Japan assisted the U.S. and NATO-led, UN-mandated war in Afghanistan (2001-continuing), and contributed to the more exclusively U.S.-led, and controversial “coalition of the willing” that supported America's intervention in Iraq (2003-11). Japan defined its goals as humanitarianism, reconstruction, and reconciliation. Its actions included:

• • Deploying Marine Self-Defense Forces (J-MSDF) for refueling for coalition members in the Indian Ocean (2002-2010);

• • Deploying 600 Ground Self-Defense Forces (J-GSDF) to the southern Iraqi city of Samawah in Iraq (2004-2006). The non-combat troops were involved in reconstruction efforts and protected by UK and Australian troops;

• • Deploying about 200 Air-Self Defense Forces (J-ASDF) troops to the Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait to airlift humanitarian aid and reconstruction equipment to Iraq (Jan. 2004-Dec. 2008);

• • Dispatching JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) volunteers and other development and technical specialists to conduct massive reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan (under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or MOFA);

• • Facilitating six multinational dialogues in Japan between the Taliban, the Government of Afghanistan, and other nations.

• • Facilitating reconciliation seminars among Iraqi Sunni and Shi’ite members of parliament, held in Japan;

• • Pledging monetary reconstruction aid to both conflicts. Japan is the largest national donor after the USA for reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan; from 20042005, during its deployment to Iraq, Japan was the largest humanitarian donor to Iraq.

On September 11, 2001, a sunny Tuesday morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four American passenger planes in coordinated suicide attack missions directed at landmark sites in America. The first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m. Seventeen minutes later, while all the world's media were covering the story without knowing exactly what happened, a second hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. At 9:37 a.m., a third plane crashed into the Pentagon. Passengers aboard a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, fought back against hijackers who intended for it to hit a Washington, D.C. target, perhaps the U.S. Capitol; it instead crashed into farmland in Pennsylvania shortly after 10 a.m. In less than two hours, nearly 3000 people of several nationalities perished in the four coordinated attacks.

The Asia Pacific Journal is proud to offer its readers a preview of John W. Dower's new book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: Norton 2010). In the first days after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prominent American news sources reacted by invoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the event as an act of “infamy.” That analogy caught the attention of many people, but Dower has thought more deeply than most about the underlying issues. The resonances between the past and the present are profound and disturbing.

The Asia Pacific Journal is proud to offer its readers a preview of John W. Dower's new book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: Norton 2010). In the first days after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prominent American news sources reacted by invoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the event as an act of “infamy.” That analogy caught the attention of many people, but Dower has thought more deeply than most about the underlying issues. The resonances between the past and the present are profound and disturbing.

Just before and after 9/11, Japanese were intensely focused on North Korea. They had just learned that the North Korean government had systematically abducted Japanese citizens for espionage purposes. During a state visit by Prime Minister Koizumi to North Korea in 2002, North Korean president Kim Jong-il confirmed that his country had abducted thirteen ordinary Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s—including some only in their teens. The purpose was for the abductees to train North Korean spies in Japanese language and mannerisms so that they could disguise themselves as Japanese citizens. Following negotiations, five of the kidnapped citizens were allowed to return to Japan. North Korea claimed that eight of them had already died, while Japan has failed to verify this evidence and also claims that nineteen citizens or more were kidnapped—not just the thirteen acknowledged by North Korea claims. The abduction news exacerbated anxiety over North Korea's spasmodic nuclear threats and tests, made still worse by lingering mutual enmity as a result of colonialism, World War II and Japan's postwar security alliances with South Korea and America. In other words, Japan's relationship with North Korea was already terrible at the time Bush broadened the scope of the “war on terror” to include the unlikely “axis of evil” encompassing North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Half a century ago, General Douglas MacArthur, proconsul in the US occupation, was acclaimed as a benevolent liberator even while patronizing the Japanese people, whom he described soon after leaving Japan as “12-year old children.” Today, proconsuls from Washington fly regularly in to Tokyo to inspect and instruct, as if Japan were a peripheral dependency, even though its economy now is roughly equal in scale to those of Germany, France and Britain combined. Japan's leadership basks in the glow of such patronage, seemingly satisfied with the role of satrap, for all the world like the one-time leaders of East European satellite states in the Soviet empire.

