EDITORIAL
Monday, March 4, 2002
U.S. furthers fraud of
Japanese reform
By STEVEN C. CLEMONS
Special to The Japan Times
WASHINGTON -- Why should Goldman Sachs and U.S. President George W. Bush
expect Japan to reconcile its financial accounts and nonperforming loans
when it is clear that Japan's political architecture inhibits
accountability on any front, particularly in matters of Japan's historical
memory?
Official Japan cannot bring itself to apologize to the "comfort
women" forced to act as sex slaves for Japan's soldiers; it cannot
overcome by leadership or regulation the fundamental involvement of the
yakuza and corruption-ridden political machines that have devastated the
health of Japan's economy; and it cannot apologize to the American prisoners
of war that Mitsui and Mitsubishi used as slave labor.
One key reason why Japan does not reconcile its past with the present,
either in finance or in historical matters, is that the United States has
at various times turned a blind eye to, permitted, encouraged and even
designed this system of structural fraud and unaccountability.
In many ways, Japan is Enron, and Bush is Arthur Andersen. When Bush,
during his recent trip to Tokyo, stated that he had looked Koizumi in the
eye and saw a bold reformer, and that the U.S. government had full faith
and confidence in Koizumi to pull off a set of Herculean and probably
impossible economic and financial reforms, Bush was merely furthering the
fraud.
Similarly, the U.S. State Department has for years blocked the release
of certain papers related to deals cut among nations on the eve of the 1951
San Francisco Treaty. Because of pending lawsuits in both the California
and federal court system brought by POWs seeking damages and apologies from
Japanese firms that enslaved them, these old materials -- some of which
remain classified -- have a fundamental bearing on contemporary issues.
Using as an excuse a "fear of biasing pending legal cases," the
State Department has refused to comply with the U.S. government's own
instructions, through the so-called Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial
Government Records Interagency Working Group, to fully disclose American
archives on the San Francisco Treaty.
The law requires the State Department to declassify this material, yet
it is failing to do so. The evidence should be the evidence, and courts
should be the arena where challenger and defender come to a legally binding
solution.
In September 2001, Congress, by votes of 395-33 in the House and 58-34
in the Senate, ordered the State Department to stop interfering in the
POWs' efforts to obtain relief through the judicial process. But the White
House intervened to subvert this congressional action at the level of the
joint House-Senate conference to reconcile the different versions of the
spending bill to which these instructions were amended. Only five times in
U.S. congressional history since 1789 has a provision that was debated,
voted on and passed in both house of Congress disappeared in the conference
process of reconciling House and Senate versions of a bill.
The Bush administration engineered an insertion into the conference
report that reads this "provision would be an impediment to America's
effort to build a broad coalition against terror." The staffers of the
Commerce-Justice-State Appropriations Committee, who worry about funding
and not U.S.-Japan affairs, were unwilling to argue with White House and
State Department emissaries. They were led to believe that Japan would not
cooperate with America in the war against terror if the provision was not
dropped. One staffer stated that they were told by high-level authorities
that there was a "quid pro quo" involved and that Japan had
threatened to withhold cooperation in the antiterror effort if the POW provision
was not dropped.
The problem is that Japan could never have made such a threat because it
is ludicrous. The Japanese government and public understand that Japan's
contributions to the antiterror war are politically important but
substantively trivial. It is worth recalling that Japan actually
contributed $13 billion to help pay for the Persian Gulf War. It was the
only nation on the planet to tax its public to support that effort. But the
current U.S. administration regards this as a less significant contribution
than passage of Japan's proposed antiterror legislation, which is mostly
cosmetic in substance.
It seems clear that the State Department and White House National
Security Council staff actually invented the quid pro quo excuse in order
to prevent exposure of the long-term manipulation by the U.S. of the
historical record. Even though I would have disagreed with the result,
simply stating in the conference report that "this provision is not in
the American national interest" would have been more honorable and
accurate.
Regrettably, the POWs and those struggling to get Japan to face its past
and to adopt some mechanism by which it can be more mature and honest about
these historical issues have no choice but to take on their own government.
U.S. policies are the root cause of Japan's intransigence over issues of
war memory and just compensation. Economic and historical reform in Japan
must start in America.
Steven C. Clemons is executive vice president of the New America Foundation,
a centrist public policy institution in Washington, D.C.
The Japan Times: March 4, 2002
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