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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
NOTE: This essay, written in January 2013, appears as the first section in a book co-authored by John W. Dower and Gavan McCormack and published in Japanese translation by NHK Shuppan Shinsho in January 2014 under the title Tenkanki no Nihon e: “Pakkusu Amerikana” ka-”Pakkusu Ajia” ka (”Japan at a Turning Point-Pax Americana? Pax Asia?”; the second section is an essay by McCormack on Japan's client-state relationship with the United States focusing on the East China Sea “periphery,” and the book concludes with an exchange of views on current tensions in East Asia as seen in historical perspective). An abbreviated version of the Dower essay also will be included in a forthcoming volume on the San Francisco System and its legacies edited by Kimie Hara and published by Routledge.
As the endnotes reveal, many of the issues addressed here will be familiar to close followers of The Asia-Pacific Journal. The essay was written for a general audience rather than for specialists, with particular concern for calling attention to (1) the interwoven nature of contentious current issues, and (2) their historical genesis in the early years of the cold war, and in some cases earlier. Apart from a few very minor stylistic changes, the contents of the several texts of the essay are identical. No attempt has been made to incorporate developments since early 2013. Only this present version introduces illustrations.
1 Great Britain, which formally recognized the People's Republic of China in January 1950, supported PRC participation in the peace conference before bowing to U.S. pressure in July 1951. The ostensible reason for excluding Korea was that, as a Japanese colony, it had not been a belligerent party against Japan in World War II. On August 16, 1951, Zhou Enlai, serving simultaneously as foreign minister and prime minister of the PRC, released a statement criticizing the treaty and conference. South Korea also expressed outrage when informed it was being excluded. For China and Korea, see John Price, Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 245-48.
2 The third distinguishing feature of the San Francisco settlement (alongside the Cold War setting and “separate peace”) was the “unequal treaty” nature of the bilateral U.S.-Japan security treaty. As Secretary of State Christian Herter told a Senate committee when the treaty came up for revision in 1960, “There were a number of provisions in the 1951-1952 Security Treaty that were pretty extreme from the point of view of an agreement between two sovereign nations”; U.S. Senate, Committee of Foreign Relations, Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan, 86th Congress, 2nd Session (June 7, 1960), esp. 11-12, 27, 30-31. This gross inequality provoked considerable tension between Tokyo and Washington in the 1950s, prompting revision and not just renewal of the treaty in 1960. Various backstage exchanges and commentaries on this issue are included in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960. Japan; Korea, vol. 18; see 23-29 for a representative expression by the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo of U.S. apprehension concerning “the stigmas and disadvantages now associated in Japan with the present Security Treaty.”
3 Nishimura Kumao, who played a leading role in Japanese planning for the restoration of sovereignty, details the evolution of post-war strategic projections, including Okinawa, in his illuminating San Furanshisuko Heiwa Jōyaku, vol. 27 in Kajima Kenkyūjo, ed., Nihon Gaikō Shi (Kajima Kenkyūjo, 1971). As early as September 1947, a letter from Emperor Hirohito himself was delivered to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied occupation forces, proposing that Okinawa be leased to the United States for twenty-five or fifty years, or “even longer,” to support the struggle against communism and hasten the end of the occupation. The letter was uncovered by Professor Shindō Eiichi and reported in “Bunkatsusareta Ryōdo,” Sekai, April 1979, 31-51 (esp. 45-50).
4 The major investigative work on Agent Orange and other toxins in Okinawa has been conducted by Jon Mitchell. See his “US Military Defoliants on Okinawa: Agent Orange” and “Agent Orange on Okinawa-New Evidence,” both in volume 9 of the The Asia-Pacific Journal (September 12, 2011, and November 28, 2011, respectively); these are accessible here. See also Mitchell's articles in Japan Times: “Agent Orange ‘tested in Okinawa’” (May 17, 2012); “25,000 barrels of Agent Orange kept on Okinawa, U.S. Army document says” (August 7, 2012); and “U.S. Agent Orange activist brings message of solidarity to Okinawa” (September 15, 2012). Secret agreements on nuclear issues are discussed and annotated below under “The ‘Nuclear Umbrella’.” The most detailed and incisive critical commentary on Okinawa in English appears in various publications by Gavan McCormack, including most recently his co-authored (with Satoko Oka Norimatsu) Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).
