[This article, and Geoffrey White’s “War Memory and American Patriotism: Pearl Harbor and 9-11” originally appeared in Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui, Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power, Center for Pacific and American Studies, The University of Tokyo, 2003. http://www.cpas.c.u.-tokyo.ac.jp/ The texts have been revised and condensed for Japan Focus.
The articles examine the intertwined Japanese and American responses to the 9/11 attacks from two perspectives. They show the ways in which long-dominant frames of reference in each nation, particularly memories of their conflict during the Pacific War shaped responses to the shattering events that quickly gave rise to the “War on Terror.” Laura Hein locates the two responses in relation to the ongoing debates in both countries on war, citizenship, and the rights of foreigners, particularly the social movements to secure apology and reparations for victims of Japanese war crimes, and those pressing for multiculturalism and equality. Geoffrey White examines the invocations of Pearl Harbor memory in American responses to 9/11. He then considers the implications of Pearl Harbor (and Pacific War) symbolism for the Bush administration’s global “war on terror.”]
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 killed an estimated 2,752 individuals, of whom at least 115 were born outside the United States. Twenty Japanese citizens were confirmed dead in New York; as were 67 British; 34 Indians; 25 from the Dominican Republic; eighteen Chinese; sixteen Canadians, Germans, and Filipinos; and a large number of Mexicans. Citizens of Indonesia, Jamaica, Guyana, Ecuador, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others, also lost their lives. September 11th profoundly affected not only American citizens but also sojourners in the United States.
In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush Administration swiftly asserted the power of the state, particularly that of the executive branch. This intensification of the national security state has had both important international and domestic dimensions. After an initial gesture toward multilateralism, the U.S. government deepened its commitment to unilateral decision-making, renewed militarization, and restriction of civil liberties. One of President George W. Bush’s first and most fundamental decisions was to treat the terrorist attacks as an act of war rather than a crime against humanity, and define the experience as an attack on America. Moreover, Bush avoided invoking international legal standards to judge the actions of the attackers, such as the ones already in place for war crimes. The United States is back on track to become a permanently militarized state with national security—defined in terms of guns and espionage—as the unquestionable highest priority. This is the logic of the Cold War, except with new, far less clearly defined enemies.
Another far-reaching development is a set of new restrictions on the rights of both citizens and foreign sojourners. Civil liberties organizations have protested these developments, particularly in regard to citizens, but have had little success in fending off the limits to individual freedoms. Their strongest intellectual resource within American political culture is the widespread contemporary belief that racism is antithetical to American democracy. The belief that unjust treatment of some Americans harms all can operate powerfully to create concern for the civil rights of citizens but is less available to foreign residents. (Many foreigners in the United States occupy a grey zone; for example, the large number who have applied for citizenship but not yet received it.)
The Japanese government quickly signed on to the American effort and, for over a year, appeared to have few foreign policy goals of its own. By Fall 2002, however, the Japanese political debate had begun to shift, as right-wing politicians took advantage of Japanese frustration at the half-century of government obedience to U.S. security mandates to push for a larger role for the Japanese military. Both Japanese public opinion and government policy became more hostile to North Korea after the North Koreans admitted to having kidnapped a number of young Japanese in the 1970s in order to improve their spying techniques. Japanese policy in general is moving toward rearmament and the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces to Iraq in the service of U.S. interests rather than of any well-defined policy goals. Nor has Japan acted publicly to defuse tension between the United States and North Korea, despite the danger that their mutual braggadocio creates for the region. Moreover, while the Japanese government advocates international law and multilateral solutions to international conflict in most instances, in this case, it has given the Bush government’s rejection of those approaches stronger support than has any other government, except for Tony Blair’s in Great Britain.
