10-02-05, 9:10 am
There was a fascinating story from Japan yesterday. A Japanese court, the Osaka High Court, ruled against Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit to a religious shrine celebrating the Japanese soldiers who fought and died in World War II. The visits, the court concluded, violated the Japanese constitution’s strong commitment to the separation of Church and State by having the Prime Minister identify with a particular religion in its relationship to political events.
Chinese and Koreans, both North and South, have denounced these visits, which represent reverence for Japanese militarism. Korea was a Japanese colony brutally governed by militarists who used millions of Korean men as virtual slave laborers and hundreds of thousands of Korean women as prostitutes for the Japanese armies.
Japanese imperialism, most scholars believed, brought death to well over ten million Chinese, more than any nation in World War II save the Soviet Union, which lost twenty-seven million people. Japanese militarists used the Chinese as guinea pigs and targets in bacteriological warfare experiments and committed unspeakable atrocities against the Chinese people, who fought for their survival and eventual liberation under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party and the large partisan peoples armies it mobilized against the Japanese invaders and occupiers. In China and Korea, the crimes of Japanese imperialism clearly rival many of the better known atrocities of the Nazis and the European fascist collaborators.
Americans also have reasons to care about these events. Although Japanese militarists committed atrocities against U.S. prisoners during the war, American capitalists had no difficulty in reviving and profiting from relations with Japanese capitalists like Mitsubishi who built the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor, while they provided $3 billion in military aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s right-wing dictatorship in its futile attempt to defeat the Chinese revolution after World War II.
Although Korea was a victim of Japanese imperialism from the turn of the century to the end of World War II (the U.S. government had 'recognized' Japan’s colonial domination of Korea in exchange for Japan’s recognition of the U.S. colonial control of the Philippines), the U.S. after the war had installed its protégé, the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, in its zone of occupation in the South, and then intervened in a civil war 1950 to keep Korean Communists from winning the war.
The 'Korean war,' besides involving Americans and eventually Chinese and costing millions of Korean lives, saw the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Japanese firms like Toyota benefit tremendously from war contracts that it received from the U.S. military. Another legacy of the U.S. occupation of Japan is Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party, which is neither liberal, democratic, nor even so much of a party, but a group of pro-business conservative interests and factions who have been in power in Japan for most of the last 50 years. Just as Japanese corporations developed and improved upon U.S. technological developments like transistors for consumer electronics, the LDP, as they are called in Japan, combined the pro corporate pro rich farmer policies of the Republicans with the classic patronage machine politics of the Democrats to build one of the most powerful and successful political machines in the world.
American authorities also had the Japanese renounce war in their constitution, which might make a great constitutional amendment for the U.S. Japanese militarists had made Shintoism, a national religion which worshipped the Japanese emperor as a God, the state religion and had manipulated it as an ideological tool to indoctrinate soldiers to kill and die for the emperor and the militarist elite as an expression of the highest form of duty and honor.
The Truman administration, which in July 1945 rejected Japanese peace feelers to end the war with the provision that they keep the emperor in favor of using the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to surrender unconditionally, found it useful to keep the emperor as a symbol of conservatism and tradition against Japanese socialists and communists who showed substantial in the new labor movement that the U.S. occupation permitted. But the U.S. used its power during the occupation to build all the roadblocks it could against any Japanese remilitarization, if only to make sure that a rival Japanese imperialism would never threaten its own imperialist interests and designs in Asia and the Pacific again.
Actually, the renunciation of war and the separation of Church and State were very good for both the Japanese people and for Japanese capitalists. With very low military spending, Japanese corporations flourished as U.S. cold warriors fought what were essentially neo-colonial wars in the name of anti-Communist 'containment' in Korea and Vietnam and tied the public sector of the U.S. economy to a parasitic military-industrial complex. By the 1980s, Japanese firms had made substantial inroads into the U.S. market in autos and consumer electronics, Toyota had replaced General Motors as the leading auto company in the world, and Japanese finance capital, along with the finance capitalists of the Federal Republic of Germany, successor state to imperial Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany, had become leading international creditors while the U.S., thanks to its trillions of military spending, had become the world’s leading debtor nation.
Americans should praise and support the Osaka High Court for upholding a very positive principle that really represents the democracy that ordinary people have long believed in, unlike the Iraq constitution which the Bush administration is parading as an a victory for its 'democratic' mission, even though that still not adopted constitution puts severe religious restrictions on the Civil Rights of women and substantially reduces the separation of church and state which existed even under the previous brutal but secular right-wing Ba’ath party dictatorship. Americans should also stand with their World War II Chinese allies and their own Pacific war veterans in joining the criticism of Koizumi’s visits to a militarist religious shrine, which Japanese progressives have criticized, even though there are violent rightist groups who threaten and sometimes physically attack critics of Japanese militarism.
With all of his obfuscation about opposing any future war and expressing sympathy for the victims of Japanese militarist war crimes, Prime Minister Koizumi is, in his visits to the shrine encouraging these rightists and like the Bush administration in the U.S. playing to the worst elements and sensibilities of Japanese political life.
Although the Osaka High Court decision isn’t binding on Koizumi it will hopefully encourage greater Japanese and international opposition to such policies, which along with both historical amnesia and denial in conservative public school textbooks, threaten to erase the anti-militarist lessons that the Japanese people learned through World War II by their own suffering at the hands of militarists and capitalists who led them in a war of imperialist conquest that brought death and destruction to many millions of people and the whole Asia-Pacific region of the world.
For Marxists the struggle against the reactionary trends in world affairs must be advanced on an international basis. Bush and Koizumi are allies and as leaders of reactionary political forces exploiting their own peoples, brothers in the defense of imperialism and the eroding in their respective nations o f the anti-imperialist and anti-militarist lessons that people everywhere drew from WWII. In fighting Koizumi's celebration of Japanese imperialism, we form a bond with the Japanese working people who were also its victims and continue the fight against U.S. led global imperialism today.
--Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
