War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Recently I have read the following book. The main points in the final chapters are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

Main points:

-Ch. 8. - one of the enduring ironies of Japan’s politics of memory lay in the government’s refusal to take an explicit, representative, ‘official’ stance on the meaning of the war. (226)

- Yasukuni problem was one of the two specific issues that had been at the center of struggles over war memory throughout the postwar decades. The other was the state screening of history textbooks and their coverage of the war years. (227)

- after the war, SCAP singled out the education system and the institutionalized religion as the two key area of Japanese public life that had perpetuated wartime militarism and need to be transform.(229)

- the real thrust of the opposition to Shinto’s infringement on other religion’s right and interest centered on its wider social implication, namely, infringement on civil rights. Democracy, defined as the protection of individual right and civil liberty from state intrusion, was at stake. The passing of the Yasukuni Shine Bill would overturn occupation reforms. (240)

- a national opinion poll about attitudes toward the Yasukuni Shrine taken by an advertising company revealed that there was an overwhelming popular support for the state-sponsored ceremony for the war dead.(252)

- conservative’s special interest was to put Yasukuni shrine in the political agenda in the early 1950s. Yet during the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a progressive opposition movement had successfully resisted the legalization of a state-dominate official memory. (257)

-Ch. 9.- a shift in international relations, changes in domestic politics, and an increasing global public culture in the late 1980s provided the context in which war memory and postwar responsibility changed from a special interest to a broad public debate. One important catalyst of his process was the forces of globalization. (261)

- relationship between and among Asian countries became the critical space for building connection, and global circuits of production and consumption. The dominant culture flow no longer connected Japan first and foremost to the US, instead in circled within Asia. (261)

-what made the eventual emergence of a lively national, cross-national, and international debate was the recognition of the changed bonds between victims of past crimes and their victimizers. This process depended on greater political and economic stability in China, Korea, and Taiwan. It provided individual and social groups with international connections. (262)

-as the politics of memory became a phenomenon of global public culture, Japan’s reassessment of its postwar in relation to its wartime past was increasingly guided by comparison. The more other Asian nations made war responsibility an issue in their relation with Japan, the more public discourse within Japan looked to West Germany in an effort to see what was politically and conceptually at stake.(263)

- in the mid-1990s, many foreign observers of contemporary Japanese affairs were fascinated with the apparent inability, or at least the unwillingness of Japan to remember WWII except in terms of their own victimhood. (270)

- two major summits emerging in Tokyo in 1998 provided historic opportunities for reconciliation and redefinition of relations between Japan and it neighbors: Communist China and South Korea. Circumstance in China forced its Chairman Jian Zemin to postpone his trip to Japan so that the Japan-South Korea summit (with Korea’s Kim Dae Jung) could took place first. The ferocity of anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea had been well known. Contrary to expectations the talk turned out to be an unprecedented success. The talks with Jian Zemin in the following month failed to produce mutual agreement. (281) Talks with China bogged down over Chinese demand that an apology be given not only orally but also in a written form. China’s and Korea’s respective domestic political objective played a huge role in this process. (282)

- there was no doubt that Japan’s push for a seat on the UN security council, and LDP’s proposal for a constitutional revision of Article 9 had played a role in provoking Chinese concerns about regional secure. But the popular outrage among ordinary Chinese and Korean had other roots as well. It arose in a democratic civil society that had only recently begun to reckon with its own postwar history. The combination of militarily and economically powerful China and a more robust civil society had set the stage for the kinds of internal political conflict that Japan had encountered for over 50 years. (283) In 2005 PM Koizumi offered a speech to clearly portrayed Japan’s postwar history and to indicate a remorse for the war. (285)

Ch. 10 - by the end of the century, the fascination with history memory had become part of a global public culture. (287) In the case of Japanese memory at the turn of the millennium the political demand inaugurated by the end of the Cold War, together with the economic and cultural challenges known as globalization had opened up unprecedented possibility for reforms.(314)

Conclusion: the salience of memory as a lens through which to interpret the post-Cold War ‘present’ in light of the postwar ‘past’ was symptomatic of a more general quest for political reorientation in the late 20^th century. (315)

