Nostalgia for your country’s past military adventures is a common tool used by politicians. But when those adventures included the killing of tens of millions of people in neighboring countries and the use of rape as a weapon, that’s different. And when you propose reviving that army, that’s a serious concern for the world. A review of the past 100 years of Japan-China relations is an eye-opening journey that is vital to understand why the plan to revive the Japanese army is a huge issue in East Asia. Richard Cullen reports.
THE WORLD ORDER IS CHANGING
Primary geopolitical shifts are disturbing the longstanding world order. This has been so for over a decade. The resulting discomfort is most acutely felt in the developed world. Certain political leaders in that world have stepped forward – with increasing electoral success – to tell voters across many Global West jurisdictions that they can (somehow) make things be the way they were.
Typically, such leaders encourage simmering anger and resentment within a given population, stressing how they recognize this distress and can provide an exceptional locus offering executive solutions to address their shared victimhood. The solutions marketed commonly stress how a return to a brightly visualized, splendidly better past era is within reach. However, that opportunity has to be emphatically (and martially) grasped.
Over the last decade, Donald Trump’s political rise and modus operandi have – repeatedly embellished with horrific levels of military violence –exemplified this process (link). Versions of this species of vehement political evolution were evident, especially in Europe, during the two decades following the end of World War I. Many have argued that the winning Brexit referendum campaign followed a similar pattern (link).
Japan as the victim
Japan, it transpires, first set off down this road around 100 years ago.
Imperial, militarizing Japan proved highly successful in the first comparatively short wars it fought with China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905) acquiring substantial Chinese territory in both cases (link).
Subsequently, Japan’s radical economic and fierce military expansion in East Asia encountered greater pushback, including from the West. It was also badly affected by the global depression, which began in America in 1929. Japan’s initial whirlwind glory thus began to face serious headwinds. By the 1930s, Imperial Japan laid increasing stress its victim status, thereby grounding intense Japanese advocacy stressing how Tokyo must respond drastically to ensure its survival.
The next step was to use the term “survival-threatening situation” (or self-defence) as a pretext to justify Japan’s military invasions across Manchuria and then all of China and later throughout South East Asia and across the Pacific. This naked aggression was boldly framed by Tokyo as vital to protect Japan’s growing offshore conquests and economic interests. It finally steered Japan towards its infamous surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in late 1941, triggering the Pacific war (link).
Pacifist Japan
This ultimately led to Japan’s complete defeat and surrender, in 1945. Given the industrial muscle marshalled by Imperial Japan and the exceptional ferocity of its warmongering, the US imposed a conclusively pacifist postwar constitution on subjugated Japan. Article 9 provides that “Japan permanently renounces war as a sovereign right and the threat or use of force to settle international disputes.” A self-defence force is permitted but Japan is prohibited from maintaining land, sea, and air forces, which could be used to initiate and wage war.
Challenging pacifist Japan: Chapter one
Notwithstanding this constitutional imposition, Japan has struggled, since 1945, to admit its profound, unqualified collective responsibility for the grotesque horrors it imposed on Asian and Pacific neighbors, and especially on China.
The catalogue of atrocities, stretching over several decades, is staggeringly wicked, involving tens of millions of murdered civilians, massive levels of rape and torture combined with enslaved prostitution and the unspeakably evil medical experimentation of Unit 731.
According to the Genocide Education Project, the Rape of Nanjing alone saw around 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers massacred (half the total population) and over 20,000 women raped with most then murdered (link).
Most harrowing to read are first-hand accounts of how systematically sadistic the methods chosen by the Japanese were, in order to terrify the locals in freshly conquered areas (link).
An elite, influential ultra-nationalist minority – previously led by right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (assassinated in 2022) – has long been deeply discontented by the Article 9, constitutional limitation. The extraordinary rise of China is what now most troubles these present-day admirers of Japan’s past imperial victories. These same people presumably also worry about how that ruthless history must shape the way China still regards Japan.
Abe was strongly influenced by his brutal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi known as the “Monster of the Showa Era.” Kishi was imprisoned after the war as a Class A War Criminal suspect and then released by the Americans to become a fervent anti-communist Japanese Prime Minister from 1957 – 1960 (link).
Jake Adelstein, a long-term observer of Japan, noted, last year, how Abe was the grandson of a war criminal, who muzzled the press, bullied broadcasters, and faked statistics (link).
In 2013, the BBC reported how Abe employed his own version of militant nostalgia to boost his aggressive, nationalist electoral appeal. The scheme involved actively provoking Beijing to ramp up claims of a serious threat to a Japan left vulnerable by that humiliating article 9 in the American imposed constitution (link).
Challenging pacifist Japan: Chapter two
The landslide winner in the recent election in Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a long-term protégé of Abe, sees herself as his robust successor (link). Mimicking Abe during the campaign, Takaichi portrayed Japan as a victim living beneath China’s menacing shadow, advocating dramatic and expensive re-militarization in order to restore Japan’s former radiance.
