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Op-Ed
Editorial: A Failure of Nerve on Futenma
Saturday, May 22, 2010
US Marine Airbase at Futenma
Tokyo -- The conservative narrative on the eight-month US-Japan Futenma struggle is now largely in place: Yukio Hatoyama and the DPJ, unaccustomed to responsibility and wishing too strongly to distinguish their policies from their predecessors, adopted an unrealistic policy on the relocation of the US Marine base at Futenma, and they paid the inevitable price for their lack of judgment.
Just by reading the sentence above you can save yourself a lot of time in reading a dozen or more conservative opinion articles that are circulating at the moment. And because these articles have institutional legitimacy and a very wide distribution network, this is the narrative that will prevail as far as most casual observers are concerned.
The view is self-serving, but it does have certain elements of truth that help provide it with its plausibility.
There is little doubt, for example, that Hatoyama's failure was connected to his inexperience and lack of vision. It is also true that the DPJ adopted a lot of its policies in the 2007-to-2009 period not out of any united ideological conviction, but in order to harass the LDP governments of those times.
However, even if many of the DPJ leaders themselves were merely engaging in a form of populism, it is, nevertheless, the political platform upon which they scored their crushing Lower House victory in August 2009, and thus they have a democratic responsibility to uphold it.
Certainly in Okinawa, ALL of the anti-base candidates won their elections based on Hatoyama’s promise that the Henoko plan would be rejected and the US Marines would be moved out of the southernmost prefecture.
And there are at least two other major problems with the conservative narrative.
Firstly, the last eight months have revealed, if nothing else, that the large majority of the people of Okinawa do not welcome the US forces stationed on their islands. To the extent that the bases were previously tolerated, this was mostly due to the sense that Okinawa was simply too small and weak to resist the power of both Tokyo and Washington, and that they ought to make the best of a bad situation.
Secondly, the Obama administration's "victory" over Hatoyama is going to carry a long-term political price that is currently difficult to measure, but is certainly going to manifest itself over time.
What if there is massive civil disobedience or even violence by those resisting the destruction of Henoko beach and the habitat of the endangered dugong? In whose hands would the real responsibility lay?
What happens when the next rape of an Okinawan occurs? What happens when the next helicopter crashes onto an urban area? Isn't the situation now like dry tinder, just waiting for a spark?
Who will take responsibility for the tragedies that may follow?
Additionally, won't there be many Japanese who will long remember how Washington humiliated their government over this issue? What happens in the future when some of these people find their way into the corridors of power in Tokyo? Do people in Washington really think that all Japanese are simply going to forget this whole episode?
Indeed, when the questions are considered more broadly—and particularly in the light of the Okinawan people's historical experience -- Hatoyama's real failure was that he was too weak and indecisive to carry out the policies that should have been carried out.
He should have stood up to the Pentagon and remained firm.
A democratic government is not wrong to reflect the better values and opinions of its own people, and if Washington can no longer understand this basic principle, then it deserves no one's loyalty.
Hatoyama and the DPJ leadership lost the political battle because they ultimately submitted to the Militarist Fear Machine, which encourages everyone to distrust their neighbors and to prepare for ever-more farfetched scenarios of foreign military threat.
The Machine cannot survive and grow without the generation of such fear, and the result of submitting to its dark prophecies is often to make their fulfillment much more likely, to the general misfortune of humanity.
Hatoyama's was not a failure of realism -- it was a failure of nerve.
PanOrient News
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