Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Japan’s Peace Constitution/映画 日本国憲法

ENGLISH BELOW

FROM SIGLO
http://www.cine.co.jp/

　戦後60年目を迎えた2005年､自衛隊のイラク派兵をきっかけに憲法についての踏み込んだ議論がはじまりました。国内のあまりに性急な改憲への動きを､世界に視野を広げて見つめ直す、それがこの映画の出発点でした。憲法とは誰のためのものか、戦争の放棄を誓った前文や第９条をどう考えるのか。本作品は､憲法制定の経緯や平和憲法の意義について、世界的な知の巨人たちが語った貴重なインタビュー集です。

この映画の製作過程で私たちはいくつかの国を旅した。そして、とくに香港とソウルで、歴史が今なおいかにダイナミックに生き、流れ続けているかを知った。戦争は60年前に終わったかもしれない。しかし、人々の戦争体験は生き続けている。戦争の悲劇と、それを忘れない義務は、条約や時間によってケジメがつくものではないし、終わるものでもない。

日本国憲法は、それが公布された時点では先駆的な文書であったし、私たちが今回の取材で再確認したように、今も世界中の人々が求めてやまない理想を示している。日本にとって、この時期にそれを捨てることは、歴史の潮流に逆らう行為だ。

　私が初めて日本を訪れたのは1969年のことである。その頃、ベトナムのジャングルでは50万人以上のアメリカ兵が戦っていた。私は16歳だった。当時のアメリカには徴兵制があったから、いずれは自分も不当で無節操な戦争に参加しなければならないという不安を感じていた。日本の平和憲法は、アメリカにあふれ返る軍国主義と明確な対照を成す、悟りと知恵の極致のように思えた。そのことが、日本にいるといつもやすらぎを感じられた理由の一つであろうし、私が長い間、日本に住み、日本で子供たちを育てようと決めた大きな理由ともなっている。将来、私の子供たちが、平和憲法をもつ国で子供を育てる道を選択できなくなるかもしれないと考えると、恐ろしくてならない。

　平和憲法と、それに守られている人権は、空気のようなものである。私たちはそれらを当然のものと感じ、ことさら考えてみることがない。現在の改憲論議は、私たちに憲法の意味をふたたび気づかせてくれる。日本に住み、日本で働き、日本で家族を育んでいるすべての人にとって、それがなぜ、どのようにして書かれたのか、そしてどうすればその精神を守り、広げていけるかを考えるよい契機となる。
監督紹介ページへ→
http://www.cine.co.jp/director/director3.html

　この『映画 日本国憲法』は、2002年に製作した『チョムスキー9.11』の続編という位置づけで企画しました。
2001年の9.11同時多発テロを受けて始まった、アメリカの孤独で強引な他国への武力行使と、それをチャンスと捉えアメリカに追随して早々に自衛隊の海外派兵へ踏み出した日本政府のやり方に、強い怒りとともに脱力感を感じていました。アメリカの一国主義が、世界中にテロを広げるのではないか。日本はこのまま憲法"改正"へと進み、軍事大国化への歯止めがなくなるのではないか。当たり前のように思っていた平和を志向する社会的な意志が、一挙に崩れ始めたように思いました。

　そうした中で、今私に何ができるのか、という問いから始めました。ひとりの個人として声を上げる。そして、個人としてだけでなく自分が属している社会、例えば地域や職場や職業という意味ですが、そこで出来ることを探す。映画のプロデューサーである私にとって、それは映画を作ることでした。

　この映画で伝えたかったのは、知識や情報ではありません。映画の中で、明快な意志をもって発言する知識人たちの態度に、連帯という言葉を思い出してほしいと思いました。それは、この映画製作を通して私自身が脱力感から抜け出すきっかけとなったものでもありました。平和を守ろうと行動する人たちを支え勇気づけるのは、何よりも人々の連帯感だと思っています。
映画へのメッセージページへ→

http://www.cine.co.jp/kenpo/comment.html

In 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, the conservative Japanese government is pressing ahead with plans to revise the nation’s constitution and jettison its famous no-war clause, Article 9. This timely, hard-hitting documentary places the ongoing debate over the constitution in an international context: What will revision mean to Japan’s neighbors, Korea and China? How has the US-Japan military alliance warped the constitution and Japan’s role in the world? How is the unprecedented involvement of Japan’s Self-Defense Force in the occupation of Iraq perceived in the Middle East?

n 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, the conservative Japanese government is pressing ahead with plans to revise the nation’s constitution and jettison its famous no-war clause, Article 9. This timely, hard-hitting documentary places the ongoing debate over the constitution in an international context: What will revision mean to Japan’s neighbors, Korea and China? How has the US-Japan military alliance warped the constitution and Japan’s role in the world? How is the unprecedented involvement of Japan’s Self-Defense Force in the occupation of Iraq perceived in the Middle East?


Through interviews conducted with leading thinkers around the world, the film explores the origins of the Constitution in the ashes of war and the significance of its peace clauses in the conflicted times of the early 21st century. Key interviews include:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower
Paris-based social theorist Hidaka Rokuro
Beate Sirota Gordon, drafter of the equal-rights clause of the Constitution
Political philosopher and activist Douglas Lummis
Political scientist Chalmers Johnson
Kang Man-Gil, president of Sangji University, South Korea
Shin Heisoo, co-representative, Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan
Korean historian Han Hong Koo
Chinese filmmaker and writer Ban Zhongyi
Syrian writer Michel Kilo
Lebanese journalist Josef Samaha
Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky

Director John Junkerman is an American filmmaker, living in Tokyo. His first film, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima, was coproduced with John Dower and nominated for an Academy Award. His 2002 film, Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, also produced by Siglo, received widespread theatrical distribution in Japan, the US, and Europe.

A companion book in Japanese, including the complete interviews with John Dower, Hidaka Rokuro, Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky, Beate Sirota Gordon, and Han Hong Koo has been published by Foil.

Additional information on screenings and sale of the film can be found at the Siglo website, http://www.cine.co.jp, or by calling Siglo, in Tokyo, 03-5343-3101

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Japanese Americans and the Making of U.S. Democracy During World War II

by Gary Y. Okihiro

from JAPAN FOCUS
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=9111

This is an introduction to two Office of War Information propaganda films on Japanese Internment.

http://ia200131.eu.archive.org/3/movies/Japanese1943/Japanese1943.mpg
http://ia200114.eu.archive.org/0/movies/Challeng1944/Challeng1944.mpg

Upon viewing once again the Office of War Information’s “newsreels” on the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II, I am struck by the contradictions of the ideals of U.S. democracy and its realities. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his message to Congress about a year before the U.S. plunged into the war, articulated some of those ideals. In his speech, Roosevelt told the nation and world that the U.S. was a beacon of democracy amidst the darkness of Europe and East Asia engulfed by despotisms. “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms,” the President declared. “The freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—anywhere in the world.” That global insistence on American democracy’s imperative, “everywhere in the world,” bespeaks an imperial and “noble” mission that became the ostensible purpose for U.S. involvement in World War II.

Needless to say, at home, the inequities under democracy were made manifest by the recent Great Depression in which capitalism’s temporary collapse prompted a New Deal for enhanced federal powers and the welfare state that strengthened corporate capitalism and instigated social reform that provided little for those at the bottom of U.S. society. As was noted by African American Clifford Burke, “The Negro was born in depression. It didn’t mean too much to him, The Great Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing. The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or shoeshine boy. It only became official when it hit the white man.” And Lakota Indian Benjamin Reifel remembered: “While I was a boy growing up on the Rosebud Reservation, we had the most sickening poverty that I could imagine. TB was a killer of Indians. The people on the Pine Ridge Reservation at Oglala were eating their horses to survive. Impoverishment was everywhere.”

So when President Roosevelt famously thundered, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” peoples of color and the poor in the U.S. were cognizant of the opportunities but also the inequalities of democracy. “It was a December Sunday, so we were getting ready for our Christmas program,” recalled Japanese American Mary Tsukamoto. “We were rehearsing and having Sunday School class, and I always played the piano for the adult Issei service.... But after the service started, my husband ran in. He had been home that day and heard on the radio. We just couldn’t believe it, but he told us that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I remember how stunned we were. And suddenly the whole world turned dark. We started to speak in whispers...we immediately sensed something terrible was going to happen.”

As the thick smoke rose from what was once America’s Pacific Fleet, Hawai`i’s governor surrendered civil authority to the U.S. Army, and teams of FBI agents and military and civilian police swept into neighborhoods and seized mainly Japanese but also German and Italian Americans in Hawai`i and along the U.S. West Coast. Martial law in Hawai`i and summary detentions in the islands and on the continent not only undermined civil liberties but tarnished the objectives of a war presumably being pursued for freedom. The situation of Japanese Americans differed from Germans and Italians in that there were no distinctions made between citizens and aliens among the nonwhite group, and the martial law instituted in Hawai`i applied to everyone in the Territory but was designed specifically to contain the “Japanese menace.” On the continent within the Western Defense Command, all Japanese Americans were removed and interned, while in Hawai`i only a select group of over a thousand experienced internment. At the same time, in the islands, Japanese Americans as an entire racialized group faced special scrutiny and restrictions, including forced removals from farms and neighborhoods and controls on religion, Japanese language, and employment.

Roosevelt himself embodied the glaring gap between the rhetoric and practice of democracy when he promised shortly after Pearl Harbor, “we will not, under any threat, or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty our forefathers framed for us in the Bill of Rights,” while adding, “some degree of censorship is essential in wartime, and we are at war.” Some five years earlier, Roosevelt, upon reading a secret report of Hawai`i’s readiness in the anticipated war with Japan, had proposed: “One obvious thought occurs to me—that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.” That “special list,” begun during the 1920s by the military in Hawai`i, formed the basis for those named and targeted for detention in the roundup of December 1941.

And on February 19, 1942, that same U.S. President who had lectured the world on the “Four Freedoms,” signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the eviction and confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, classified by “race,” two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. Roosevelt and his men knew their culpability in this violation of the Constitution’s protections. As the assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, put it when the Justice Department ruled that only enemy aliens, Japanese American citizens, could be held in detention: “If it is a question of the safety of the country [and] the Constitution.... Why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.” And the President, in a conversation a few days before EO 9066, instructed his secretary of war to “go ahead and do anything you think necessary,” even if it involves citizens, as long as it is dictated by “military necessity.” Although, he added, “be as reasonable as you can.”

That myth of “military necessity” was the essential message of the 1943 short, “Japanese Relocation,” put out by the Office of War Information. The OWI, it should be noted, controlled the news the American public received of the war, and its primary purpose was to promote patriotism and present the U.S. war effort in the most favorable light. “Japanese,” in the film’s title, blurred the distinction between the Japanese enemy and Japanese Americans, while “relocation” implied a temporary “mass migration,” which was framed in the spirit of the mythic West and frontier. Because the “Japanese,” the film’s narrator states, proved “potentially dangerous,” living and working as they did along vital harbors and near airfields, their “relocation” was prudent and necessary. The job, perhaps offensive to some, was made easier knowing that it was being conducted “as a democracy should” and involved cheerful and cooperative “Japanese.” Further, the land upon which those “pioneer communities” [concentration camps] were situated was “raw and untamed but full of opportunity.”

