Southeast Asia

Tokyo woman, Tokyo woman
You’ve got the techniques to rule the world
That adorable inscrutability
Tokyo woman, you’re a secret

basic ace

The democratic governments of Northeast Asia – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – have survived and also thrived in a nightmarish equilibrium where their death is centered on:

an America in Asia but not in Asia ( see here ), and
• a China gathering its power and biding its time.

There are costs associated with this position status, this endless present, not just those associated with proper danger and wealth but also those associated with national incoherence and stagnation.

While Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have avoided the British trash fires of violence, drugs and fat, they have not been able to dodge the relativism and cultural alienation of end-state socialism and liberal democracy. The great professor did include his back on the pitfalls awaiting the Last Guy at the End of History, even though this writer enjoys bash Francis Fukuyama.

Liberal democracy produced “men without trunks”, composed of need and cause but lacking thymos, brilliant at finding innovative ways to satisfy a host of trivial desires through the analysis of long-term self-interest. Without the next man’s desire to be acknowledged as superior to others, no excellence or accomplishment was possible. Articles with his pleasure and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wishes, the next man ceased to be individual.

In liberal democratic Asia, men without chests are the product of political design more than they are naturally occurring Last Men at history’s end.

The Liberal Democratic Party ( LDP ), which has been in power almost exclusively since its founding in 1955, is what made Postwar Japan.

The dark but now open secret of the LDP is that it was founded by accused war criminals ( including Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi ) and had received financial and intelligence support from the US Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) for decades.

After Mao’s communists won China’s civil war in 1949, the US “reversed course” in Japan while Germany went through a denazification program. Japan’s right-wing militarists, expecting to be purged and charged with war crimes, were instead rehabilitated to form a political bulwark against communist expansion.

Many were certainly right to condemn Cold War opportunism, but ultimately it meant that the Japanese nation was less than sovereign, never adequately confronted its former wartime past, and never had a real say in the US’s military occupation.

Japan became a bonsai nation – a well-tended miniature state denuded of thymos. Sanctions against Toshiba, the Plaza Accord, and “voluntary” export quotas quickly reminded the Japanese of their place when they dared to challenge the US in the auto and semiconductor industries and pretend to be bonsai.

Japan is sui generis – no economy has stagnated for so long after outperforming so spectacularly for even longer. That is the tragedy of a bonsai country: only men with chests can dream so big. And so, Japan– once the land of samurai warriors and hardened salarymen – has been reduced to a theme park filled with kawaii anime, Pokémon, Super Mario and schoolgirl manga in not-so-hidden corners.

Japan will have to find a new equilibrium in the Western Pacific in the event that America’s military is no longer able to sustain itself. Japan’s interminable bonsai present cannot be all that satisfying, hanging over the nation the way regret haunts a Murakami novel.

Without America, Japan will have to fight for its right to self-determination, leave its bonsai pot, and leave its creepy hentai, hikikomori, and tentacle porn to become men with chests once more.

Much of this will be very off-putting to many Japanese. It will be terrifying to leave behind the comfort of a long-established equilibrium for an unknown future. Much of Asia has unfinished business with Japan. Not just any unfinished business, but blood debt of the most raw, most passionate kind, remembered for generations if not already immortalized in legend.

Japan had little to fear from China for almost all of its history prior to World War II. The Yuan Dynasty’s Mongols twice attempted to invade the Japanese islands, but they were defeated by bad weather each time. ( England and France, in comparison, fought 41 wars against each other since the Dark Ages. ) &nbsp,

This time, however, is different. It can be a bit unsettling to see China have a military that is powerful enough to crush the US ( hypothetically, of course ) and suffers from deep historical grievances. Without the US military, much of Asia – from China to South Korea to Southeast Asia – will want to settle unfinished family business.

However, World War II a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge. Only a select few of the Japanese war veterans are still alive. Few living Asians have memories of Japanese atrocities. It’s difficult to imagine Asia demanding anything but” symbolic” atonement gestures from Japan.

But in the land of thymos, symbolic gestures, like teaching war atrocities in Japan’s schools or removing war criminals from the Yasukuni Shrine, are the most difficult to swallow.

On November 25, 1970, novelist Yukio Mishima led by four disciples into a military base in central Tokyo, tied up the commander, blocked the doors, donned a white headband, stepped onto the balcony, and delivered a rousing speech to soldiers gathered below.

Meant to inspire a military coup d ‘état restoring direct rule to the emperor, the speech was met with puzzlement and jeers. Shortly after his speech, Mishima apologized to the imprisoned commandant and committed hara-kiri ( seppuku ), disemboweling himself like a samurai in the past before being killed by a disciple.

Mishima spent all his adult life trying not to be a “man without a chest”. Mishima avoided almost certain death in the hopeless final days of the war by being turned down by the army for a false tuberculosis diagnosis he may or may not have faked.

Cheated from or having cheated the glory of battlefield death, Mishima lifted weights obsessively, became a skilled kendo swordsman and lamented the emptiness of modern Japan. Before Francis Fukuyama, Mishima identified Japan’s men without chests:

Japan has lost its spiritual tradition, and instead has become infested with materialism. Japan is currently suffering from a green snake curse. The green snake is biting Japan’s chest. There is no way to get out of this impure condition.

In 1959-1960, protests erupted across Japan in opposition to the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Anpo in abbreviated Japanese. The agreement would formally grant the US the right to keep its military installations in Japan.

Opposition was immense from both the left and the right. Hunderts of thousands of protestors crowded the Tokyo-based parliament of Japan at its height. On June 15, 1960, students breached the building, resulting in violent clashes with police.

