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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Just so it's not lost on everyone, A) Okinawa was a sovereign country that Japan occupied and annexed, B) the Supreme Court of Japan is using structural power over Okinawa to forcibly maintain and advance the interests of the USA, who nuked it twice, on the island of Okinawa, C) the USA is continuing to impose itself on the Pacific region through imperialism and it so dominates Japan that Japan's highest court is oppressing its own colonial holdings in favor of the global hegemon.
A few points you missed.
Yes, the Rykuyu islands were a sovereign country... In the 16th century. It's been run by Japan - save for a brief period between 1945 and 1978 - ever since. There's a small and insignificant independence movement that pretty much everyone ignores. I remember them throwing bread rolls at our gate guards.
The US didn't nuke Okinawa. I don't think it was intentional, but your wording implied that it did.
Okinawans are split over the military issue. Some people want the US out. Others make tons of money off the Americans being there. It's not a clear cut situation as you seem to imply.
The US is responsible for Japan's defense ever since the end of WWII, just like it was for west Germany. Given that Japan didn't make many friends during their little adventure across east Asia, having the world's largest military protect them is a favorable arrangement for them.
It's been several generations since WWII. Japan is one of the US' closest allies. If they wanted to transform their self-defense force into a full-blown military and take over responsibility for their own defense, I'm sure they could do so. So far, no one has generated the political will to do that. Your buddy Kim isn't helping things by sending missiles over Japan.
And lastly, WWII wasn't a war of conquest for the US. Blame the US for interfering in Korea and Vietnam and the middle east all you like, but Japan was a different story. Calling the US' actions in Japan "Imperialism" destroys any credibility you may have otherwise had.
The U.S. declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor was not imperialism. But after the war, when the U.S. turned Japan into a vassal state and kept a ton of military bases throughout the Pacific (to supplement those from its initial phase of empire building), that is imperialism.
Japan certainly wasn't trying to liberate Hawaii. This is not a good take.
I understand you didn't say that. What I meant was, had Japan been trying to liberate Hawaii and the U.S. reacted by trying to maintain control, I would see that as U.S. imperialism. But that wasn't the case -- it was more like Napoleonic France launching an attack on British India and Britain invading France as a response. Both are imperial powers, sure, but one metropole attacking another in response to its colony being attacked is really stretching the definition of imperialism. And it helps to have somewhat restricted uses of terms like imperialism so they don't just become meaningless (see libs calling everything done by any Bad Country "genocide").
So, pray tell, what would you have done in the US' position?
Lol are you suggesting the U.S. had no choice but to build an empire? That in the wake of WWII, the only industrialized country untouched by the war, and the only country with nukes, was somehow forced to maintain a permanent military presence all over the world? No one was forcing the U.S. to do shit; we chose our path.
If I were Truman on V-J Day, I would have at minimum dismantled the incipient military-industrial complex and the associated national security state. This would not have been a novel idea; countries regularly demobilize after wars. I would have tried to work with the USSR rather than oppose it at every turn (a policy U.S. leaders decided on before the war had even finished). I would have honored the wartime agreements among Allies (e.g., the Atlantic Charter) regarding peoples' right to self-determination instead of backing imperialists' efforts to re-establish control of their colonies. I would have taken de-Nazification and its corresponding programs in other occupied countries seriously. I would have set the precedent of the U.S. obeying international law even when it ran against national interests, and would have at least tried to make international law enforceable.
You apparently do not understand the role of a government.
A government is responsible for itself and its people. It is not responsible for the well being of the world at large. It's not there to be nice. If it has principles (the US does), it is up to the citizens of that country to hold their government accountable to those principles.
US citizens generally approved of their government's actions after the war, so in that sense the government was acting properly.
I cannot emphasize this enough. The US government is not responsible for the rest of the world. How everyone else feels about what the US does only matters insofar as how it affects US interests. It was that way then, and it's that way now, and it's like that for every modern country on the planet.
The US does not need to (or want to) be subject to international law when it can act with near impunity. Law only works when it can be enforced. No other country is powerful enough to hold the US to account, so it would be against the US' interests to submit itself to it.
Don't like it? Tough. That's the way the real world is. One day the US will fall, but until that happens it will continue to consider its own interests above everyone else.
