"Koizumi both benefits from and plays his part in feeding the national paranoia. His controversial Yasukuni visits and ambiguous statements about Japan's militaristic past confirm his nationalism, while his devotion to George Bush shows a reassuring (to Washington) alliance-orientation. However, this same Koizumi has also adopted the cause of normalization of relations with North Korea as his major political commitment, alone of world political leaders visiting Kim Jong Il twice, on his own initiative and with at best the reluctant consent of Washington. He could do this with impunity because his fidelity to Washington seemed beyond doubt and because (from January 2004) the boots of the Japanese troops were firmly planted on the ground in Iraq and multi-billion dollar Japanese financial support was propping up the Bush world. Yet on this issue Koizumi was plainly flying his own kite."
"Alone among Western leaders, he has visited North Korean leader Kim Jong Il twice (2002 and 2004), after their second meeting declaring Kim mild-mannered and cheerful," "very smart," and "quick to make jokes"[76] -- in other words someone to do business with. Koizumi's pledge to restore trust between Japan and North Korea, so that "abnormal relations can be normalized, hostile relations turned to friendly relations, and confrontation to cooperation,"[77] and to strive to normalize relations within his remaining two years of office, if possible within a single year,[78] contrasted sharply with the view of George W. Bush, who has declared that he "loathes" Kim and finds him "evil," or of Vice-President Cheney, who says that "you do not negotiate with evil, you defeat it."[79] In his talks with Kim Jong Il Koizumi seems to have ignored the official US position of CVID (complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament), indeed, afterwards he sounded rather like Kim Jong Il's messenger, pressing the Dear Leader's suit for direct talks with the US president. With Japan's voice added to the Chinese, Russian and South Korean calls for a realistic policy to try to solve the North Korean question, the US had no choice but to abandon its hard line stance and for the first time present elements of a "roadmap" for settlement. The alternative was unthinkable: the US either sitting in a minority of one at the six-sided Beijing table or launching an attack. Koizumi's absolute fidelity on Iraq and other fronts earned him the freedom of maneuver on North Korea."
McCormack doesn't mention that Koizumi bent over backwards, flying in the face of the Japanese Far Right, in engineering the releases of the Japanese "kidnapees", including fronting for an American deserter wanted by the Pentagon who had married one of them.
What all these contradictions represent is the shifting gravitational axis of the various fractions of the Japanese bourgeoisie. The traditionally dominant fraction - the Toyotas, Sonys, Mitsubishis and their banking buddies - oriented towards maintaining access to the American export market, are in decline. The new China-oriented fractions are in the ascendent, and Koizumi's Korea policy shows it. But overall the Koizumi government will likely go down as a merely transitional tightrope-walker between the two.
And somebody beat me to the "Manchukuo" analogy with Iraq:
"One influential thinker describes the US operations in Iraq as an aggressive war comparable to Japan's invasion of China that started in 1931. Both, he argued, were characterized by defiance of international society and the belief that military superiority would be decisive. In his view, Iraq was America's Manchukuo, a base from which to try to transform the Middle East as Japan had once thought to transform the whole of China, and just as likely to mark the beginnings of imperial decline.[86]"
It figures, though, that this commentator has a Korean name. The most objective observers of Japanese affairs in Asia are almost always Koreans. One need not wonder why too hard...
A treat off a too often dull Znet:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=17&ItemID=6372%20
If so inclined as I am, one can freely dispense with the use of terms such as "empire" and "civil society" as purely ideological inconveniences. Just read around them. Heavily footnoted.
-Brad Mayer
PS: "Bakufumatsu" = end time of the Tokugawa Shogunate, mid 19th century to 1868. "Bakufu" = 'tent government', i.e., military government, which I think better describes the US global role - the (increasingly tattered) "big tent", the global Pentagon Bakufu - rather than "empire", with all of the modern connatations of a deeper Roman-style economic-socio-cultural integration borne by this word. (The late Roman imperialist Republic was, therefore, also a bakufu government, but more like the Kamakura 'dual-power' Bakufu before 1333). Ironically, the Latin original, "imperiator" = "commander", exactly matches the Japanese "shougun" = "commander of the army", which though, was never confounded with the role of "tennou" in historic Japan. And despite the present Christian-Judiac fundamentalist drive towards sacrilization of "America's role", neither will the world mistake the earthly American Bakufu for the Imperial Divine.
Welcome to our very own American Bakufumatsu time.