The first Anpo had egregious terms in it:

• no specific end date or means of abrogation,
• allowing the US military to use bases without consulting the Japanese government, in any way.
• authorization for US troops to put down domestic protests.

Even with those terms being specifically removed, the 1959-1960 protests were opposed to Anpo. Despite the protests, the revised Anpo was ratified, but at the cost of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi’s resignation and the cancellation of a celebratory visit by US President Dwight Eisenhower.

Student protests erupted again in 1968-1969, but this time in much less egregious form. The revised Anpo provided abrogation opportunities every ten years. Today, opposition to Anpo is largely confined to residents of Okinawa who bear the brunt of the environmental impact ( noise pollution, chemical run-offs, live-fire exercises ) and service member criminality of the US occupation.

The Anpo protests led to the radicalization of Yukio Mishima. In 1961, Mishima wrote the short story” Patriotism”, which was made into a popular 1966 short film in which he directed and starred.

The movie reached its climax when Lieutenant Takeyama committed hara-kiri while struggling to reconcile his love for both his comrade-in-arms and the Emperor’s strings. In an interview, Mishima explained:

The sense of beauty was always associated with death in samurai tradition. For instance if you commit hara-kiri, the samurai was requested to make-up his face by powder or lipstick in order to keep his face beautiful after his suffering death.

I don’t want to revive the hara-kiri itself, but through the very strong vision of hara-kiri, I want to inspire and stimulate younger people spiritually and spiritually by bringing back some sense of honor or sense of very strong responsibility. That’s my purpose.

The suicide of Mishima at the height of his life was a political call to arms, a personal cri de coeur, an artistic expression of supreme beauty, and a reclamation of the glorified death that slipped through his fingers as a young man.

This all proved too much for 1970 Japan. When the country was beginning to become cosmopolitan, its most well-known writer, blatantly conjuring up unpleasant memories, makes a feudal spectacle of himself. The stunt was certainly beyond the pale in neighboring China and both Koreas, whose inhabitants likely had had enough samurai swords, bushido and hara-kiri for a few centuries.

Mishima was trying to restore Japan to its former glory. Unfortunately, World War II survivor guilt bound him to the most objectionable period in Japan’s history.

After Commodore Perry and his black ships opened Japan under threat of cannon fire, tumultuous changes swept through Japanese society, toppling sworn-for-forgotten institutions like the shogunate and the samurai.

The Meiji restoration overturned the isolationist Edo period, centralized government and industrialized the economy, but ultimately went down an unfortunate militarist path. The remainder is, shall we say, history. Any hint of Meiji-Shōwa militarist revival surely would set off ear-piercing alarm bells across all of Asia.

Fortunately, Commodore Perry’s black ships do not need to be the beginning of Japan’s renaissance. Modern Japan has almost certainly retained more of the Tang Dynasty than modern China.

In Chang’an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty, kimonos, geisha makeup, and Kyoto-style architecture would look more appropriate than anything else in Beijing, Shanghai, or even Shenzhen.

The Tang Dynasty (605 to 907, minus a 690-705 interregnum ) had a profound impact on all facets of Japanese culture, from aesthetics to language to religion to government.

With 25, 000 foreigners living in its capital, The Tang was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of China’s dynasties. Japanese, Turks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Persians, Indians and Central Asians filled Chang’an’s restaurants, wine-houses and temples ( Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Zoroastrian ). &nbsp,  

In this atmosphere, Tang China was in constant contact with Japan, receiving 19 official missions (kentoshi ) of up to 600 people who made the two-year round-trip journey ( some staying decades before returning ).

In their official capacity, Japanese ambassadors and scholars who had completed the Kyoto Institute established Chinese-style laws, bureaucracies, calendars, and measurements. In their unofficial capacity, they brought back Chinese fashion, literature, musical instruments and artistic taste. &nbsp,

Fears of China collecting on Japanese blood debt in draconian fashion are highly misplaced. The Communist Party of China can revert to its Confucianism without a barbaric military presence along China’s maritime border. While the political West swings left and right, political China swings between Legalism and Confucianism.

Legalism and its authoritarian tendencies rule in these troubled times; there can be no entertainment and fun when Qin Shi Huang is reviving the Qin Dynasty. And only after Emperor Taizong defeated the Eastern and Western Turks could the Tang Dynasty relax, allowing Chang’an and Yangzhou to become cosmopolitan cities where commerce, poetry, painting, calligraphy, drunken parties and dancing girls flourished.

President Xi Jinping has been battening down China’s hatches along Legalist lines for over a decade, reining in the loosey-goosey free-for-all of the Hu-Wen era. China is no longer feigning its strength and passing the time.

China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times that of the US. It is only a matter of time. Without the US Navy Seventh Fleet stationed in Yokosuka, the Qin-esque Communist Party of China will mellow out and become Tang-esque – a version of China much more amenable to an anxious Japan.

Abandoning a well-known equilibrium to confront Japan’s past and secure an unknown future is a high-risk/high-reward endeavor. Japan has everything to lose. An unforgiving China bent on vengeance would be the end of Japan without the US’s support.

Japan, however, also has everything to gain. Japanese politics and society have been hampered for decades by the US military presence. A forgiving China not interested ( much ) in settling scores is the only real future Japan has. The status quo has stunted Japan, turning its novelists into purgatorial torture.

Mishima went out in a macabre blaze of glory. For what could have been, Murakami is unstoppable. And Ryū ( the other ) Murakami wants to set it all on fire. Japan can finally let its Tang renaissance wash over Asia in a hypothetical future free of American alien invasion.

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