SNA (Tokyo) — News item: Cheered on by the United States for its “bold leadership,” last month “Japan unveiled a dramatic revamping of its security strategy and defense policy, including a plan to acquire long-range weapons–a so-called counterstrike capability–that can target and hit enemy bases” (Japan Times, January 14).

Doubling its defense spending to 2% of GDP within five years, Japan will soon have the world’s third-largest military budget, behind only the United States and China.

Pushing Japan to remilitarize was never, and still is not, a good idea.

This is not just because an arms race in Asia is the last thing the region needs. But also because Japan, consistently unable to face up to its own history, is simply not the country to represent the world’s liberal democracies in Asia, especially as a military power.

Let’s start with that history. After the Meiji Era, Japan decided to industrialize its way out of being colonized by the Western Powers. It soon realized that its own military was colonizer-class after it defeated China in 1895 and then Russia in 1905. After that, Japan decided to “free” the region under its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and its government lost control of its rapacious military.

Japan’s commanders fundraised through trafficking drugs, engaged in biological experimentation and warfare, deliberately struck civilian targets, cruelly ignored Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, massacred the civilians of at least one major city as revenge, sponsored an official system of sexual slavery, tried to wipe out civilizations and plunder their cultural treasures, and started the Pacific War.

Japan’s military has a lot to answer for, and it never really has. Unlike Germany and other colonizers, Japan never engaged in the postcolonial self-diagnostics that would get its own popular culture and national narratives to own up to an evil past.

To this day, government-sanctioned history books are rewritten, and bestselling revisionist books are sold which promote the view that Japan was just a wartime victim, claim that Japan’s imperialism “did good things” to the people it subjugated, and portray historical events like the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre as mere fictions designed by foreigners and leftist anti-establishment forces to deprive Japan’s youth of their birthright to national pride.

This ahistorical narrative has negative consequences on society, with Japan’s normalized militarism obvious to anyone not socialized under it.

Grade schoolers nationwide march in formation every spring during undokai sports days. Patriotism is a graded subject in many Japanese public schools, with counter-narratives and minority views treated in adulthood as “un-Japanese” and “Japan-hating.” Even bayonet practice (jukendo) was revived as a “martial art” in school physical education classes in 2017.

Japan tends to treat public education, sports, and policing like military endeavors. Institutionalized is hierarchical bullying at the classroom and corporate level. Self-sacrifice and physically- and mentally-unhealthy public environments are extolled as “Japan’s unique culture” for the sake of national pride. The police engage in police-state lockdown tactics whenever there is a public panic, and routinely use tortuous methods in their lengthy interrogations.

And don’t forget Japan’s biggest military blind spot: The very existence of the “Self-Defense Forces.” They are in fact unconstitutional, undermining the integrity of our country as a constitutional democracy adhering to the rule of law.

Consequently, annual displays of military jingoism, glorifying even Japan’s most ruthless war criminals, are on flagrant display annually at a major Tokyo shrine. Public rallies with well-funded soundtrucks use bully-boy terrorism and intimidation (routinely overlooked by police) against people suspected of being leftist subversives or Koreans. To even question Emperor Hirohito’s wartime responsibility is to invite public sanction and deadly force.

You see this zealotry even at the highest levels of power in Japan. Politicians and pundits in well-organized political backroom rightist groups such as Nippon Kaigi routinely deny (or even justify) negative Japanese history using sophistry, whataboutism, or just plain revisionism–much to the anger or delight of anyone overseas who needs reasons to distrust Japan.

This is because many of the elites governing Japan are direct descendants of those who ran the brutal Empire of Japan, and see historical revisionism as a means to clear their family names as well.

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the grandson of a rehabilitated war criminal (who himself became prime minister). He wanted that history overwritten. Former Prime Minister Taro Aso’s family made money off of still-uncompensated wartime slave labor. Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was an architect of the Comfort Women system, etc.

Is it any wonder that other Asian countries are concerned about getting behind Japan as a regional leader and resurgent military power?

It comes down to a matter of trust. Putting more weapons in the hands of people, who continuously justify the past inhumane use of them, is something, for my part, I don’t trust.

I think the US government actually agrees with me there. Note that despite all their recent boosterism, the United States is still keeping (in fact increasing) its bases in Japan–partly to keep their hand in the game, but also, to paraphrase a US general formerly stationed in Okinawa, to “keep the genie in the bottle.”

But now, Japan’s future ability to project military force overseas is a leaking genie.

Memories are long in a defeated people, especially when those people and the systems that led Japan to defeat were never purged from power. Playing into these people’s hands by giving them even more power is incredibly risky.

Japan happens to be the only non-nuclear state, according to the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, that reprocesses its spent nuclear fuel into weapon-grade plutonium. It could potentially become a nuclear state, capable of producing 5,000 nuclear bombs, within months.

The late Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara overtly called for Japan to prepare to use nukes on China.

This information is common knowledge, available for any State Department briefing to the US President. Yet Obama missed it during his “Pivot to the Pacific” policy. Trump missed it because he had no coherent policies and was snake-charmed by a flattering Abe. And now Biden, back-slapping a nervous-looking Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House last week, has missed it too.

Elites know how to handle fellow elites, and Japan’s ruling class, like it did so well to stay in power after the Pacific War, has once again played the Americans into giving it even more power.

In conclusion, we should at least touch upon the elephant in the room: What to do about an aggressive China and the possibility of them invading Taiwan?

In all honesty, I’m not sure right now what to do. I’m not a specialist in the area, and know better as an academic than to venture too boldly into territory where I’m not an expert.

But I do know that it is dangerous to assume that a rearmed Japan will act in the best interests of its fellow rich liberal democracies.

Anyone who has experienced life in Japan for an extended period knows just how easily it can be mobilized behind single-minded “go-it-alone” militaristic mindsets that still riddle Japanese society.

Japan remains hardwired for self-sacrifice for unclear national goals. And prodding it towards a costly, destabilizing Asian arms race I pray will not play into World War III.

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