Call it imperialism, call it what you like - but it could be so, so much worse. Just ask Japan - the US could have annexed the entire country and enslaved everyone. Instead, they denazified it and helped them rebuild. Oh, what horrible villains!
(edit: autocorrect keeps "correcting" the possessive form of "it.")
You're missing all the treaties the U.S. has ratified that do impose obligations to the rest of the world on it. But even if you ignore all of that, a state that has no qualms about mass murder outside of its borders is a dangerous, violent state that should be destroyed.
This is also a silly response to "what would you have done?". It's not about what states historically have done, it's about what the U.S. could have done that would have made it worth supporting. In the immediate aftermath of WWII the U.S. had military, political, economic, and social influence unparalleled before or since. It could have actually remade the world order, or at least tried, but it instead chose to continue imperialism with itself in the driver's seat. It was in no way forced to do this, and its decision is worth criticism.
U.S. citizens generally approved of the genocide of indigenous Americans, too. Just like democracy does not extend to voting to kill someone, it does not extend to committing genocide (which the U.S. supported and directly aided throughout the Cold War) and other war crimes, no matter how popular they are.
"I could have killed my wife, but I just broke her arm! She should be thankful."
Ah yes, all that genocide the US supported in Japan. I must have missed that.
Yeah, I'm done here. You've moved on to a completely different subject and I'm tired of arguing with tankies for the evening.
Hirohito remained emperor until his death and the imperial reign continues. Many war criminals were put into positions of power after the war. A couple examples include Yasuhiro Nakasone, the prime minister of Japan from 1982-87, who was directly involved in creating the "comfort women" system of sexual slavery during the war, and Nobusuke Kishi, the prime minister of Japan from 1957-1960. Here's a couple choice paragraphs from his Wikipedia page:
Japan continues to be a far-right haven to this day. Shinzo Abe, the recently assassinated former prime minister, was a direct descendant of Kishi and denied many of the crimes against humanity Japan committed during the war. He posed in a plane with the same numbers as the infamous Unit 731, a torture camp located in occupied China that was once under the control of his great-grandfather.
This only begins to scratch the surface of the far-right in Japan directly enabled by the United States. I hope you can see what a foolish statement you have made here.
Why do you all talk like this
It's a common idiom that indicates skeptical disagreement.
Common among redditors, maybe
I've been using it since before reddit existed. You'd almost think that people from different areas talk differently.
Yeah I can believe that too
How is that hard to believe? I was already an adult when the Internet became open to the public. My basic speech patterns were pretty well set by then.
English is one of the most spoken languages on the planet. How is it you expect everyone to sound the same?
Maybe you should consider traveling.
This is why
This is an incredibly useless question. Any socialist would tell you "let Japan's former territories decide what to do" barring the mainland, which would require occupation for a period to purge the fascists (something the US deliberately neglected to do). There would subsequently be one China, one Korea, and I don't know whether Japan's referendums would result in independence for Okinawa or Hokkaido (I doubt it, but idk), but either way the main body would not be one that pays annual tribute to some of the most heinous war criminals in history.
Uh, they literally made them a protectorate by denying them the ability to field a military. Then when Japan was outcompeting them economically the USA economically undermined them pretty openly and Japan couldn't do anything about it.
Japan is an imperial junior partner to the USA. They are a protectorate and vassal.
They literally made them a protectorate after fighting a bloody four year war that Japan started. Then denied them the right to field a military so that they wouldn't start their shit up again.
What was the US supposed to do after Pearl Harbor? Shrug it off?
I find your claims of Japan being undermined by the US to be dubious at best. Japan has done very well since WWII. The US gave them their largest market (when many other Asian imports were blocked) and remains their second highest trading partner after China. They have the third largest economy in the world. That's not exactly a "vassal."
Looks, I get it, "US bad" no matter what. But out of all the examples of shitty things the US has done, picking Japan is just silly.
LOL
You mean the attack the USA deliberately provoked by moving its naval assets to encircle and blockade Japan with the express goal of provoking an attack to create the necessary pretext to go to war? That Pearl Harbor?
How many other nations do you know of that were defeated in war that were prevented from having a standing military for nearly a century and instead was occupyied by the victor's military forces and the Supreme Court of that country ruling in favor of the military interests of the dominator?
