Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan 1965-1975

by Thomas R.H. Havens

Overview

Professor Havens analyzes the efforts of Japanese antiwar organizations to portray the war as much more than a fire across the sea" and to create new forms of activism in a country where individuals have traditionally left public issues to the authorities. This path-breaking study examines not only the methods of the protesters but the tightrope dance performed by Japanese officials forced to balance outspoken antiwar sentiment with treaty obligations to the U.S.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609850
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #491
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	342
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

Fire Across the Sea

The Vietnam War and Japan 1965â"1975

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By Thomas R. H. Havens

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05491-9

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CHAPTER 1

The War Comes to Japan

Sato Eisaku served so long as prime minister that the pundits called his leadership "the politics of waiting." As a party sultan he outlasted his top rivals Ikeda, Kono Ichiro, and Ono Banboku, whose deaths one after another in 1964–1965 left Sato in full command of the Liberal Democrats precisely when the socialists in parliament were split into two parties and the Left as a whole was stunned by political upheaval in revolutionary China. Sato, who was the younger brother of former Prime Minister Kishi, graduated from the elite law faculty of Tokyo University and became a career bureaucrat in the transportation ministry. After the war he became the protégé of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and a party loyalist to the core. His peers knew him as a master schemer who united the party through his skill at human relations, under the motto "tolerance and harmony." Sato's patience helped him survive a corruption scandal, student demonstrations, and another potential treaty crisis. Although he was often chided for inaction and his economic program was ridiculed as a "nonpolicy," Sato's perseverance allowed him to ride out the storm over his Vietnam policy, and it also produced the chief accomplishment of his career: the reversion of Okinawa on May 15, 1972.

Okinawa, China, and Vietnam

During his term of seven and one-half years, Prime Minister Sato continued Ikeda's policy of separating politics from economics. He managed to draw closer to the United States on military issues without jeopardizing Japan's trade with communist countries. Seikei bunri was popular in Japan because it helped the economy prosper. The Vietnam War was highly unpopular, but the Sato cabinet continued to support America's policies there in order to achieve two goals: 1) heading off future trade conflicts with the United States, and 2) regaining control over Okinawa. Soon after he took office on November 9, 1964, Sato tipped his hand about Vietnam. He warned that the foreign ministry was wrong in showing "a lack of determination to establish peace and freedom in Asia," adding that Southeast Asia should not "be considered only a market." Sato put the Okinawa issue to President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on January 12–13, 1965. Reversion had first been raised when Kishi met Eisenhower in 1957, and later between Ikeda and Kennedy. The Sato-Johnson communiqué of January 13 at least recognized Japan's desire to regain Okinawa and the Ogasawara (Bonin and Volcano) Islands, and the scope of the standing bi-national committee on the Ryukyus was broadened. The Sato-Johnson agreement also reaffirmed that the American military facilities on Okinawa were vital for preserving peace in the Far East. Many Japanese inferred that when tensions in Asia relaxed, Okinawa would be restored to them. The communiqué also emphasized that the Taiwan regime was the recognized government of China but Japan traded privately with the People's Republic. Finally, both countries "agreed that continued perseverance would be necessary for freedom and independence in South Vietnam." In exchange for American flexibility on Okinawa and China, Sato now seemed to be marching jowl to jowl with Johnson on the war.

Actually the prime minister's endorsement of American policies was still almost as guarded as the response of most of the other major allies. He said in January that although Japan could not constitutionally send military assistance, "I shall be happy if we can provide something more than moral support." The cabinet on January 28 gave 11,645 radio receivers to the psychological warfare ministry of the Saigon government so that citizens could listen to broadcasts from Japan — or announcements their rulers wanted them to hear. It also continued to send medical supplies and other humanitarian aid. Even though Sato defended America's intentions in January 1965 when he addressed the Diet (parliament), on other occasions he was cautious about the use of outside forces. He declared that Asian problems needed Asian solutions and that he would give Johnson some ideas. Foreign Minister Shiina traveled on to London after the Sato-Johnson talks and pointed out that "in China there is the expression 'three parts military, seven parts politics.' ... isn't the United States doing just about the opposite in Vietnam, just like the old Kwantung Army? The United States understands this, but the problem is how to put it into practice."

Both Sato and Shiina were anxious to defuse the situation. They sent Noda Uichi, a Liberal Democratic member of parliament, to Saigon in late January to see what could be done. The next month they dispatched a member of the parliamentary House of Councillors, the prominent Buddhist Otani Yoshio, to talk with South Vietnamese politicians and clerics. These emissaries found that the real problem was the political fragility of the GVN. Gen. Nguyen Khanh carried out a coup on January 27, 1965 to regain his eroding power but yielded three weeks later to Premier Phan Huy Quat, whose government lasted until June. At that point he was replaced as premier by the young air force general Nguyen Cao Ky. The opposition parties in Japan did not take these missions seriously, calling them a sop to domestic opinion. Japan was only one of many countries that tried to mediate the conflict, and its occasional peace efforts were inevitably tarred by the government's close economic and military ties to the United States.

