The Homecoming of Japanese Hostages from Iraq: Culturalism Or Japan in America’S Embrace?

Volume 7 | Issue 22 | Number 4 | Article ID 3157 | May 25, 2009 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Homecoming of Japanese Hostages from Iraq: Culturalism or Japan in America’s Embrace? Marie Thorsten The Homecoming of Japanesepervasive rationale that individuals, more than Hostages from Iraq: Culturalism or governments, must rise to the challenges of economic uncertainty. In other circumstances Japan in America’s Embrace? this would be sensible, but “self-responsibility” in quotation marks negatively insinuates that Marie Thorsten governments are preoccupied with profits In the spring of 2004, five Japanese civilians obtained in global markets, and have doing volunteer aid and media work in Iraq abandoned responsibility toward their own were kidnapped, threatened and released (unwealthy) citizens. Japan’s leaders seized the unharmed by Iraqi militant groups in two hostage homecoming to rearticulatejiko separate, overlapping incidents lasting just sekinin back into the embrace of cultural over one week. On their return to Japan (16 nationalism, but for critics of excessive April 2004), the hostages appeared defensively governmental power, the term still retained its solemn, having been harshly criticized and negative connotation. shamed for their effrontery to travel to a government-declared danger zone andNeoliberalism, also called market undertake anti-war actions perceived as critical fundamentalism, conceptualizes winners and of both the Japanese and U.S. presence in Iraq. losers according to the laws of the More than the abductions themselves, the marketplace. But it can also provide inhospitable homecoming seized headlines opportunities for individuals to take their around the world and marked one of the most interests, skills and citizenship outside their searing images in Japan’s controversialborders—which is exactly what the five persons involvement in the American-led war. did by asserting their freedom to work in Iraq independent of the government. But amid war, The first, more publicized, abduction was which heightens loyalties and exclusions, the initially seen as a test of the commitment of individuals were redefined as subjects of a Japan to support America, but within one week nation, even though the state, and many of was transmogrified in Japanese media to public their fellow citizens, did not reciprocate shaming of the victims. The five wereresponsibility toward them: the five were compelled to say they were “sorry” for their harassed and ostracized, as if their citizenship transgression and were pressured to pay back was suspended.[1] This is characteristic of some of their repatriation expenses to the neoliberal regimes that actively produce state. In the story’s moral ending, they should “disposable others,” explains Takahashi have been acting with “self-responsibility” (jiko Tetsuya, who reminds us that “responsibility” sekinin). entails a relationship toward others. Instead, orthodox proponents of Japanese state policies In 2004, still at the height of faith in global were using the concept as “a rhetorical device market fundamentalism, critics often spoke of to discard whoever [is] in the weaker position “self-responsibility” pejoratively to question the at any given moment.” After the repatriation, 1 7 | 22 | 4 APJ | JF Takahashi adds, parents of the hostages were It would be easiest to explain the shaming of also charged with inadequatejiko sekinin, the hostages as the result of ancient traditions. personal responsibility, in a “feudal sort of joint But cultures are mutable, and politics of [parent-child] liability.”[2] spectacle are often unstable and unpredictable.[4] Wars and political instability Many critics of the inhospitable homecoming, can invite arbitrary power, prompting the state in Japan and abroad, also drew essential lines itself to seize a kind of “self-responsibility” by of distinctiveness by shaming Japan’s own unilaterally declaring that a “state of shaming, implying that this could happen only exception” exists. Giorgio Agamben writes that in provincial Japan, not in cosmopolitan Europe the state of exception occurs with a legitimate or America. Japan is well known for isolating “standstill of the law,” when the rules and non-conformists within its culture whilenorms of a society are suspended but not simultaneously being isolated in theeliminated; citizens lose rights, but not their international community. For Samuelbodies, in the course of being reduced to “bare Huntington, Japan is the “lonely state” that life.”[5] Though an ancient concept, the state of does not fit anywhere else in his taxonomy of exception became a dominant paradigm of the clashing civilizations.[3] U.S. reaction to 9/11.