Opinion The half-baked right By Douglas Lummis	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
中途半端な小泉首相 8月15日、所用で東京に向かう機内で、 小泉首相が靖国神社に参拝するニュースを見た。 本稿では改めてその意味について考えてみる。

On Aug. 15, I flew up to Tokyo for a meeting. On the plane, the TV showed the morning news. Over and over, we saw Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, his eyes gleaming defiance, stride up to Yasukuni Shrine to pay his respects, whatever they're worth, to the war dead.

My meeting place was at Suidobashi, just across from the Korakuen parachute ride. The street was blocked off by a riot police barricade. Outside the barricade was a long line of those big, black armored trucks the rightists use to scare people with.

I assumed the riot police were trying to prevent the rightists from attacking anti-Yasukuni demonstrators. Later I learned that that was not all. Recently we learned that the late Emperor Hirohito had left a memorandum saying he opposed official visits to Yasukuni. So now (I was told) the right is divided, some supporting Koizumi's visit, some angry with him for disobeying the emperor.

The situation gets more and more complex.

But actually it was already pretty strange. The Japanese right, or what I shall call the "half-baked" right, has been busily painting itself into a corner.

The "fully-baked" right has advocated, among other things, to kick out the U.S. bases, rebuild the Imperial Army, remilitarize the culture, reestablish an ideology of xenophobia, male domination, etc., intimidating, but consistent.

The half-baked right, represented by Koizumi, maintains the very anti-nationalist policy of keeping Japan under U.S. military protection/domination. But acts like visiting Yasukuni Shrine contradict that policy. Yasukuni visits, along with textbook revisions, the proposed new Basic Education Law, etc., are all part of a project to persuade the people that Japan's attempt to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn't so bad after all.

The obvious message of the Yasukuni visits is that the convicted war criminals enshrined there should not be thought of as war criminals, but as heroes. This would mean that the judgment of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was wrong.

Think where this logic leads, if carried to its conclusion. Under the Peace Treaty of 1952, the Japanese government is obligated to accept the results of the Tokyo trial. By making these visits, Koizumi is flirting with the idea that Japan is no longer bound by that treaty. Only flirting, because as a half-baked rightist, he won't come out and say directly that the men are innocent. Still, everyone knows that's what his visits mean.

But, innocent of what? These men were convicted of the crime of aggression: attacking countries that had not attacked, and had no plans to attack Japan. If you say the war was OK after all, and those first-strike attacks were OK after all, remember that one of those first-strike attacks was on Pearl Harbor.

This is the logical endpoint of Koizumi's actions, the place his half-baked rightism must go if it is ever to become fully baked. It seems that this has not yet sunk into the thick skulls of the politicians in Washington, D.C. When it finally does, the Japan-U.S. alliance will be in for some rocky times.

(501 words)