5 The major scholarly study of the origins of these territorial issues is Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (Routledge, 2007, 2012), which devotes separate chapters to each of the disputes. Hara reiterates the thesis of deliberate ambiguity in the San Francisco peace treaty concisely in various essays. See, for example, “50 Years from San Francisco: Re-examining the Peace Treaty and Japan's Territorial Problems,” Pacific Affairs (Fall 2001) and “Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: The Troubling Legacy of the San Francisco Treaty,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (September 2006). For another densely annotated treatment, see Seokwoo Lee's online article, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,” from Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, 2002.
6 For the U.S. response to the 1956 Japan-Soviet negotiations, see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-57. Japan, vol. 23, part 1:202-5, 207-13. See Hara, Cold War Frontiers, 71-99 on the 1945-1951 background, and 96 (and accompanying citations) on the thwarted compromise of 1956.
7 Hara, Cold War Frontiers, 14-49, esp. 31-35, 47.
8 The densely annotated entry on “Liancourt Rocks dispute” on Wikipedia includes many references to Korean-language sources. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) also declares the islands to be Korean territory.
9 The May 15, 1950, memorandum was reported by Japanese journalists affiliated with the Jiji Press news agency in Beijing; see the December 27, 2012, Beijing Jiji dispatch “'Senkaku wa Ryūkyū no Ichibu’” online, as well as coverage in the Asahi Shimbun on December 27 and 28.
10 For Zhou and Deng, see Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194; M. Taylor Fravel, “Something to Talk About in the East China Sea,” The Diplomat, September 28, 2012; and Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2011), 303-4. Speculation about potential oil and gas resources in the East China Sea dates from the late 1960s, and obviously influenced both China's and Japan's perceptions of the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. The increasingly intransigent Chinese position that developed after Zhou and Deng's downplaying of the dispute in the 1970s is that there is a deep historical record showing that the islands have traditionally been regarded as part of China. The U.S. position is that it is agnostic on the sovereignty issue, but obliged to side with Japan militarily if Sino-Japanese tensions over the Senkakus lead to conflict. For an almost elegiac essay on the early history of the islands between China and Okinawa, see “Narrative of an Empty Space: Behind the Row over a Bunch of Pacific Rocks Lies the Sad, Magical History of Okinawa,” The Economist, December 22, 2012.
11 Hara, Cold War Frontiers, 157.
12 The concept of an American “empire of bases” was introduced by the late Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2004). For an informative recent overview, see David Vine, “The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War,” posted online in July 2012 at Tom Dispatch.
13 See Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Doubleday, 1965), 382. LeMay spoke similarly in an April 1966 interview for the J. F. Dulles Papers archive at Princeton University; cited in Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (Modern Library, 2010), 151-52. He was not taking pride in this devastation, but rather arguing that immediate and massive bombing of key cities in North Korea might have been more effective and less costly in human terms than the devastation wreaked in the protracted air war. The cities in South Korea were bombed when they were occupied by North Korean or Chinese forces. On the air war in Korea in general, see Cumings, Korean War, 147-61; Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (Free Press, 1986), 226-48, 259-60; and Taewoo Kim's two-part treatment: “War against an Ambiguous Enemy: U.S. Air Force Bombing of South Korean Civilian Areas, June-September 1950,” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (June 2012) and “Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of North Korea during the Korean War, 1950-1953,” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (September 2012). Bombing tonnage varies depending on the source. Cumings (Korean War, 159) calculates that the United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs (plus 32,557 tons of napalm) in Korea, compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. Marilyn Young puts the volume of bombs dropped in the Korean War at 386,037 tons (and 32,357 tons of napalm), with a total of 698,000 tons when all types of airborne ordnance are included; “Bombing Civilians: An American Tradition,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, April 19, 2009, accessible online. At the peak of the bombing in Korea, U.S. planes were dropping around a quarter-million pounds (125 tons) of napalm per day-with napalm tanks initially manufactured in Japan; see the “Napalm in War” entry here, and also Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Incendiary Weapons (MIT Press, 1975), 43. The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the British and U.S. air forces combined in World War II was slightly over two million tons, of which 656,400 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater. In the U.S. air war that devastated over sixty Japanese cities, the total tonnage dropped was 160,800 tons (24 percent of the Pacific theater total); see United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), July 1, 1946, 16. In the air war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the volume of bombs dropped by U.S. forces escalated to over seven million tons.
