Published on December 8, 2019.
This chapter introduces Ezaki Michio’s essay “Is Japan a ‘Reliable Ally’ for the United States?” published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
It discusses the Trump administration’s hardline policy toward China, the Abe administration’s appeasement of China, America’s “strong Japan” and “weak Japan” factions, the Nixon Shock, the Chinese Communist Party’s nuclear armament, Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles, the argument for Japan’s nuclear armament, and the essence of the Japan-U.S. alliance.

December 8, 2019.
Amid the fact that America was becoming unable to play the role of “world policeman,” Nixon thought that in order to counter the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, Japan too should be made nuclear-armed.
Readers who know that my arguments have been almost 100 percent on target must immediately head to the nearest bookstore to buy this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
The following is from an essay by Mr. Ezaki Michio, published on page 82 under the title “Is Japan a ‘Reliable Ally’ for the United States?”
He too is now one of the most spirited and genuine scholars.
He is a precious scholar for the Japanese nation.
He alone is raising the market value of Kyushu University.
A conspicuous posture of appeasement toward China.
Is it truly acceptable to invite Xi Jinping, President of the Chinese Communist Party government, as a state guest next spring?
Such doubts are beginning to be voiced here and there.
On November 7, at the House of Councillors Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense, former Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Defense Hiroshi Yamada of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party pointed out, “While the detention of Japanese nationals has not been resolved and cases of territorial sea incursions are tending to increase, can we really say that Japan-China relations have ‘completely returned to a normal track’?”
But Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi rebutted, “Japan and China have become able to hold dialogue at a different level than before, and the relationship has completely returned to normal.
There are issues in the areas of security and the detention of Japanese nationals, but in order to deal with them appropriately, efforts are needed to hold talks at various levels and resolve them.”
The Abe administration has cooperated with the Trump administration on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, missiles, and the abduction issue, but now its posture of appeasement toward China is conspicuous.
Will things really be all right as they are?
After all, President Trump, in the National Security Strategy released after the inauguration of his administration, positioned China and Russia as “revisionist powers,” in other words as “enemies,” making his administration a “dragon slayer,” that is, a hardline administration toward China.
In fact, in the National Defense Strategy 2018 as well, the Trump administration redefined “great power competition,” with China in mind, as the greatest threat, and while earnestly expanding the military by increasing military spending by about 7 trillion yen every year, it launched a trade war against China and is trying to weaken the Chinese economy thoroughly.
Furthermore, out of concern that Chinese investment in the United States could become a security threat, it has successively enacted legislation to protect American technology from China, including strengthening the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS, to review foreign investment.
In this way, the United States and China are now engaged in fierce struggles in the fields of “diplomacy,” “military affairs,” “economics,” and “intelligence,” including the struggle over intellectual property.
Caught between this U.S.-China confrontation, the Abe administration has promoted the “Indo-Pacific Strategy” in opposition to China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, seeking to bring India and ASEAN countries to its side, and it has been highly evaluated by the Trump administration.
However, the Abe administration is in step with the Trump administration mainly only in diplomacy.
In military affairs, although the Trump administration is asking allies to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, Japan’s defense spending remains at 1.1 percent of GDP.
In the economic sphere as well, Japan should have played the role of pulling the world economy, which might stagnate because of the U.S.-China trade war, and from the Trump administration’s point of view, it wanted Japan to buy more American agricultural products and the like.
Yet the Abe administration raised the consumption tax to 10 percent this October, and the Japanese economy is again heading toward stagnation.
In the field of intelligence, although international exchanges by the Self-Defense Forces have developed dramatically, legislative measures concerning the protection of intellectual property to protect Japanese technology from Chinese industrial spies have made almost no progress.
From the Trump administration’s point of view, in policy toward China, Japan today is in no condition to be called a “reliable ally.”
The troublesome point is that the discrepancy over the posture toward China will not merely make the Japan-U.S. alliance awkward.
After all, America is a genius at mistaking enemies for friends.
It has before chosen to ally itself with “useful enemies” rather than “unreliable allies.”
It goes without saying that America is not monolithic.
When divided by policy toward Japan, there are the following two political forces.
One is the “weak Japan faction,” which says, “A strong Japan will bring turmoil to Asia and should therefore be watched with caution.”
They believe that stability in Asia should be maintained through cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party government, and this tendency is strong among the left wing of the Democratic Party as well as among senior officials in the State Department.
