An Army for Japan
By JULES MENKEN IT is almost twelve years to a day since the Japanese Privy Council, meeting in the Emperor's presence on December 1st, 1941, heard the Prime Minister, General Tojo, make the fateful declaration that, " from the viewpoints both of Japan's national power and of strategy, it is now utterly impossible for Japan to permit the present situation to continue any longer . . . Japan has now no other way than to wage war." Japanese warships bound for Hawaii were already on the high seas, while on Hainan Island and in southern Indo- China large Japanese forces and their landing equipment stood ready for action. A week later the Japanese blow fell at Pearl Harbour and in Malaya.
Neither the decision to strike nor the war which followed was made lightly. Both resulted from a policy which was deliberate, calculated, and tenaciously pursued. As Professors Langer and Gleason write in the concluding volume of their massive and indispensable survey of the events which brought the United States into the Second World War (The Undeclared War, 1940-1941. Royal Institute of International Affairs. 60s.), the "Tokyo leaders never abandoned their conviction that Japan must expand in order to survive as a great Power, and that its national interests could be assured only through Japanese hegemony over East Asia." Four years of bitter war, immense material fosses, and terrible suffering were required to frustrate the Japanese effort finally, and to lay the founda- tions for the very different view which found expression in Japan's complete post-war disarmament and in the remark- able Article 9 of the 1946 Constitution which states that " the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." And yet today the rearmament of Japan is regarded as essential by all serious Western students of the international scene, and the formation of adequate Japanese armed forces with all possible dispatch is earnestly urged by policy-makers in Washington in face of a Japanese reluctance which is wide and deep in official and unofficial circles alike.
For this reversal of roles—as for the parallel change in the case of Germany—Communist world policy must bear primary and major responsibility. The background 'which makes the rearming of Japan essential not only includes innumerable and all too familiar acts of Communist aggression. It is not even confined to the fact that the massive and accelerating armament- effort in the Soviet Union, the European satellites (including Eastern Germany), and China has placed at the command of Moscow not only the terrors of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, but also the largest conventional armies and air forces which have ever existed in time of nominal peace. The final reasons why Japan must be rearmed lie in the nature of the cold war, in her significance for Communist world strategy, and in the type of means which alone can counter Communist aims successfully.
Contrary to a commonly held idea, the cold war is not just a matter of general agitation, subversion and sabotage, of unceasing, strident propaganda and skilfully fomented but unjustified wage demands and strikes, of terrorism and in- surrection in remote countries. It is all these things, of course; but it is more also. The term " cold war " deserves its substantive as well as its adjective; it is not only, cold in the sense that it avoids major armed action (or lukewarm where relatively small-scale hostilities are engaged in); it is also war in the sense that it has a strategy and objectives, and that its aims serve—or are intended to serve—the larger purposes of the entire policy of which it forms a part.
What, then, are the strategy and objectives of the cold war? The strategy is to destroy—or, at least, to undermine—the resources and will of the free world, and, if possible, concurs rently to increase Communist strength by seizing important regions or bringing- them under Communist rule, whether open or disguised; the objectives—as with any policy which aims at world power—are the great centres of population, industry, and natural resources on the one hand', and areas of major strategic importance on the other. Germany and Japan obvi- ously qualify under both heads; considerations of strategic geography make intelligible the great effort which Communist policy has devoted to Guatemala and to British Guiana in relation to the Panama Canal and the Caribbean Sea, both of them vital to the free world's command of the sea and the movement of oil supplies.
Except for natural resources, in which she is seriously deficient, Japan would be a major prize, well worth the most serious Communist effort to capture. Of her 87 million people, more than seven million are males between 18 and 29, and more than 14 million are males between 18 and 44—a formid- able reservoir of military manpower which a Communist regime would drain to the utmost; and after the evidence of the Second World War Japanese fighting qualities need no com- ment. Japan is by far the most important industrial country in East Asia. In the heavy industries, which are the founda- tion of modern war, she is surpassed only by the United States, Britain, Western Germany, and perhaps France in the free world, and by the Soviet Union alone among Iron Curtain countries. No other Asian country can rival Japan's output of steel, which is four times as large as- India's, and at least four times as large as China's. Outside the Soviet Union no engi- neering industry exists east of Suez which can equal Japan's; while in shipbuilding—and especially naval shipbuilding—she would bring the Communists resources in skill and capacity whose quality Britain, Germany and the United States alone can outstrip. Strategically, Japan is no less important. The Japanese islands form the king-pin of the island-chain which skirts the East Asian mainland from Kamchatka southwards; the Kuriles and Sakhalin are already in Soviet hands; without Japan the other islands in the chain would soon become un- tenable by the West; while the loss of Japan would, in effect, reverse the naval outcome of the Second World War and push American sea-power far eastward in the Pacific. No less serious would be the loss of Japanese bases for anti-submarine work in the Western Pacific.
As soon as Moscow's grip had fastened firmly on the satel- lites, the Kremlin set to work to levy and organise satellite armies under Soviet control. One of the most important results of the Korean war has similarly been the conversion of the well-disciplined and doughty, but poorly trained and equipped, People's Liberation Army into Chinese Communist ground and air forces of about the same size armed with modern heavy weapons and trained to use them. Organised military man- power in substantial numbers is one essential requirement for victory in the cold war, not least because Britain, the United States, and France cannot possibly supply the effectives re- quired and shoulder the burden of supplying arms and equip- ment as well; and London and Washington have taken to, heart this lesson, which all the Soviet wars-by-proxy have taught, and are now applying it in Malaya and Indo-China and Korea, as they previously applied it with striking success in Greece.
As the Greek campaign of 1947-49 and the present " explana- tions " to prisoners of war at Panmunjom demonstrate, forces like the Greek and South Korean armies are not mere mercenaries called on to fight in a cause not their own. The ultimate moral basis on which such armies rest derives from the enslavement by terror and force to a ruthless despotism of all societies where Communism is established, and from its destruction of the independence of all smaller peoples that fall under its power. As Article 5 of the San Francisco Treaty recognises, Japan, which geography exposes ineluctably to the combined threat of Soviet and Chinese Communism, possesses the same " inherent right of individual or collective self- defence "; while the political risk that Congress may weary of maintaining American troops in Japan gives an edge of practical urgency to the creation of Japanese forces which can replace them. . The re-establishment of Japanese armed forces will create new problems, and. difficult ones. The Constitution of 1946 may have to be amended. A further heavy burden Will be added to the already strained Japanese economy. American opinion will have to adjust itself to an irresistible consequent demand for expansion of Japan's trade with China. Britain will feel increasing 'Japanese pressure in the export markets. Despite the safeguards in the Anzus treaty, Australia and New Zealand will be fearful of-a Japan in which even small armed forces again exist. Similar fears will be felt in Asia. Nor are more distant dangers negligible. In his poignant and dramatic study, The Nemesis of Power* (Macmillan: 50s.), Mr. Wheeler-Bennett reminds us of the perils which can flow from the inordinate devotion of able men to the aggrandise- ment of their own power or their country's strength. What happened in Germany between the wars may happen there again, and in Japan also. The risks are real, and must be faced. They are somewhat diminished by the costliness of Modern war, which imposes a burden no nation with limited resources can afford. But in the present situation there can be no policy which is without risks. The free world must therefore accept lesser and more distant dangers in order to cope with existing and developing perils. And it must hope that the gifted Japanese people, whose devotion and capacity for sacrifice are unsurpassed, may on this occasion find self- fulfilment while contributing to the common good.
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