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The Coming War with Japan
George Friedman and Meredith Lebard.
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991. 447 pp. Bib. Ind. Maps. Notes. Tables. $24.95 ($22.45).
Reviewed by Captain Edward L. Beach, U.S. Navy (Retired)
There are light books and heavy ones, but seldom one as heavy as this one. In spite of small detriments, such as surprising carelessness in grammatical construction and an attention-getting title that implies far more than it delivers (because the book is not about the next war at all), The Coming War with Japan is worthy of serious attention. It is a scholarly overview of world economics in the light of the disappearance of the communist threat. It is unfortunate that the text was set before Desert Storm broke, for the insights resulting from that lesson in power politics bear directly on the message The
Coming War purports to convey.
Briefly, the authors contend that since World War II the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union supported each other’s superpower status, and all other nations aligned themselves as best they could in these two tremendous shadows. This was particularly true with Japan: crushed to earth in World War II, then set back on its feet by the U.S. need for Japan’s support during the Cold War that immediately followed. With U.S. protection, Japan developed a new army, navy, and air force, and built one of the most powerful industrial bases in the world, all free of any necessity to provide for ongoing defense in an increasingly rapacious environment. By 1990, however, things had changed radically. The Soviet Union had left the arena; only one superpower remained. The authors foresee an entirely new world order that must therefore resemble the world before the two World Wars. To make this point, however, their scholarly research gives way to less-than-scholarly prediction.
Replacing the two superpowers theoretically poised on the brink of nuclear war, the authors postulate “regionalization” based on economics. For starters, the regions will be Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. By location and industrial power (plus reawakening ambition), Japan will be forced to lead the Asian Region and will revive the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” under another name. The United States will of course lead the Western Hemisphere, and the outcome of the European Economic Community will hold the political hegemony of Europe.
Having covered the waterfront of international economic relations since World War II, the authors do not shrink from the next step: projection as to U.S.
The Improbable War with Japan:
A Discussion with Captain Jurika and Dr. Kataoka
By Lieutenant Commander Sam Tangredi, U.S. Navy
Publication of The Coming War with Japan prompted a lively discussion at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace by two recognized experts on Japanese military policy.
Captain Stephen Jurika, Jr., was raised in Japan and the Philippines and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1933. He was literally present when the Japanese decided to go to war, serving as the Assistant Naval Attache for Air to Japan until November 1941. He was the operations officer on the USS Hornet (CV-8) during the Doolittle Raid, the Battle of Midway, and until the carrier was sunk at Santa Cruz.
Other assignments took him behind Japanese lines on New Georgia. After the war he traveled throughout the Pacific as head of the Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet’s Evaluation Group. He also helped train the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force and served as attache in Australia and New Zealand, as a Navy strategic planner, and as Commander Fleet Air Wing 14. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science and Geography from Stanford and taught there, at the University of Santa Clara, and at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is coeditor of The Armed Forces in Contemporary Asian Societies (West- view Press, 1986) and a research fellow at Hoover.
Dr. Tetsuya Kataoka is a senior research fellow at Hoover, concentrating on Japanese defense policy and its effect on U.S.-Japanese relations. He is the author of Waiting for a Pearl Harbor: Japan Debates Defense (Hoover Institution Press, 1980), Defending An Economic Superpower: Reassessing the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance (Westview Press, 1990), and The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan’s Postwar Politics (Crane Russak, 1991). He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, has taught at numerous universities in the United States as well as at Tsukuba University in Japan, and is a frequent contributor to The Asian Wall Street Journal. Dr. Kataoka is an adviser to the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party.
Tangredi: How plausible is the scenario presented in The Coming War with Japan?
Jurika: More than a faint possibility, but not a probability. From a military perspective, it is unlikely if we retain our presence in East Asia. Unofficially, all of ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] want the United States to remain the stabilizer of the Western Pacific. Even with the Soviet threat removed for the present, there is latent hostility toward Japan from China and Korea for past wrongs. China will exact retribution from Japan when the Japanese least expect it. The book is very important, however. Its message shakes our complacency, our belief that the status quo will continue indefinitely. It was just such a complacency that led Ambassador Joseph Grew to believe almost to the end of 1941 that there would be no war with Japan.
Kataoka: Very improbable, but not impossible. In order to get to war, the entire current world order would have to be destroyed, and the United States would have to completely withdraw its presence from Asia and form some sort of trading bloc—a North American common market that excludes Japan. These two preconditions would well come close to the 1930s. I don’t think the Japanese would make the first move, but they would undoubtedly respond to such a very improbable situation. On the other hand, I see why this sort of book is written; it is a danger signal indicating that changes in U.S.-Japanese relations must be made explicit. U.S. power has declined relative to Germany and Japan. The United States must realize that the previous postwar situation was unique, and strong economic competition from Germany and Japan is the normal state of affairs. But the United
and Japanese and, to a lesser extent, European policy during the half-century ahead of us. Germany, they predict, will become the dominant economic power in the European region: reunification of Germany and the emergence of some
Eastern European nations as modern sovereign states, coupled with the political and economic diminution of the British Empire—and now the Soviet Union—make this a foregone conclusion. It is hard to fault the authors on this premise, except to point out that England has never surrendered easily and may yet find a way to keep some of its hegemony intact. In any case, say Friedman and Lebard, Europe will return to something resembling its pre-World War I orientations. Maybe so. There will be some big differences, all the same.