In fact, of course, the military forcibly evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and farms based upon their “race,” without proof of espionage, sabotage, or even disloyalty, and confined them behind barbed wire in horse stalls and fair grounds and in some of the most inhospitable deserts and swamps of the American West and South. As the Army general in charge of the defense of the West Coast quipped, “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” And the director of the Office of Indian Affairs offered Native American land for the “colonization of the Japanese” like his plan to “colonize 10,000 American Indians” to develop an irrigating system to make the reservation self-supporting. His office, he noted, had “long experience in handling a minority group,” and was thus well equipped “to provide for the Japanese aliens the type of treatment and care which will make them more acceptable as members of the American population.”

By 1944, the release year of the second short, “A Challenge to Democracy,” the OWI, War Relocation Authority (which administered the ten concentration camps) and Office of Strategic Services no longer needed to explain the necessity of the camps to the American public and world but were faced with a glaring contradiction among the principles of the “Four Freedoms,” the conduct of the war, and U.S. democracy. No contradiction, the film’s producers contend, the camps were, in fact, schools in American democracy, transforming the “Japanese” into “Japanese Americans,” indeed, into real “Americans” so they could reenter American life after the war, as was suggested by the Office of Indian Affairs’ director. America’s concentration camps had rendered them safe for democracy. See how “American” the dislocated people are, the film shows, how they’ve converted barracks into “apartments,” they’ve made the desert bloom with produce, they play baseball and football, they exercise democracy and enjoy religious freedom, and above all, they enlist in the U.S. Army and wish Japan’s defeat. This is “their” country, the film intones, where freedom prevails regardless of race, creed, or ancestry.

Besides the coercive and undemocratic nature of America’s concentration camps and martial law Hawai`i, the wartime period saw in the drive for unity an intolerance of the freedom of speech, the rise of propaganda and press censorship, segregation in the military of African and Japanese Americans, and violent race riots directed against Filipino and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Diego and against African Americans in Beaumont and Evansville, Texas, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia. The June 1943 Detroit riot was one of the costliest of the century in which twenty-five African Americans and nine whites were killed, and property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was destroyed. Clearly, whatever the war rhetoric and OWI “news” propaganda, U.S. democracy failed to embrace all of the nation’s peoples.

Amidst the pervasive intolerance and illusion of freedom for all, many Americans maintained a belief in their country by holding it to its ideals and not their lived realities. As an African American mother, “Georgia,” wrote in 1943: “I have faith in the goodness of America, because I’m an American.... I believe that America will eventually wipe out this challenge to her democracy, and that the time will come when no person need fear that he cannot become a truly great American because of race, color or creed.” In that same spirit, about 25,000 Japanese American men and women from martial law Hawai`i and from America’s concentration camps served in the U.S. military during the war, while in 1944, seventy Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain concentration camp refused to enlist and were convicted of draft evasion and conspiracy to violate the law. “We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” those patriots explained. Their resistance, thus, was directed at restoring those rights and guarantees, because the Constitution was more than “just a scrap of paper” to them, “for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups.”

The Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan was asked to comment on President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” in a March 6, 1943 Saturday Evening Post essay: “We do not take democracy for granted,” the labor organizer promised. “We feel it grow in our working together—many millions of us working toward a common purpose.... What do we want? We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promises and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger. If you want to know what we are—We are Marching!”

Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books including The Columbia Guide to Asian American History. Written for Japan Focus, October 26, 2005.

Okinawa and the Revamped US-Japan Alliance

From Japan Focus
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=9132

George and Junichiro, two great buddies (if the Japanese media is to be believed) meet again, on 15 and 16 November, in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto. Since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is one of the dwindling band of ever-faithful Bush supporters, and since officials on both sides have been working hard to clear away all possible obstacles from the negotiating table between them, the mood may be expected to be warm: Japanese troops will remain in Iraq till September 2006; the ban on US beef imports, till recently cause of great congressional anger, is about to be lifted; the Japanese Post Office, sitting on the world’s largest pool of funds, is about to be privatized; and, perhaps most important, a deal has just been done on the re-organization of US forces in Japan. The ground should therefore be clear for an untroubled meeting, plenty of windy rhetoric about the world’s “closest and most important” relationship, some photo-ops, and perhaps some quiet tippling under the red and yellow-hued autumn foliage of the old Kyoto palace.

Yet the truth is that the relationship is precarious: Koizumi does what he is asked by Bush, but cannot be sure of being heard when he seeks something in return [1]. This time, in his eagerness to please, he has promised something that he almost certainly cannot deliver: a solution to the long-running dispute over relocation of the US Marine base at Futenma in Okinawa. The alliance is no stronger than its weakest link, and Okinawa today is undoubtedly that weakest link.

Over the past decade the objectives of planners in Washington and Tokyo have consistently been blocked and the initiative has passed from their hands to their opponents on the ground in Okinawa. Two major phases in the struggle over the past decade have ended in defeat of the forces of the Japanese (and behind it, American) states by local, democratic opponents. The Kyoto meeting signals a new phase in the struggle to neutralize and/or suppress such opposition to negotiating a deal on the bases behind the backs of the Okinawan people, but the odds are high against it succeeding.

Both governments, and the relationship between them, now face the concerted opposition of local island residents to their core plans. The best-laid plans of the empire’s centre are challenged by apparently insignificant local fishermen, retired teachers, local residents and old people, who lack almost everything but belief in the justice of their cause. The contest is virtually without precedent in postwar Japan, and has evolved through several distinct phases. Japan’s centre, and in a sense the centre of the world (because it is the pillar on which the alliance between the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 powers rests, is not Tokyo but Japan’s remote southern periphery: Okinawa prefecture.

When postwar Japan was first reconstituted under a “peace constitution” (1946) and sovereignty returned to the government of Japan (1952), Okinawa was excluded from both processes, remaining under US military control until 1972, the “war state” that made possible Japan’s “peace state.” Though Okinawans in general suffered immeasurably more than mainland Japan from the war, and that experience generated a deep commitment to pacifism, when the islands were eventually returned to Japan in 1972 the bases remained intact; constitutional pacifism and local self-government proved empty promises. When at last the Cold War ended, Okinawans hoped anew that the bases would be removed and peace-orientation substituted for war orientation, but they slowly learned that Pentagon plans were predicated on retention, even a beefing up of the facilities, and that the Japanese government was committed to doing as the US government sought. Militarism and war were to be their future, as well as their past and present.

From 1995, however, the islands have been wracked by dissent. Despite every effort at containment by the national government, local, democratic forces have inflicted successive defeats on Tokyo’s (and Washington’s) plans. The Kyoto meeting between Koizumi and Bush heralds a new and more intense phase of confrontation at the very moment that the two leaders plan to unveil their expanded military ties. Despite media and commentator assumption that the two governments will be have their way in disposing of Okinawa as a joint military base for the future projection of regional and global force, that outcome is far from assured.

Henoko Mark One—The Heliport Plan, 1996-1998

In 1995, Okinawa exploded in outrage when a 12-year old Okinawan girl was raped by three US soldiers. That anger threatened the US position in Okinawa and therefore in a sense the entire US-Japan East Asian military posture, of which it was and still is the “cornerstone.” To appease the anger, the Clinton administration promised in April 1996 to return to Japan Futenma Marine Air Station, a huge sprawling base that sits in the middle of Ginowan township, a major base over half a century for US wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, where war planes constantly circled menacingly around the town’s schools, hospitals and residences. The most recent major incident in Ginowan occurred in August 2004, when a US helicopter crashed onto Okinawa International University. The Futenma return promise had a catch, however. The US and Japanese governments agreed that Futenma would be replaced by equivalent, indeed significantly upgraded, facilities which, as Okinawa soon learned, would also have to be located in Okinawa. It would be a reshuffle resulting in an upgrading rather than a return.

The next phase of the Okinawan struggle occurred from 1997, when the fishing village of Henoko in the administrative unit of Nago city, in the north of Okinawa’s main island, was chosen as the site for construction of the replacement base. In the first place, it was conceived as a huge, 1500 meter long, offshore, floating pontoon platform resting on steel poles. The word “heliport” was deliberately deceptive, suggestive of something like a rooftop when actually it would be several city blocks in area. Despite the appearance of a newly thought out plan intended to facilitate return of Futenma and satisfy the longing of the Okinawan people for a release from military burdens, actually the idea of concentration of US military functions was rooted in the US military pursuit of rationalization and reinforcement and dates back to 1966, the height of the Vietnam war. In 1996, therefore, plans for an offshore airport, ammunition store and port facilities in the Henoko area drawn up thirty years earlier were simply dusted off [2].

In response to demand from Nago citizens, a plebiscite was in due course held, and despite heavy-handed intervention from Tokyo, a majority decisively rejected the idea of construction of the base. However, in an astonishing show of contempt for democracy, the mayor of the city announced that he would accept the base plan on the city’s behalf, immediately resigning to take responsibility for having done so. His outrageous action, however could bring only a temporary stay of execution on the heliport plan. In February 1998, however, prefectural governor Ota Masahide announced that he would honor the statement of local principle and not accept the planned construction. When he refused to sign compulsory lease renewal agreements for continuing US military use of Okinawan land, he was taken before the Supreme Court and ordered (in a peremptory, two sentence judgment) to submit. For his stubbornness, the Tokyo government thereafter refused to cooperate or even to talk with him, making administration of the prefecture virtually impossible. He was eventually defeated by a more compliant figure in elections in December 1998. The first phase of the 10-year war ended in a moral victory for the opposition forces and an ambiguous, soon to be proven pyrrhic, victory for the state in securing nominal local assent to its plan.

Henoko Mark Two—On the Reef, 1999-2005

The new Governor, Inamine Keiichi, a local Okinawan businessman backed by both the major national conservative parties, Liberal-Democratic Party and the Buddhist Komeito, assented to the plan to construct an offshore base at Henoko, but only on three conditions: it would be a joint civil-military use airport, US military use would be restricted to 15 years, and there would be appropriate assurances that the construction and usage of the airport would not result in environmental damage. After long negotiations between his administration and the national government, a revised plan was drawn up during 1999. This airport would be a grander structure than originally conceived, with a runway of 2,500 meters. It would take over a decade to complete, require prodigious expense (330 billion yen just for the land reclamation, and a likely total cost of around one trillion yen), and sit astride the relatively unspoiled coral in waters frequented by the internationally protected dugong. Futenma would only be returned when the new facilities were in place, and the Japanese taxpayer would meet all costs.

Massive political and economic (sweetener) pressures were brought to bear to try to soften and divide the Okinawan opposition. Money was poured into various “Northern Development” projects in and around Nago City, the 2000 G-7 “Kyushu-Okinawa Summit” was held in the City, and a new two thousand yen note was issued that featured the gate of Okinawa’s Shuri castle in an effort to buy local support. Tokyo even sought to reconstitute Okinawan identity so that it would “grow out of” its pacifism and opposition to the island’s military role by learning to understand and take pride in maintaining the peace and security of East Asia [3]. That campaign, known as the “Okinawa Initiative,” proved fruitless, but the economic pressures and incentives had an effect, inevitable given the straightened circumstances of the islands, with their high unemployment and structural dependence on Tokyo and the bases. With the progressive parties in disarray nationally, conservative candidates were elected to office in one after another local governing body during this period of intense economic pressure.