Soon after taking on the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Ms Takaichi stressed that Japan may face a another “survival threatening situation” if Beijing ever used military power to impose a naval blockade on Taiwan. The Mainichi, a leading Japanese daily paper, said that: “Previous administrations had always avoided directly linking the exercise of collective self-defense to a Taiwan contingency” (link).
A recent Reuters report argued that:
By labelling a potential attack by the People’s Liberation Army on the self-ruled island claimed by China as “a situation threatening Japan’s survival”, the prime minister has reinforced Beijing’s concerns over a historical foe with ambitions to remilitarise. …. The phrase uttered in parliament on Wednesday is a legal description introduced in 2015 which, if invoked, allows the premier to deploy the country’s Self-Defense Forces (link).
Takaichi’s deliberate choice of this term, with its belligerent 1930s resonance, was aimed at provoking a harsh response from Beijing and confirming her hardline posture with like-minded LDP members prior to the election she was planning (all of which had worked for Abe). Here was Japan’s first female prime minister speaking to the electorate, casting Tokyo as a confected target and offering her own “Iron Lady” militarized solutions to address their shared victimhood.
William Favre, an historian of modern Japan, recently summarized the essence of her political approach in this way:
“Her language on China is among the toughest of any Japanese leader. She has warned of Beijing’s growing military and economic influence and expressed suspicion toward Chinese diaspora communities in Japan, suggesting they may serve as conduits for espionage—comments that drew domestic backlash for xenophobic undertones but resonated with nationalist audiences” (link).
It significantly helps politicians like Takaichi that Japanese nationalists have, for many decades, effectively enforced the sanitation of wartime, text book narratives used in Japanese schooling (link). Most Japanese voters grow-up with a limited understanding, at most, of the repetitive, grotesquely horrific behaviour of the Japanese military forces during the imperial era.
Challenging pacifist Japan: Chapter three
Takaichi’s most urgent goal is to revise Article 9 of Japan’s 1947 Constitution. Unlike Abe’s reinterpretation in 2015, which permitted collective self-defence, Takaichi seeks a formal amendment to recast the present Japan Self-Defence Forces (JSDF) as an uninhibited, national military force. She argues that only by doing so can Japan normalise its security posture in the era of great-power competition and effectively counter threats from North Korea and China.
This is an ominous project that, inescapably, draws one’s attention to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shinto Shrine. This wartime memorial offers conspicuous, long-term, menacing confirmation of the active evasion of historical responsibility (including, at times, atrocity denial) entrenched within certain Japanese elite sectors.
Imagine if named leading Nazi military figures, such as Goering, Himmler and Rommel, had been enshrined in Cologne Cathedral, after Germany’s surrender in 1945. And, in accord with this arrangement, sympathizers – including current senior German political leaders – could visit to venerate or send tributes.
In fact, in the case of Germany, this is inconceivable given the acute collective understanding of the need to stress continuing atonement for Germany’s monstruous Nazi past and to ensure that that history can never be openly venerated in any way (link).
But in Japan the inconceivable is entirely conceivable. Visitors to the Yasukuni Shrine pay respect, there, to over two million who have fallen fighting for Japan, including over 1,000 convicted war criminals and 14 enshrined class A war criminals.
This ill-famed edifice provides an alarming reminder of the embedded nature of the project to secure a militarist rebirth of Japan. Prior to his assassination, Shinzo Abe visited once whilst Prime Minister and he regularly sent tributes. It is relatively common for senior, serving Japanese politicians to send tributes to this shrine (link).
Sanei Takaichi, Abe’s striking protégé, previously visited the Yasukuni Shrine, including as a government minister.
Conclusion
China remains Japan’s leading trading partner. When combined, Mainland China and Hong Kong, take over 25% of Japanese exports (link). Moreover, according to Australia’s Lowy Institute, Japanese direct and indirect investment in China keep rising (link). On balance, this trading experience has been very good for China- and immensely good for Japan, as most Japanese businessmen will confirm.
However, the extraordinary, wholly peaceful rise of China during the last half-century has, in much of the Global West, fuelled puzzlement, followed by envy leading to intense resentment and even infuriation. Now that dismal pattern is conspicuously evident in Japan.
Thus, although reckless, Takaichi’s recent statement on the Taiwan dispute was plainly deliberate: it was aimed at vexing Beijing and pleasing fellow ultra-conservatives, who want to ramp-up military spending remarkably. It also threw red meat to the powerful posse of influential Washington war-hawks who would, today (like their soulmates in Japan) love to put Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution to the sword.
To allow this to happen would be very bad for Japan. First, it would promptly accelerate the degradation of regional trust in Tokyo. Next, and worse still, it would undermine the pivotal project of maintaining peace in Asia (and globally).
Japan’s depraved martial history continues to inform the fevered mindset of certain Japanese elites. These are the people who, today, seek far more weapons to back up amplified use of Japan’s fearsome rising sun war flag. It is incontestable that Japan, Asia and the world need Japan to remain bound by Article 9 – unreformed.
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
To see a list of articles he has written for this outlet, click this phrase.
Image at the top is a montage of photographs and art, some by AI.