[6] Seen only as a strategic assertion of a unitary In another era, de Tocqueville appraised self- culturalism to define the nation, the jiko sekinin exceptionalism as connected to America’s debacle distracted from recognition of the origins as a democratic nation-state, and to its pressures other countries felt to be roots as an exemplar of Puritanical “responsible” to America to support the Iraq Christianity.[7 ] The application of self- war. The last throes of support for the “with us exceptionalism to foreign policy became or with the terrorists” binary logic in which the conspicuous after the end of the Cold War, as conflict began came to an end in the spring of the United States began to exempt itself from 2004, the time of the two incidents. Within the several international agreements concerning same month of the Japanese homecoming, the land mines, nuclear test bans, global warming, Abu Ghraib prison abuses were starkly exposed human rights, and the creation of an to the world, helping to unravel American International Criminal Court.[8] Particularly claims of moral superiority that had gone unchallenged in the nationalistic atmosphere after America invaded Iraq in March 2003--an permeating the early phase of the “war on act of aggression neither for self-defense, nor terror.” authorized by the United Nations-- the question of American exceptionalism moved to the fore Were the hostile homecoming incidents more of global debates.[9] about the “responsibility” of nonconformists to Japan, or about the responsibility of Japan to In Japan, the discourse on unique America? In either case, the discourses those “Japaneseness” nihonjinron( ) becomes questions generated, that of culturalespecially active during times of threat, such as distinctiveness or alliance unity, belied the during the Second World War and the many gestures of cross-national community economic “trade wars” of the 1980s. Japan’s taking place throughout the ordeal, from culturalism is also cultivated through the capture to repatriation. external gaze, through non-Japanese analysts such as Huntington who sustain the States of Exception, Alliances ofrepresentation of Japan as a resolutely peculiar Exceptionality nation. 2 7 | 22 | 4 APJ | JF Then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice history even more than the “personal chemistry also attempted to define temporalbetween leaders,” according toThe Weekly exceptionalism. In “extraordinary times,” such Standard, Bush considered Japan “a living as World War II, the Cold War and 9/11, she rebuke to critics of his pro-democracy strategy explained, “the very terrain of history shifts in the Middle East.”[17] beneath our feet and decades of human effort collapse into irrelevance.” Leaders mustThe Iraq war, for many security officials in both transform alliances to meet new purposes and Tokyo and Washington, provided the fortuitous “enduring values.”[10] The defeated Japan of opportunity for Japan to finally become a 1945 was also a special model for the current militarily “normal” nation, which also opens the U.S. occupation of Iraq, she wrote, recalling window for joint exceptionality. While the U.S. the favorite anecdote of President George W. put aside international conventions on warfare Bush: that his father was shot down by the and the treatment of prisoners, Japan made Japanese as a young pilot in World War II, but exceptions to Article Nine of its Constitution, later proved as U.S. president that former war which mandates that the nation “forever enemies can become friends.[11] renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of The two rhetorics of exceptionality meet in the settling international disputes.” Japan has also discourse of the U.S.-Japan security alliance. made apparent exceptions to its Self-Defense Huntington not only called Japan a “lonely Forces Law of 1954 which stipulates that state”[12]; he also wrote that America is a ground, maritime and air forces (SDF) can “lonely superpower”[13], but together the two maintain national security only by defending lonely hearts constitute a pillar of global power. the nation against direct and indirect America and Japan possess the world’s first- aggression, and it has made de facto exceptions and fifth -largest defense budgets[14], and the to its “three non-nuclear principles” stating first-and third -largest economies.[15] Since the that the nation will not possess, produce or 1980s, political and military leaders have admit into the country any nuclear weapons. institutionalized the incantation of the special Announced in 1967, the non-nuclear principles relationship between the two nations,were adopted by the Japanese parliament in frequently quoting Ronald Reagan’s1971 and earned former Prime Minister Sato declaration, “Together, there is nothing our Eisaku

Load more