Yet the Futenma Return, supposed in 1996 to occur “within five to seven years,” made little progress. It was 2002 before the two governments signed off on a basic construction plan. Environmental assessment and preliminary test drilling at the site were expected then to take three years and construction a further ten. There would be g no Futenma return till 2015 at the earliest. Inamine’s three conditions were left unresolved even in this agreement. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon found the Japanese failure to push ahead with construction increasingly irksome.

The environmental assessment was intended to be perfunctory, its outcome assumed in advance to be favorable even though the site was known to be home to the internationally-protected dugong, the sea shores home to a colony of sea turtles, and the reef to comprise some of the island’s few remaining live, relatively healthy, coral colonies. The local and international movement to protect the dugong, and nature in general, spread, with Greenpeace taking up the cause. In September 2003 a suit was launched (which still continues) in the US to restrain the US Department of Defense from any action likely to be prejudicial to the dugong.

It was not till April 2004 that the Japanese government decided to hasten the process by overriding local objections and enforcing the preparatory engineering works, test-drilling etc. Local resident and opposition groups therefore launched a land-based protest with a sit-in conducted at a makeshift tent village at the site, where Okinawan elders, some of them in their 80s or even 90s, mingled with fishermen and townspeople from around the island as the central importance of the struggle was gradually appreciated, together with a “blockade” by fishing boats, canoes, and even hardy swimmers, of the offshore site. Over the next period of more than five hundred days, the state’s survey team managed only to erect four lighting beacons, which had to be dismantled with each typhoon, as the sit-in and blockade continued [4]. Otherwise, the major finding of the environmental survey was that the dugong population was much greater than had been originally assumed: between 30 and 50 of the marine mammals regularly grazed the sea-grasses of the bay. That fact alone should have been enough to put an end to the idea that the construction could proceed without deleterious environmental consequences.

In October 2005, the two governments struggled to resolve these issues in advance of the planned Bush visit to Japan. Late in the month, senior US and Japanese officials had to concede that all efforts to break the opposition had failed. Prime Minister Koizumi acknowledged that the government had been “unable to implement the (initial) relocation (plan) because of a lot of opposition.” [5] Suddenly, and dramatically, the Henoko offshore plan was dropped; the second (1998) Henoko plan thus went the way of the first (1996). In nine years, all that had been accomplished to implement the SACO agreement was that the dugong had been counted and four lighting towers had been erected and then dismantled. The 29 October outcome was an admission of defeat by those nominally possessing almost absolute power, and a tribute to the determination and persistence of the local coalition, the “Association to Defend Life”. Okinawa, strictly speaking the fishing village of Henoko (population: 1,458), had defeated the nation state for a second time.

Henoko Mark Three—2005-

The state would, however, concede no such defeat, and a new stage in the epic struggle was immediately launched. As part of the comprehensive realignment of US forces in the context of revised global military posture, the Foreign and Defense Ministers of Japan and the US signed their “Interim Agreement on the realignment of US Forces in Japan” on 29 October 2005 and the Cabinet approved it two weeks later [6]. Despite the absence of public or parliamentary debate, the agreement amounted to a major new step in the transformation of the Cold War security relationship, in which, at least nominally, the defense of Japan had been the major orientation, to a military alliance of partners in support of US regional and global objectives. It amounted to the forging of a true military alliance, formally transforming the limited cooperation of the 1951 and 1960 versions of the security alliance [7]. “Interoperability” was one key word of the new agreement. The Japan Ground Self Defense Force (Army)’s “Rapid Reaction Force” would be moved to Camp Zama in Kanagawa prefecture where it would share facilities, and coordinate activities, with the headquarters of the US Army’s First Corps, to be transferred there from Fort Lewis in Washington State; a joint US and Japan air force command would be set up at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, a US nuclear-powered aircraft-carrier would be stationed permanently at Yokosuka, a substantial force, 7,000 US Marines to be transferred from Okinawa to Guam, with the Japanese government footing half the costs (estimated at more than four billion dollars). However, the precondition for this latter transfer was that the marine facility at Futenma be first transferred to a new base to be built in the vicinity of Camp Schwab, in close proximity to Henoko. Part of the existing camp facilities on Cape Henoko would be demolished and a runway of 1,800 meters constructed across the Cape, stretching northeast into Oura Bay and southwest onto the reef. This plan was, if anything, even more ambitious than its predecessors and it included all three of the elements of the 1966 design—airport, ammunition supply, and port facilities. It amounted to a concentration of hitherto scattered US military functions and services, reinforcing them in a single giant northern Okinawa military complex at the same time that other US forces were being concentrated in Japan.

US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld described the Interim Agreement with satisfaction as marking an end to the long-running debate over Futenma. Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro said it was final and beyond review. President Bush himself took note of it, describing the agreement overall as a “good faith agreement” and “positive” despite the fact that “in a democracy, it’s hard to satisfy all the people all the time,” hinting at the difficulties that lay ahead in securing agreement.

In Okinawa, the reaction was universally negative. Outrage would not be too strong a word to describe it. Hitherto, governments in Tokyo had always pledged consultation, at least gone through the motions of honoring local sentiment, and promised no deal that would go against Okinawan wishes. It was possible, as Nago Asemblyman Miyagi Yasuhiro puts it, to “refer to a logic of agreements, laws, environmental assessment principles, and argue point by point.” [8] This new agreement, however, was reached over the heads and without any consultation at all with the Okinawans. The Governor, supposedly a conservative and a reliable ally for the LDP authorities in Tokyo, described the plan as “totally unacceptable” and said that “everyone in the prefecture and in Nago City opposes it.” [9] Around the island, local government authorities, the mayor and local governments of Ginowan and Nago prominent among them, denounced the agreement. During 2004 and until October 2005, prefectural opposition to the Futenma transfer to Henoko, or indeed to any place in Okinawa, had been running at around 80 per cent. It jumped briefly at the end of October to 90 per cent against the new deal [10]. Another survey in mid-November measured opposition at 72 per cent (compared with 15 per cent in favor) [11]. In Tokyo, the Koizumi government spokespersons could only splutter that they would make the utmost effort to explain the position sincerely and seek Okinawan cooperation.

The government of Japan has rarely if ever faced anything like this resistance from an entire prefecture, in effect a rebellion. The respected Okinawan scholar, Hiyane Teruo, sees the islands now as in a state similar to that of the shimagurumi toso, the island wide struggles of resistance that marked the seizure at bayonet-point of agricultural lands for base construction during the 1950s [12]. Koizumi’s task in Kyoto is to assure Bush that the October agreement will be carried out, the Okinawan governor has spoken repeatedly of the magma of discontent rising in the prefecture, and his own anger now suggests that that an eruption may be close. The November 16, Kyoto press conference by Koizumi and Bush made plain that issues remain to iron out over the coming half year, presumably referring above all to the Okinawan impasse.

The October Japan-US deal showed a harshness on the part of the Koizumi government and a readiness to ride roughshod over Okinawa that was new. Till October, Inamine as Governor and Kishimoto Tateo as mayor of Nago had been seen as crucial allies in the process of persuading Okinawans to accept the base. Now their anger matched, even exceeded, that of Governor Ota in the Clinton-Hashimoto era. Watching now the fury and bitterness of Governor Inamine, it is hard to recall that this is the man set in place by the Tokyo government only six years ago to replace the recalcitrant Ota. Despite being the LDP’s chosen man in Okinawa, however, Inamine knows the strength of Okinawan feeling,and cannot help but feel concern over how his name and reputation would be remembered in history if he were now to surrender to what Okinawans see as unjust, unreasonable and unconstitutional demands.

Faced with the opposition of Governor Ota in the mid-1990s, when his cooperation was required to enforce the renewal of lease agreement with the US forces over Okinawan land, Tokyo first took the Governor to the Supreme Court and went to the lengths of passing a special law to obviate his opposition [13]. That legislation was endorsed by around 90 per cent of members in the Lower House and 80 per cent in the Upper House, even though flying in the face of the constitutional provision (Article 95) that “A special law, applicable only to one local public entity, cannot be enacted by the Diet without the consent of the majority of the voters of the local public entity concerned, obtained in accordance with law.” [14] When the 2005 deal was announced, and knowing that Governor Inamine was certain to oppose it, the Japanese government made known that it was again considering resort to such a “Special Measures Law,” this time to remove administrative powers over the sea around Okinawa from Governor to Prime Minister, so that the reclamation of the waters adjacent to Cape Henoko could proceed without local approval [15]. Already the prefecture is deprived of control over 20 per cent of the land of its main island’s land and 40 per cent of its air-space (for US military purposes), so such a law to strip it of sea rights too would be an extremely bitter pill, tantamount (as Hiyane Teruo puts it) to a denial of the history and culture of Okinawa [16].

Former Governor Ota commented that such special laws designed to strip the powers of a prefectural governor would arouse uproar if directed at one of the major metropolitan prefectures, but little support for Okinawa could be expected elsewhere in Japan. Former Deputy Governor Yoshimoto Masaki says, “it is as if there were no constitution.” [17] While the Koizumi government and LDP spokesmen speak of establishing new rights and advancing regional autonomy under a new constitution, in fact they move to curtail local government autonomy, shuffle off restraints on the possession and use of force, and demand that citizens prioritize their duties to the state over their rights from it and at the same time love it (by compelling “patriotism"). Okinawa, excluded from constitutional order for 25 years from 1947 under direct US military rule, and then offered a watered down version of it in which US military prerogatives were entrenched and pacifist and regional autonomy clauses emptied of substance, is now to be stripped of further rights and harnessed even more decisively to the requirements of a revamped military alliance, as permanent, joint US-Japan military colony.

Prospect

How this third phase of modern Okinawan struggle will evolve is hard to predict [18]. The Japanese state having twice conceded defeat by abandoning its airport construction plans in the face of sustained and principled opposition, facing Pentagon impatience and the deadline of the Bush visit to Kyoto, seeks to impose a solution in the teeth of almost universal Okinawan opposition. Unlike Prime Minister Hashimoto, who in 1998 said that “the heliport will not be built without local consent,” [19] Koizumi is promising Bush that it will be built despite almost universal dissent. Tokyo officials talk of patience, persuasion, and sincerity, but their patience and their persuasive powers seem to have been exhausted, their sincerity is dubious, and their readiness to apply force when and if necessary is implicit. If or when the state orders riot police to clear the land-based site of protesters, or uses force to end the sea-based resistance, and if or when local governments are reduced to expressing their opposition by denying the national government the use of highways, electrical power and water in order to block the construction, the affair could quickly spiral out of control. That, needless to say, would bring the Japanese state system and the alliance of the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 powers into unprecedented crisis.

Despairing of accommodation within the Japanese state (and the US-Japanese condominium) Okinawa might attempt again to flourish as an independent (and demilitarized) centre of culture and trade. The notion of Okinawan independence is to be heard again in Okinawa these days. It has deep roots, since Okinawa, or the Ryukyu Kingdom as it was then known, enjoyed independence, at first real and then largely nominal, as an East Asian centre of culture and trade for half a millennium before being assimilated within the modern Japanese state in the late 19th century. With its population of 1.3 million, contemporary high levels of education and culture, and pivotal geopolitical location, it could, if it so chose, seek to become an independent state larger than more than forty of the current UN states. Alternatively, some Okinawans propose the idea of “special administrative status, as an “autonomous prefecture.” [20] Such projects, needless to say, are utterly at odds with the designation in Tokyo and Washington of a central Okinawan role in the projection of regional and global force in the interests of their superpower alliance. Okinawan prize-winning novelist Medoruma Shun wrote recently that Okinawa’s problems would only be resolved when its people stood up, overcoming their fear of being cut loose by Japan and the US, and themselves took active steps to remove the Japanese and US heel from their islands [21].