14 Yoshida's early arguments in defense of Article 9, and the later shift in policy, are annotated in J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954 (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1979), 369-400.
15 See, for example, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951. Asia and the Pacific, vol. 6, part 1:831. In the end, Article 11 of the peace treaty simply stipulated that “Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan”-a proviso that required the Japanese government to obtain permission of the foreign governments involved in these trials before altering individual sentences that had been imposed.
16 The translations from 1972 and 1998 are from the English renderings released by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The full apologetic phrasing of the 1998 “Joint Declaration on Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development” reads as follows: “The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious distress and damage that Japan caused to the Chinese people through its aggression against China during a certain period in the past and expressed deep remorse for this.” The 1998 declaration was issued during a state visit to Japan by China's president Jiang Zemin, and accompanied by acrimonious public exchanges over Japan's war responsibility that are not reflected in the text of the declaration itself. See Kazuo Sato, “The Japan-China Summit and Joint Declaration of 1998: A Watershed for Japan-China Relations in the 21st Century?”, CNAPS Working Paper Series, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, Brookings Institute, 2000-2001; accessible here.
17 The escalating acrimony from the 1980s of “war history” issues on both the Chinese and Japanese sides, including the politics propelling this, is a major theme in He, The Search for Reconciliation.
18 The devastating famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, the destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, for example, are all taboo subjects in China-ignored in textbooks, censored on the Internet, and brushed over in historical exhibitions such as at the recently renovated National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square.
19 On censorship of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton & The New Press, 1999), 413-15, 620-21. The first major collection of photographs appeared in the August 6, 1952 edition of Asahi Gurafu.
20 For U.S. considerations concerning the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, see Bruce Cumings, “Korea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 8, 2004, accessible here and reproduced as “Nuclear Threats Against North Korea: Consequences of the ‘Forgotten’ War,” available here; also Cumings, “Why Did Truman Really Fire MacArthur? The Obscure History of Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War Provides an Answer,” History News Network (George Mason University), January 10, 2005, accessible here. See also Malcolm MacMillan Craig, “The Truman Administration and Non-use of the Atomic Bomb during the Korean War, June 1950 to January 1953” (M.A. thesis, Victoria University, New Zealand, 2009), accessible online.
21 Operation Hudson Harbor is discussed in Craig, “The Truman Administration and Non-use of the Atomic Bomb,” 119-21.
22 The literature on the impact of the Bikini Incident is enormous. For a descriptive overview that places Japanese anti-nuclear protests in a global context, see Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970 (Stanford University Press, 1997), vol. 2 of The Struggle against the Bomb, esp. 8-10, 42-43, 241-46, 321-24. Wittner also describes the high-level U.S. response to the Bikini Incident, which included identifying the Lucky Dragon as a “Red spy outfit” and the ship's captain as being “in the employ of the Russians” (this by the head of the Atomic Energy Commission), denying that the fishing boat had been outside the officially announced danger zone, emphasizing the “high degree of safety” of American nuclear tests in general, and asserting that the vessel's radio operator had died of hepatitis rather than “radiation sickness,” as the Japanese government itself reported. In a cable to Washington, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo described the popular outrage in Japan as “a period of uncontrolled masochism” as the nation “seemed to revel in [its] fancied martyrdom.” See ibid., 146-48, 153-54.
23 Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 55, no. 6 (November/December 1999), 26-35. On mobilization during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Jon Mitchell, “'Seconds Away from Midnight’: U.S. Nuclear Missile Pioneers on Okinawa Break Fifty Year Silence on a Hidden Nuclear Crisis of 1962,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, July 20, 2012; accessible online.
24 Norris, Arkin and Burr, “Where They Were.” Reischauer's statement came in an interview with the Mainichi Shimbun on May 18, 1981; for an English summary, see “Nuclear ‘Lie’ Strains U.S. Ties,” Time, June 8, 1981. Reischauer threatened to resign as ambassador in 1967 when he “discovered that there was a craft at Iwakuni, the Marine base on the Inland Sea, which held a store of nuclear weapons.” In his view, this was entirely different from the legitimate transit of nuclear-armed ships through Japanese waters, and violated understandings with the Japanese government. He regarded the uproar that greeted his 1981 acknowledgement of the latter as a “fiasco”; see his memoir My Life between Japan and America (Harper & Row, 1986), 249-51, 276-77, 280, 299, 346-47.
