US-Japan postwar relationship: reflections on political and strategic tensions

¶ … postwar relationship United States Japan.

Unfortunately, the postwar relationship between the United States and Japan has mirrored the relationship of the United States with the vast majority of countries that it has dealt with in the ensuing decades that followed World War II. Veiled, shadowy secrets, duplicity, and outright deception have characterized the vast majority of these relationships; numerous exchanges between the United States and Japan have indicated that the relationship of these countries was no exception to this proclivity. What may be most appalling about the situation between the U.S. And Japan during the postwar epoch, however, is the degree of complicity that Japan was virtually forced to take on in the relatively brief amount of time that existed since it engaged the U.S. On the battlefield.

A prime example of Japanese compliance that seems particularly unsettling, of course, is in regards to the assistance it provided America with the facilitation and propagation of nuclear warfare. It has been widely documented that in 1945 the U.S. ended the Second World War by dropping a pair of nuclear bombs on Japan. However, it was not until 2009 that the Japanese government finally admitted to abetting the U.S. carriage and production of nuclear weaponry as early as 1960, as the following quotation from Gavan McCormack's "Ampo's Troubled 50th: Hatoyoma's Abortive Rebellion, Okinawa's Mounting Resistance and the U.S.-Japan Relationship" makes painfully evident. The author explains that there was "…a "tacit agreement" of the Government of Japan (January 1960) to turn a blind eye to U.S. nuclear weapons, agreeing that "no prior consultation is required for U.S.> military vessels carrying nuclear weapons to enter Japanese ports or sail in Japanese territorial waters." It would be interesting to note what the families of the murdered and the survivors of the nuclear detonations in Japan would have thought about the liberty which their government afforded the U.S. with such transportation of nuclear weapons in territory that had traditionally been Japanese.

Yet even this very notion, of Japan's land and the surrounding area encompassing it, was severely challenged if not outright disregarded by the U.S. In the postwar years. The most salient example of the United States all but bullying the Japanese into handing over their land can be evinced in the scandal regarding Article Nine of the Japanese constitution, a clause that that was inserted to allow for a commitment to peace. When a Japanese judge ruled that U.S. occupation of both the mainland and Okinawa were in violation of the article and a threat to peace in the country, U.S. bureaucracy determined a way to continue its dominance and disrespect the Japanese right to govern the land, as the following quotation from McCormack's article succinctly demonstrates. "…the appeal process was short cut short by having the matter referred directly to the Supreme Court, and MacArthur then met with the Chief Justice to ensure that he too understood what was at issue. In December 1959 the Supreme Court reversed the Tokyo Court judgment…"