Notes

[1] See my previous essays, “Koizumi’s Japan in Bush’s World” and “Koizumi’s Kingdom of Illusion”.

[2] “Beigun 66 nen ni no keikaku,” Asahi shimbun, 4 November 2005. Okinawan architect and activist Makishi Koichi has posted key US archival documents on this plan on his blog.

[3] See Gavan McCormack, “Okinawa and the structure of dependence,” Glenn D. Hook and Richard Siddle, eds, Japan and Okinawa—Structure and Subjectivity, London and New York, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp. 93-113.

[4] Urashima Etsuko, a local activist, author, and environmentalist, has written a powerful chronicle of the local movement in the monthly journal Impakushon. Her final chapter details recent events: Urashima Etsuko, “Zoku—Okinawa dayori—furidashi ni modoru,” Impakushon, No 149, October 2005, pp. 108-115.

[5] Kanako Takahara, “Japan, U.S. agree on a new Futenma site,” Japan Times, 27 October 2005.

[6] Full text of the Interim Agreement in Asahi Shimbun, 30 October 2005.

[7] Asai Motofumi, “Bigun kichi hantai ni okeru shiten tenkan o,” Ryukyu shimpo, 6 November 2005.

[8] Interview, Nago, 5 November 2005.

[9] Asahi shimbun, 9 November 2005.

[10] Opinion surveys, Okinawa Times, 14 September 2004; Ryukyu shimpo, 22 June 2005; and Okinawa Times, 5 November 2005.

[11] “Engan-an ‘hantai’ 72% Futenma isetsu,” Okinawa Times, 15 November 2005.

[12] Hiyane Teruo, “Kawaru kokka zo—Okinawa no kiki,” Ryukyu shimpo, 7 and 8 November 2005.

[13] Koji Taira, “The Okinawan charade: The United States, Japan and Okinawa: Conflict and Compromise, 1995-1996,” Japan Policy Research Institute, Working Paper, No 28, January 1997.

[14] Ota Masahide, lecture, International Christian University, Tokyo, 14 November 2005.

[15] “Kyoken—Okinawa neraiuchi/hanron fusatsu ni tsuyoi ikari,” Okinawa Times, 27 October 2005.

[16] Hiyane, cit,

[17] “ Kyoken,” Okinawa Times, 27 October 2005.

[18] In focusing here on the distinctive Okinawan experience, I set aside the rising resentment and anger in other prefectures, notably Yamaguchi and Kanagawa, over the burdens assigned them in the new military arrangements.

[19] BBC, 6 August 1998, quoted in Aurelia George Mulgan, “Managing the US base issue in Okinawa: A test for Japanese democracy,” Working Paper No 2000/1, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, January 2000.

[20] See, for example, Hamazato Masashi, Sato Manabu, and Shimabukuro Jun, Okinawa jichishu—anata wa do kangaeru? Okinawa jichi kenkyukai, Naha, 2005.

[21] Medoruma Shun, Okinawa sengo zero nen, Tokyo, NHK seikatsu shinsho, 2005, p. 189.

Gavan McCormack is professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University and visiting professor at International Christian University in Tokyo. He is a coordinator of Japan Focus. He is the author of Target North Korea—Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe. He wrote this article for Japan Focus.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

嘘とごまかしの重ね塗り/Masuoka Ken’s latest posting

益岡　賢
2005年11月18日

Read more in Japanese on this issues and more
http://www.jca.apc.org/%7Ekmasuoka/

Specifically:

Colombia/コロンビア
http://www.jca.apc.org/%7Ekmasuoka/places/colombia.html

Iraq/イラク
http://www.jca.apc.org/%7Ekmasuoka/places/iraqtop.html

Afganistan, Palestine-Israel, East Timor, U.S., Latin America
アフガニスタン, パレスチナ／イスラエル, 東チモールおよびインドネシア, 米国, ラテン・アメリカ／カリブ
http://www.jca.apc.org/%7Ekmasuoka/places/places.html

ジョン・ピルジャ, ウィリアム・ブルム, ノーム・チョムスキ
Pilger, Blum, Chomsky
ノーム・チョムスキ
http://www.jca.apc.org/%7Ekmasuoka/persons/persons.html

歴史を覚えていない者たちは同じことを繰り返すと言われる。これは正しくない。我々は皆、歴史を忘れる。重要なのは、忘れたことを再び見つけ出す方途があるかどうかである。よりはっきり言うならば、客観的な過去により我々が誠実であり続けることができるかどうかである。子供たちや研究者やおばあちゃんたちのために、コンテンツを収集して維持することで、それを行うのが図書館である。自由な社会はこの知識を前提とする。
Lessig, L. 2004. Free Culture. New York, Penguin. p. 109.

このところ、かなり異様な事態がまかり通っている。その場しのぎの嘘とごまかしを次々と持ち出して、平然とやり過ごすこと。もちろん、以前から事態は同様であったけれども、私が気づかなかっただけという可能性もあるけれど。

いくつかのサンプルをあげよう。

1. イラク侵略

米国は、当初、イラクを侵略する理由として、サダム・フセインの「大量破壊兵器」をあげていたはずだった。もちろん、そんなものはなかった（もしあったなら米国も侵略を控えていたかもっと慎重だったはずである）。もちろん、大量破壊兵器をイラクが保有していたとしても、米国のイラク侵略は国際法違反の犯罪である。

それが早々と通用しなくなって、米国はアルカーイダとのリンクも持ち出した。世俗政権のサダム・フセイン（フランク・シナトラとスコッチ・ウイスキーが好きらしい）とアルカーイダとは敵対関係にあった。これを主張するために持ち出した嘘もはやばやと暴かれ、通用しなくなった。もちろん、仮にリンクがあったとしても、米軍のイラク侵略は国際法違反の犯罪である。

それらが通用しなくなって困ったために米国が持ち出したのが、「イラクを解放し、民主主義をもたらす」という驚愕すべき口実である。イラクを解放して民主主義をもたらすためにイラクを侵略し占領する？

第一。論理的に成立しない。「占領は解放である」？？？　「おまえを生かすためにはおまえを殺さなくてはならない」と言う主張の論理的破綻と、限りなく近い。

第二。現状がまったくそれを裏切っている。イラクの現状について、イラクの多くの人が、サダム・フセイン支配下よりも悪化したと語っている。ファルージャをはじめとする多くの都市で、クラスター爆弾や白燐弾を用いて民間人を無差別に殺してきた米軍。この世の苦しみから「解放」するという、考えるだけでも具合が悪くなりそうな悪辣な冗談でも言わない限り、これは「解放」ではない。

「民主主義」？　ブレマーが一方的に発布した政令でイラクはがんじがらめになっている。メソポタミア文明の昔から連綿と引き継いできた農業のための種子の利用を禁じ、モンサント社などの遺伝子組み換え種子を買って育てることを強制する政令を出したのは、占領者である。ここにイラク人の意志などみじんも反映されていない。

それにもかかわらず、日本の少なからぬ大手新聞は、「憲法制定」をめぐる「国民投票」などを、あたかもイラク民主化の一歩であるかのように報じた。

二つの、メディア上で意図的に仕組まれた忘却がこの犯罪を支えている。第一は、イラク侵略の理由は「大量破壊兵器」や「テロリストとのリンクにあった」という、それ自体イカサマな主張の忘却。

第二は、歴史上これまでもずっと、極めて多くの場合、侵略者は自らを「解放者」と称していたことの忘却。どんなに破壊と略奪と殺人を行なっても。どんなに人々を苦しめても、侵略者は自らを「解放者」と称してきた。

ナポレオン、チャーチル、スターリン、ヒトラー、そして日本のアジア侵略。

日本の過去を美化する人物を外相とする国が、米国によるイラク侵略と占領、人々の殺害に加担し、占領軍の使いっ走りを派遣している状況は、「歴史を忘れたものは過ちを繰り返す」という図式にあまりによく合致する。

2. イラクでの白燐弾

当初、米国は、白燐弾など使用していないと言い張った。

それでごまかすことができなくなると、今度は、白燐弾は照明弾として、煙幕として用いたのであり対人利用はしていないと叫んだ。

さらに、米軍自身が報告書の中で白燐弾を人に対して用いたことを認めた。ただし、戦闘員に対して用いたのであると（それも犯罪である）。

民間人に対して用いたという証拠は多数ある。今のところ、米国は「戦闘員」を「乳児であれ幼児であれ老人であれ非武装の女性であれ誰であれ、米国および同盟軍が殺した相手」と定義しているようなので、白燐弾を用いた相手は戦闘員であると強弁している。

その定義には無理があるから、通用しなくなるときが来るかも知れない。そのとき、米国は、「白燐弾は無害だ」と言うかも知れない。米軍は白燐弾が相手に与えるダメージを賞賛しているけれど、たぶんその頃までには、みんなそれを忘れさせられているだろうから。

関連する記事は、こちらやこちらにあります。ほかにもFalluja, April 2004でフォローしていますので、ご覧下さい。

3. 小泉改革

あまり沢山ありすぎて困るが、国債発行を抑えるという公約。小泉政権第一期で、国債長期は約６４０兆円から７４０兆円へと増加した。

ところで、２００５年９月の選挙に際しての小泉自民党のキャッチフレーズは「改革を止めるな」。これまでの方針をそのまま悪化させることが「改革」というのは、「解放するために侵略する」というのと同じくらい、無理がある。

にもかかわらず、大手メディアは、選挙の際、これをはじめとするさまざまな観察点を体系的に繰り返し読者にわかるように提示することを避け、この５年ほどのつい最近の歴史を抹消してきた。

4. 地球温暖化

記録してあった資料が今、手元にないのできちんとした参照はできないが、１９９０年前後には、ニューズウィーク誌等の主要な雑誌もメディアも、地球温暖化などは起きていないと主張することが流行だった。

その後、地球温暖化が進んでいることが否定しようもなくなると、今度は「地球温暖化は我々の生活に打撃を与えはしない」という論調が目につくようになった。

今は、地球温暖化対策ビジネスが流行している。

教訓と自戒

ブログやウェブでも、ともすると新しいトピックを追いがちなので、定期的に、あるトピックの以前の状況を見直すよう、気をつけなくては。

■１１月２０日：「プーチンはチェチェン戦争をやめろ！デモ」

12:00-12:45 豊島区・池袋駅東口駅前にて、デモ実行委によるアピール。
13:30-14:30 中池袋公園に移動。中池袋公園にて、チェチェン、アイヌ個別集会
14:30-15:00 チェチェン、アイヌ合同集会
15:00-15:30 デモ（中池袋公園を出発。豊島区周辺でデモ）
15:30〜 交流会
※短いデモです。ぜひご参加を！チェチェン紛争の背景については、こちらをご覧下さい。

■１２月１１日（日）：「ピークオイル論」をめぐる話

小さな公民館で益岡が「ピークオイル論」についての話をします。
日時：１２月１１日（日）　１８時１５分〜
場所：文京区立　本駒込地域センター　和室Ｂ
定員：１８名
参加費 : ５００円
※主催は、エコロジー雑貨ももんがさん。事前予約制です（12/4（日）締切）。なお、予約は、益岡にではなく、上記ももんがさんのＨＰのメールフォームから、あるいはエコロジー雑貨ももんがの右下「mail」からお願いします。