25 See, for example, Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick, “Japan, the Atomic Bomb, and the ‘Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power’,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 2, 2011; accessible here. The “paranuclear state” language appears in a lengthy treatment of nuclear development in Japan titled “Nuclear Weapons Program,” accessible here. As of late 2012, it was calculated that Japan's stockpiles of separated plutonium totaled more than nine metric tons, enough to make “more than 1,000 nuclear warheads”; “Rokkasho and a Hard Place: Japan's Nuclear Future,” The Economist, November 10, 2012. See also Frank N. von Hippel and Masafumi Takubo, “Japan's Nuclear Mistake,” New York Times, November 28, 2012. The easy conversion from civilian nuclear programs to weapons projects is addressed in Matthew Fuhrmann, Atomic Assistance: How “Atoms for Peace” Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity (Cornell University Press, 2012); see 221-25 on Japan.
26 The two quotations are from internal Department of State memoranda, both dated May 4, 1956 (DOS file number 711.5611/5-456), but many similar diplomatic notes and exchanges took place beginning in the mid 1950s. See Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 109, 116-17, 166-67, 388, 505n69, 514n17. For an accessible sample of these apologies (and the patronizing U.S. “understanding” they prompted), see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-57. Japan, vol. 23, part 1:495-98, reporting on a September 1957 meeting in Washington between Secretary of State Dulles and Foreign Minister Fujiyama Aiichirō, who had just delivered a speech at the United Nations calling for an end to nuclear testing. Fujiyama took the occasion of this meeting with Dulles to essentially dismiss what he had said to the United Nations. His apology, as the State Department summarized it, ran as follows: “The Japanese people, old and young, are very sensitive on this question. It is not merely a question of communists. The Japanese Government was placed in a position where it had to lodge a protest. The handling of this matter is vital for the conservative government. The psychological situation in Japan compels the Government to stand for disarmament, the abolition of war, and the establishment of peace, and against the manufacture and use of all nuclear weapons.” Dulles replied that he understood that “the Japanese Government has a special problem that is more emotional than reasonable. The American people perhaps reason about this, while the Japanese view the problem emotionally, and the Japanese Government must take that into account.”
27 Eric Johnson, “Nuclear Pact Ensured Smooth Okinawa Reversion,” Japan Times, May 15, 2002, quoting from a declassified U.S. document dated June 20, 1959.
28 Many declassified English-language documents pertaining to the 1960 and 1969 secret agreements have been assembled by Robert A. Wampler and made available in two widely separated releases by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. See (1) “Revelations in Newly Released Documents about U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Okinawa Fuel NHK Documentary,” May 14, 1997, covering thirteen documents and accessible online; (2) “Nuclear Noh Drama: Tokyo, Washington and the Case of the Missing Nuclear Arrangements,” October 13, 2009, covering eleven documents and accessible here. (3) The November 1969 secret agreement between Satō and Nixon is discussed in Kei Wakaizumi, The Best Course Available: A Personal Account of the Secret US-Japan Okinawa Reversion Negotiations (University of Hawaii Press, 2002); Wakaizumi was an aide to Satō, and his book originally appeared in Japanese in 1994. An online copy of the agreement is accessible here. Satō's copy of the secret agreement was made available by his son in 2009 and reproduced in Asahi Shimbun, December 24, 2009. (4) See also Shinichi Kitaoka, “The Secret Japan-US Pacts,” in Research Group on the Japan-US Alliance, In Search of a New Consensus: The Japan-US Alliance toward 2010 (Institute for International Policy Studies, December 2010), 15-27. Kitaoka, who headed a Foreign Ministry committee investigating the secret agreements, at one point refers to the Japanese government's “intentional avoidance of clarification.” He also quotes Satō stating, in October 1969, that “the three non-nuclear principles were a mistake.” The full Institute for International Policy Studies publication is accessible online. (5) Henry Kissinger discusses the Nixon-Satō agreement (without calling it secret) in The White House Years (Little, Brown, and Company,1979), 325-36, 1483.