In Japan, as in the United States, there is an ongoing domestic debate over treatment of ethnic/racial minorities, the cost to society at large of racial prejudice, and the core principles of democracy. In recent years, well-established social movements have won considerable gains toward equality for both citizens and permanent residents. The Japanese are also debating whether they should abandon their formal Constitutional rejection of war. These dialogues were well underway before 9/11, have continued since, and affect the Japanese-American relationship, sometimes in counterpoint to state policy. For example, Japanese proponents of multiculturalism have drawn on the rhetoric and organizing experience of American multiculturalism to make demands for equal treatment in ways that challenge both Japanese and American state priorities.
Activists for reparations in both countries also have used international law to criticize the violence of their own governments and demand redress for the past treatment both of people who are currently citizens and of foreigners. They are invoking international law to set up a framework that logically holds across national lines and metaphorically posits a community of global citizens with the right to protection against “crimes against humanity.” The claim that global citizenship protects individuals from abuse and rejects the logic of all-powerful nation-states. Here too, there is considerable cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies, this time flowing more strongly from Asia to North America, among social activists. Like the anti-racist efforts, to which the reparations movement is closely linked, the reparations activists are shaping dialogue between Japanese and Americans as well as providing the framework for significant debate within each nation.
The Rights of Citizens and Foreigners in the United States and Japan
Since 9/11, the Bush Administration has curtailed the rights of legal residents and made it more difficult to get visas, either for people who wish to immigrate or for sojourners, such as college students. This is part of a growing distinction in the U.S. between citizens and legal residents. For example, the welfare reform bill of 1996 excluded legal residents from cash assistance (although they are still eligible for food stamps and other forms of assistance.) American law on most issues does not distinguish between legal residents and citizens. Even illegal immigrants have traditionally had significant rights—e.g. children have the right to a public school education regardless of immigration status. The U.S. seems to be moving away from welcoming foreigners, and perhaps toward ending the huge wave of immigration of the last decade.
Given the enormity of the task of policing the 60 million foreigners who enter the U.S.A. every year, the Bush administration has resorted to racial profiling—a law enforcement tool that has been challenged for domestic use and had lost much legitimacy by September 2001. On November 9, 2001, the State Department announced special measures for all male visa applicants between the ages of 16 and 45 from 26 countries with large Muslim populations. (Since Islam is a religion rather than a place, there are no records of how many immigrants or visa recipients are Muslims.) These are still in place, although as of December 1, 2003, the new Department of Homeland Security announced that male visa-holders from the same countries who are already in the United States no longer have to register with federal authorities. That policy had yielded no information about terrorists but had massively disrupted the lives of thousands of families and further enhanced the international image of official American policy as anti-Islam.
The Justice Department around the same time detained 1,147 people, mostly non-citizens, and held about half of them incommunicado and in secret (refusing to release their names) for unspecified reasons. Most were released or deported within a few months but, according to the website of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, many were held for extended periods and suffered severe violations of their due process rights. The government asserts its right to detain foreign nationals indefinitely on the basis of mere suspicion of involvement in terrorism and has continued to arrest both legal and illegal residents ever since. Separately, 650 individuals were being held by the U.S. military either in Afghanistan or at the Guantanamo Air Force Base in March 2003. These are prisoners of war from the Afghan conflict who have been denied the rights of POWs. Even though the U.S. government defines the conflict as war, which should mean that international agreements signed by the United States govern the behavior of the combatants, the Bush Administration is unwilling to submit to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which define and regulate treatment of POWs. (Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only career military officer in the Bush inner circle, openly but unsuccessfully dissented on this decision out of concern for the potential effects on future American POWS.) The main justification for these acts is that the suspects are terrorists and therefore not deserving of POW status, although the Geneva Conventions clearly state that even irregular forces have the right to humane treatment. The Bush administration has also announced plans to bring foreigners to trial in U.S. military courts if it believes they are members of Al Qaida. Amnesty International and domestic civil liberties groups have protested these actions against foreigners, even those resident in the United States, but they have mostly gone unchallenged by the American public.