Even though Sato had moved a few steps closer to Washington during his first months in office, he backed the war without enthusiasm and for very specific, instrumental goals: trade and autonomy. His ill-starred attempts to arrange a settlement, which were partly intended to silence a small coterie of dissidents in his own party, showed that he was determined not to be a meek hostage of American foreign policy in early 1965. Still, in spite of the prime minister's hesitation, Japan was drawn by degrees into more active support as the war widened. Speaking two decades later in the alumni club of Sato's university, the antiwar leader Oda Makoto conceded that Vietnam for Japan was a piece of tragic theater: "our country was a kind of 'forced aggressor' in the war. Because of the security treaty, Japan had to cooperate with the American policy of aggression. In this sense Japan was a victim of its alliance with that policy, but it was also an aggressor toward the small countries in Indochina."

The First Johnson Shock

"It is difficult to understand the minds of Buddhists fully if you have a Christian outlook," Prime Minister Sato told the press with considerable asperity the week after the United States began bombing North Vietnam on February 7, 1965. The aerial campaign came as a total surprise to the Japanese government, which reflexively defended its ally against a squall of censure but also said it hoped for a quick resolution of the conflict. Years later the Pentagon Papers divulged what many Japanese leaders had suspected: the Americans briefed Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand before bombing Vietnam, and they also told the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan about the initial phase of the strategy only. It is no wonder the besieged prime minister felt exasperated with the snub from Washington, which three weeks earlier had courted his cooperation on Vietnam.

Part of the reason the American bombardments shocked ordinary citizens in Japan so greatly was that before February 1965 they had taken very little interest in the war. A month or so earlier the press had begun carrying vivid accounts of the fighting, such as Omori Minoru's thirty-eight-part "Mud and Flames of Indochina" for Mainichi and Kaiko Takeshi's "Vietnam War Diary" in Shukan asahi. The photographer Okamura Akihiko published his best-selling War Report from South Vietnam in January (Minami Betonamu kara jugunki), and starting February 1 TBS television began showing a documentary on the Viet Cong by the Australian communist Wilfred Burchett. But it was the bombing campaign that created the first real public interest in the war. As the critic Owada Jiro noted, "the newspapers died with the security treaty crisis but came to life again with Vietnam."

No major paper approved of the bombing strategy. The national dailies called for peace, as did the opposition parties in the Diet. The foreign ministry at first tried to reassure the public that the air raids would not "escalate the war," but when it became obvious that they had, Shiina on February 10 called the bombardments "justified" and argued that they constituted proper self-defense. Two days later Sato said he hoped the war would not enlarge further. The government was also discomfited by the disclosure, on February 10, of a plan for joint Japanese-American military operations in South Korea if another war should break out there. The Japan Socialist Party assailed the scheme, prepared in 1963 and known as the Three Arrows Study, but Sato brushed it off as "merely a game of war on paper."

The Three Arrows Study had no real connection with Vietnam, but the furor helped to sharpen the debate in parliament over how liberally the United States could use its bases in Japan for operations in Indochina. Shiina told the budget committee of the lower house on February 14 that Vietnam was not within the Far East but that the security treaty could not be limited to the Far East alone if nearby events menaced its peace and security. Reaffirming the government's position since 1961–1962, he said that direct combat operations undertaken from bases in Japan required prior consultation but that routine supply functions did not.

The following month Shiina told the Diet that the government essentially accepted Washington's definition of the Far East and that it would not ask for prior consultation when bases in Okinawa, which was not covered by the treaty, were used for direct combat. When the Democratic Socialist representative Nagasue asked on April 7 how the Vietnam War threatened peace and security in the Far East, Shiina replied vaguely that Japan was affected by the war. Later that day at Johns Hopkins University President Johnson set forth the terms acceptable to the United States for peace and postwar development in Vietnam, a speech "welcomed" by the Japanese state.

Through this series of pronouncements, the Sato cabinet yielded to Washington's interpretations of the treaty, reneging on Kishi's promises to the Diet just five years earlier. Kishi had limited the treaty to the Far East, which he placed north of the Philippines, and he had insisted that Japan could veto American requests during advance consultations. Now the government of Japan not only took a more expansive view of the geography involved but also practically wrote off the need for prior consultation. The result was that the United States never once asked for prior consultation throughout the whole war, and none was ever held. With such a broad and ill-defined security system that might embroil Japan in an unwanted conflict, many critics said they felt less secure under the treaty than without one.

The Earliest Public Protests

The struggle in 1960 over the security treaty, which was rooted mostly in domestic political rivalries, attracted unimagined throngs but in many ways resembled the strikes and hostile urban confrontations that erupted in Japan before World War II. The public commotion over the Vietnam War after early 1965 was different: it was much smaller at first, it was mainly a challenge to the foreign policies of another country, and it often used tactics not previously seen in Japan.

Both in and out of parliament, the Old Left had condemned the American advisers in South Vietnam long before Johnson ordered the Rolling Thunder bombings in the spring of 1965. Right after the escalation began, Sohyo organized a rally against the war on February 26 in Tokyo, and together with another labor federation, Churitsu Roren, it sponsored a meeting there on March 27 to demand that the United States withdraw. Two days later Gensuikyo sent a delegation to the American embassy to deliver a note of protest to Johnson.

