Asia without America, part 2: Japan’s Tang renaissance

The liberal democracies of Northeast Asia – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – have survived and even thrived in a purgatorial equilibrium where their fate is dependent on:

an America in Asia but not of Asia (see here) and

a China gathering its strength and biding its time.

There are costs associated with this equilibrium, this status quo, this interminable present – costs not just of treasure and strategic risk but of civilizational stagnation and national incoherence.

While Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have avoided the American dumpster fires of crime, drugs and obesity, they have not been able to dodge the nihilism and cultural anomie of end-state capitalism and liberal democracy. As much as this writer likes to bash Francis Fukuyama, the good professor did cover his rear on the pitfalls awaiting the Last Man at the End of History:

Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

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.

Postwar Japan is a concoction of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power almost exclusively since its founding in 1955.

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.

While Germany went through a denazification program, the US “reversed course” in Japan after Mao’s communists won China’s civil war in 1949. 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.

Cold War expediencies were certainly justifiable to many – but ultimately, for the Japanese, it meant that their country was less than sovereign, never adequately confronted its wartime past and never had a real say in its military occupation by the US.

Japan became a bonsai nation – a well-tended miniature state denuded of thymos. When the Japanese absentmindedly forgot about their bonsai status and dared to challenge the US in the auto and semiconductor industries, sanctions on Toshiba, the Plaza Accord and “voluntary” export quotas quickly reminded them of their place.

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 nation – men without chests are allowed to dream only 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.

In a future in which America’s military is no longer tenable in the Western Pacific, Japan will have to find a new equilibrium. 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 be forced to grow up and wrestle with sovereignty, to break out of its bonsai pot and be liberated from creepy hentai, hikikomori and tentacle porn – to become men with chests again.

Much of this will be very off-putting to many Japanese. Casting aside the comfort of a long-familiar equilibrium for an unknown future will be terrifying. Much of Asia has unfinished business with Japan. And not just any kind of unfinished business – but blood debt of the rawest, most impassioned 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. Mongols from the Yuan Dynasty attempted to invade the Japanese islands twice and were defeated by inclement weather both times. (England and France, in comparison, fought 41 wars against each other since the Dark Ages.) 

This time, however, is different. A China with a military strong enough to muscle out the US (hypothetically, of course) and nursing deep historical grievances can be somewhat worrisome. Without the US military, much of Asia – from China to South Korea to Southeast Asia – will want to settle unfinished family business.

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

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, aided by four disciples, stormed a military base in central Tokyo, tied up the commandant, barricaded 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 tied-up commandant and committed hara-kiri (seppuku), disemboweling himself like samurai of yore before being decapitated by a disciple.

Mishima spent all his adult life trying not to be a “man without a chest.” In the hopeless last days of the war, Mishima avoided almost certain death by getting rejected from the army for an erroneous tuberculosis diagnosis, which 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. Mishima identified Japan’s men without chests decades before Francis Fukuyama:

Japan has lost its spiritual tradition, and instead has become infested with materialism. Japan is under the curse of a green snake now. The green snake is biting Japan’s chest. There is no way to escape this curse.

In 1959-1960, protests erupted across Japan in opposition to the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Anpo in abbreviated Japanese. The treaty would formally allow the United States to maintain military bases in Japan.

Opposition was immense from both the left and the right. At its height, hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan’s parliament in Tokyo. On June 15, 1960, students breached the building, resulting in violent clashes with police.

The original Anpo contained egregious terms:

no specific end date or means of abrogation,

allowing the US military to use bases for any purpose without consulting the Japanese government,

authorization for US troops to put down domestic protests.

The 1959-1960 protests were in opposition to Anpo, even with those terms specifically removed. 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.

The revised Anpo provided abrogation opportunities at 10-year intervals, with student protests erupting again in 1968-1969 but in much-attenuated form. 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.

Yukio Mishima was radicalized by the Anpo protests. In 1961, Mishima wrote the short story “Patriotism,” which was made into a popular 1966 short film in which he directed and starred.

The film climaxed with Lieutenant Takeyama, unable to reconcile loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty to his comrade-in-arms, committing hara-kiri, with the strings of Wagner playing in the background. In an interview, Mishima explained:

In samurai tradition, the sense of beauty was always connected with death. 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.

Spiritually, I wanted to revive some samurai spirit through it… I don’t want to revive hara-kiri itself but through the vision, very strong vision of hara-kiri, I want to inspire and stimulate younger people… I wanted to revive some traditional sense of honor or sense of very strong responsibility… a sense of death in honor. That’s my purpose.

Mishima’s suicide at the prime of life was a political call to arms, a personal cri de cœur, an artistic expression of ultimate beauty, a reclamation of the glorified death that slipped through his fingers as a young man.

This all proved too much for 1970 Japan. Just when the nation was coming into its cosmopolitan own, its most famous writer makes a feudal spectacle of himself, gratuitously conjuring up unpleasant memories. 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 on a mission to Make Japan Great Again. Unfortunately, World War II survivor guilt bound him to the most objectionable period in Japan’s history.

After Commodore Perry and his black ships forced open Japan under threat of cannon fire, shattering 250 years of splendid seclusion, tumultuous changes swept through Japanese society, toppling centuries-old 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 rest 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, Japan’s renaissance need not begin with Commodore Perry’s black ships. Modern Japan has almost certainly retained more of the Tang Dynasty than modern China.

Kimonos, geisha make-up and Kyoto-style architecture would look less out of place in the ancient Chinese city of Chang’an (present day Xi’an), capital of the Tang Dynasty, than anything in Beijing, Shanghai and 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.

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

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).

Japanese envoys and scholars who had completed kentoshi instituted Chinese-style laws, bureaucracy, calendars and measurements in their official capacity. In their unofficial capacity, they brought back Chinese fashion, literature, musical instruments and artistic taste.  

Fears of China collecting on Japanese blood debt in draconian fashion are highly misplaced. Without a barbarian military on China’s maritime border, the Communist Party of China can relax into its Confucianism. While the political West swings left and right, political China swings between Legalism and Confucianism.

In anxious times, Legalism and its authoritarian impulses prevail – there can be no fun and games when Qin Shi Huang is consolidating 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 hiding its strength and biding its 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 known equilibrium to wrestle with Japan’s past and secure an unknown future is a high-risk/high-reward undertaking. Japan has everything to lose. Without US protection, an unforgiving China bent on vengeance would be the end of Japan.

Japan, however, also has everything to gain. The presence of the US military has warped Japanese politics and society for decades. A forgiving China not interested (much) in settling scores is the only real future Japan has. The status quo has stunted Japan in a bonsai pot – purgatorial torture for its novelists.

Mishima went out in a macabre blaze of glory. Murakami is perpetually wistful for what could have been. And Ryū (the other) Murakami wants to set it all on fire. In a hypothetical future undistorted by America’s alien presence, Japan can finally exorcise the ghost of the Meiji-Shōwa era and let its Tang renaissance wash across Asia.