29 For Kishi, see Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. Japan, vol. 23, part 1:285; Kishi was following up on a similar statement by the head of the Defense Agency the previous month. For Ikeda, see Jon Mitchell, “Okinawa, Nuclear Weapons and ‘Japan's Special Psychological Problem’,” Japan Times, July 8, 2010. For Satō as well as others on Japan possessing nuclear weapons, see “Nuclear Weapons Program,” op. cit., here. Satō's bellicose statement about attacking China with nuclear weapons is cited in “The U.S. Nuclear Umbrella, Past and Future,” a December 27, 2008, editorial by Hiroshima Peace Media Center, accessible online; their source is a declassified Foreign Ministry document. Beginning in the late 1950s, U.S. diplomats and planners sometimes anticipated that Japan might acquire nuclear weapons in the near future. See, for example, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. Regulation of Armaments; Atomic Energy, vol. 20:276-77 (minutes of a January 1956 meeting involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff); also Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960. Japan; Korea, vol. 18:27 (an April 1958 dispatch from U.S. ambassador to Tokyo Douglas MacArthur II).
30 The “throwing off Asia” (datsu-A) phrase comes from a famous 1885 essay attributed to Fukuzawa Yukichi. For an extended image-driven treatment covering Meiji Westernization, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Russo-Japanese War, see the three-part online treatment “Throwing Off Asia” at visualizingcultures.mit.edu.
31 For the pivotal role assigned to Japan by U.S. Cold War planners, see John W. Dower, “The Superdomino in Postwar Asia: Japan In and Out of the Pentagon Papers,” in Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (ed.), The Pentagon Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition, vol. 5 (Beacon Press, 1972), 101-42.
32 Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951. Asia and the Pacific, vol. 6, part 1:825-26. The fuller statement by Dulles explains that the Japanese “have felt that the Western civilization represented by Britain, more latterly the United States … represents a certain triumph of mind over mass which gives us a social standing in the world better than what is being achieved in terms of the mainland human masses of Asia, and … they think that they have also achieved somewhat the similar superiority of mind over mass and would like to feel that they belong to, or are accepted by, the Western nations. And I think that anything we can do to encourage that feeling will set up an attraction which is calculated to hold the Japanese in friendly association with us despite the fact that the mainland is in possession of the economic means of setting up an attraction which we, perhaps, in those particular terms of economy cannot match.”
33 For basic documents covering Nixon's talks with Zhou in February 1972 and declassified for the National Security Archive, see William Burr, “Nixon's Trip to China,” posted December 11, 2003 and accessible here; two long reports from Kissinger to Nixon summarizing his talks with Zhou in July and October 1971 can be accessed through note 4 here. Although these declassified documents are only lightly sanitized, some lines and passages pertaining to Japan have been excised.
34 The strategic considerations underlying the rapprochement are summarized in He, The Search for Reconciliation, 182-89. The honeymoon wording is hers.
35 The four key bilateral documents are as follows: (1) The landmark “Joint Communiqué of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China,” issued on September 29, 1972, announced termination of “the abnormal state of affairs” and established the basic terms reiterated in subsequent statements. Japan recognized the “Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China,” and expressed understanding and respect for the PRC's position that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China.” The two nations declared commitment to peaceful coexistence as embodied in the charter of the United Nations, and pledged to “refrain from the use or threat of force” in any disputes that might arise between them. Japan expressed regret for “serious damage” inflicted on the Chinese people in the past, and China in turn renounced its demands for war reparations. Reparations had also been renounced by the Republic of China in 1952 and by South Korea in 1965. (2) The “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People's Republic of China” that followed six years later, on August 12, 1978, was exceedingly brief, consisting of an introduction declaring continued adherence to the principles enunciated in the 1972 communiqué, followed by five platitudinous articles.
(3) On November 26, 1998-twenty years after the peace treaty was signed, and seven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War-the two countries issued a lengthy “Japan-China Joint Declaration on Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development,” accompanied by a list itemizing thirty-three specific areas of proposed collaboration. In addition to apologizing for Japanese aggression in the past, this declaration opposed nuclear testing and proliferation, and called for “the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.” (4) The fourth joint statement-issued ten years later, on May 7, 2008, and bearing the lengthy heading “Joint Statement between the Government of Japan and Government of the People's Republic of China on Comprehensive Promotion of a ‘Mutually Beneficial Relationship Based on Common Strategic Interests’”-took care to emphasize that the two nations “are partners who cooperate together and are not threats to each other.”
