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Kevin Lamarque (c) REUTERS

"US-Japan Relations:
Do We Share the Same Values and Overall View of History?"

Do the United States and Japan share the same values and overall view of history? Answering this question and examining how South Koreans think about it is to place the question in the context of the US-Japan security alliance. There are two reasons why this exercise is useful. First, military alliance is a good barometer to measure the strength of mutual trust between countries based upon common values and worldviews. Forging a military alliance is not only determined by the purpose of deterring the projected military threat from a common adversary. Military alliance is also an institution that nations create to protect political ideology and key principles they deem indispensable for maintaining civilized orders. For instance, as political scientist Tony Smith concludes in his book America’s Mission, the Second World War marked the defeat—the former immediate and the latter after four decades—of fascism and communism, the two totalitarian rivals of liberal democracy, as viable forms of political organization. It was not just a military victory by the Allied Powers.

Second, the question is closely related to the issue of upgrading the US-Japan security relationship as a value-based, future-oriented alliance into the twenty-first century. In the Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee issued after the 2 + 2 meeting on October 3, 2013, both governments declared that they “set forth a strategic vision, reflecting our shared values of democracy, the rule of law, free and open markets, and respect for human rights.” The 2013 Joint Statement also emphasized that “promoting deeper security cooperation with other regional partners to advance shared objectives and values” is one of the objectives for the revision of the 1997 Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo claimed at the joint press conference with President Barak Obama on April 24, 2014 that “Between Japan and the United States, we share values such as freedom, democracy, human rights and rule of law. We are global partners.”

Enhancing the bilateral security partnership as a value-based military alliance is an ambitious goal for both sides. Under international anarchy, where there is no central authority above sovereign states to enforce promises between states, it might be regarded as a rarity that states tie their national security to pursuit of shared values. To realists, it is a futile and dangerous practice. Justifying your security alliance with values and principles is only useful as nice diplomatic rhetoric or a code word. Yet, others consider that the transformation of the US-Japan alliance, if successful, would serve as a beginning of the institutionalization of the Asia-Pacific security community based upon common values and a collective identity, something akin to NATO. As Thomas Risse-Kappen explains, compared with NATO and the EU, the US-Japanese security relationship appears to have remained weak with regards to the level of mutual identification with the same civilization, although they succeeded in establishing norms of consultation and policy coordination similar to those of NATO. Walter Lippmann explained that the members of the “Atlantic community” are “natural allies of the United States.” The day when the US-Japan military alliance constitutes a pluralistic security community similar to NATO, we will be able to conclude that a sense of shared values between the two countries and their peoples is indeed strong and fundamental.

South Korea has closely followed the debates on the United States and Japan sharing common values and historical view. The main reason for this interest is that, although it is in essence an issue between the United States and Japan, it has direct and significant impact on Korea’s foreign relations with the two countries and its national identity politics. South Korea has a keen interest in this issue from the alliance perspective. Broadly speaking, it assesses the status of the US-ROK military alliance by two standards: functional and comparative. As for functional aspects, the South Korean government and public assess the value of the alliance in terms of its contribution to national security, especially for maintaining a sufficient and reliable deterrence and defense capability against military threats from North Korea. At the same time, South Koreans tend to use the US-Japan alliance as a measuring stick for US “fairness” toward South Korea as its ally. The way the United States and Japan define the core missions and nature of their bilateral security alliance affects the way South Koreans expect the United States to define those of the US-ROK security alliance.

To many South Koreans, the US-ROK security partnership must be as qualified as the US-Japan security alliance is to become a global partnership based upon common values and historical views. Like Japan and the United States, South Korea and the United States have taken steady steps to elevate the status of their alliance to a value-based alliance. The Joint Vision for the Alliance of the United States of America and the Republic of Korea announced on June 16, 2009 stipulated the commitment of both governments to “build a comprehensive strategic alliance of bilateral, regional and global scope, based on common values and mutual trust.” The 2009 Joint Statement even tied the mission of the alliance to Korea’s unification based upon shared values between the allies. It defines the purpose of the alliance as “establishing a durable peace on the Peninsula and leading to peaceful reunification on the principles of free democracy and a market economy.” Such strategic vision is reiterated and articulated in the 2013 Joint Declaration in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Alliance between the Republic of Korea and the United States of America, in which the two declared that the alliance “has evolved into a comprehensive strategic alliance with deep cooperation extending beyond security to also encompass the political, economic, cultural, and people-to-people realms. The freedom, friendship, and shared prosperity we enjoy today rest upon our shared values of liberty, democracy, and a market economy.” The 2013 Joint Declaration also affirmed that it is the basis of the Joint Vision that Korean unification should be achieved peacefully and “based upon the principles of denuclearization, democracy and a free market economy.”

Some may suggest that finding out whether the alliance can be a genuine value-based security partnership in fulfillment of the official strategic visions is impossible until North Korea’s military threat disappears. Only then will we be able to find out if the alliance is truly based upon mutual identity and common values, as in the case of NATO remaining robust even after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. To this suggestion, one can point out that Japan is not free from the same problem either. One can only imagine what the main strategic vision underpinnings of the US-Japan alliance might have been had there not been the rising military power of China. The discourse of a value-based US-Japan alliance would not have been so strongly popularized in the absence of the China threat.

Another reason for South Korea to pay close attention to the issue of the US-Japan security alliance as a value-based alliance is that it deeply touches upon Japan’s remembrance of the colonial occupation and the Pacific War and its attempts to achieve its identity as a “normal country.” This is not just a domestic issue for Japan; for the Korean people, it is very much an issue related to the sovereignty and national character of Korea. As illustrated in the Preamble of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea, the national identity is inseparable from its struggles against Japanese militarism and colonial occupation, upheld by “the cause of the Provisional Republic of Korea Government born of the March First Independence Movement of 1919.” This is why how the United States positions itself in debating and understanding Japan’s war responsibilities affects South Korea’s willingness to support the US-led effort in forging a virtual alliance between the United States, South Korea, and Japan as like-minded countries.

