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The Bunker America’s Pearl Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor supposedly
ended the era of American innocence. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Japan started off as an imperial power and ended up as America’s prized
possession in its Asian empire. Since 1945 almost every aspect of Japan’s foreign,
military, economic and financial policy has been determined by the U.S. There
is every reason to believe that this did not happen by accident. The U.S. cynically and ruthlessly maneuvered the
hapless Japanese into a war whose outcome was always inevitable. Japan was a
Johnny-come-lately among the imperial powers and was not accepted as an equal.
While the U.S. could accept the European powers carving up everything outside
Europe and the Americas among themselves, the same latitude would not be
extended to the Japanese. From 1937 the Japanese were on a rampage through
China, and the U.S. government was indignant at this violation of Chinese
territorial integrity. Yet Japan’s actions in China were scarcely different
from those of the other European powers. When Japan took advantage of the war
in Europe to seize French Indochina, the United States responded with fury. It
imposed embargoes on oil and scrap metal and froze all Japanese assets in the
United States. The Americans also urged the British and the Dutch, who
controlled Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies, to impose a trade embargo. Japan
was now in desperate straits. As a condition of the lifting of the embargo, the
United States demanded that Japan withdraw from all of its Asian conquests. The
Japanese thus had two options. They could withdraw from Asia with their tail
between their legs. With their weakness and vulnerability so manifest, they
would soon be little more than an American protectorate. Alternately, the
Japanese could take possession of Europe’s colonies and use their abundance of
strategic resources to make sure that America would have to pay a high price to
dislodge them. On Nov. 25, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson
wrote in his diary that the salient issue now was "how we should maneuver
them into the position of firing the first shot." The Japanese offered to
withdraw from Southern Indochina. The U.S. rejected the offer. The Japanese
offered to withdraw from all of Indochina and promised not to attack any
Western colonial possession. Again the U.S. rejected the offer. FDR insisted
that the embargo would be lifted only if Japan relinquished all conquests since
1937, including China and Indochina, and withdrew from the tripartite pact with
Germany and Italy. Faced with humiliation, the Japanese decided to go for
broke. Their only hope of taking possession of Europe’s colonies was to
neutralize U.S. naval power in the Pacific, which they were sure would be used
to aid the beleaguered Europeans. Thus Pearl Harbor. After the war, the United States stationed
hundreds of thousands of troops in Japan and Okinawa. Japan became the U.S.
listening post in the Far East, the forward base of the Cold War effort in
Asia. In return, the United States encouraged Japan to develop its
export-driven economy. The Japanese economy was entirely geared toward the U.S.
consumer market. American markets were opened to Japanese products with no
expectation of reciprocation. The U.S. even pressured U.S. firms to relinquish
ownership rights to technologies being transferred to Japan. By the 1960s, Japan had become a major economic
power, but its form of capitalism differed markedly from that of the United
States. In the U.S. version, profitability is the only measure of a company’s
success; in Japan, it is conquest of market share. The Japanese were encouraged
by their government to save and put their money into banks, which in turn were
encouraged to invest in certain key industries. Foreign investment was kept out
through an elaborate system of cross-share ownership. The United States got its
military bases and the Japanese got to target U.S. industries that they would
supplant. Japan built up vast trade surpluses; the United
States vast trade deficits. The Japanese bought U.S. Treasuries to finance the
U.S. government deficit and stocks to finance the U.S. trade deficit–a happy
relationship of mutual dependence. U.S. industries were wiped out even as the
stock market boomed. Thanks to the U.S.-sponsored Japanese "economic
miracle," average incomes in the U.S. have scarcely risen since 1973. Everything was going swimmingly until the 1980s,
when American workers began to realize that while U.S. elites might rhapsodize
about Japan’s being a stalwart Cold War ally, they were getting very little out
of the relationship. An anxious U.S. government pressured the Japanese to raise
the value of the yen against the dollar: the famous 1985 Plaza Accord. The
higher yen would supposedly make Japanese products more expensive and hence
less competitive. The Japanese responded by massively increasing production
with a view to driving down prices. This vast overproduction of manufactured
goods for markets already saturated with cars, tv’s, VCRs, walkmans and
sneakers led to the Japanese stagnation of the past decade. The Clinton administration, fearing Japanese
economic collapse and hence collapse of our Asian empire, decided to allow the
Japanese to lower the yen again. Between 1995 and 1997, the yen fell 60 percent
against the dollar, but this had a rather unfortunate consequence: the
economies of East Asia–which themselves were modeled on Japan–went into crisis,
since their products were now far more expensive than those of Japan. There is little prospect of Japan’s
subordination coming to an end any time soon. Today, the new Japanese prime
minister, Junichiro Koizumi–widely hailed as a Japanese
"nationalist"–is talking of modifying the U.S.-imposed post-1945
constitution. Japan, it seems, is soon to possess armed forces beyond what is
necessary for self-defense, and there is nothing whatsoever
"nationalist" about this proposal. It is just the latest policy being
foisted on Japan by the United States. It is not hard to figure out why: Japan
is to be our junior partner in the coming conflict with China. To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