36 See, for example, Ronald O'Rourke, China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Naval Capabilities-Background and Issues for Congress (Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2012); also Jianwei Wang, “Confidence-Building Measures and China-Japan Relations,” February 2000 report to the Stimson Center (Washington, D.C.), accessible here.
37 For the asymmetry quotation, see Gerald L. Curtis, “U.S. Policy toward Japan from Nixon to Clinton: An Assessment,” in Curtis (ed.), New Perspectives on U.S.-Japan Relations (Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2000), 39-40; this forty-three-page overview of U.S.-Japan relations after 1972 is accessible online. Gavan McCormack develops the clientstate argument in detail in two books: Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (Verso, 2007) and, with Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands. For a capsule summary, see McCormack, “The Travails of a Client State: An Okinawan Angle on the 50th Anniversary of the US-Japan Security Treaty,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 8, 2010; accessible here.
38 The power-shift argument has been advanced by Hugh White of Australian National University, among others. For a concise presentation, see his “Power Shift: Rethinking Australia's Place in the Asian Century,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 65, no.1 (February 2011), 81-93, esp. 82. For an extended analysis, see his The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power (Australia: Black Inc., 2012). White's arguments have generated considerable online discussion and controversy.
39 In 1991, Deng Xiaoping advised colleagues to maintain good relations with the United Sates while building up China's strength; see Andrew J. Nathan, “What China Wants: Bargaining with Beijing,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011, 154.
40 Henry A. Kissinger, “The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012; this essay was adapted from the afterword to a paperback edition of Kissinger's book On China (Penguin Press, 2011).
41 In December 2012, the newly appointed Chinese leader Xi Jinping took care to make one of his first public events a meeting with the nuclear unit in charge of ballistic and cruise missiles (the Second Artillery Corps), praising it as “the core force of our country's strategic deterrent …. a strategic pillar of our great power status, and an important bedrock for protecting our national security”; Jane Perlez, “New Chinese Leader Meets Military Nuclear Officers,” New York Times, December 5, 2012.
42 For an overview of the revolution in precision warfare plus analysis of China's projected “A2/AD” capabilities, see Andrew F. Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle? (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010). Fear that China's growing sophistication in ballistic missiles threatens America's hitherto “virtually invincible” Pacific fleet of carriers is typically expressed in a widely circulated Associated Press article: Eric Talmadge, “Dong Feng 21D, Chinese Missile, Could Shift Pacific Power Balance,” Huffington Post, August 5, 2010. For a concise sampling of current military jargon, see “China's Military Rise,” The Economist, April 7, 2012.
43 Much of this bellicose rhetoric focuses on economic and financial issues. Its ubiquity can be gleaned by online searches under phrases such as “China threat,” “containment of China,” and “Cold War with China.” Certain books also trigger extended online commentary. See, for example, Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (Norton, 2011); Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can be Won (FT [Financial Times] Press, 2006; revised and enlarged in 2008); and Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon-A Global Call to Action (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011). Death by China became the basis of a full-length documentary film with the same title. China-bashing intensified during the 2012 presidential election, as noted in “The China-bashing Syndrome,” The Economist, July 14, 2012. The New York Times published a selection of opinions under the headline “Are We Headed for a Cold War with China?” on May 2, 2012.
44 See press releases from the Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO) dated November 9 and 10, 2011, and titled respectively “Multi-Service Office to Advance Air-Sea Battle Concept” and “The Air-Sea Battle Concept Summary.” For another concise summary of the ASB mission by two officers affiliated with this office, Navy Captain Philip Dupree and Air Force Colonel Jordan Thomas, see “Air-Sea Battle: Clearing the Fog,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2012; accessible here. The Defense Department's Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, issued in January 2012, refers to “asymmetric challenges” by states such as China and Iran, and italicizes its mission in this area as follows: “Accordingly the U.S. military will invest as required to ensure its ability to operate effectively in anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) environments.”
45 China was targeted as a rising problem by the incoming administration of President George W. Bush in 2001, but this was put aside after the September 11 terrorist attacks and ensuing fixation on the “war on terror.” The ASB concept, with primary focus on China, is attributed to Andrew Marshall, the influential long-time head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. Its articulation is now strongly associated with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a Pentagon-supported think tank; see Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Model for a Future War Fans Tensions with China and inside Pentagon,” Washington Post, August 1, 2012; this includes a map of the “inner” and “outer” island chains where “A2/AD” access is contested. For CSBA reports, see Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle?; also Jan van Tol et al., “AirSea Battle: A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept,” May 18, 2010, accessible online. Krepinevich includes chapters on China and Iran, while emphasizing that the former is by far the greater threat to U.S. power projection; he also includes a map of the “first” and “second” island chains. Air-Sea Battle represents a departure from “Air-Land Battle” concepts introduced after the Vietnam War for countering the Soviet threat.
