverting to its past militarism. The goal, they argue, is to align their utopian Constitution with something resembling current reality. Japan’s military is, in fact, Asia’s richest, best equipped and most modern, even though Tokyo still insists that the SDF isn’t truly an army since it’s eternally barred from offensive combat. Advocates of change aren’t, in the main, after more tanks or guns, but more honesty. “Japan,” says Motohisa Furukawa, a lawmaker who supports revising the Constitution, “has spent too much time and energy trying to call a black crow white.”
Japan’s past victims are justifiably alarmed by any hint of renewed militarism. China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency recently accused Tokyo of capitalizing on post-September 11 security fears to expand its overseas military missions. Yet criticism from neighbors won’t likely quash Japan’s budding security debate. The proponents of change are too powerful. Washington, Japan’s guardian throughout the cold war, wants Tokyo to strengthen its military posture. It hopes the SDF will participate more fully in the global war against terrorism and support American forces in potential conflicts “surrounding Japan,” a euphemism for Taiwan and North Korea. Public sentiment for revision is growing, too. When Japan deployed naval ships recently to assist U.S. forces in Afghanistan, 63 percent of Japanese surveyed expressed support for the mission. “The public now accepts that Japan has to do more [and] is a bit cynical about the hypocrisy of Article 9,” says Ellis Kraus, an expert on Japanese politics at the University of California, San Diego.
In retrospect, Japan’s Constitution fell behind the times shortly after its ink dried. Drafted by staffers in General MacArthur’s occupation government, it aimed to render Japan forever defenseless against its enemies and immune to nationalist fevers at home. But after the Korean War broke out in 1950, Washington encouraged Tokyo to rearm. Japan formed the National Police Reserve, which later became the SDF. Rather than amend the Constitution, however, the government simply reinterpreted it, claiming that its new military force was not a violation because it lacked any potential to attack other countries.
That fiction lasted for decades until the gulf-war crisis in 1991 proved an unlikely catalyst for change. Tokyo, invoking its Peace Constitution, sent money–but not troops–to support the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. Though it spent a staggering $11.5 billion on the war, Japan was humiliated when the Kuwaiti government left Tokyo off its official “thank you” list. Since then, Japan has been keen to bolster its credentials as a good global citizen. It sent military engineers to help rebuild roads and bridges in war-torn Cambodia in 1992, and later deployed peacekeepers to Mozambique, Rwanda, East Timor and, most recently, the Indian Ocean, in support of the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan.
It’s true that when SDF troops are deployed, they don the blue helmets of U.N. peacekeepers. Still, Japan’s military profile has risen so dramatically in recent years that some form of constitutional reform seems almost inevitable. Consider, for example, the SDF’s ongoing efforts to resupply U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan. Proposed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the mission won easy Diet approval under the guise of antiterrorist legislation, even though it marked Japan’s first deployment during a time of war since 1945. But LDP critics won’t let the government loan front-line warships, equipped with sophisticated long-range listening technology, for fear that American or British combat units might use the information they gather to strike targets. That much cooperation, they say, would violate core constitutional provisions barring Japan from participating in “collective self-defense.” But the 19 Japanese warships that have so far delivered some 230 million liters of fuel to American and British forces may have done much to buff the country’s image. “We needed SDF troops or ships appearing on television screens [to] have a much bigger impact than any amount of money,” says a senior Japanese diplomat.
More important than the missions, say analysts, are the new technologies the SDF is rapidly acquiring. Recent additions to its arsenal include larger transport aircraft, aerial refueling tankers and advanced warships that, according to military experts, could double as aircraft carriers. Tokyo is also cooperating with Washington in developing an anti-missile defense shield and in February will launch its first spy satellite. Says Bates Gill, an Asia security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: “Japan is shedding its old, traditional taboos about building up its military capabilities.”
Until recently, Japan’s military ambitions were seldom discussed at home. Courses of the sort that recently sparked controversy in Kobe did not exist. Leftist university professors, most of them antimilitary and anti-United States, preferred to indoctrinate their students with the virtues of Japan’s pacifist Constitution than present a balanced picture. Anti-SDF student activism has therefore often come closer to ideological zealotry than simple protest. One leader of the Kobe campus protests, Hiroyasu Ebisu, screamed himself hoarse defending the antimilitary orthodoxy, shouting, “This is not education! War cannot be talked about! We demand that this seminar be stopped!” Seminar organizer Tosh Minohara laments his school’s decision to push the class off campus. “It’s sick that Japan can’t have a productive debate about the military or the Constitution,” he said. “Japan still hasn’t entered its post-postwar phase.”
The voices most rarely heard are those of Japan’s soldiers themselves. Groomed to avoid the limelight, members of the SDF seldom volunteer opinions on their own role. Yet numerous officers interviewed by NEWSWEEK betrayed a confused, even demoralized force. “The gulf war was an embarrassment for Japan,” volunteers one career Army officer. “We haven’t been given the chance to show people that we are brave and willing to cooperate with others. Just doling out yen doesn’t make up for that.” And the humiliations cut even deeper when they come from fellow citizens. “There have been incidents where SDF men have been denied access to public baths,” one airman told NEWSWEEK. “We’re not gangsters, but sometimes people react to us as if we were.” Gangsters or good guys? That’s the question Japanese are beginning to ask about a military force that’s existed in the shadows since World War II. How they answer it will change more than a piece of paper.