-the question was: why war responsibility did not become more explicitly a matter of state policy in Japan as it was in Germany. A broadly comparative look at the key historical factors that influenced the place of war memory in postwar politics in Japan and Germany provided some answers. One important fact for Japan lay in the striking continuities between the wartime and postwar political elites, despite the new democratic constitution. Hirohito weathered the transition. (317)

-in Japan the different interpretation of the Asia-pacific war became the tools for ideologically charged domestic conflict. The discourse espoused by the Japanese left was not state-sanctioned. (319)

- in Japan, different and incompatible memories of war and defeat competed for public space as important tools of domestic politics. (321)

- the fact that Japan’s historical injustice were still hotly debated today spoke less to the severity of the atrocities or the ‘silence’ of some ‘Japanese memory’, but more to the complex process by which the past was absorbed into the even-changing present as experienced by the people.(323)

War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Recently I have read the following book. The main points in chapters 6 and 7 are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-              2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

Main points:

-Ch. 6 - changes in the generational makeup of interest groups’ constituents represented the first perceived challenge to the war memory operated in the politics in the second postwar decade. (159)

All the five organizations knew that memories of the war needed to be transmitted to a younger cohort of members who had no personal war experience. The impact of generational changed on war memory was especially strong in the war bereaved. (159)

- it was well known that Japanese society underwent changes in the first postwar decade, especially with the onset of high economic growth. For postwar memory, not only the ‘present’ was changing, but the ‘past’ itself had also changed. The definition of the past grew more complex as time passed. War memory and postwar responsibility became closely intertwined. Because interest groups had constructed a specific war memory, this memory was in need of an update once the context and changed. This dynamic became an integral part of how memory functioned in postwar politics. (161)

- many conservative bureaucrats and politicians had war time career, when they returned to political prominence in the early 1950s they promoted policy designed to avoid too radical a break with the wartime structure. But on the other hand, the intellectuals and political left intended to widen the break with the past. This political polarization gave war memory an important role. (162)

- civic groups on the political left, as those on the right, sensed an increasing public indifference to the special interest formulated around a particular war memory. Many argued that in the 1960s the economic miracle had eclipsed the discourse on war responsibility. (165)

- by the late 1950s, the once-promising younger generation presented a ‘social problem’ to the Isokukai (the conservative/right wing), and Wadatsumikai even broke up over the politics of the student movement. (169)

- no explicit ‘postwar’ conceptualization of memory that was independent of direct war experience could gain significant currency at this time. The politics and intellectual climate of the second half of the 1960s favored a different and newly prominent aspect of memory – namely Japan’s national memory of the world war was a history to be shared with most of the Asia people. Efforts to refocus war memory away from the obvious fragmentation of domestic politics and toward an imagined national unity thus expanded the parameter of ‘memory’ in important ways. (188)

-Ch. 7. – the idea that each nation involved in WWII produced its own specific national memory which was part of a shared history emerged in the course of 1960s. A national memory of the war was certainly ‘imagined’ in the sense that it was constructed discursively and according to one’s political standpoint. The liberal left regarded national memory as the state’s efforts to revive prewar nationalism. The conservative right defined national memory as a series of masochistic reiteration of Japanese failures at the hands of foreign imperialists. By the mid-1960s, the legacy of Japan’s war involvement in Asia certainly began to shape public discourses. (189) Japan’s normalization of relations with South Korea in 1965 and with the PRC in 1972 signified two important makers of this development. (189)

- in the basic treaty signed in 1965, Japan declared void all treaties with Korea before its annexation in 1910 and agreed to pay South Korea a grant in the form of goods and service, plus low-interest loans to promote economic development. South Korea in return renounced its right to demand reparations and refrained from pressing for a formal apology for Japanese atrocities during the colonial period. The treaty contained no hint of remorse on the Japanese side. Japan insisted that the grants and loans were regard as economic cooperation rather than as compensation. (204) Nationalist sentiment in Japan, as in other former colonies, cut in various direction and revealed competing memories of a shared history against the equally shared background of the US military presence in the region.(205)