46 Department of Defense, Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), Version 1.0, January 17, 2012. Army Capabilities Integration Center, U.S. Army & Marine Corps Combat Development Command, U.S. Marine Corps, Gaining and Maintaining Access: An Army-Marine Corps Concept, March 2012. For a brief summary, see Michael Raska, “Air-Sea Battle Debate: Operational Consequences and Allied Concerns,” Defense News, October 30, 2012; accessible online and other sites. Raska is affiliated with the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. On the transfer of long-range bombers as well as Global Hawk drones to the Asia-Pacific area, see Thom Shanker, “Panetta Set to Discuss U.S. Shift in Asia Trip,” New York Times, September 13, 2012.
47 President Obama himself never used the term “pivot” during his Asia trip, although it was used by his spokespeople. For official presentations, see “Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament,” November 17, 2011, accessible at the White House web site; Hillary Clinton, “America's Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, November 2011; and Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, January 2012. For independent in-depth analyses, see Kenneth Lieberthal, “The American Pivot to Asia: Why President Obama's Turn to the East Is Easier Said than Done,” Foreign Policy, December 21, 2011; Mark E. Manyin et al., Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Administration's “Rebalancing” Toward Asia, Congressional Research Service, March 2012; David J. Berteau and Michael J. Green, U.S. Force Posture in the Asia Pacific Region: An Independent Assessment, Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2012; and Michael D. Swaine et al., China's Military & the U.S.-Japan Alliance in 2030, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2013.
48 Masaki Toki, “Missile Defense in Japan,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 16, 2009. The reference to China in the guidelines issued in 2004 reads: “China, which has a major impact on regional security, continues to modernize its nuclear forces and missile capabilities as well as its naval and air forces. China is also expanding its area of operation at sea. We will have to remain attentive to its future actions”; Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, National Defense Program Guideline, FY 2005~, December 14, 2004. The Japanese government has also released very slightly different translations of this document. The “Basic Space Law” was revised in August 2008 to permit using space for defense purposes.
49 National Defense Program Guidelines for FY 2011 and Beyond, approved by the Cabinet and Security Council on December 17, 2010. The official English translation can be found here.
50 For the 1967 and 1976 policies restricting arms exports, see the report submitted by Japan to the United Nations in 1996 under the title Japan's Policies on the Control of Arms Exports; this is accessible on the U.N. website and Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. As noted in this report, in 1983 exceptions were made for transferring military technologies to the United States, leading to cooperation in the production of fighter aircraft and missile defense systems. For other exceptions involving small arms and dual-use goods, see Robin Ballantyne, “Japan's Hidden Arms Trade,” Asia Times, December 1, 2005. On the missile-defense system announced in 2012, see Thom Shanker and Ian Johnson, “U.S. Accord with Japan over Missile Defense Draws Criticism in China,” New York Times, September 17, 2012; Chester Dawson, “Japan Shows Off Its Missile-Defense System,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2012.
51 ”Concert of Asia” is the concept advanced by Hugh White in widely quoted commentaries following publication of his 2012 book The China Choice. For “Pacific Community,” see Kissinger, “The Future of U.S.-China Relations.” The “Pax Pacifica” concept was promoted in 2012 by commentators like Kevin Rudd, the foreign minister of Australia; see, for example, “Rudd: Asia Needs ‘Pax Pacifica’ as China Rises,” summarizing a talk at the Asia Society of New York, January 13, 2012.
52 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) dates from modest regional beginnings in 1967; became ASEAN Plus Three in 1997 with the addition of Japan, the PRC, and South Korea, bringing total membership to thirteen; and in 2010 expanded to ASEAN Plus Eight by adding Australia, India, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States. APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), which presently has twenty-one Pacific Rim “member economies,” was established in 1989 and held its first summit in 1993. The East Asia Summit (EAS), dating from 2005, added Russia and the United States in 2011; total membership numbers eighteen nations, including Japan, the PRC, and India.
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