Pacifism has been another major theme of domestic resistance to the Japanese government since 1945 and, since 1948, has been couched as protest against American military priorities in Asia as well. Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro used the occasion of 9/11 attacks to rush through Japan‘s Antiterrorism Measures Special Law of 2001, which gave the government legal authority to order the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to a war theater. Since the Japanese military budget is now a hefty annual $50 billion dollars, deployment of the SDF potentially could mean a major offensive presence. The Antiterrorism Law was, in part, passed in the service of a long-term Liberal Democratic Party project to amend the Constitution to allow Japan to engage in full-scale war, a change that the U.S. government has been pushing for since 1950. The Koizumi government continues to press for a Constitutional amendment to permit remilitarization and deployment of troops overseas in the face of popular opposition within Japan. The events of September 11th may well finally provide the opportunity to change Japan‘s military stance in ways desired by the U.S. Government since 1950. However, Japanese remilitarization is unlikely to resolve tension either within Japan or between Japan and the United States.
In particular, the new Bush doctrine is likely to intensify the contradiction between Tokyo‘s support for American military practices and Okinawan resentment at the U.S. military presence on their islands. While many Japanese hoped the end of the Cold War meant that the Americans would reduce their military forces in Okinawa, the events of September 11th and U.S. policy priorities since then have slammed the door shut on those hopes. Indeed, the importance of Okinawa to American military strategy in the Pacific has increased with the Afghan and Iraq Wars. The attack on Iraq, the U.S. re-embrace of the Indonesian military, despite its abysmal human rights record, and renewed belligerence toward North Korea also have significantly increased tension in East and Southeast Asia, to which Japan must respond. Japanese leaders seem likely to maintain their commitment to support the American government but the domestic and diplomatic costs of that stance to the Japanese government will almost certainly grow in future.
International Law and Redress Movements
The Bush Administration had rejected important principles of international law well before 9/11 when it spurned the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and announced withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile control agreement with Russia, so its later stance was an expansion rather than an entirely new position. Bush and his top advisors oppose any restraints on U.S. sovereignty and believe, moreover, that the United States ultimately does not need the support or even the goodwill of other nations. While they prefer the fig-leaf of international support, they are not willing to compromise very much to get it. The —United States demands total obedience from its allies, even more than during the Cold War.
Of particular significance is the Bush decision after 9/11 to reject the standing of the International Criminal Court, indeed the principle that U.S. citizens should be bound by international law. The Clinton administration had signed the document to establish the court before leaving office but Bush renounced that action in May 2002. Bush demanded blanket immunity for American peacekeepers and military personnel, while the rest of the world sought to maintain the principle that no one is above the law. After a bitter battle behind closed doors, the negotiators emerged with a promise that no Americans would be investigated or prosecuted for one year by the new court. The small concession that this exemption must be renewed annually was the sum total of American willingness to accept outside limits on their own behavior.
The U.S. government has also framed its primary task as a war against an amorphous “terrorism,” rather than specific enemies. The fight is against a methodology and it is hard to see how a battle framed in those terms can ever be concluded. By definition, the conflict is permanent. In fact, the Bush administration has, like the Likud government in Israel, exempted its own and its allies’ state terrorism from moral and legal scrutiny, while condemning non-state terrorism in the harshest terms. In a recent book, War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, Mark Selden and Alvin So usefully define state terrorism as: “violence against civilians under war conditions, particularly large-scale, systematic state-directed violence against the civilians of another country in an international war or against ones’ own people in a civil war.” They also label the U.S. government’s position as “the logic of impunity.” As Richard Falk notes, “Such a double standard will damage the indispensable effort to draw a credible distinction between the criminality of the attack and the legitimacy of the retaliation.”
Even more alarming, by June 2002, the Bush administration had staked out an argument for the legitimacy of its own preemptive attacks against groups or states that may be capable of and willing to use weapons of mass destruction. Falk once again put the problem succinctly; “It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the UN or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity.” That official stance defines the rights of the (U.S.) state as freedom to act in any way it pleases anywhere in the world.
