Sha Qingqing's review of "Pro-Americanism and Anti-Americanism" | The "unconsciousness" of the "pro-Americanism" attitude in mainstream Japanese society
2024-08-20
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"Pro-Americanism and Anti-Americanism: The Political Unconsciousness of Postwar Japan", written by Toshiya Yoshimi, translated by Wang Guangtao, published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in April 2024, 224 pages, 58.00 yuan
If you take a passenger plane from the west to Tokyo, the capital of Japan, you can observe a special phenomenon whether you land at Haneda Airport or Narita Airport: when the passenger plane approaches Tokyo airspace, it will turn south or north instead of flying directly over Tokyo. Obviously, this kind of "circumventing flight" by passenger planes does not seem to be reasonable, whether from the perspective of economic benefits or time saving. In fact, the reason why passenger planes do this is mainly to avoid the "Yokotsu airspace" covering the entire western part of Tokyo.
The so-called "Yokota airspace" refers to a huge airspace controlled by the US military, spanning the western part of Tokyo, the Izu Peninsula, Nagano Prefecture, and Niigata Prefecture, with an altitude of 3,700 to 7,000 meters. The Yokota Air Base of the US military stationed in Japan is located in this airspace, and any aircraft passing through this airspace must obtain permission from the US military in advance. In contrast, the US military enjoys absolute freedom in this airspace, and in theory can even conduct any form of military exercises or actions on its own without notifying the Japanese government. Therefore, passenger planes taking off and landing from Narita or Haneda have to avoid this airspace and can only detour.
Since Japan's defeat and surrender, the US military has actually managed the airspace of Japan. In 1952, the "San Francisco Peace Treaty" was signed, and Japan restored its sovereignty, and it should have also taken back the governance of airspace in various places. However, the US military retained the governance of many airspaces, including the Yokota airspace, in the name of "temporary measures" on the grounds that "Japan's control facilities and personnel are not yet ready." After 1975, according to the agreement of the Japan-US Joint Commission, the US military's governance rights continued to be recognized. In any country, if more than half of the sky over its capital is controlled by foreign troops (even allies), it would not be a normal state. However, in the sixty or seventy years since the war, "abnormal conditions" such as the Yokota airspace have continued to exist "as usual", so that ordinary Japanese people are not even aware of it. Japanese investigative journalist Hiroharu Yabe once lamented: "From a global perspective, only in Japan does such a strange thing as the 'Yokota Airspace' exist... Most bureaucrats don't know what the 'Yokota Airspace' is. The few who know don't understand why there is such an airspace above the metropolitan area." And according to the latest report by Japan's "Daily News" in April 2024, negotiations on the "return of Yokota Airspace" are actually at a standstill.
Negotiations on the return of Yokota airspace have stalled
If we observe the US-Japan relations or the attitude of Japanese society towards the US over a long period of time after the war, the situation in the "Yokotsu airspace" happens to be a very appropriate metaphor: the abnormal state continues in a daily way, and the vast majority of Japanese people treat it as air. The "treating it as air" here can be understood as "not seeing this almost transparent major problem" or treating the various actual forms of the US presence in Japan as "air". Most people may attribute this almost extreme "pro-American" situation to the political and social transformation of Japan by the United States after World War II and its de facto long-term military control.
However, Professor Yoshimi Toshiya of the University of Tokyo clearly pointed out in his famous work "Pro-Americanism and Anti-Americanism: The Political Unconsciousness of Postwar Japan" that "the pro-American consciousness of the Japanese was not formed in recent years, but was the result of more than half a century of shaping", and its earlier signs can even be traced back to the end of the shogunate in the 19th century. In Professor Yoshimi's view, it was precisely because the "black ship voyage" of the United States broke the state of isolation of the Tokugawa shogunate for more than 200 years that the Japanese regarded the United States as a symbol of "civilization and enlightenment" since the end of the shogunate. Before experiencing the "European style", the first thing Japanese society encountered was "American rain". In the chaos of the Meiji Restoration, people from different camps were also greatly influenced by the United States. Yokoi Shonan, Sakamoto Ryoma, Nakaoka Shintaro, who pursued republican politics, and even Enomoto Takeaki, who established the so-called "Ezo Republic", all regarded the American social system and national system as a model.