■PEACE ON ハニさん来日の賛同募金をお願いします！

PEACE ONさんが、「イラク　混沌からの光」というテーマでイラク人画家とPEACE ONの現地職員を日本に招き、展覧会やアートライブ、講演などを行います。１１月１７日の段階でまだ賛同募金、必要額の半分程度ということで、募金を募っています。ぜひご協力下さい。

■アジア・太平洋戦争を忘れない
　泰緬鉄道（死の鉄道）元ロウムシャ
　マレー系マレーシア人の証言集会■

マレー系マレーシア人は、戦後６０年の今まで、沈黙を続けてきました。今年マレーシアで、華人系８・１５集会に、マレー系の方々が同席（初めて！）、３０年マレーシアに通って、初めての光景だった（高嶋伸欣先生談）。そんなドラマから証言集会が生まれました。
日時：１２月１０日（土）午後３時（２時半開場）
場所：サポートセンター２階ホール（横浜駅西口徒歩４分）
証言：アフマド・ハムザさん＆ワン・ママさん（ともにマレーシア）
講演：高嶋伸欣さん（琉球大）
　永瀬隆さん（元通訳）
資料代：1000円（高校生以下無料）
呼掛人：石田甚太郎・笠原十九司・川田龍平・信太正道・高嶋伸欣
　高良真木・俵義文・中原道子・西野瑠美子・林博史・前田朗（敬称略）
主催：アジア・フォーラム横浜

このページに、私が訳した文章が再掲されていました。当ページからの再掲・転載は、それぞれのご判断と責任のもとで勝手にやって下さってかまいませんし、むろんご連絡もいりませんが、再掲・転載の際には、当ページへのリンクを張るか、翻訳あるいは文章のクレジットは付与して下さいますよう。その方が、相互リンク関係からアクセスの広がりも出ますし（と人を介して連絡してもらったら、上記ページには参照がつき、運営者からお詫びの連絡がありました。感謝）。

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Bush Plan to Bomb Al-Jazeera: Press Freedom or Freedom to Bomb the Press?

by Stephen Soldz

Reprinted from ZNET

See this version for full annotations:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=9182

The British Daily Mirror newspaper reported today that, in April 2004, President Bush planned to bomb the independent Al-Jazeera television network headquarters in US ally Qatar. Tony Blair reportedly talked him out of it. In case one doubts this report, the fact that the British government has already indicted a civil servant for leaking this document confirms its validity. In typical fashion, the White House press spokesman Scott McClellan issued one of his typical nondenials in an e-mail to the Associated Press, writing: “We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.”

In evaluating this report, we should remember that on April 8, 2003, Al-Jazeera ‘s office in Baghdad was bombed by US forces, killing a journalist, Tarek Ayoub, an event movingly described in the movie Control Room. This attack was despite the coordinates of the office being given to US forces, and despite huge markings being placed on the roof. [On the same day, a US tank slowly aimed and fired in broad daylight on the Palestine Hotel, killing two journalists.]

The April 8th attack was not the first or the only time the US attacked Al-Jazeera. In November 2002 the US destroyed Al-Jazeera ‘s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a missile. Fortunately, no one was killed. As always, the US claimed the attack was an “accident.” As the US launched its “shock and awe” Iraq invasion, it also launched a propaganda attack on Al-Jazeera.  In July 2003, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz accused Al-Jazeera of “endangering the lives of American troops” in Iraq, while in November 2003, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Al-Jazeera of cooperating with Iraqi insurgents. [When the American press do this, it’s called “embedding."] In September 2003, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council banned Al-Jazeera [and the Al-Arabiyah station] for two weeks, and in February 2004 they were banned for a month. Later in 2004, the US/UN appointed Iyad Allawi banned Al-Jazeera from working in Iraq.

The claim that Al-Jazeera was pro-Saddam was patently absurd, as was attested to by the fact that, during the war, the Iraqi Information ministry banned two Al-Jazeera correspondents, leading the station to suspend reports from Iraq. The station reiterated their independent position. As their spokesperson told the BBC: “We faced lots of things like that before from the Iraqi Government and from other governments in the Arab region, because this is a way they think. They think they can impose some conditions on Al-Jazeera or they think they can change the reporters, they can put their own criteria on our work.”

Given the number of reporters killed by US fire in Iraq (eight as of May, 2005), and the systematic refusal of the US to hold anyone accountable, many have been suspicious that these deaths were not all accidents. The new report that Bush planned an attack on Al-Jazeera shows how central the destruction of independent reporting on the Iraq war was to the American administration. This new report strengthens suspicions that at least some of the attacks on media headquarters and deaths of journalists and other media personnel in Iraq were not accidents. Thus, there is an urgent need for an independent international investigation into those journalists killed by US forces in Iraq.

Also needed is an investigation into other American efforts to avoid independent reporting from Iraq, such as the seizure of the main hospital in Fallujah before the US attack in November 2004, so that doctors there could not report on civilian deaths. Now that reports on US use of White Phosphorous as weapons in the attack on that city have been verified, after a year of US denials, and it has been revealed that the US also used thermobaric weapons in that attack—weapons which have been compared in their impact by some to tactical nuclear weapons—we can understand why the US was so anxious to avoid independent reporting from that city. Given the extent of attacks on civilians that have characterized the US invasion and occupation in general, it is understandable that the US would want to make independent reporting from Iraq so dangerous that few will attempt it.

We cannot, of course, ignore the fact that many, perhaps a majority, of deaths of journalists in Iraq are due to the insurgents. The combined deaths from all sides make the Iraq the most deadly for media workers since Vietnam. Unfortunately, neither side respects the press and its vital functions of shining a spotlight upon the evils that inevitably accompany war. However, this fact in no way justifies barbaric or illegal acts committed by the US government, a government, after all, which claims to have liberated Iraq from despotism and to be fighting for the creation of a democratic Iraq. The evidence that suppression of a free press was a major strategy in this war is yet another nail in the coffin of the claims that liberating Iraqis had anything to do with US war aims. A country that enshrines press freedom into its constitution should not be allowed to suppress the press in other countries with impunity.

There is another aspect of Bush’s plan to attack Al-Jazeera that bears commenting upon. According to Amnesty International, as they stated after the US bombed an Iraqi television station during its original attack, “the bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned. It is a civilian object, and thus protected under international humanitarian law.” If an Iraqi station is protected, surely an independent and respected television network located in a nonbelligerent country could in no sense be construed as a legitimate war target. Thus, an attack on the Al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar would inevitably be a criminal activity. If the US was seriously considering committing such a criminal action in a friendly country, there is no reason to believe that illegality of an activity plays much of a consideration for US war planners.

If concern for legality is a minor consideration for US officials, so too is concern for the truth. Just in the past couple of weeks, the US was revealed to have lied about its denial of use of White Phosphorous (WP) against people in Fallujah. It was further found that the US lied when it said classification of WP as a chemical weapon was ridiculous as the US had itself so classified WP when it was Saddam who used it. Also, the last couple of weeks saw the silly spectacle of the US shedding crocodile tears for victims of torture in Iraqi Interior Ministry dungeons while fighting to preserve the right to itself torture those incarcerated in its various secret dungeons around the world. We, of course, have the dozens and dozens of reports of torture throughout Iraq by US forces, all denied until they cannot any longer be denied, only to be blamed on the innumerable “few bad apples” that seem to plague unit after unit of the US occupation forces. Given this systematic pattern of denial, deceit, and outright lying, we can assume that the US response to this new report will continue in the same vein as Scott McClellan’s initial comments.

Wars are always dirty. Those engaged in war seldom admit the truth about the brutal means they are using. Those conducting an unpopular occupation are tempted to use all possible means to suppress those who resist occupation. The press, to the degree that it functions as an independent force, serves as one factor providing disincentives to the use of the most barbarous techniques available. Given the extent to which the American corporate press has often echoed obviously false US claims long after their absurdity became apparent, the international press like Al-Jazeera plays a critical role in limiting US brutality. By suppressing the press in Iraq, the US has increased its ability to kill with impunity. Evidence that many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died at US hands suggest that the US has actively seized the opportunity.

Stephen Soldz (mailto:ssoldz@bgsp.edu) is psychoanalyst, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web page and the Psyche, Science and Society blog.

Power Politics and Willing Masses

By Kato Shuichi

Reprinted from JAPAN FOCUS, which has many articles on Japan and Asia from a more independent perspective than seen in the domestic Japanese or US press.

The Sept. 11 Lower House election resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Liberal Democratic Party. Now the prospect that two great parties will alternate administrations in the manner of the prewar Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government Party) and Minseito (Constitutional Democratic Party) is more distant than ever. How has this come about?

Of course, the single-seat constituencies systematically favor the large parties. Even if the LDP loses some votes, the party does not lose Diet seats. Even if the Social Democratic Party gains some votes, it does not gain Diet seats.

Strategically, there is no question that the prime minister and the executives of the ruling coalition partners, the LDP and New Komeito, have maneuvered adroitly.

However, all this pertains to the government parties; that is, the country’s leaders. The reasons for the LDP’s landslide victory are also re-flected in the political opinions of those who are led, meaning the Japanese citizens.

Reform vs. status quo

Why did the citizenry support the LDP? To know that, one would have to quiz each and every individual citizen.

This is obviously an impossibility, so instead I shall offer some hypotheses.

First, the majority of citizens want to maintain the status quo. Even if the number of unemployed people rises, the still larger number of employed people must prefer things as they are. Of course, although they still have a job, they are continually beset by worries about their future, the shrinking welfare system, the need to care for their elderly parents, their children dropping out of school, and soon.

Still, they are reasonably well fed and clothed; they do not want to change the general framework of society.

And who can guarantee that stability? The LDP and the machinery of the bureaucracy. Even if a bold and daring Prime Minister Junichiro Ko izumi announces a “reform” once every three days, the populace have faith that with the LDP in charge, nothing will change fundamentally.

Second, decade upon decade of money politics and hereditary Diet seats make boring fare indeed. Working men and women come back from their companies at the end of the day and must want from their TV something a little more dramatic, some more exciting spectacle.

Precisely at this point, the desire for reform appears. But what sort of reform? “Appropriate reform.” And when should it take place? “At an appropriate time.” It is on such metaphysical wings as these that the desire for reform soars in Japan.

The first desire (for the status quo) and the second desire (for reform) contradict each other. In dialectically overcoming such contradictions, the LDP has been successful, whereas Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) has failed. The process and results of the recent election have demonstrated this clearly.

The success of the governing parties--one might almost say their brilliant success--hinged on first dis solving the Diet, then making “postal reform” the key election issue. Here, “reform” meant privatization, and most of the electorate knew nothing of its costs and benefits. They must have calculated that however the postal system was reorganized, it would have no great effect on their daily lives.

As political spectacle, this responds sufficiently to the people’s desire for reform, while also satisfying their desire to maintain the status quo. To borrow a phrase from a shrewd journalist, it creates an arena one might call the “Koizumi Theater.”

Koizumi Theatre

Inside this theater one has the thrills and chills of an imaginary, potential adventure. But take a single step outside, and one discovers that the theater’s internal adventures have no effect on reality. The LDP landslide was inevitable.