Japan, having experienced a half-century long “golden age,” will be forced into leadership in Asia by default. Oil, however, will remain the dominant issue, and Japan’s absolute need for ample and assured energy supplies will determine its policies. Thus, Japan will gravitate toward the pre-World War II situation, in its case, and its need to dominate the
States must also stop coddling Japan and permitting the imbalanced benefits that the Japanese derive from the special relationship designed to stem the Soviet threat.
Tangredi: Is there growing sentiment among the Japanese to abolish Article 9, the “pacific clause” of their constitution? Jurika: Yes, I have heard such talk, principally in Japanese cities. The common view is that since the constitution was imposed on them, it is not appropriate for a sovereign, powerful Japan. Some say that the current constitution is alien to the Japanese nature and desires. This is worrisome since the Japanese have yet to officially acknowledge their atrocities in China—I was there and saw it. Japanese history books have never told the full story of the war, and never totally acknowledged their defeat.
Kataoka: Yes, and the sentiment is underreported by the U.S. press. The media here seem to be obsessed with the fear of ‘‘militarism” in Japan. They seem to interpret the constitution as keeping “militarism” at bay. This is a completely mistaken impression; the Japanese government does not retain Article 9 because it checks militarism, but because it is an excellent cover for noninvolvement and nonresponsibility, even when Japanese vital interests are involved—such as in the Persian Gulf. But the sentiment to abolish Article 9 is not true “militarism”; it is quite normal and reflects a realization that Japan must bear its share. Retaining Article 9 has been a bad thing tor the Western alliance, and allows Japan an unfair economic advantage. Japan was probably the only Asian ally of the United States that did not participate in the Vietnam War; even the Philippines sent medical teams, if not troops. It is °ne thing for Japan to refuse to participate in Korea in 1950, even in Vietnam in the 1960s, but it is quite another to refuse send men to the Gulf in 1991. Japan stands to make a Profit” from the Gulf War; it can be portrayed as a “merchant of death” in that its economic lifeline was secured at no human cost to itself.
langredi: Has the attitude of the Japanese political elite toward the United States changed with the apparent softening of the Cold War?
Jurika: Yes, many Japanese are discounting the special relationship with the United States. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has diverse factions, the leaders of which all expect to become Prime Minister. Their only point of agreement is to continue to take advantage of the stupidity and blindness of the United States by continuing the subversion of our Congress through lobbyists. Japan is one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington, which is the major reason our trade agreements are unequal. As the Soviet threat is removed, Japanese “respect” for the United States will also wither.
Kataoka: Yes, because the special relationship was not normal. But it is the attitude of the U.S. political establishment that needs changing. General MacArthur invented the image of Japan as a 12-year-old boy whose trigger-happiness could be contained only if the United States gave him permanent military protection. Americans continue to believe this; hence, they levied a “defense tax” to fight the Gulf War. This is not the way to normalize the special relationship. On the other hand, when Japan wanted to pay a bigger share toward international stability—into the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example—the Americans blocked it because that would have increased Japanese voting rights in the IMF. This sort of policy is a mistake that hurts, not helps, U.S.-Japanese relations and causes some Japanese to see the United States as both a paper tiger and a bully.
Tangredi: The book refers to a self-deception that the Americans and Japanese maintain about each other. Is that an accurate description?
Jurika: Certainly on the part of the United States. It literally takes a Pearl Harbor to change the U.S. perceptions of foreign nations. Our stereotypical image of the Japanese before the war—that their forces were militarily inferior to ours—lasted until the attack on Pearl, despite, for example, my reports on the capabilities of the Zero fighter. Ambassador Grew called all the military attaches into his office and accused us of being “jingoists” and trying to provoke a war because we accurately reported on what we saw as Japanese capabilities and preparations for war. The reason we don't understand Japan is because we send ambassadors who don’t speak Japanese, and
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will be as great as in 1941. Friedman and Lebard believe Japan’s reaction to all this will be the same as in 1941: that it has learned nothing; that, contrary to the wishes of everyone on both sides, there will be an inevitable conflict of interests between the Western Hemisphere and Greater East Asia, and the result will be all-out war.
This thesis is far easier to state than to prove, even if economic factors so indicate (to economists). Opposed to this is the idea that nothing, after the Bomb, can be the same as before. The “lessons of history” (or economics, for that matter) are difficult to identify in advance.