Apart from labor, the antibomb groups, and the opposition parties, the first widely reported public dissent came on February 13, 1965, when the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Yukawa Hideki and six other scholars appealed to Johnson to end the war. Another Nobel physicist, Tomonaga Shin'ichiro, formed a committee of scientists who called on world leaders to limit the conflict. This was the beginning of a fusillade against the United States from liberals, socialists, neo-nationalists, and uncommitted intellectuals. Some of the critics had strong ties to Japan's authoritarian regime that had seized Southeast Asia during 1941–1945, such as the leading journalist Ryu Shintaro, who ignited a letter-writing campaign with an attack in Asahi on American war policy. Soon the Harvard-educated scholar Tsuru Shigeto and five other leading intellectuals wrote to the editor asking that Japan steer clear of the war. Even the usually pro-American Cultural Freedom group, including tough-minded scholars like Hayashi Kentaro and Inoki Masamichi (later head of the Defense Academy), asked the United States to withdraw from Vietnam at once.

By far the biggest blasts of the spring came in late April, from groups of scholars, writers, and artists led by a seventy-seven-year-old economist, Ouchi Hyoe, and a thirty-three-year-old novelist, Oda Makoto. Ouchi, who was a professor emeritus at Tokyo University and a leading Marxist ideologue in the left wing of the Japan Socialist Party, presented a petition on behalf of ninety-two academic, literary, and cultural figures addressed to Prime Minister Sato on April 20. It asked him to explain to the United States that its policies in Vietnam were misguided and to take action so that Japan would not become involved. The appeal contained three main points: 1) "we demand that the Japanese government immediately make it clear" to all that "it will not sanction the use of American military bases in Japan for combat operations"; 2) "we demand that the Japanese government request the United States to immediately cease its bombing of North Vietnam"; and 3) "we demand that the Japanese government" ask the combatants "to effect a suspension of hostilities and open diplomatic negotiations which include the South Vietnam National Liberation Front."

This statement specifically addressed Japan's self-interest, rather than rejecting war in principle, and it also attacked concrete American actions in Indochina without lapsing into generalized condemnations of aggression or imperialism. Many of the ninety-three signers, and most of the 521 Tokyo University professors and lecturers who supported them in a petition the following month, were liberals who were normally well-disposed toward the United States. Although they disagreed with its current actions in Vietnam, a number of them supported the Johns Hopkins proposals of April 7, and most wanted to keep their campaign "from being transformed into an anti-American movement."

Unlike the earlier protesters in letters to editors and street rallies, the ninety-three petitioners were too eminent to ignore. Sato replied at once that the Japanese government welcomed the Baltimore speech, that it hoped for peace, and that it felt hamstrung in trying to bring it about: "it is difficult for Japan to intervene directly on behalf of a peaceful solution, but for some time we have been taking every opportunity to make our opinions known to the American government."

A far less diplomatic reply to the Ouchi group arrived from the playwright Fukuda Tsuneari, who berated them for their naiveté and for the "uselessness" of their proposals. Vietnam was unready for independence, Fukuda contended, and granting its freedom would be "more criminal and cruel than what the United States is doing in Vietnam — including the bombing of the North." If Tokyo did not stand by its ally, "Japan might end up as the orphan of Asia." Although the writer Kaiko Takeshi quickly rebutted Fukuda in print, many other influential Japanese agreed that Sato was right to back the Americans. Two of the most prominent were Asakai Koichiro, a former ambassador to Washington, and Matsushita Masatoshi, the head of Rikkyo University who founded the Kakkin Kaigi antibomb group in 1961, ran for governor of Tokyo, and later joined the Unification Church. An important commentator on military affairs, Saeki Kiichi, tartly reminded the antiwar protesters of the domino theory and argued that bombing North Vietnam would have a restraining effect on communist rebels in Laos. Such rigorous scholars as Eto Shinkichi and Kamiya Fuji, writing in the spring of 1965, said the Vietnam situation showed that Japan should be far more active diplomatically and stop relying on the security treaty alone to defend its interests. Like their counterparts in other countries, Japanese intellectuals wrangled endlessly over the war. Some agreed with the Americans completely, some gave concrete aid to Hanoi and the NLF, and others could not abide either side and called for peace at once.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Fire Across the Sea by Thomas R. H. Havens. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• INTRODUCTION. Japan, the United States, and Vietnam, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 1. The War Comes to Japan, pg. 24
• CHAPTER 2. The Protests Thicken, pg. 54
• CHAPTER 3. The Silent Partner, pg. 84
• CHAPTER 4. Steady State, pg. 107
• CHAPTER 5. Choppy Waters, pg. 130
• CHAPTER 6. Waves of Dissent, pg. 164
• CHAPTER 7. The Protests Peak, pg. 192
• CHAPTER 8. Preparing for the Post-Vietnam Era, pg. 213
• CHAPTER 9. Adjusting to Peacetime, pg. 237
• CHAPTER 10. Fire Across the Sea, pg. 259
• NOTES, pg. 265
• SOURCES CITED, pg. 301