The government is also encroaching on the rights of citizens but more tentatively and in different ways. Most disturbing is the case of Jose Padilla (also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir), an American citizen who is alleged to have links to Al Qaida and to have been plotting to explode a radioactive bomb. He was arrested on May 8 at Chicago‘s O’Hare airport and is being held as an enemy combatant in federal military prison. The government claims the right to hold him until the end of the war on terrorism, whenever that may be, without trial or any of the safeguards that are his right in civilian courts. Their argument is that he has sworn obedience to a foreign entity and so can be held as an enemy combatant in military prison even though he is an American. The one place where there is any sustained debate about American actions is over the infringement of the civil liberties of citizens of the United States. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, judging by book sales, news articles, and enrollments in college courses, Americans rushed out to learn more about Islam and Muslim-Americans. Many couched their concern as a desire to combat religious and racial prejudice. The United States is manifestly multicultural today—as ten minutes in any major city reveals—and tolerance of multiculturalism seems to many Americans not only a good thing but also what sets them apart from other nations. Many commentators emphasized the theme that bigotry and race hysteria were dangers equal to—and complicit with—terrorism. Prejudice against Arabs and Muslims (overlapping but distinct categories) certainly exists in the United States but the dominant response to the September 11th attacks among the citizenry at large was to condemn rather than condone it.
At the popular level, remembrance of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII, now universally treated as an unconstitutional abridgment of their rights, has provided a vehicle for people to express their concern. The memory of internment has provided language—almost the only language—for Americans to criticize their government’s actions post 9/11. The link between condemnation of wartime internment and contemporary civic life is obvious, for example, on the many websites designed to teach the principles of democracy and good citizenship to school children. Only one of the sites I visited, Choices for the 21st century Education Project at Brown University, had posted curriculum specifically on the implications of the September 11th attacks, but all the others, such as the Social Science Education Consortium and the Youth in Action sites, provided material on civil liberties, the rights as well as the duties of citizens, and many had extensive material on Japanese-American internment packaged for teachers of K-12 classrooms and presented as a cautionary tale on the importance of protecting civil liberties. All emphasized the need for citizens to exercise their rights in order to maintain a healthy democracy and all defined racial prejudice as corrosive and incompatible with core American values. This is the issue most likely to be a nucleus for future criticism of national policy.
A survey of contemporary American history high school textbooks reveals the prevalence of the theme that racism harms all Americans, not just the non-white citizenry: this represents an enormous change since the 1970s in textbook treatment of minorities. In stark contrast to the 1950s, American textbooks all adopt a highly respectful story of the multi-cultural origins of US citizens and emphasize that all Americans gain in providing full access to the privileges of citizenship to their compatriots regardless of race. While textbooks give little attention to Muslims or Arab-Americans compared to African-Americans, Hispanics, or Asian-Americans, the heightened awareness of their presence in large numbers in the United States since September 11th mainly has been framed within these previously established textbook narratives of the benefits to America of multiculturalism.
The same textbooks that show an enormous social distance from attitudes of the 1940s toward Japanese-Americans and African-Americans, however, avoid any reflection on American treatment of others in either World War II or the Vietnam War. In other words, the pattern of little concern for the rights of foreigners or the effects of American policy on people in places like Afghanistan, but greater concern for treatment of minorities in the United States, is typically American.
Nonetheless, many Americans would prefer that the United States maintain the principles of “just war” doctrine that have been delineated in international law and are usefully summarized by Richard Falk. These are to maintain the “principles of 1) discrimination (force must be directed at a military target, with damage to civilians and civilian society being incidental, 2) humanity (force must not be directed even against enemy personnel if they are subject to capture, wounded or under control, as with prisoners of war); and 3) necessity (force should be used only if nonviolent means to achieve military goals are unavailable).” The core of this argument is that safeguarding human rights and civil liberties is the best riposte to attacks on America and that indiscriminate military response simply “expands the zone of violence.” But these misgivings among many people have not coalesced into a powerful counterforce to the government’s stance that it alone should shape American interactions with the outside world, nor did it prevail against White House determination to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11.