It is clear that preparations to revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution are progressing; at the same time the opposition of half of the citizenry is also becoming evident.

One would think that choosing whether our country will openly espouse war or not has a greater impact on the lives of our citizens than choosing whether postal deliveries will be handled by civil servants or private employees.

From the citizenry’s point of view, it might be said that subsuming all electoral issues into the one issue of postal reform, and totally ignoring the Constitution, is a kind of misdirection.

As we noted above, from the LDP’s point of view it constitutes an adroit electoral strategy. And from Minshuto’s point of view, its position onthe Constitution was, prior to the election, much of a muchness with the LDP’s, so they could not make an issue out of this, either.

The moods of the masses

But is this really the opinion of the individual citizens? Or is the very concept of “the individual citizen” a fiction? In a group-oriented society such as ours, where people are continually subjected to group pressures in their neighborhoods or workplaces, can they realize their “inalienable rights” and achieve their unconstrained independence as free individuals all of a sudden, simply by making a political judgment and casting a ballot?

Yet if that does not happen, then what in the world is the meaning of “a free election?” As I consider where we have come from and where we are headed, my thoughts are troubled indeed.

One September day following the election, I viewed the restored edition of Fritz Lang’s silent-film-era master piece “Metropolis” (1927), at a retrospective in Tokyo on the German periods of Lang and F. W. Murnau. This film is a sort of city-of-the-future tale, in which the ruling class lives above-ground while manual laborers toil away at machines underground.

The above-grounders have their masters, too, whose lives are hardly depicted at all. Likewise, the below-ground proletariat hardly ever appear as individuals: they are seen on-screen only en masse.

Due to an industrial accident, masses agitate for shorter working hours, appearing quietly and with drawing quietly under the leadershipof a female preacher. To alienate the working masses from this preacher, the ruling class sends in a robot provocateur who looks identical to the preacher. The masses are whipped up into a riotous frenzy by the robot’s provocations and destroy the machinery indiscriminately. This results in a flood that threatens to inundate the city.

In their chaotic attempts at flight, many workers and their families are sacrificed. Believing that the robot is the preacher, and that it is a witch responsible for these calamities, the worker-masses pursue the robot and burn it at the stake.

So the masses are pacific, violent in their actions, and sometimes merely chaotic. The vision and the cinematic expression here are fabulous.

The film’s dynamism rivals that of the tumult of workers attempting to occupy a factory, as captured by the camera of Vsevolod Pudovkin in his 1926 film, “Mother.” In conveying the multifaceted nature of mass psy chology and action (that is, the group as a group, not merely as a collection of individuals) there must be few films that can surpass “Metropolis.”

The main character of this film is not any of the individuals portrayed so much as it is “the masses” as such, with all their collective sense of solidarity but defenselessness against provocation; their righteous pride and their malleability; their obedience to authority and their self-interest.

In the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s, Lang tried to depict the city of the future: Was he not something of a prophet? Such are my musings in the aftermath of the election.

The author is a critic and writer whose many books include A History of Japanese Literature: The First Thousand Years. This article appeared in IHT/Asahi: November 10,2005. It is published at Japan Focus on November 16, 2005.

ISSN: 1557-4660

Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program

By Tsuneishi Keiichi

Reprinted from JAPAN FOCUS, which has many articles on Japan and Asia from a more independent perspective than seen in the domestic Japanese or US press.

[Japan’s Unit 731 remains central to the fiercely contested China-Japan controversy over war crimes and war memory, and to the international debate on science and ethics. With a staff of more than 10,000, including many of Japan’s top medical scientists, 731 and its affiliated units conducted human experiments, including vivisection, on Chinese and other victims in Manchukuo and throughout China between 1933 and 1945. The experiments tested, among other things, the lethality of biological weapons and sought to determine the ability of the human body to survive in the face of various pathogens and in conditions such as extreme cold.

Tsuneishi Keiichi is Japan’s leading specialist on biowarfare. His voluminous studies conducted over thirty years in Japan, China, the United States and Europe, have provided core material for all writing hitherto on the Ishii Network. In the following careful resumé essay, he concentrates on organization and function, omitting much of the horrific detail covered elsewhere. Drawing on Japanese military records, this study documents the deaths of 850 victims in the years up to 1943, the largest number infected with plague, cholera, and epidemic hemorrhagic fever. It also makes use of American records and interviews.

Unit 731 not only conducted tests but also led the way in waging biological warfare on numerous occasions throughout the war, the best documented being attacks on Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. As in the case of the Nanjing Massacre and the “comfort women,” casualty figures remain contested. The figure of 3,000 persons exterminated at Pingfan, the major experiment site of the Ishii Network, is widely accepted among specialists for the period ending in 1945. The post-surrender destruction by the Japanese authorities both of the research sites and the military documents, has made precise casualty estimates difficult.

As Tsuneishi documents, attacks in Zhejiang resulted in more than 10,000 Japanese military casualties including the death of 1,700 Japanese soldiers, revealing the difficulty of waging effective biowarfare. No estimate is provided here of Chinese deaths. a reminder of contemporary practice in providing only American body counts in Iraq, but also of the difficulty of establishing Chinese casualties.

Japan’s grim experiment with biowarfare pales in comparison with the estimated 10-30 million Chinese who died as a result of war and associated conditions of famine in the years 1931-45. But the findings of Ishii and his colleagues were important enough for American authorities to grant immunity from prosecution in exchange for evidence of the research findings of Unit 731. The 731 scientists, who were evacuated to Japan prior to the defeat, continued their careers as eminent figures in the postwar medical and scientific establishment. Japan Focus.]

The Ishii Network

Unit 731 was the common name of a secret unit of Japan’s Manchuria-based Kwantung Army whose official name was the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department. [1] The leader of the unit was Ishii Shiro, who held the rank of lieutenant general at the end of World War II. The unit epitomized the extensive organization for the development of biological weapons within the imperial army, which was referred to, beginning in the late 1930s, as the Ishii Network.

The network itself was based at the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, established in 1932 at the Japanese Army Military Medical School in Tokyo. Unit 731 was the first of several secret, detached units created as extensions of the research lab; the units served as field laboratories and test sites for developing biological weapons, culminating in the experimental use of biological weapons on Chinese cities. The trial use of these weapons on urban populations was a direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which outlawed the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. It was also understood by those involved that the use of human subjects in laboratory and test site experiments was inhumane. This was why it was deemed necessary to establish Unit 731 and the other secret units.

Lt. General Ishii Shiro

The Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory was created under the initiative of Ishii Shiro after he returned from two years of field study of American and European research facilities. It was set up, with the approval of top-level army authorities, as a facility to develop biological weapons. It is said that Ishii first became convinced of the need to develop biological weapons with the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925.

The biological weapons Ishii sought to develop had humans as their target, and Unit 731 was established with this goal in mind. In order to produce biological weapons as quickly as possible, Ishii considered it essential to have a human experimentation site at the disposal of his research laboratory. Japan had occupied northeastern China and in 1932 the puppet state of Manchukuo was established. Within this “safe zone,” Ishii set up what was called the Togo Unit, based in the village of Beiyinhe, about 100 kilometers south of Harbin. Human experimentation began there in the fall of 1933. The Togo Unit was a secret unit under the vice chief of staff of the Kwantung Army. It was set up to determine whether it was possible to conduct human experiments in northeastern China, and if it was possible, whether the experiments would produce useful results. The launching of this feasibility study reflects the deliberate nature of Ishii as the organizer of the research, and you could say it was marked with his character. All of those involved in this research and development were military doctors, but they all used false names. At this stage, the scale of the project involved about ten doctors, along with a staff of about one hundred.

The Inauguration of Unit 731

Unit 731 was officially established in 1936. Its establishment is reflected in a memo dated April 23, 1936, entitled “Opinion Regarding the Reinforcement of Military Forces in Manchuria,” from the chief of staff of the Kwantung Army to the vice minister of the Ministry of War (contained in the Ministry of War Journal for the army in Manchuria, Rikuman Mitsu-dainikki). Under the heading “Establishment and Expansion of the Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention Department,” the memo states that the department will be “newly established” in 1936 and “one part of the department will be expanded in fiscal 1938.” This is the oldest official document concerning Unit 731 that has been found to date.

In addition to inaugurating Unit 731, this memo also laid the foundation for establishing two other units. It called for the establishment of an additional biological weapons development unit, independent of Ishii’s unit, which was called the Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 100), and for preparations to set up a chemical weapons development unit called the Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 516).

Several months later, the memo’s recommendations were approved by Emperor Hirohito, the two units were established, and preparations began for creating the Testing Department. The Ministry of War Journal for May 21, 1936 recorded this development under the heading. “Imperial Hearing on Military Force Improvement Consequent upon Budget Approval.” The journal noted: “Units concerned with epidemic prevention: One unit each is established for epidemic prevention among humans and horses.”

Having been officially established, Unit 731 moved its facilities from Beiyinhe to a newly established laboratory at a hospital in Harbin. This laboratory served as a front-line headquarters while the unit’s permanent facilities were being built in Pingfan, outside of the city of Harbin. These facilities were completed and capable of conducting research in the fall of 1939, after the hostilities at Nomonhan (on the border between Manchuria and Mongolia) had ended.

With the construction of the Pingfan facilities, the primary research staff changed in composition from the military doctors of the Togo Unit to private-sector medical researchers affiliated with universities and other institutions. The first group to be posted to the unit was a team of eight assistant professors and instructors from Kyoto Imperial University in the spring of 1938. The group consisted of two bacteriologists, three pathologists, two physiologists, and one researcher specializing in experiments using animals. Within a year, a second group had arrived at the facility, and the research staff had expanded considerably. The prominence of researchers in pathology and physiology in the development of biological weapons reflected the need for specialized judgment in assessing the results of human experimentation.

The Unit 731 Building Reconstructed as a Museum at Pingfan

With the expansion of the war front throughout China after 1937, sister units affiliated with Unit 731 were established in major Chinese cities. These units were also called Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Departments. (Unit 1855 was established in Beijing on February 9, 1938; Unit 1644 in Nanjing on April 18, 1939; and Unit 8604 in Guangzhou on April 8, 1939). Later, after Japan occupied Singapore a similar unit (Unit 9420) was established there on March 26, 1942. These affiliates comprised the scope of the Ishii network through the end of the war. As of the end of 1939 (that is, before the establishment of the Singapore unit), the network had a total staff of 10,045, of which 4,898 were assigned to the core units in Tokyo and Pingfan.

Human Experimentation

Human experimentation took place at all of the units of the Ishii network, but it was conducted systematically by Unit 731 and Unit 1644. Of these two, there are extant reports from a US Army survey of human experimentation by Unit 731, so the general outline of its program is known.

Exterior remains of Unit 731 at Pingfan

The following table was compiled from two sources: a report to US occupation authorities dated December 12, 1947 by Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, concerning human experimentation by Unit 731 and related facilities; and a list of specimens brought back to Japan by a Unit 731 pathologist in July 1943. Aside from Ishii and another unit leader, Kitano Masaji, the names of individual researchers do not appear; they are identified as military personnel (M, primarily military doctors), (C) civilian technicians conducting research within the military, and (PT) part-time researchers working outside of the military.

The number of specimens reflects the number of subjects who died as a result of human experimentation as of July 1943. Consequently, the total number of victims of human experimentation at the time of Japan’s surrender two years later would be higher than these figures. The figures also do not include victims of germ bomb tests at the Anda field test site or from other experiments.