After entering the 20th century, the influence of the United States on Japanese society also extended to the field of popular culture. Hollywood movies, jazz music, and baseball, which the Japanese later regarded as the "national sport", were all imported from across the Pacific. In other words, before World War II, various cultural symbols of the United States were no longer unfamiliar to Japan, and were even internalized as part of its own culture and life. Even during the militarist era, American culture was regarded as heresy and eliminated, but it was actually just a conservative episode of nationalism. Yoshimi Toshiya even believes that the extreme anti-Americanism of the militarist era was actually an "alternative manifestation" of the great influence of the United States on Japan.
After World War II, the pro-Americanism of Japanese society was not only due to occupation and transformation, but also had its historical context, rather than happening suddenly overnight. What Yoshimi Toshiya wants to emphasize is that Japan's "cultural gaze" on civilization, imperialism and the United States has continued from before the war to after the war. In the book "Pro-Americanism and Anti-Americanism", the author does not want to define "pro-Americanism" or "anti-Americanism" in theory, but hopes to sort out and re-examine through this book how the "pro-Americanism" attitude of mainstream Japanese society has become "unconscious", and how the image of "America" has evolved in the minds of the Japanese since the end of the shogunate.
For postwar Japanese society, since the mid-1950s, "the military violence of the United States has gradually retreated from the daily lives of the Japanese, while at the same time it has captured the hearts of the Japanese people more deeply from another level." This level is actually the growing prosperity of American popular culture, from music, movies to clothing, from American lifestyle to American home appliances. When visiting various Japanese families, Ezra Vogel, who conducted field research in Japan, and his wife at the time, noticed that Japanese housewives had a strong interest in the various electrical appliances and living habits commonly found in American families. Yoshimi believes that this phenomenon makes "America" as a symbol more concrete in the minds of the Japanese, and then "penetrates into their own roles and identity. In other words, while the symbols of the postwar United States are being indirectly, mediatized, and impressionized," they are also being internalized by the Japanese. This internalization process is so powerful that even when the "anti-security struggle" was rising and falling in the 1950s and 1960s, "pro-Americanism" was still the mainstream sentiment in Japanese society. For example, around 1960, when the "anti-security movement" was in full swing, the proportion of people who "liked" the United States was still 47.4%, while those who "hated" the United States were only 5.9%. Another example is that Professor Yoshimi wrote this book more than 20 years ago, when the United States was launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of the "war on terror". A wave of "anti-American" public opinion arose worldwide. And he noticed that in this wave of "anti-American" waves, the Japanese's favorable impression of the United States was almost unaffected.
Of course, although the "violent military side of the United States has gradually retreated from the daily lives of the Japanese", the most important part of the US-Japan relationship during the Cold War and the current post-Cold War era is still the so-called "US-Japan security system". Under the leadership of the long-term stable pro-American consciousness after the war, Japanese society will also attribute the long-term economic prosperity to the military protection of the United States. This cognition directly gives the legitimacy and rationality to the US stationing troops in Japan, including the "abnormal state" such as the "Yokota airspace", which is also accepted frankly. However, although the so-called "violent military side of the United States" seems to have disappeared from the vision of most ordinary Japanese, it has taken root in this country in a more secretive and direct way. In addition, for the Japanese people in Okinawa and other similar areas who have suffered greatly from US military bases, this "military violence" has become a part of their daily life that they have to endure.
In postwar Japan, "anti-Americanism" naturally also exists, and its spectrum can extend from left-wing groups to right-wing elements. Their motivations and positions vary. They can be based on class struggle against imperialism, such as the student movement that swept across Japan in the 1960s; they can also be based on nationalist self-indulgence, such as Yukio Mishima's "suicide"; or they can simply be based on dissatisfaction and grievances that the United States has not treated Japan equally, such as Shintaro Ishihara's "Japan Can Say No". In Professor Yoshimi's view, many of the so-called "anti-Americanism" are actually just another manifestation of "pro-Americanism". Therefore, it is not surprising that some seemingly "anti-American" figures began to move closer to the United States in their later years - they just revealed their "essence".
In comparison, Yoshimi Toshiya seems to be more in favor of the views of Tsurumi Shunsuke and others, that is, their "anti-Americanism" is essentially a resistance to the imperialist order in Asia - except that during the Cold War, this imperialist order happened to be dominated by the United States. In other words, Professor Yoshimi hopes that Japanese society can break out of the simple binary thinking mode of "pro-American" or "anti-American". Chinese readers can re-examine the post-war US-Japan relations and the changes in Japanese social thought through the analytical perspective provided by Professor Yoshimi in this book, which can also help us grasp the future development trend of Japanese society.
Sha Qingqing
(This article is from The Paper. For more original information, please download the "The Paper" APP)