It is a stance that contradicts the logic behind the current international social movement to win redress, especially in the forms of apology and reparations for victims of war crimes. Both Japanese and American citizens are active in this movement, which embraces international law, and they hope to compel their own governments to accede to it. The movements are also strikingly international, extending throughout Europe and Asia and beyond. In this case, Japanese activists, working together with others (including North-Americans) have led the way. The efforts for recognition and reparations for World War II forced labor, POWs who were mistreated, and especially the “military comfort women” have been among the most important and influential international social justice movements in the last decade. The plaintiffs in these cases are all foreigners (including many who once were Japanese colonial subjects) while many of their supporters are Japanese. The reparations movement began long before the events of September 11, 2001 but has continued since then. The activists in the reparations movement for victims of Japanese war crimes are trying to win international condemnation of the behavior of wartime Japan based on a universal standard of morality and legality, as is now prevailing on Nazism. The underlying goal is to wrest from the Japanese government and citizens recognition that those victimized are individuals deserving of full human status, legally, socially, and morally. They see their efforts as protecting human rights and international justice in the future, and more pragmatically, as developing better tools for international enforcement of those protections. Essentially, they are working toward a universal global citizenship that protects all human beings from “crimes against humanity.”
As part of that broader effort, the former “military comfort women” and their attorneys have pioneered new legal strategies, particularly ones that emphasized the women’s status as forced laborers. They argued that the precedents set by the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and Japanese acceptance of their verdicts in the peace treaty, were grounds for individuals to file claims against the Japanese government for redress for human rights violations. By the 1990s, a new standard of international law was emerging, partially based on new laws but mostly derived from reinterpretations of older international law, both pre-surrender and the Nuremberg/Tokyo laws. This development suggests that the official Japanese position that restitution is only a matter between states is increasingly incompatible with customary international law. (The United States government has unequivocally supported Japan in this argument for more than half a century since the San Francisco Treaty although, at the popular level, there is considerable criticism of Japanese treatment of POWs and civilians during the war.) The United Nations has played a particularly active role in establishing the idea that individuals have standing in international law and a right to enforcement of fundamental human rights and freedoms, and restitution as well. In addition, feminists have extended legal recognition of women’s bodily integrity and redefined violations as crimes against their individual rights as people, rather than against the honor of their male relatives. These are still-evolving legal developments but the trend clearly moves toward treating gross violations of the human rights of individuals as the rightful concern of international bodies.
The second major innovation has been to shift the attack to new defendants. Unlike national governments, corporations are not protected by treaty from lawsuits. For this reason, in recent years a number of former slave laborers have demanded redress from Japanese corporations in both Japanese and foreign courts, following the successes of former slave laborers in Europe. This strategy has already yielded results through out-of-court settlements. Four major Japanese corporations have settled with Korean or Chinese forced laborers since 1999, suggesting that the public relations nightmare of a lengthy lawsuit is a powerful political weapon, even though it has yet to prove successful as a legal one.
An important feature of the contemporary legal and commemorative environment is the cross-fertilization of the redress efforts against the Japanese government and companies with kindred movements elsewhere. The campaigns to win redress from Japanese firms for World War II-era actions are linked in a variety of ways to those demanding redress from European firms that collaborated with the Nazis. Moreover, the plaintiffs have used the precedent of American and Canadian payment of reparations and apologies to their resident Japanese non-citizens (as well as citizens) for internment during the war as evidence of an emerging international norm requiring apology and compensation that embraces individual foreign victims whose rights were violated by the state during World War II.
The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan‘s Military Sexual Slavery, held in December 2000 in Tokyo, focused on Japanese government involvement in the enslavement of the “military comfort women.” That tribunal demonstrated the great social distance people all around the world, especially women, have traveled in their attitudes toward forced prostitution and sexual slavery since the 1940s. The verdict, delivered by judges who had served in Rwanda and Bosnia and made public in December 2001, further underlined that distance when it declared the entire wartime government, including the Showa Emperor, complicit in the human rights crimes of slavery, forced labor, and violation of the dignity of women. These political and legal efforts are already changing the global environment by establishing an international moral and (to a lesser degree) legal standard that individuals should be protected from certain forms of violence, even in time of war.