SEE CHART AND PHOTOS HERE
http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=452

Technicians who were civilian employees of the army were treated as officers. The status of civilian employees ranged from infantry-class to general-class, but technicians were treated as lieutenants and above. Ranking below the technicians were operators, clerks, and staff. For the most part, the Ishii network took on university researchers as technicians. The part-time researchers were part-time employees of the Military Medical School Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory; they were professors at Tokyo and Kyoto imperial universities who were contracted to perform research in their own laboratories. In short, a large number of civilian researchers were mobilized.

Biological Warfare Trials

For the most part, the use of the biological weapons developed by the Ishii network amounted to field trials.

The first of these trials took place during the Nomonhan Incident in 1939. In August, toward the end of the hostilities, pathogens that cause gastrointestinal disease were placed in the Holsten River, a tributary of the Halha River that the Soviet Army used as its source of water. It is not clear how many Soviet soldiers suffered from this attack, but it is thought that casualties were not widespread. This was because the typhoid bacillus and the other pathogens that were used lose their infectivity when placed in water. This fact was known to Ishii’s group. It is thought that they nonetheless carried out the attack because they wanted to conduct a field test of biological weapons in combat. While there were likely few Soviet casualties, at least one Japanese soldier became infected when he spilled liquid from a drum filled with contaminated water while dumping it into the river. He died of typhoid fever at an army hospital in Hailar.

During the following year, 1940, larger scale field trials were conducted in central China, using biological weapons dropped from airplanes. The pathogens were cultivated by Unit 731 and shipped to Unit 1644 in Nanjing, which served as the forward base for the attacks, which continued until 1942. During the first two years, these attacks were carried out in cities along the Chang River. Of these, the large-scale attack on the city of Ningbo on October 27, 1940 is well documented and has also been thoroughly investigated by the Chinese.

The attack took place at 7 a.m. from heavy bombers flying a low-altitude run at 200 meters. The bombers dropped fleas, grain, and strips of cotton on the streets in the center of the city. The fleas were infected with the plague. They had ingested blood from plague-infected rats and were called “plague fleas.” The plague bacteria were not dissipated directly, as it was considered more effective to infect the carrier fleas and release them, in order to target a specific area with a focused attack. It was also expected that the bacteria would live longer in the bodies of the fleas. The fleas were dropped with grain and cotton to ensure that they reached the target area, and it was also thought that the cotton would absorb some of the shock of impact on the ground.

The first death was recorded on the fourth day, October 30, and casualties increased rapidly in the days that followed. By November 2, it was clear that the disease was an epidemic, and the area was sealed off as disease-contaminated. The next day, it was determined that the disease was the plague. By then 37 deaths had been reported. The quarantine imposed on the area slowed the spread of the epidemic.

The plague epidemic ended on December 2 with the death of the last two victims. Deaths totaled 106 people. These figures were reported in a survey, conducted by two Ningbo researchers and published in March 1994 by Dongnan University Press. This historical account of the epidemic tracked down all of the victims and listed them by name, and it is thus a very valuable document.

This attack, killing more than one hundred people, was the most lethal in this series of attacks on Chinese cities. However, when one considers that the attack was carried out by heavy bombers on a risky low-altitude run, these results have to be considered a military failure.

There were two primary reasons for this failure. First, the bacteria used was so infectious that it immediately set off alarms among its victims. Second, the effort suffered from exaggerated expectations of the ability to artificially spark an epidemic. In February 1941 Ishii reported to his superior officer, Lt. Gen. Kajitsuka Ryuji, chief of the medical department of the Kwantung Army: “It is not as easy as some people think, and as I once thought, to deliberately spread infectious disease. While infectious disease spreads readily in natural circumstances, numerous obstacles are encountered when artificially spreading infection, and sometimes great pains must be taken to overcome these.” [2] It was expected that pathogens dropped in a densely populated area like Ningbo would quickly spread person to person, but these expectations were betrayed.

Great Failures

In November 1940, the month after the attack on Ningbo, the Chinese began to take countermeasures in response to biological warfare attacks on urban populations. On November 28, the central Chinese city of Jinhua suffered an attack. The result was a failure. According to a Chinese Ministry of Health document, “At the time that the plague epidemics were continuing in Ningbo and its vicinity, three Japanese airplanes flew over Jinhua and dropped a large number of small granules the size of small shrimp eggs. These strange objects were gathered and examined at a local hospital. . . . They showed the physical characteristics of the bacteria that cause the plague. In any case, the plague did not break out in Jinhua and as far as this town was concerned the Japanese experiment in germ warfare ended in failure.”

No effort was made to collect the material dropped from the airplanes on Ningbo, but one month later the objects dropped on Junhua were gathered and analyzed. There had been rapid progress in securing evidence in response to the attacks. It is also likely that townspeople were warned to stay inside their houses. As a result, the Japanese experiment was deemed a failure.

Biological weapons are not only useful as potent means of war; their use can also be accompanied by an important element of strategic disinformation, if it is claimed that the enemy itself used them, or if it is implied that they were used in retaliation. In this sense, when biological weapons are used, one tactic is to cause confusion as to whether they were used or not, but if the enemy deems the trial uses a failure, the tactic itself fails decisively.

Nonetheless, the trial use of biological weapons on central Chinese cities continued in the fall of 1941. One of the targets was the city of Changde, about 1000 kilometers east of Shanghai in the Chinese interior. The Chinese applied the lessons they learned the previous year and were able to keep casualties in the single digits. Thus the results of the trials through the end of 1941 indicated that dropping plague fleas from airplanes as a means of attacking urban areas was quite ineffective.

Beginning in 1942, Japan began dropping pathogens from airplanes into battlefield zones, on a scale that amounted to a combat operation. In April, Japan launched the Zhejiang campaign. In this campaign, Ishii and company carried out massive biological weapons attacks. Cholera bacteria was the main pathogen employed, and the attacks resulted in more than 10,000 casualties. It has also been reported that some victims contracted dysentery and the plague. More than 1700 soldiers died, mostly from cholera. This would have been considered a great success for the Ishii group, but for the fact that all of the victims were Japanese soldiers.

A Japanese medic captured by American forces at the end of 1944 described the casualties among the Japanese army during his interrogation: “When Japanese troops overran an area in which a [biological weapons] attack had been made during the Chekiang [Zhejiang] campaign in 1942, casualties upward from 10,000 resulted within a very brief period of time. Diseases were particularly cholera, but also dysentery and pest [bubonic plague]. Victims were usually rushed to hospitals in rear. … Statistics which POW saw at Water Supply and Purification Dept Hq at Nanking showed more than 1,700 dead, chiefly from cholera; POW believes that actual deaths were considerably higher, ‘it being a common practice to pare down unpleasant figures.’” [3]

A New Type of Bomb

After the 1942 failure, the Japanese army general staff lost all confidence in the efficacy of biological weapons. The pressure was on to find a new approach that would ensure the safety of friendly troops and deliver a more reliable, more devastating blow to the enemy.

The new approach developed was to pack the pathogens in bombs or shells, which would be dropped from airplanes or delivered by artillery. This would satisfy both of the requirements, to deliver massive carnage while maintaining the safety of the attacking troops. At the same time, the only way to prevent disasters like that of the Zhejiang campaign was to improve communication among the troops.

Two hurdles confronted the effort to load bombs with pathogens. The first was the need to keep the pathogens alive for long periods of time. The second was the need to develop a bomb made of materials that would break apart upon impact using little or no explosives; this would prevent the pathogen from being destroyed by heat. Alternatively, if a bombshell could not be made of fragile material, a pathogen that could withstand the heat of an explosion would have to be selected. When a bomb or a shell lands, people do not immediately gather at the point of impact, so it was necessary to convey the pathogen from that spot to wherever people were. Again a live host like a plague flea that would physically carry the pathogen and infect people was considered the best solution to this problem.

A bacteria bomb using the plague bacteria was developed to satisfy most of these requirements. The bomb used plague fleas packed in a shell casing of unglazed pottery made from diatomaceous earth (a soft, sedimentary rock containing the shells of microscopic algae). This same material was used in a water filter that Ishii had developed and patented. As this bomb would break apart using minimal explosive, it was expected that the plague fleas inside would survive the heat and scatter in all directions, to bite people and spread the disease. This bomb, called the Ishii bacterial bomb, was perfected by the end of 1944. In the beginning of 1945, the collection of rats went into high gear, and Unit 731 went to work cultivating fleas to be infected with the plague.

Japan’s Defeat

The main force of Unit 731 left the unit headquarters by train soon after the Japanese surrender and returned to Japan between the end of August and early September 1945. Some members of the unit and officers of the Kwantung Army were captured by the Soviet military. Twelve of these POWs were tried by the Soviet Union at a war crimes trial in Khabarovsk in December 1949. In addition to members of Unit 731, officers of the Kwantung Army and the army’s chief medical officer were also charged as responsible parties. All of those charged were given prison sentences ranging from two to twenty-five years, but aside from one man who committed suicide just before returning to Japan, all had been repatriated by 1956. The record of the Khabarovsk trial was published in 1950 as Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow).

On the other hand, not one of the members of Unit 731 who returned to Japan was tried as a war criminal. Instead, the American military began investigating the unit in September 1945, and unit officers were asked to provide information about their wartime research, not as evidence of war crimes, but for the purpose of scientific data gathering. In other words, they were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for supplying their research data. The American investigation continued through the end of 1947 and resulted in four separate reports. The investigation took place in two phases.

The first phase resulted in the Sanders Report (dated November 1, 1945) and the Thompson Report (dated May 31, 1946). These two reports contained information on the unit’s bacteria bombs, but did not address the subject of human experimentation or the trial use of biological weapons. Kitano Masaji, who was in Shanghai at the time of Japan’s surrender, was interrogated in January 1946, but he was instructed by Lt. Gen. Arisue Seizo, the Japanese chief of intelligence, that he should not talk about “human experimentation and biological weapons trials,” Kitano later told this writer. In other words, until that time, these two subjects had been effectively concealed.

Body disposal at Unit 731.

However, at the end of 1946, American authorities received notice from the Soviets that they intended to try cases involving human experimentation and biological warfare. Ishii and others were interrogated again, and they confirmed the general content of the Soviet claims. The American investigation began anew, headed by new investigators. Two additional reports were produced: the Fell Report (dated June 20, 1947) and the Hill and Victor Report (dated December 12, 1947). These documents described the human experiments conducted by Unit 731 and its related units, based primarily on the interrogation of researchers involved in the experiments.

The Hill and Victor Report concludes with the following evaluation: “Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which have been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Information had accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.”

The above account makes clear the nature of the crimes committed by the Ishii Unit. At the same, it is necessary to question the responsibility of the American forces who provided immunity from prosecution in exchange for the product of these crimes.

Sources

Tsuneishi Keiichi, 731 Butai: Seibutsu heiki hanzai no shinjitsu (Unit 731: The true story behind the biological weapons crimes) (Kodansha, 1995).

Tsuneishi Keiichi, Igakushatachi no soshiki hanzai (The organized crime of medical practitioners) (Asahi Shimbun, 1994; reprinted 1999).

Kobayashi Hideo and Kojima Toshiro, eds., 731 saikinsen butai: Chugoku shin shiryo (The bacteriological war unit 731: New Chinese documents) (Fuji Shuppan, 1995).