A succession of weak Japanese Prime Ministers, the drama of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current global financial crisis once again have returned the subject of Japanese security policy to a position of relative political marginality. [*] Throughout the Cold War, the analysis of Japanese security was a topic largely overlooked by both American students of Japan and by students of national security. Japan, after all, was the country that had adopted a Peace Constitution with its famous Article 9 interpreted as legally banning the use of armed force in the defense of national objectives. Its professional military had little public standing and was under the thumb of civilians. And Japan's grand strategy aimed at gaining power and prestige and sought to leverage its economic prowess to a position of regional and perhaps global leadership that would complement rather than rival that of the United States. At the same time Japan relied on the continued protection by the U.S. military. To be sure, since the late 1970s the U.S. government persistently pressed Japan to play a larger regional role in Asia and to spend more of its rapidly growing GDP on national defense. But Japan made no more than marginal concessions. On security issues it kept a low regional profile, and since the late 1980s Japanese defense spending consistently stayed below one percent of GDP. Writing on problems of Japanese national security, thus, was left to policy specialists issuing regular conference reports on the ups and downs of the U.S.-Japan bilateral defense relationship. Theoretically informed scholarship was conspicuous by its absence.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) publication included in this reader, “Japan's Assistance to Afghanistan: Towards Self-Reliance,” explains that, regardless of the issues raised by McCormack and Katzenstein, Japan's humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan are substantial. Many of these projects involve collaboration with NATO, grassroots organizations and various international organizations, especially those in the United Nations orbit, and represent an attempt to separate Japan somewhat from American military actions there. One of the many parallel events included in the 2012 commemoration of 3/11 was a UNICEF-sponsored videoconference between high school students in Fukushima and the Tajwar Saltana Girls High School in Afghanistan, one of the schools rehabilitated by funds from UNICEF and the government of Japan.

Military interventions since the end of the cold war have often been justified as humanitarian. But, as both experts in international relations and others have noted, that justification requires deciding whether we should give priority to state sovereignty or the rights of individuals. In the best-case scenario, nations intervene in other sovereign nations to prevent despotic leaders from violating human rights; however, the nice-sounding ideal of “humanitarianism” can easily become a pretext for interventions that have little moral justification.

It has been seven years since the US military launched air strikes in revenge for the 9/11 terror attacks. The Taliban have not been suppressed and Afghanistan remains in a state of war. Although overshadowed by the war against Iraq, this too is a war of aggression. A Japanese photo journalist examines the US-Afghan War.

The azure skies peculiar to Afghanistan weigh heavily on the land. Rivers that are supposed to flow among the mountains have dried up, exposing the earth's cracked skin. Snow remains here and there, but it is still too early in the season for it to moisten the soil. Magnificent mountains extend in all directions.

The December 2003 deployment of Self-Defense Force troops to Iraq by the Koizumi administration took Japan closer to the practical repudiation of the non-belligerancy principle of Article 9 than any prior move in its more than half-century of existence. Of course, as the very existence of “self-defense forces” attests, Article 9 had already been subjected to considerable abuse by interpretation, virtually since inception. Nevertheless, the deployment to Samawah was controversial. It stirred visible opposition in the beginning even though it soon faded, at least from public view. Thus is a status quo created.

In the spring of 2004, five Japanese civilians doing volunteer aid and media work in Iraq were kidnapped, threatened and released unharmed by Iraqi militant groups in two separate, overlapping incidents lasting just over one week. On their return to Japan (16 April 2004), the hostages appeared defensively solemn, having been harshly criticized and shamed for their effrontery to travel to a government-declared danger zone and undertake anti-war actions perceived as critical of both the Japanese and U.S. presence in Iraq. More than the abductions themselves, the inhospitable homecoming seized headlines around the world and marked one of the most searing images in Japan's controversial involvement in the American-led war.

“If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.”

