TOPICS: Japan should listen to constructive criticism

When Shinzo Abe met Dick Cheney in Japan last week, a special kind of chemistry was probably in effect. The hawkish Japanese prime minister and the bellicose US vice president, self-described friends, have more in common than declining poll numbers.

Cheney visited Japan, according to the White House, to thank officials there for “their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Japan has sent non-combat troops to Iraq and has supplied logistical support in Afghanistan. Cheney arrived in Japan roiled by its debate about rising militarism. Japanese Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma suggested last month that the war in Iraq was a mistake. He was criticised roundly by Abe’s people, and Cheney then snubbed the defence chief. The message: Friends don’t criticise friends. Cheney appears bent on whipping up support for a reluctant Japan to continue to follow the Bush administration’s lead in the war-torn Middle East. In refusing to meet the defence minister, Cheney seemed to be saying that a silent nod to the wise is sufficient.

The US occupation of post-World War II Japan, along with a unique “peace constitution,” was designed to make a former warrior nation allergic to war, and it largely succeeded. It is not only Japan’s neighbours who get upset when Japanese politicians visit the Yasukuni

war shrine, which honours Japanese war criminals among the war dead; in fact, more than half of those polled in Japan are against such visits as well. From time to time, US voices, such as former Rep.

Henry Hyde (R) of Illinois, remind us that official visits to a shrine that makes a mockery of Pearl Harbor and Nanjing do not serve US-Japan interests, either.

Likewise, Japan should listen carefully to what other American statesmen have been saying. A motion by Rep. Mike Honda (D) of California calling for an apology on the oft-denied issue of Imperial Japan’s “sex slaves” and other wartime injustices, is not bullying but a nudge — from a friend to a friend — saying we need to agree on basic facts for the relationship to go forward.

The widespread Japanese commitment to peace, after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, extends to an understandable abhorrence of nuclear weapons. Yet, military analysts say that US ships armed with nuclear weapons routinely pull into Japanese ports such as Yokosuka and Okinawa — making a sham of Japan’s “three non-nuclear principles” (not possessing, producing, or permitting nuclear weapons into the country).

Cheney took part in a photo-op aboard the US aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk during his visit — an insensitive move that might well come to be regretted as a “mission accomplished” moment for the vice-president. Tokyo’s flamboyant mayor, Shintaro Ishihara, had primed the public by asserting — without apparent evidence — that the Kitty Hawk is nuclear-equipped.

Instead of posing on the carrier, Cheney should have taken the time to hear what Kyuma and

other Japanese critics of the Iraq war had to say. — The Christian Science Monitor