Originally posted on July 4, 2019.
This piece was written in response to “Henken Jizai,” Masayuki Takayama’s renowned column titled “Hatred Has Vanished,” published in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
Using Trump’s remark as a starting point, it discusses Japan’s need for nuclear armament and self-defense, de Gaulle’s strategy of all-direction deterrence, and the transformation of America’s view of Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, arguing that the time has come for Japan to possess the resolve to defend itself.
Through Takayama’s historical perspective and civilizational outlook, it also sharply examines the true nature of the postwar constitution and the state compensation framework imposed upon Japan.

2019-07-04
As for Trump’s remark mentioned in this essay as well, from the very instant I heard that news, I had thought that Trump ought to say something like the following.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s famous column “Henken Jizai,” published today in Shukan Shincho under the title “Hatred Has Vanished.”
I want Alexis Dudden to be made to read this essay too before anyone else.
At the same time, as for Trump’s remark mentioned in this essay as well, from the very instant I heard that news, I had thought that Trump ought to say something like the following.
Since a dictatorship that is not only nuclear-armed but also an anti-Japan state does not hide its intention to invade or attack Japan,
it is only natural that Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons and deal with this.
A country should defend itself, and Japan, moreover, is a great power.
At the same time, I immediately recalled de Gaulle’s words when he decided on nuclear armament.
By the “First Military Equipment Plan Law” enacted in December of that year, the aim was to bring into service one wing of Mirage IV strategic bombers, the principal means of nuclear delivery, and to produce surface-to-surface medium-range missiles.
“It will no longer be an army of millions lacking heavy artillery, as in 1914, nor an army without airplanes and tanks, as in 1940.”
The strengthening of a powerful nuclear force aims at enhancing “deterrence” by making the other side calculate that the losses and damage from nuclear retaliatory force would be far greater than any gain from invading French territory, and that deterrent, without assuming any hypothetical enemy nation such as the Soviet Union, has become France’s official strategy to this day as an “all-direction deterrence (defense) strategy,” that is, one designed to cope with the possibility of invasion from any direction, a strategy adopted by de Gaulle in 1967.
In the nuclear age, all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union is suicidal, and unless its vital interests are threatened, there is a high possibility that America may strike a backroom deal with the Soviet Union concerning Europe (Ureshino, Biography of de Gaulle).
Western Europe cannot rely on American defense.
In other words, “military alliances have become outdated.
A nation cannot place complete trust in any foreign country.”
“A nation without nuclear weapons has no choice but to submit to the will of those that possess them.”
“France’s possession of the hydrogen bomb is the only way to counter the threat of invasion, and it is what guarantees France’s independence.”
Of course, the quantity of nuclear weapons does not come close to that of the United States or the Soviet Union, but “there is no absolute value in quantity.
Whether an individual or a nation, one dies only once, and if one possesses one’s own nuclear deterrent and has the resolve to inflict a fatal blow on an invader, then both sides are in the same position.”
In an April 1965 speech, de Gaulle declared, “I reject having France’s national defense and economy absorbed into the Atlantic Alliance that depends on American weapons, economy, and policy.
Maintaining an independent nuclear force is not something excessively costly.
NATO ultimately leaves France in only a supplementary role and does not truly defend France.”
What do you think.
This is Masayuki Takayama’s essay.
America, which opened up the mysterious country of Japan, a country that even appears in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, was greatly proud of that.
Japan was always invited to expositions, and newspapers reported its exquisite crafts and artisan skills as if boasting of their own achievements.
The words of the female critic Marietta Horne of that time, “Japan is strange, but completely different from the disgusting strangeness of China,” well convey that feeling.
But America’s warm gaze suddenly vanished with the Sino-Japanese War.
In that war, China possessed two state-of-the-art German-built battleships, the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, whereas Japan had not even half their size or number of ships.
The army was in much the same condition.
Once the fighting began, the world was astonished.
China’s Beiyang Fleet, with the giant Dingyuan, challenged Japan with ramming tactics, thrusting from the bow into the enemy ship’s side.
It was a form of naval battle from ancient Greece, but the Japanese navy, approaching in column formation, circled to the right of the enemy fleet and sank the ships one by one from the end.
When the Chinese ships closed in, the Japanese wove between them and poured secondary-gun fire upon them.
Before long, the Dingyuan caught fire, and the Beiyang Fleet suffered a crushing defeat.
Admiral Ding Ruchang drank raw opium and killed himself.
Even more than the skill of the naval battle, what astonished the world was the way the Japanese army fought on land.
From Old Testament times onward, the form of land warfare had been that when one won, one killed enemy soldiers and enemy civilians alike, plundered, and violated women.
In fact, Chinese soldiers gouged out the eyes of captured Japanese soldiers, cut out their tongues, dismembered their limbs, and killed them.
Yet even such Chinese soldiers, if they surrendered, were not killed by the Japanese army.
There was no retaliatory slaughter, no plunder, and no rape.
The British Asia specialist Sir Henry Norman praised this noble way of fighting, saying, “The Japanese are a brave and proud people endowed with magnificent intelligence.”
Sarah Paine, a fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote in her own The Sino-Japanese War that “it was precisely because of that evaluation that Britain regarded Japan as worthy of being an ally,” leading to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.
But America received it differently.
What until yesterday it had thought of as a lovable, strange little Eastern country turned out in fact to be a people not only possessing powerful military strength but also intelligence and mercy.
Americans possessed none of those qualities.
America is a nation of commoners.
Even if aristocrats came to Ellis Island, they were made to cast off their status and, along with it, noblesse oblige.
A heart of mercy and conduct worthy of serving as an example to others were, in this new land, rather obstacles.
That is why they felt no pain in whipping black slaves.
When gold was discovered in the Cheyenne reservation of Sand Creek, they attacked the reservation while the male warriors were away and massacred all the women and children.
They considered it a matter of pride rather than shame to scalp them, cut off their ears, gouge out their genitals, and decorate their saddles with them.
When they discovered in the Japanese a people 180 degrees different from themselves, that became intense hatred.
Theodore Roosevelt regarded Japan as an enemy that should be destroyed, and from then on successive presidents devoted themselves energetically to toppling Japan.
First, in order to alienate Japan and China, they brought in large numbers of Chinese students and had them carry out boycotts of Japanese goods.
Nothing proves this more than the fact that U.S. Minister Paul Reinsch directed the May Fourth Movement.
They also had the Anglo-Japanese Alliance scrapped at the Washington Conference, and Franklin Roosevelt had Chiang Kai-shek launch war against Japan while America simultaneously cut off oil.
They made the Apache and the Cherokee fight one another, exterminated the bison, and cut off the line of sustenance.
Imitating that exactly, they finished off the weakened Japan with the atomic bomb.
After the war, in order to seal away the elegant and strong Japanese forever into the future as well, America imposed that constitution upon Japan.
One was the renunciation of military force, and the other was the State Redress Act.
They had The Asahi Shimbun stir up cries that people should extort money from the state by making accusations about drug damage, discrimination, or radiation exposure.
As a result, “squalid Japanese who love peace” have greatly increased.
Now Trump has begun talking about scrapping the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.
You were the ones who worshipped Article 9 and left yourselves defenseless of your own accord.
If you do not like it, arm yourselves.
Crude though it may be, that is profoundly meaningful.
The Japanese are no longer elegant.
If it was frank advice born of a sense of affinity, then that too is a little sad in its own way.