The other is the “strong Japan faction,” which says, “In order to counter China’s military rise, we should support a strong Japan.”
The U.S. military, which faces the Chinese military threat, and conservatives who are fighting left-wing family-destroying policies inside America are, if anything, in this camp.
And it was Trump who was elected president with the support of this “strong Japan faction.”
“The Pacific Was About to Become a Red Sea.”
However, if one asks whether we can feel secure because Trump became president with the support of the “strong Japan faction,” history proves that this is not the case.
Regrettably, during the presidency of a “strong Japan faction” president, America once joined hands with the Chinese Communist Party and implemented a policy of containing Japan.
And while it is true that China’s operations toward the United States were skillful, the problem lay even more with Japan itself.
That U.S.-China collusion occurred on February 21, 1972, when Republican President Richard Nixon visited China for the first time, met with Chairman Mao Zedong and others, and transformed U.S.-China relations from confrontation to reconciliation.
After World War II, it was the Chinese Communist Party regime that defeated the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist government that America had been supporting.
In the Korean War that began in June 1950, America also fought China behind North Korea, and suffered about 50,000 war dead.
After that as well, America earnestly supported Taiwan, led by Chiang Kai-shek, which was confronting the Chinese Communist Party, and the United States and China were mortal enemies.
And yet Nixon joined hands with the hated enemy state, the Chinese Communist Party.
The international community was astonished, and it was called the “Nixon Shock.”
What was the reason for this?
To understand it, one must understand the international situation at the time.
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, which had founded the People’s Republic of China with the backing of the Soviet Union, continued “exporting revolution” in order to communize surrounding countries.
In 1956, it concluded a trade agreement with Cambodia, and in January 1960, it concluded a mutual nonaggression treaty with Burma, now Myanmar.
In December of the same year, with Chinese support, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam began armed attacks against the South Vietnamese government.
America, preoccupied with responding to the situations in Europe and the Middle East, became aware of the penetration of communist forces into Southeast Asia and felt a strong sense of crisis.
In May 1961, U.S. Vice President Johnson, who had toured Southeast Asia, told Democratic President Kennedy, “We must begin the fight against communism in Southeast Asia with strength and determination.
Otherwise America will inevitably have to abandon the Pacific and take up defense on its own homeland,” and he declared that if communism swept across Southeast Asia, “the security of the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan will be lost, and the vast Pacific will become a red sea,” Michael Schaller, What Was “the Japan-U.S. Relationship”?, Soshisha.
However, this sense of crisis was not conveyed to the Japanese government.
In December 1962, President Kennedy, visiting Japan, gave a speech at the Joint Japan-U.S. Committee on Trade and Economic Affairs, saying, “The important problem we face today is the growth of communist forces in China, and how to restrain the expansion of communism in Asia,” and he asked Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda and others present for their opinions, saying, “What can Japan and the United States do as allies, and what role can we play to prevent communist domination of Asia?”
In response, Vice Foreign Minister Ryuji Takeuchi merely answered, “Japan has fought China twice, but the majority of Japanese think of themselves as aggressors,” the aforementioned book.
The situation worsened further in October 1964, when China became a possessor of atomic bombs.
Indonesian President Sukarno, who was receiving military aid from China and leaning toward communism, delivered a speech at the independence ceremony on August 17 of the following year, 1965, saying, “Even if we create an anti-imperialist axis of Jakarta, Phnom Penh, Hanoi, Beijing, and Pyongyang, this is not imaginary.
This axis is a real one, created by the course of history itself,” and received applause from Zhou Enlai, who was present.
A huge communist united front of Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and North Korea was beginning to appear in Asia.
America, Unable to Be the “World Policeman.”
On June 17, 1967, following the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party government also conducted a hydrogen bomb test and was dramatically enhancing its nuclear attack capability.
Meanwhile, America was exhausted by its military intervention in the Vietnam War, and it was becoming difficult for it to fulfill its mission as the “world policeman.”
In October of that year, presidential candidate Richard Nixon published an essay titled “Asia After Viet Nam” in the autumn issue of the foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs.
In this essay, Nixon argued that since the role America would play as the world policeman would be limited from then on, allies needed to make greater efforts to defend themselves from “China’s ambitions.”
Moreover, in this essay, Nixon intended to tolerate Japan’s nuclear armament.
