7-25-07, 9:46 am

There was a disturbing article in the New York Times recently concerning the expansion of the Japanese military's role in East Asia and the Pacific. While the article really gave readers no serious idea of the historical context of what it was talking about, the facts it reported, that is, the present rightist LDP led Japanese government policy of undermining Japan's postwar anti-militarist constitution and developing 'modern' warfare capabilities, should be very disturbing both to the people of China and other Asia-Pacific countries and to the people of Japan, who have benefit hugely from their anti-militarist constitution, which Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi refers to as 'pacifist.'

What is missing from Onishi's article is that the anti-militarist constitution was drafted by the U.S. occupation authorities, who controlled Japan entirely until their withdrawal at the beginning of the Korean war. Unlike Germany, which was occupied by the US, the USSR, Britain and France, and then divided into a U.S. supported capitalist 'West' and a Soviet supported socialist 'East,' neither Britain, which was also at war with Japan and saw its captured soldiers suffer atrocities at the hands of the Japanese imperialists, nor the Soviet Union, which entered the war against Japan in its last days and liberated Manchuria and Korea from the Japanese army, participated in the occupation and reconstruction of Japan.

Unlike the Cold War in Europe, where U.S. strategy was to re-arm West Germany and bring it into the NATO alliance that the U.S. largely created to fight a potential World War III against the Soviet Union and its allies in Europe, U.S. strategy in Asia was to 'demilitarize' Japan so that Japan could never again be a serious rival to U.S. corporate-government longterm imperialist interests in controlling the trade and investment future of the Asia-Pacific region. (The U.S. and Japan had been economic-political and potential military rivals fighting for control of the region, particularly China, since the end of the 19th century.)

Also, and this is very important, the great majority of the Japanese people had repudiated the militarist regime which had led them into a disastrous war that had devastated their country and wanted nothing to do with the grotesque synthesis of feudal warrior ideology, emperor cult, and 'modern' weapons technologies and geopolitical policy thinking that had characterized prewar and wartime Japanese imperialism.

Furthermore, the Japanese capitalist syndicates like Mitsubishi who had profited from the militarist regime soon found out that they could profit even more from a Japanese state that provided them with enormous subsidies to develop automobile, consumer electronics, and other industries that made huge advances in global markets rather than produce military goods for the Japanese state paid for by Japanese taxpayers. Ironically, a U.S. policy aimed originally at removing Japan as a competitor for the trade and investment power that is the economic foundation for all imperialist policies helped make Japanese corporations into a much more effective competitor to U.S. corporations, which lived off and continue to live off their enormous military contracts while they eventually lost out to companies like Toyota (which has surpassed General Motors as the leading automobile producer in the world).

But a potential revival of Japanese militarism concerns much more than the U.S. government today. Indeed, both the present Abe government like its immediate predecessor sees the development of military power 'commensurate' with Japanese economic power as leading Japan into a strategic 'partnership' with the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region. Such a 'partnership' would of course be aimed at China, which suffered over ten million dead and millions more casualties in the Second World War at the hands of Japanese imperialism, second only to the Soviet Union in the loss of human life in World War II or for that matter any war in human history.

Although China would be the primary target of any U.S. Japanese military alliance in Asia, Korea, both North and South, has much to fear from such a development also. Korea suffered brutal oppression and repression under Japanese militarist rule when it, with the acquiescence of the U.S. ruling class, became a Japanese colony following the Japanese Empire's victory against the Czarist Russian empire in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The Bush administration has done everything in its power to demonize North Korea and undermine improved relations between the two Koreas. Whereas U.S. cold warriors liked to say during the Korean War that Korea was a dagger pointed at Japan (a Japan they controlled at the time) and thus could not be 'permitted' to fall into Communist hands (or unified for that matter, regardless of the wishes of its people), in reality Japan in modern history has been a 'dagger' pointed at Korea and a redefinition of and expansion of Japanese military power would threaten Korea, potentially the Philippines, and the entire Asia-Pacific region, whether it is in alliance with or opposed to U.S. policy.

Japanese imperialists before World War II often dreamed of becoming the 'England of Asia,' that is a great naval and military power at the center of a great colonial empire. U.S. imperialist planners and their Japanese counterparts may today 'dream' of a Japan that will act in Asia the way Tony Blair's Britain has acted, that is, as a political military handmaiden of U.S. policy, ready to go in force anywhere and everywhere that the U.S. government wishes.

That is against the interests of the Japanese people, the American people, and the peoples of Asia. Imperialist military alliance systems are not corporate marketing agreements against competitors. They are always unstable, as the powers, like the corporations, are quick to double cross one another when they have opportunities to gain greater profits or a more advantageous strategic position. One doesn't have to read or reread Lenin's Imperialism (never a bad idea and more important today than when the Soviet Union existed) to understand that the imperialism that today goes by the name of 'globalization' produces more militarization and military alliances and conflicts that make war and eventual world war more not less likely.

The undermining of Japan's anti-militarist Constitution by the Abe government and the potential dangers that stem from a re-militarized Japan in the Asia-Pacific region are further reasons for the Japanese people to repudiate the anti-working class Abe government in the upcoming Japanese parliamentary elections. This after all is a government which has sought to both deny or at least blur the crimes committed by Japanese imperialism both before and during World War II while at the same time turning a blind eye to the disasters and suffering that militarist polices brought on the Japanese people. The answer to that kind of thinking, of course, is 'never again.'

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.