- the association of Shinto Shrines strongly criticized Korea’s resistance to normalize relation with Japan as a continuation of its fierce nationalism, and to use memories of earlier conflicts to drum up anti-Japanese feeling which should be directed toward the US as the real culprit of the postwar order in Asia. (205)

- China renounced demands for reparations. It declared that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese people, it renounced its demand for war reparation from Japan. In striking contrast to the Japan-South Korea peace treaty seven years before, Tanaka’s China diplomacy elicited no significant protest in either country. The treaty ushered in a China boom in Japan in the 1970s. The popular criticism of Japan appeared only in the 1980s and 1990s when China developed a market economy that gave rise to an increasingly vibrant civil society and less controlled local press. (212)

- CCP national memory constructed a ‘victor narrative’: they were the heroic communist survivors who liberated their country. This narrative had little room for Chinese victims of Japanese aggression. Furthermore, it was noted that in China more peasant had died during the great famine in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution than in the hands of the Japanese during the anti-Japanese war. (213)

-the complexity of war memory within the framework of the postwar Japanese nation-state appeared greater in the late 1960s than ever before. Questions of national identity, diplomatic relations with other Asian countries, and even nation’s territory issues became important anchors for negotiating conflicting lessons and legacies of the past, in addition to the perennial contention concerning the war dead, Shinto shines, and the contents of history education. (222)

- in the following two decades, the most intense battles over war memory centered on ‘official memory’ and its default custodian, the state, in the highly public controversies about the state of Yasukuni Shrine and the contents of history textbooks.(225)

(to be continued)

War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points in chapters 3 to 5 are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

Main points:

Ch. 3-  while the Shintoists and the war-bereaved families tried to regain the economic lost because of the war defeat, the Japan teachers’ union tried to undo the war itself, picking up the union movement of the 1920s and vowing to complete Japan’s democratic revolution. (86)

- the rapid rise of the teachers’ union movement in the early postwar years was an integral part of the so called ‘the politics of democratic revolution’. The revolution began at a time when the term ‘war responsibility’ appeared widely in public debates. It suggested a broad consensus among the liberal left that the catastrophe of war had structural roots in the wartime ‘system’, usually labeled as either feudal or fascist. And that a radical transformation of society was necessary in order to achieve a complete break with wartime thought and practice. (88) One of their goals was to promote core democratic values such as individual autonomy and political consciousness and participation. (88)

- of crucial important to the emergence of the teachers’ union was in 1945, it got the mutual tolerance and even support of the Japan Communist Party and the occupation authorizes.(89) The need to be able to bargain for higher wages and benefits most clearly defined the teacher’s union as a special interest group.(94)

- in tandem with social scientists and literary critics debating ‘war responsibility’, teachers active in the union said the war time social structure as a typical pre-modern system that was fascism . Whether be it feudal or fascist, it lacked the notion of individual responsibility. (96)

- the struggle against the state bureaucracy had become not only a matter of political fact but one of principle.(99) The principle of resistance often took precedence over issues of substance. For example the local boards of education and textbooks became the ground for the struggle. (99)

- even if the Teachers Union and the Assn. of Shinto Shrines appeared diametrically opposed to each other on issues such as the Emperor system, they shared a similar view of wartime bureaucracy as excessively controlling and harmful to their interest. The Assn. of War-bereaved families, in contrast, campaigned for the revival of wartime bureaucratic support.  Shrine Shintoists lobbied for government support, whereas the Teacher’s Union opposed the government. (106)

- Ch. 4 -an eclectic group of people with ties to China formed a movement to ‘set the grand stage of Japanese-Chinese friendship’ by promoting cultural and economic exchanges.(108) The sentiment of remorse and atonement for specific Japanese war crimes was central to the establishment of the Japan-China Friendship Association. (110)

- the Japanese government had no independent foreign policy. It made clear that it regarded the reparation program as a way to build up East Asian trade rather than as compensation for the war damages. This Friendship Association saw it as evasion of responsibility. (114) US quoted the lesson of WWI in Europe, suggesting that the crippling indemnities imposed on Germany had led to Hitler’s rise. (114)