These precedents, particularly Japanese-American success in winning reparations and apology for internment during World War II from the U.S. Government, also have inspired some African-Americans to organize for reparations for slavery. Besides raising the issues of forced labor and involuntary confinement on the basis of race, the Japanese-American experience suggested the tactic of working through Congress rather than the courts. Beginning in 1989, shortly after President Ronald Reagan signed the bill for reparations and apology for Japanese-American internment, Congressman John Conyers introduced a bill in the House of Representatives calling for a commission to study the impact of slavery and make recommendations for reparation. The issue got little attention at first but has gained impressive momentum recently, particularly since the September 2001 UN World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. Delegates to that meeting ruled that the transatlantic slave trade was “a crime against humanity,” again building on the Nuremberg/Tokyo War Crimes Trials precedent. Although they discussed the question of reparations for slavery, they reached no agreement on that subject.
This is one of the few social efforts critical of the U.S. government to thrive after September 11th. Conyers’ bill, which he introduced on January 6, 1999, asked that the United States “acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865, and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on Living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies and for other purposes.” Since then a number of local governments have passed resolutions urging support for Conyers’ bill. Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Dallas, and the State of California have all passed such resolutions, many of them since September 2001.
Since 1989 other precedents in addition to the Japanese-American reparations agreement have inspired the reparations for slavery advocates. In 1993 Congress formally apologized for conquering Hawai’i and overthrowing its monarch. African-American survivors of a pogrom in Rosewood, Florida in 1923 won reparations, and the state of Oklahoma is considering paying restitution and issuing an apology for a massacre of black citizens in Tulsa in 1921. All these claims were inspired by the success of the Japanese-American reparations effort.
African-Americans have borrowed not just the moral reasoning but also the legal strategies pioneered by advocates for the WWII-era slave laborers. Following the example of the “military comfort women,” for example, a group of African-Americans have filed suit in U.S. courts against corporations that benefited from coerced labor prior to 1865. They have initiated three class-action lawsuits against FleetBoston Financial Corporation, a bank, Aetna Inc., an insurance company, and CSX, a railroad operator, seeking reparations for the profits of slave labor for their descendents, the 35 million African-Americans living today. They are also pursuing redress in the International Court of Justice and have asked the UN to investigate under provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
International exchange regarding ideas about the rights of both citizens and foreigners is inescapable, as the example of reparations to Japanese-Americans by the U.S. Government shows. That relatively small-scale act has had a huge impact both domestically and internationally. It has spurred both Americans and Japanese to debate among themselves how to strengthen democracy by developing greater respect across racial/ethnic lines. More and more Japanese and Americans have come to accept the validity of international law to protect the rights of individuals to humane treatment, bodily integrity, and compensation for their labor, even as their governments fight against that growing international consensus. On these issues, the “leaders” of the United States and Japan are heading in the opposite direction from significant segments of their publics.
The growing commitment to human rights and racial equality notable in popular embrace of both multiculturalism and reparations provide clear grounds for condemnation of the attacks of 9/11, something neither the American nor the Japanese governments have stressed. These two concepts may well prove inadequate to the task, but they are, in my view, the strongest intellectual and ethical resources available in American political culture to counter the U.S. Government’s assertion that only the state has the right to define good and evil. In Japan, the powerful postwar pacifist tradition is an additional resource against the Japanese Government’s support of Bush’s international policies. Both the American and Japanese governments’ stances on terrorism undermine the social transformations of the last half-century. Although coherent direct protest is still limited to a minority of citizens of both nations, it is hard to see how the two governments can hold their current positions without violating the principles underlying those transformations and refusing the demands, not only of their citizens, but of wronged foreigners as well.
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