The historian Michael Schaller points out the following.
“In this essay, Nixon lamented Japan’s constitutional restraints on rearmament and urged the Japanese government to behave like a great power, and that included possession of nuclear weapons.
According to Nixon’s biographer Stephen Ambrose, in the biography, the relevant passage in the first draft had stated that ‘Nixon urged Japan to expand its forces “without nuclear weapons,”’ but after Eisenhower read the draft and told Nixon that Japan wanted to have nuclear capability of its own, Nixon decided to remove the phrase ‘without nuclear weapons,’” the aforementioned book.
Following the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party also possessed nuclear weapons and was plotting the communization of Asia.
For Nixon, it seems that if Japan were to undertake constitutional revision and intended to fight the communist forces together with America, he was considering recognizing Japan’s nuclear armament.
President Nixon, Who Recommended Nuclear Armament to Japan.
Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai of the Chinese Communist Party, who had analyzed the Nixon essay in detail, seem to have understood this well.
And probably not by coincidence, in Japan, movements to prohibit nuclear armament became active.
On December 8, two months after the Nixon essay appeared, Komeito lawmaker Yoshikatsu Takeiri, who was working for Japan-China friendship, asked in the Diet that the Three Non-Nuclear Principles be clarified: not to manufacture nuclear fuel or nuclear waste, not to equip oneself with them, and not to bring them in.
Three days later, on the 11th, this time Socialist Party Chairman Tomomi Narita pursued the issue of bringing nuclear weapons into the Ogasawara Islands, and Prime Minister Eisaku Sato for the first time presented the Three Non-Nuclear Principles of “not possessing, not producing, and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons.”
In March of the following year, 1968, U.S. President Johnson announced that he would not run in the next presidential election and that bombing of Vietnam would be halted, and a shock ran through Asian countries that “America may withdraw from Asia.”
In November of the following year, 1969, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato visited the United States and announced in a joint statement with President Nixon that they had “agreed on the return of Okinawa during 1972.”
According to historian Michael Schaller, during this Sato-Nixon meeting, President Nixon “urged that the nuclear weapons in Okinawa be changed from American-made ones to Japanese-made ones.”
Amid the fact that America was becoming unable to play the role of “world policeman,” Nixon thought that in order to counter the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, Japan too should be made nuclear-armed.
The Nixon administration’s remarks tolerating “nuclear armament” continued thereafter.
In July 1971, “both publicly and in private discussions, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who visited Tokyo, harshly criticized the Japanese demand for the removal of nuclear weapons from Okinawa, and argued that, in exchange for America limiting its security efforts, Japan should provide military aid funds to Southeast Asian countries, strengthen its own military capabilities, and begin deployment of anti-ballistic missiles to prepare for a future Chinese threat.
He and his subordinates hinted that the U.S. government favored Japan’s nuclear armament,” the aforementioned book.
Perhaps sensing these intentions of the Nixon administration, in August 1971, in an interview with an American reporter, Zhou Enlai warned that Nixon’s policy of encouraging Japan’s rearmament in parallel with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam was encouraging the revival of Japanese militarism.
Perhaps in light of these Chinese intentions, in November 1971, during Diet deliberations on the Okinawa Reversion Agreement, Komeito suddenly proposed a Diet resolution on the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles,” and the Three Non-Nuclear Principles were elevated to a national policy.
In January of the following year, 1972, President Nixon told Prime Minister Sato, who had again visited the United States, that Japan should play not only an economic role but also a military role in Asia, and again said that Japan should reconsider its stance toward nuclear weapons, but Prime Minister Sato had no choice but to explain that “the overwhelming majority of Japan’s Diet and people oppose nuclear weapons.”
Partly due to the influence of China’s operations toward Japan, movements such as the movement against atomic and hydrogen bombs had risen in Japan, and not only the Socialist Party and Komeito, but also former Foreign Minister Takeo Miki of the same Liberal Democratic Party, had come to advocate the Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
Nixon, having learned that Japan had no will to fight together with America, decided to join hands with the Chinese Communist Party in order to fight the Soviet threat.
The Chinese Communist Party, which at the time was deepening its confrontation with the Soviet Union, also accepted Nixon’s proposal and tried to draw economic cooperation from America.
It was Japan itself, which refused to fight together with America, that produced the U.S.-China collusion known as the “Nixon Shock.”
This essay continues.