Reading this beautifully written appeal from the Afghan Peace Volunteers is like hearing, amid the drums and trumpets of war, the delicate sound of a flute. What is heartbreaking about the Afghan struggle is that none of the main contenders we hear about - the Karzai government, the U.S. military, NATO, the Taliban, al Qaeda - seems capable of hearing that sound. An eye for an eye, said Gandhi, and the whole world goes blind. A bomb for a bomb, it could be added, and the world goes deaf as well - in particular, deaf to the sound of peace. It is heartening, and a source of hope, to hear that sound coming from Afghanistan, despite everything.

[Editors’ note: The final version of this article was received just prior to the announcement of Fukuda Yasuo's resignation as Prime Minister. Tanter comments: Fukuda's resignation will change nothing in the underlying domestic and alliance strains that lead to his decision to resign. The next Liberal Democratic Party leader, whether Aso Taro, Koike Yuriko, or someone else, will face the same limitations, and the same demands on military policy, but with even more diminished political resources and room for maneuvre. If the LDP moves to a general election following the selection of a new Prime Minister, the Democratic Party of Japan would be under severe pressure, on the one hand, from domestic sources to make good on its criticism of the Indian Ocean deployment, and on the other, from the United States, to recognize US understandings of Japan's global responsibilities - and maintain the deployment - possibly as the price of power.]

We have recently crossed the five-year mark since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush used the occasion to triumphantly declare that, due to his decision to invade, ‘the world is better, and the United States of America is safer.’

In Japan, the Asahi Shinbun appears virtually alone in using this occasion to reflect upon the Iraq War. For all its pro-war cheerleading, the Yomiuri Shinbun did not even see fit to produce an English-language editorial on the subject. The Foreign Ministry offered no statement either. Iraq shattered and dying? Hmm, that's too bad – just so long as it doesn't die on the streets of Tokyo.

We have recently crossed the five-year mark since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush used the occasion to triumphantly declare that, due to his decision to invade, ‘the world is better, and the United States of America is safer.’

In Japan, the Asahi Shinbun appears virtually alone in using this occasion to reflect upon the Iraq War. For all its pro-war cheerleading, the Yomiuri Shinbun did not even see fit to produce an English-language editorial on the subject. The Foreign Ministry offered no statement either. Iraq shattered and dying? Hmm, that's too bad – just so long as it doesn't die on the streets of Tokyo.

Five years ago Thursday (Japan time), U.S. bombers started pounding Iraq as part of an invasion force intended to topple Saddam Hussein, an action that would eventually embroil Japan. Yet, key questions remain unanswered over Tokyo's decision to dispatch Self-Defense Forces to the war-torn nation. Why did Japan feel so strongly that it had to support the U.S.-led invasion by sending SDF troops? What was its significance, justification and repercussions?

Five years have elapsed since the start of the Iraq war, but there are people who are still trying to justify this historic blunder.

President George W. Bush asserted in his State of the Union address in late January that ‘high-profile terrorist attacks are down.’ He went on: ‘The Iraqis still have a distance to travel. But after decades of dictatorship and the pain of sectarian violence, reconciliation is taking place – and the Iraqi people are taking control of their future.’

Kyodo News on March 29 produced a follow-up piece on GSDF reconstruction projects in Samawa. For the entire period that the GSDF was stationed in its base near Samawa, the Koizumi Administration and its camp followers repeatedly insisted that their presence was needed there in order to carry out ‘humanitarian and reconstruction support activities.’

It is not easy to evaluate clearly the degree to which the local community in Samawa benefited from the GSDF activities. During the GSDF deployment itself, most news reports suggested that a majority of the local people were pleased to have the Japanese among them as they imagined that their presence would signal major improvements in the local economy and because the Japanese troops didn't shoot anybody. On the other hand, there was a minority – apparently affiliated with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr – who did not welcome the GSDF on the Iraqi nationalist grounds that they were allies of the American occupiers. These people fired mortars at the GSDF base and created a sense of threat, but never actually wounded any Japanese soldiers. The fact that the GSDF was able to complete their 2 1/2 years in Iraq without taking any casualties can be regarded as a success for the political supporters of the mission. They seem to have benefited from a combination of careful planning, risk-avoiding local strategies, and simple good luck.