- the Friendship Association emphasized the common victimization at the hand of Japanese militarist in the past and conservative Japanese government in the present.(122) They accused the government in using anti-communist ideology to avoid wartime aggression responsibility. (123)

- as Akira Iriye had shown, cultural internationalism became an urgent matter in the aftermath of WWII. He believed in the importance of cultural contact for the preservation of peace (e.g. through UNESCO). (129)

- unlike the Assn. of Shinto Shrines, the Japan Assn. of War-bereaved Families, and even the Teacher union, the Friendship Association made memory of Japanese war time aggression a prominent part of its mission.(132)

- the Friendship Assn. aspired to positive government involvement. Their goal after all was to change the government foreign policy and to restore Japanese official diplomatic relation with China. (133)

-Ch. 5. The Japan Memorial Society for the Students Killed in the War (Wadatsumikai) was established by intellectuals, students and relatives of the war dead who came from Japan’s elite universities, especially the university of Tokyo and Kyoto. (136)

- the memory of the war dead, Dower wrote, was greatly complicated by the experience of defeat. Defeat left the meaning of war death raw and open. Individual and collective attempts to explain theses contributed significantly to the definition of the emerging political platform. The feeling of guilt and responsibility could be appropriated. (138)

-  while Shintoist etc. justified war death in the name of the Emperor and national struggle again foreign imperialism, many more reinterpreted their losses as giving birth to a new and different Japan. (138)

- in sum, the first phase of Wadatsumikai’s history was a failed attempt to create a mass movement through special interest politics. Reflecting back, the leader criticized the Cold War logic of being forced to pledge allegiance to one of two opposing side. (151)

- Wadatsumikai delivered the most comprehensive critique of the Emperor system in the 1970s, when the Assn. of Shinto Shrines campaigned for the revival of prewar aspects of the imperial institution. Japan’s’ problematic relation with other Asian countries slowly emerged as an important issue in Wadatsumkai activism. Germany offered an important parallel in solving the problem of war responsibility which was a common issue in the 1980s (155).

(to be continued)

War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945- 2005

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points in chapters one to two are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

 Main points:

-ch.1. -  for some Shintoists, taking responsibility for the defeat was a quick and decisive matter, along with several military leaders the chief priest committed suicide in 1945.(35) On 3 February 1946 Shrine Shinto formally dissolved all institutional ties to the state and established a new umbrella organization, the Association of Shinto Shrines.(37)

-the US politics of ‘demilitarization and democratization’ set the stage for Shinto to resist against the US occupation in Japan as well as its cooperation with it. (38) The ‘Bill of Right’ removed all restriction of political, civil, and religious liberties. (38) MacArthur chose to ignore Shinto’s religious character. (39) SCAP wanted the Assn.  of Shinto Shines to be divorced from the state to become a public agent of Shinto. It also wanted to keep the Emperor not as sacred, but as the locus of Japan’s ‘essence’. This represented a continuity through 1945 which was deemed central by the US. The Emperor made Japan ‘Japanese’. (41)

- the Assn. of Shinto Shrines founded in 1946 was a private organization. (45) In sharp contrast to progressive civic groups that formed in the early postwar years that claimed a break with the war time era, Shine Shinto based its claim on historical continuity that crossed 1945. The Assn. of Shinto Shines had always been the moral leaders of the people; they believed that if the shrines bore responsibility for the war, the responsibility was qualified by the shrine’s won victimization in the hands of militarists. The shrine world claimed that they had suffered like the common people. (47)

- for Shintoists, remembering the war meant restoring to public legitimacy the status of shrines as the concert embodiment of the idea that Japan, as a national entity, possessed a spiritual core which resided in the Emperor’s unchanged relationship to the Japanese people through history. (53)

- by the early 1950s, they no longer stressed Shinto priest’s mandate as popular spiritual leaders, but instead highlighted the importance of nationalism. This change reflected a shift in the political climate: the US occupation’s reverse course. The American turned around from supporting progressive interest to siding with conservative and anti-communist politics. (54)