Despite principal author Friedman’s impressive credentials in Political Science and National Security, not all historians (who also study the past) will agree with his thesis. Economics was a factor in most, if not all, past wars, but a number of other factors also operated in each instance. Power politics, national or personal ambition, territorial aggrandizement, simple greed, national and racial hatreds, revenge, and religion, have been some of them. Only the very rash will pontificate with assurance as to the cause or nature of any future conflict. No one who has experienced or studied the capabilities of modem war can have any misconception of what a future war, with “smart” bombs and nuclear warheads, will be like. This goes for political and military leaders as well as writers. The reviewer, for example, believes future years will show that all-out “superwars” came to their historical end in 1945. Superwars cannot appear rational in any sense, and thus would only be irrational. Nuclear blackmail may seem potentially useful to some, but the search is already on for ways to counter it
Friedman and Lebard use nearly all the
403 pages of their densely printed text to survey the ground prior to their predicted war, and only a very few, at the end, to say why they consider the United States and Japan to be on a collision course. They have written an admirable study of the effects of economics on world history, if one accepts the idea that only economic motives are controlling. Although their book is not about a future war, it is nonetheless valuable for what it tells us of how past wars may have come about, and hence how some of the exacerbating factors leading to future ones can be avoided. This is what the authors really intended to do, and this they have accomplished.
A much-decorated submarine combat veteran of World War II, Captain Beach has written, among other titles, the Naval Institute Press’s Keepers of the Sea (1983) and its 1985 reissue of Run Silent, Run Deep. His article “Down by Subs” appeared in the April 1991 issue of Proceedings.
who rely on what friends in the Japanese House of Peers, or businessmen tell them over lunch.
Kataoka: To some extent, but I am convinced that the United States and Japan know each other much better than they did in 1941. The former is much wiser, much less naive about balance-of-power politics than it was in the first half of the century, when it thought it could do away with international politics entirely. Japan was completely irrational in taking on the Americans as a military foe. Japan knows it will never be as well endowed with resources as the United States, which is why a war is so improbable, unless a complete withdrawal of the U.S. presence from Asia leaves a power vacuum. The Japanese would have to fill this vacuum, but even that does not mean a war. A war will come only if we give in to irrational fears.
Tangredi: The book talks about the “myth of Hiroshima.”
This “myth”—cited often by those who promote nuclear disarmament—is that because the Japanese are the only people to have suffered an atomic attack, they understand “the futility of war” better than any other people. The implication is that Japan, with its “non-military” policy, has become a model for all other nations. Is this pacifist impression a myth?
Jurika: It is absolutely a myth. Two generations have passed and the Japanese have "re-rewritten" their history. The belief that Hiroshima taught the Japanese—and us—about the futility of war is simply “liberal guilt” with no basis in reality. The Japanese chose the optimum time to surrender, before the home islands were invaded. The atomic bomb saved the lives of up to two million Americans and Japanese who would have died in the inevitable invasion. The bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved far. far more lives than they took. Kataoka: The “Hiroshima syndrome” has been vastly exaggerated because Americans want to believe it. The Japanese have let the United States believe it and have milked the myth for all it is worth in deferring the costs of their own defense. It was a convenient fiction for the Japanese to say they were so shocked they will never fight again. But let’s face it. Nuclear weapons are weapons of deterrence that have kept the peace. But the United States will keep the myth of Hiroshima as long as it can provide a nuclear cover over Japan.
Tangredi: Are the current size and scope of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces sufficient for Japan’s defense? What about the sale of increasingly sophisticated and powerful weapons systems such as Aegis?
Jurika: It makes no sense now to sell Aegis to the Japanese.
With the Soviet threat abated, who are they going to use it against? In light of their constitutional prohibition about operating out of area, there is no threat to them that justifies such weaponry. For example, the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army/Navy is infinitely inferior in spirit as well as capabilities. The only threat such weapons make sense against is the U.S. Navy. And if we don’t retain base rights so we can operate in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans, the U.S. strategic posture will be so reduced that Japanese ambitions could again become a threat.
Katakoa: Those who would suggest that modern weaponry makes a war between Japan and the United States more likely do not understand Japan's strategic realities. Traditional Japanese strategic thought argues that Japan cannot take on a continental power without a sea power ally protecting its rear. Likewise, Japan cannot successfully challenge a sea power without control over the continent of Asia. In fact, Japan does not have even a toehold on the mainland, which is where the potential military threat to it lies. Even if so desired, there is no strategic precondition that would allow the Japanese to challenge U.S. sea power. It is difficult to find anyone in Japan who could even conceive of ever going to war with the United States, and it would certainly take at least ten years of very bitter antagonism to cause such a change in attitudes. I would suggest that the United States and Japan will be allies for a very long time. It is of economic benefit to the former and of psychological benefit to the latter to bring the relation- 1 ship to “normalcy,” with Japan a full partner in defense and the United States an equal partner in trade.
At the time he conducted this interview. Lieutenant Commander Tangredi was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently executive officer of the USS Fort McHenry (LSD-43).