Political and intellectual leaders in Japan, both from conservative and liberal orientations, concede that Japan needs to become a “normal country,” which it has not been since its defeat in the Pacific War. The search for normalcy as a sovereign country has been largely dominated by the conservatives. The LDP used its fiftieth anniversary to identify 2005 as the first year Japan would start revising its Constitution, focusing on territorial rights and history reeducation that emphasized nationalism and tradition. It declared that 2005 would be a year of “complete self-reassessment of the postwar system.” The reassessment prompted a shift in government policies and more aggressive actions, leading to an explosion of diplomatic rows and conflicts with Japan’s neighboring countries.

The conservative right wing party has formed committees to serve as core actors on both domestic and foreign affairs: “History Review Committee,” “Politicians’ Meeting to Pay Homage to the Yasukuni Shrine,” “Junior Politicians’ Meeting for Those Who Support Visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to Pray for Peace and Promote National Interest,” “Union to Protect Japan’s Territory,” “Group Meeting to Promote Japan and History Education,” “The People of Japan,” and “Association of Politicians Who Pursue Value Diplomacy.” They are deeply involved in history, territorial, and security related issues, directly responding to diplomatic conflicts and having a significant influence on the policy decision-making process, which strengthens their conservative base. The landslide victory by Abe’s LDP in the fall of 2012 elections and the party’s win in the Upper House in the summer of 2013 consolidated Japan’s right wing power. Opposition parties basically fell apart; the so-called progressive-liberals were aging and weak, and the main opposition party split. Even civil society groups that had criticized the movement towards ultra-conservatism had weakened. Under such circumstances, Japan’s right wing politicians took center stage and carried out acts that viewers in South Korea and many others perceived to be regressing to Japan’s pre 1945 past.

Such efforts by the conservatives for the past decade to ground the quest for a “normal Japan” in reconstructing memory of the 1930s-1940s have complicated Japan’s relations with the United States. These efforts challenge American values and views of modern history, even as the Abe administration has deepened Japan’s dependency upon the United States as the essential security partner. Just as we have witnessed for the past two years that Japan has actively supported the US rebalancing strategy toward Asia, its top leaders have been making remarks indicating that a great civilizational divide exists between the two countries on political and historical issues.

For instance, Prime Minister Abe held a summit with President Obama only two months after his inauguration, fulfilling his promise to “restore” the US-Japan security tie that had been severely damaged during the DJP government as his top priority. But only two months later in April, Abe made a controversial remark at an Upper House Budget Committee session that embraced a revisionist view of Japanese history, saying that what constitutes aggression during WWII has not been settled. The controversy left the impression that the man Obama had embraced as his counterpart in security and in a values agenda seemed to believe that Japan basically was forced into fighting WWII and the aggression leading up to it, including the Pearl Harbor attack, because it was motivated by legitimate concerns over Western colonial policies in Asia.

Yoshida Yutaka proposes “double standards” as the keywords in understanding the way in which the Japanese government and conservatives interpret Japan’s war responsibilities. He argues that, at the international level, the Japanese government made a decision to accept war responsibilities at a minimal level by accepting the outcome of the Tokyo Tribunal, as affirmed in Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In return, Japan acquired the status of US ally. Domestically, the government virtually denied the war responsibilities by holding only the military culpable, but leaving the citizens as victims. Such a dual approach to the issue of war responsibilities encouraged the Japanese to identify themselves as victims deceived by the military rather than perpetrators of atrocities upon people and nations in the Asia-Pacific. The United States helped to minimize Japan’s sense of responsibility by maintaining very generous occupational policies in order to build an anti-communist security system during the Cold War. The sense of victimhood underlying the collective psychology of the Japanese people accounts for the popularity of Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron, which espouses that the Pacific War was a just war for the liberation of Asia from Western colonial powers.

Shirai Satoshi submits that postwar Japan has been locked in the state of eizoku haisen (permanent defeat), a kind of vicious cycle in which Japan is perpetually dependent upon the United States in order to remain free from facing its war responsibilities in any fundamental way. As long as it remains dependent upon the United States for national security, Japan can continue to deny accountability for its wartime crimes. Although this security dependency allowed Japan to achieve postwar prosperity and peace, it deepened its isolation from neighboring countries. In return, isolation in the region provided additional motivation for it to more strongly depend on the United States. This cycle of isolation and dependency produced a grotesque system in which the foundational identity of nationalism was supported externally and patriotism and conservatism became pro-American, rather than critical of the US influence.

The Abe government appears to have inherited this system of eizoku haisen. On the one hand, it has aggressively supported the US pivot to Asia with a number of important government restructuring measures and bold revisions of the law on national security, including the cabinet decision that allows Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense. On the other hand, the government has committed a series of controversial actions on historical issues, including Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine and the decision to review the process of making the 1993 Kono statement, which admitted Japan’s responsibility for the comfort women. This pattern is ironic in that it made important contributions to the successful implementation of rebalancing to Asia in the short term, but it undermined the long-term prospects of the rebalancing. The historical revisionism of the Abe administration escalated hostility between China and Japan and thereby raised the cost of US military engagement in East Asia and prevented South Korea—another crucial US partner for implementing the rebalancing strategy—from fully joining the US-led regional security initiatives. It also collides with core cultural values for which America stands, undermining the ideational message that Washington is seeking to convey. The US-Japan security alliance cannot be transformed into a genuinely value-based alliance as long as Japan fails to complete its quest for the state of normalcy as a sovereign state.