- the Assn. launched its new life movement, and showed its commitment to restore Shinto to its prewar place as a pillar of public life rather than merely as a political interest. The Assn. advanced a view of Japan’s recent past that played down the historical break of 1945. It insisted on an unchanging system of public values that firmly anchored on traditions. It tried hard to erase the postwar perception of Shinto as militaristic. They participated in special interest politics, strengthened relation with both the Imperial Household agency and the right wing of LDP. It influenced public memory of the war by encouraging an ethnocentric, apolitical and ahistorical view of international conflict while discourage criticism of the Emperor. (59)

Ch.2. in February 1946, one week after the Japanese government had terminated pension payments, Makino appeared on the NHK radio to all for the establishment of the War Victim Bereaved Families League. (69) A year later, Otani campaigned to draw local war-bereaved groups into an organization committed to remembering the war dead and their relatives, and to recreate a positive identity rather than a sense of victimhood. In November 1947 the ‘Japanese League of the Welfare of the War Bereaved’ was founded. (69)

- the league focused on two interrelated goals: 1. creating a consciousness of a war-bereaved problem in society; and 2. pressing concrete issues of special interest to all or part of its membership through political channels.(76)

- the US reverse course in 1947 facilitated the emergence of the war bereaved as a political interest group in ways similar to the experience of the Assn. of Shinto Shrines. They took advantage of the increasingly conservative political climate by lobbying government institutions. (78)

- the military pension law that was introduced in 1953 represented an explicit revival of wartime pension. The pension law was revised 56 times between 1953 and 1995. Most importantly was in 1955, when the families of convicted war criminals became eligible and that the execution of war criminal was officially treated as ‘death incurred in the line of duty’. This provision established the ground on which Yasukuni Shrine enshrined Class B and C criminal, based on a name lists made available in 1966. It also served as the basis on which 14 Class A war criminals were enshrined secretly in 1978. (79)

-in 1952, the Leagues’ policy further changed so as to allow families of the executed war criminal to join. (81) Various changes and adjustment culminated in the League’s official re-establishment as the ‘Japan Association of War Bereaved Families’ in 1953. (81)

- organizationally, Shrine Shinto was much more severely constrained by the constitution. The Assn. of War-Bereaved Families was able to compete equally with other interest groups for state support. These two ultraconservative groups pursued similar politics of celebrating national unity and national strength as exemplified by the Meiji state. (85)

(to be continued)

War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-                          2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

Main points:

Introduction:

- two events had framed Japan’s history of war memory. First, that question of war memory and postwar responsibility had been a part of public life in Japan from the end of war into the 21^st century. War memory developed together with the particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. Democracy had shifted, so did memory in public life. War memory remained fragmented yet it was closely woven into the political structure. (4). Second, even if war memory implicitly shaped the way internal political battles were contested, it rarely guided postwar politics explicitly on the state level.(5) Even while the two events depicted here addressed Japanese domestic audience, they were informed by global circumstances in crucial ways.(5)

- this book traces the social politics of war memory in Japan from the defeat in 1945 to the beginning of the new millennium. It draws upon history of five prominent civic organizations from the political spectrum that were at the forefront of this struggle: the Association of Shinto Shrines, the Association of War-Bereaved Families, the Japan Teachers’ Union, the Japan-China Friendship Association, and the Memorial Society for the Student-Soldiers Killed in the War (Wadatsumikai).(7)

- the Association of Shinto Shrines was an umbrella organization that worked with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Imperial Household Agency. It was crucial in keeping in public view the problem of the ‘Emperor system’. (9)

-another conservative interest group was the Japan Association of War-Bereaved Families which lobbied LDP representatives and the Health and Welfare Ministry for state recognition. (9) On the political left, the Japan Teacher’s Union (JTU) sought to diminish the power of the bureaucracy. It saw the bureaucracy as a continuation of wartime militarism and opposed over the system of textbook approval and school curricula decision etc. (9)

- a progressive interest group, the Japan-China Friendship Association, sought to improve the Japanese relations with the PRC. (9-10). A small but influential peace group was the Japan Memorial Society for the Students Killed in the War known as Wadatsumikai. This group organized high school and university students and teachers around a pacifist critique of contemporary politics. It complied and edited many editions of the book entitled “Listen to the Voices from the Deep”. (10)