In Japan, while immigration is very difficult and foreigners’ rights are few, there has been considerable movement in the last decade on the rights of long-standing permanent residents. Several different minority groups in Japan have launched sophisticated and highly visible challenges to Japanese ideas of homogeneity over the last decade. Among the most vocal are the resident Koreans in Japan. By now, most of them are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the colonial subjects who were came to Japan as laborers before 1945 and were stripped of Japanese citizenship when Japan regained sovereignty in 1952. All but the oldest Korean residents have lived in Japan their entire lives, speak native Japanese, and are thoroughly acculturated to Japanese society. Many have long protested their exclusion from Japanese civic life including the requirements that they register as aliens by being fingerprinted and carry their alien registration books with them at all times. The Japanese government only granted Koreans permanent residency and allowed them to travel abroad freely as a response to international pressure on the basis of the Human Rights convention ratified by Japan in 1979 and the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1981. In 1990, Korean residents were still barred from all government jobs, including teaching in public schools, working in municipal governments, and delivering the mail. By 2002, however, as a result of steady pressure for change from Korean residents, many local governments had eased those restrictions, even though the central government continues to resist changing the laws barring non-citizens from most jobs in the public sector.
Citizens who have historically suffered discrimination, such as Okinawans, have also made significant gains recently. As in the United States, overtly unequal treatment of citizens out of racial/ethnic prejudice, while uncontroversial decades ago, is harder to justify in Japan today. Okinawans are now pressing harder for something that can be called a hyphenated Okinawan-Japanese identity, and also are changing mainland attitudes as well—at the level of both government and society. In Island of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, a book edited by Mark Selden and myself, Julia Yonetani shows that the Japanese government is now beginning to respond to the demands for equal treatment at the heart of Okinawan protest against hosting 75 percent of the U.S. bases on Japanese soil. In various ways since 1945, the Japanese government has offered the United States more or less free rein in Okinawa in exchange for greater autonomy on the mainland. After a wave of protests against the bases, touched off by the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. servicemen in 1995, the Japanese government was forced to make new symbolic concessions to Okinawans in order to preserve the American base structure ]that is central to these grievances. In addition to long-standing tactics of compensatory payment and political pressure on elected officials to buy Okinawan acquiescence to discrimination, in the “Okinawa Initiative” debate of 2000, the national government mobilized pro-Liberal Democratic Party Okinawans to reframe its political relationship to Okinawa. The proponents of the Okinawa Initiative acknowledged that World War II-era policies were deeply prejudicial toward Okinawans. They also conceded that the Japanese government’s postwar willingness to cede Okinawa to the United States in 1952 and to leave all U.S. bases intact at reversion in 1972 was deeply unfair. These concessions clearly were made in the hope that rhetorical apology—together with higher cash payments—would suffice to mollify Okinawan ire over being forced to continue hosting the bases. They also institutionalized multiculturalism within Japan in ways likely to significantly affect political culture. Okinawan remembrance, and the political demands associated with it, is something that Tokyo officials can no longer ignore without jeopardizing both the U.S-Japan military relationship and domestic peace.
Of course, demands to respond to Okinawan grievances necessarily imply interrogating the idea of Japaneseness as well. Demands for full civic and social inclusion for Okinawans require rethinking fundamental questions about the expansionist prewar Japanese state, the war, the alliance with the United States, economic development priorities, and the routes to social mobility in contemporary Japan. For some Japanese, those changes are deeply alarming, precisely because they both validate heterogeneity and democracy and challenge ethnic and gender hierarchies. Many other Japanese, however, welcome greater diversity within their own society and find the efforts by Okinawans and other minorities to expand the meaning of contemporary Japaneseness deeply satisfying. They hope that Okinawan challenges to the status quo and their display of cultural resourcefulness will help transform all Japan into a more lively, vibrant, cosmopolitan, and humane place to live. Japanese nationalists argue that Japan should become a “normal state,” by which they mean a militarized one, but more and more, in the minds of many people, a “normal state” means a self-consciously multi-ethnic and multi-cultural one that strives to serve all its citizens and residents well.
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