Tanaka Akira and Matsumura Takao, eds., 731 Butai sakusei shiryo (Documents produced by Unit 731) (Fuji Shuppan, 1991).

Tsuneishi Keiichi, Mokuteki: Ishii (Target: Ishii) (Otsuki Shoten, 1984).

This essay was written by Tsuneishi Keiichi for publication in Sekai senso hanzai jiten (Encyclopedia of world war crimes) (Bungei Shunju, 2002), edited by Hata Ikuhiko, Sase Masamori, and Tsuneishi. Tsuneishi Keiichi is a Kanagawa University professor specializing in the history of science, and Japan’s leading specialist on biological warfare and Unit 731. Translated by John Junkerman, a documentary filmmaker living in Tokyo. His most recent film, “Japan’s Peace Constitution,” will be distributed in North America by First Run Icarus Films. He is a Japan Focus Associate. Published at Japan Focus on November 20, 2005.

ISSN: 1557-4660

Hu Jintao’s Strategy for Handling Chinese Dissent and U.S. Pressure

by Tanaka Sakai

Reprinted from JAPAN FOCUS, which has many articles on Japan and Asia from a more independent perspective than seen in the domestic Japanese or US press.

It is said that the number of demonstrations against government mismanagement and corruption in China is rising. Since late last year, the media in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, Japan, and the United States has frequently reported protests erupting at city offices and other public sites across the country.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/PEK31100.htm

People regularly barge into government offices to protest when local newspapers reveal incidences of corruption. News coverage leads to public anger when redevelopment projects provide almost no restitution for people who have been evicted to make way for construction, while the relatives of local officials get rich. Protests frequently prompt revenge. Local officials send gangsters to threaten and physically harm people who had raised their voices against government abuse.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VDNRGTT

Recently, many Chinese have seen their standard of living deteriorate as state-owned companies are privatized, as employees are fired with little compensation, and as businesses begin to charge for services, which were once free, at company-affiliated schools, hospitals, and apartments. In the meantime, the children of well-connected party officials are raking in money, building luxurious homes, and driving around in expensive cars. This situation heightens the dissatisfaction of average citizens, so when protests begin, they quickly expand as other people, who have different complaints, arrive. http://tanakanews.com/d1016china.htm

74,000 Protests Per Year

“There were 58,000 protests that involved over 100 people throughout China two years ago. Last year the number rose to 74,000, and a total of 3.8 million people participated in these demonstrations.” This announcement in August 2004 by Zhou Yongkang , Minister of the Public Security Bureau, alerted the world to the country’s heightened unrest. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/chin-s06.shtml

The news of 74,000 protests caught the attention of reporters throughout the world. Soon many commentators in the West and Japan were speculating that the Chinese regime might be on the verge of collapse. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/19/news/china.php

Yet even as people throughout the world were reading these reports, one was forced to wonder why the Chinese government was making a point of communicating to the outside world that demonstrations were on the rise.

Previously, the Chinese government had neither announced yearly statistics about demonstrations, nor had it talked about any specific incidents. In addition, Chinese media outlets only sporadically mentioned the protests. The only people able to gauge the magnitude of the disturbances were a few top Communist leaders. If the Minister of Public Security had not announced that protests were increasing, nobody would have known that this was happening.

Almost all Chinese perceive that economic disparities are growing and are aware of the protests, but they do not think that the government is threatened with collapse.

The rising number of protests is a sign of “economic struggles” rather than “political strife.” The cause of the demonstrations is public anger over lost economic benefits, such as compensation, that people have not received because of corruption. Because this is the case, if municipal and Communist Party officials provide the expected compensation and punish officials accused of corruption, the protests will subside. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/GJ21Cb01.html

It is thought that many demonstrations grow out of strikes organized by labor unions demanding higher wages and “negotiating” over prices. Just as labor unions demanding higher wages from companies do not seek to topple the companies, people who are calling for compensation from the government are not attempting to bring down the Communist Party.

Fanning the Flames Before a Shift In Policy

Many Chinese understand the causes of the demonstrations in this manner, but many Western and Japanese observers do not comprehend the realities of the situation. Because hawks dominate the media in the United States, many commentators have a hostile attitude towards China, and Japan is the recipient of much of this skewed American analysis. If the Public Safety Bureau reports that there were 74,000 demonstrations in 2003, it is not surprising that many outside observers conclude that China must be near to collapse. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112491871730222274,00.html

Recent events help explain why top Chinese officials are heightening the sense that the country is facing a crisis. At the fifth plenary session of 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Hu government decided to shift its economic emphasis away from strengthening large cities to a Five Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development aimed at agricultural areas.
http://202.108.249.200/news/china/20051018/102507.shtml

In China, if the government decides that it is going to crack down on local official corruption, it first reveals the extent of corruption in the press in order to persuade people that the new policy is necessary. If the government did not do this, but simply promulgated an anti-corruption law, then many officials would be angered and the result would be a political battle between different factions within the Communist Party. To avoid such a scenario, the government arranges for many articles detailing corruption to be published. The government seeks to mobilize public opinion by raising public concern in order to smooth the way for the implementation its new policies.

Hence the Public Safety Bureau’s announcement that the number of demonstrations are rising and the increase in coverage by local newspapers to prepare the way for the launch of the Five Year Plan in 2006. Because the plan will decrease funds being directed to large cities, urban party officials are sure to oppose it. In order to quell this opposition, central government officials are playing up the danger posed by protests in rural areas.

The Last Will of Deng Xiaoping?

The Chinese government in October announced the rural revitalization plan just before U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow visited China. Before his trip, Snow had repeatedly criticized China’s refusal to allow the yuan to float more freely.

During his visit, however, Snow praised the Five Year Plan as “beneficial not only for China but good for the world.” This is because if the prosperity of rural Chinese—1 billion of the country’s 1.3 billion population—improves even marginally, they will probably buy more American goods and the U.S. trade deficit with China will decrease.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/GJ20Cb02.html

Since the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “getting rich first” has guided Chinese economic policy. The idea of “getting rich first” allowed people who can get rich first, to do so, while those who cannot fall behind. The current policy shift initiated by Hu places an emphasis on helping rural agricultural areas that have been left behind for the last two decades. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/GJ13Cb01.html

Hu is Deng’s second successor. Perhaps Deng’s last will was that his “get rich first” policy should expire after about twenty years.

Courting Taiwan

Hu Jintao is launching other new policies. One of these is that China will not strike out at Taiwan as long as the island does not declare “independence.” http://tanakanews.com/f0510taiwan.htm

China appears ready to recognize Taiwan’s autonomy in the economic realm. Encouraged by Korea, the Hu government explored the possibility of allowing a representative from Taiwan to attend this month’s APEC conference in Pusan.

(On 12 October, after a visit to Taipei by Korean officials the Taiwanese government decided to send Wang Chin-p’ing, Chairman of the National Assembly, a top official in the opposition Nationalist Party to the meetings, but China apparently responded that a politician would not be acceptable, so the Koreans asked Taiwan to send an economic expert. http://www.roc-taiwan.or.jp/news/week/05/051021b.htm )

Nurtured by the Hu government, economic ties between Taiwan and China have been growing stronger. Chinese can now buy fruit grown in Taiwan and take vacations to the island, and the exchange of the two rivals’ currencies has begun on a limited scale. As economic ties strengthen, a declaration of independence becomes more difficult. Proponents of independence warn their fellow islanders to “not be taken in by Chinese money,” but many Taiwanese cannot restrain the desire to “get rich on the continent.”
http://www.takungpao.com/news/05/10/20/TM-472696.htm

Simultaneously, Hu has been seeking to politically isolate Taiwan. In September at the UN General Assembly, he met with President Bush and suggested the creation of a bilateral organization to maintain stability across the Taiwan Straits. This proposal represents a Chinese attempt to advance a process for resolving the cross-straits standoff without including Taiwan, that is, one that is entirely between China and the United States. Hu was seeking to take advantage of the Bush administration’s view that any movement toward Taiwanese independence is a threat to the U.S.-Chinese relationship, but because many U.S. congressional representatives are hostile to China and sympathetic to Taiwan, Bush remained noncommittal.
http://www.worldjournal.com/wj-la-news.php?nt_seq_id=1236375

Meanwhile, the Hu administration is embracing Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party, which tends to be friendly to Beijing. The most recent Chinese strategy to woo the Nationalist Party centers on positioning “ Japan as the common enemy.” On September 3, Hu declared in a speech at the Sixtieth Anniversary Commemoration of Victory in the War of Resistance that “the Nationalist and Communist parties fought together, each party fulfilling its role, in order to defeat Japan during the anti-Japanese war.” This was the first time that any top Chinese Communist leader had clearly recognized the contribution played by the Nationalist party in the war against Japan.
http://www.atchinese.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6435&Itemid=28

Because of President Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Chinese relations with Japan are adversarial. Hu’s pronouncements that “ China and Taiwan should unite in face of the enemy Japan,” utilising the Yasukuni visits as ammunition, reveal a deeper strategy.

America Decreases Its Criticism of China

Recently, T’ien Hung-mao, Taiwan’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is now the chief of the Foreign Policy Research Center, stated in an interview with local media: “If the United States pulls out of Iraq, America will be swept by isolationism and not want to become involved overseas, and the spread of Chinese hegemony will pick up speed. As America’s desire for a fight falls, the likelihood of a military conflict in the Taiwan Straits will decrease. The Taiwanese government should face up to this scenario, and make realistic plans about how it will deal with such a situation.”

In summary, T’ien Hung-mao predicted that as a result of its self-destructive behavior in Iraq, the U.S. would fall into isolationism, world power would become more multipolar, Chinese hegemony would be strengthened, and Taiwan would no longer be able to maintain a hard-line stance vis-à-vis China by relying on U.S. power.
http://www.atchinese.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8538&Itemid=64

T’ien Hung-mao’s statements are supported by recent developments. In the past several months, top Bush administration officials have toned down criticism of China during visits to the country. As mentioned, Treasury Secretary Snow praised Hu’s Five-Year Plan during his trip in early October. The purpose of Snow’s trip was to advance the interests of U.S. financial institutions and manufacturers in China.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/17/business/snow.php

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld arrived in Beijing soon after Snow departed. Even while criticizing increases in Chinese defense spending, he expressed hope for greater military exchange between the United States and China.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112951071147070320.html

Rumsfeld is like a salesman for the U.S. arms industry. During the Iran-Iraq War, he met with Saddam Hussein to persuade the dictator to buy chemical weapons. (At the same time, the United States was exporting weapons to Iran via Israel.) During this trip to China as well, it is thought that Rumsfeld was actually trying to sell U.S. weapons to China, even as he was publicly criticizing its leadership.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GJ21Ad01.html

Before Snow’s arrival, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Beijing. She may be a “secret proponent of multilateralism.” A few months earlier, during meetings between China, Russia, and India about how to maintain peace and stability in Eurasia, Rice placed a call to the Chinese foreign minister to extend her support for the conference. http://tanakanews.com/f0607philippines.htm

After Bush participates in the APEC meetings in mid-November, he will visit China. During his first four-year term, he repeatedly criticized China, but like President Clinton, it appears that during his second term, he will lower his criticism and instead put on a happy face in Beijing and become a spokesman for U.S. companies hoping to make money in China.

The Truth and Fiction of the “Plan for Democratization”