- by the mid-1950s, these five organizations had established themselves as special interest groups dominating the political contest over the memory of war and its aftermath.(10) Each association represented a distinct stance on war memory. The Association of Shinto Shrine and the Association for War Bereaved Families centered their tactics on resuming aspects of wartime system. The Japan Teacher’s Union, the Japan-China Friendship Association and the Wadatsumikai opposed the continuation of the political structure that supported militarism. Wadatsumikai activists insisted on a universal humanist pacifism. (11)

- the structure of this book reflects the main phases in Japan’s history on war memory. Part I describes how these five most prominent political interest groups were formed. They represented different stance over the war memory. They ranged from far right to radical left. (13) Part II analyzes different aspects of public memory as they merged in the changing context that was connected to specific political controversies. The social politics of war memory remained tied to issues of bureaucratic control over school curricula, textbook, and the official celebration of the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine. These controversies revealed the shifting parameters of the memory debated in public life which was influenced by generational changes in the second post war decade, by the international context of the 1960s, and also by the struggle over the official custodianship of memory since the 1970s.(13) Part III documents the most significant shift in Japan’s history of memory. From the 1980s on the interest-based, domestic politics began to engage a global, right-based approach to memory and restitution. International dimension could no longer be ignored. (14)

All five groups surveyed here had continued actively to participate in public life up to the present; each group was nationally organized, with regional and local chapters. (15)

- in organization, each group employed strategies to which war memory was central.  Some points were noted: first, being a Shinto priest or an elementary school teacher did not necessarily mean that one shared the same war experience. The establishment of a Shinto organization or teacher’s labor union could involve ideological consideration, and required an articulation of the past and present realities with which potential members could identify. (16).

- second, organizations competed for a share of public attention by positioning themselves as leaders of democratic changes. Initially they targeted the common people. (16) Third, organizations located themselves on the emerging political map of postwar Japan vis-à-vis the occupation authorities. They had to adjust their activities in response to political changes. (17)

-fourth, each civic group formed networks with political parties and other organizations to establish its interest in the political arena and each benefited from the political power of larger organization. As the political system coalesced into two dominant parties in the first half of the 1950s, organizations became identified with a particular stance on contemporary issues, including views of the war. (17)

- as organizations such as the ultraconservative Association of Shinto Shrines and the Association of War-Bereaved Families successfully lobbied state institution on behalf of their cause, left-liberal groups positioned themselves in opposition to the state. War memory organized along a left-right divide. (20)

- the dominant pattern of contention over both the war-time and the postwar was remained locked in a dynamic that pitted (liberal) citizens against the (conservative) state. One landmark was the beginning of the textbook trials in 1965 over the legality of textbook censorship. (24)

- the five organizations competed with one another for public space to present what they considered to be the essential legacies of war. (24) With the loosening of institutionalized political alliances at the end of the long conservative hegemony by the LDP, there was a growing interaction of local and national politics. There was an emerging public that focused attention on war memory, as both a political issue and a framework for historical analysis. (25)

- as the Chinese and South Korean government discovered political capital in the war memory issues, they began to monitor Japanese official gestures in endorsing an unapologetically nationalist view of the war. (26)

- emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989 ended the Showa period; the fall of the Berlin Wall in the same year, the collapse of the long hegemony of the conservative LDP in 1993 together marked a pivotal point in the history of memory in Japan. The issue of war, and postwar responsibility for Japan’s war conduct in Asia became tied to the politics of redefining Japan’s position in the world. This new beginning catapulted Japan’s unresolved war responsibility into the political limelight. (26)

- the Persian Gulf War in 1991 led the US to demand for Japan’s’ active participation. At the center stood the Japan’s constitutional and the legal position of the Self-defense Force (SDF). The “PKO Bill” allowed overseas deployment of the SDF. (27)

- in 2005 a wave of anti-Japanese mass protest across China was unprecedented in scale. Japan’s active campaign to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security council formed one specific issue of conflict. In Japan the constitutional revision of Article 9 appeared to be a real possibility. (30)

(to be continued)