Your lack of imagination and historical awareness is not an argument for why the USA isn't engaged in imperialism.
https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/09/11/washingtons-old-japan-problem-and-the-current-china-threat/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/05/containing-japan/376337/
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8717/c8717.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/business/us-china-trade-war-japan-intl/index.html
Again, your ignorance is not a point of view that commands respect. Japan did everything it could to work within the US rules and in doing so began to actually compete with the US economically. So the US used its outsized power to launch a trade war against Japan and ultimately forced its hand into signing lopsided trade deals, because Japan is a vassal and must comply with the will of the hegemony of the North Atlantic as expressed through the USA.
We don't need to only critique the USA for atrocities. It's important to see the world for how it works. Japan's occupation of Okinawa is still terrible and this action to put a US military base is a good example as to why. If Okinawa was fully assimilated into Japan, it wouldn't be the dumping ground for USA military bases enforced by the Japanese Supreme Court. Likewise despite people thinking Hawaii is an assimilated part of the USA, it wouldn't be the tragedy that it is.
The largest minority group in Japan are the Ryukyuan people of Okinawa and Japan won't even recognize them. Japan is a junior imperialist partner of the Western imperial block executing to advance the interests of the USA and, by proxy, the North Atlantic bourgeoisie.
The idea that this should be above reproach because it's not the worst thing the USA did is ridiculous. The idea that Japan deserved it is just bog standard liberal bloodthirst.
Funny how almost all our battleships were in Hawaii, then. Not much of a blockade. Perhaps you mean that we stopped trading with them and they declared it an "act of war?"
In any event, the US didn't need an excuse to join the war. Germany was giving us plenty already.
Germany wasn't allowed a standing military, either. They managed to convince the allies that they could contribute to NATO, and were allowed to do so again.
Japan is forbidden to have a military by their own constitution. Certain parties have tried to have it amended to allow a more active military (the SDF is almost purely self-defense), but so far the political will hasn't been there for it.
The "ruling in the interests of the dominator" bit is your words. I wonder if the Supreme Court of Japan would agree with your description of their decision. I somehow doubt it.
Yeah, the trade balance with Japan was heavily skewed on Japan's side. The US and Japan worked out a rebalance of the system. What, exactly, is so evil about that?
Tell me you've never been to Okinawa without telling me you've never been to Okinawa. It's not some hick island full of yokels. It's a modern, fully-integrated Japanese prefecture. A bit more laid back than the mainland, but that's to be expected.
The bases there were built before the US decided to return Okinawa to Japan. The US has been slowly decommissioning bases and returning them to Japanese control ever since.
Did you even check what the supreme court was ruling? They're not building a new base. They're relocating MCAS Futenma, because it's smack dab in the middle of a city and can't do night operations without waking everyone up and filling the air with jet fuel fumes.
What is it with you tankies and Hawaii, anyway? Have you spent any real time there? I have. Saying it's not fully part of the United States is bizarre. It's a state. The only way it could become more a part of the United States is if you somehow towed the islands to California.
They're Japanese citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities of every other Japanese citizen. You want to talk about disenfranchisement, talk about the Ainu. I'm sure you'll figure out some way to blame that on the US too.
"North Atlantic bourgeoisie" - that just cracks me up.
I never claimed anything was above reproach. I said it wasn't a good example of imperialism and that you should choose another example if you want to criticize the US.
Now tell me some unrelated nonsense (maybe bring up Hawaii again?) and that you're "not going to post anymore" because it's useless to talk to me (which it is - you're very clearly in the wrong on this one), so we can get this behind us.
As if most Japanese people in general aren't politically disenfranchised with their one party political system and of course that one party has been a puppet of
since the end of the war, also includes a bunch of the very same fascists you keep using as justification for US imperialism
If the Japanese fascists are the reason US imperialism is justified in Japan than why did
let all of those fascists go with out punishment? Why hire them to continue the same work they were doing?
A tankie saying a one party system is bad? The irony is strong with this one.
Turns out that we like one party systems where the proletariat is in control and dislike one party systems where the bourgeoisie are in control. Shocking.
Uphold the Communist Party of China and Marxism-Leninism-MZT; Amerikkka inspired Nazism and will, like its child, die in a bunker with a gun to its head
When the one party is the puppet of the US, as they said in that very sentence, yes it is bad. If there were two parties that were both controlled by the US (and really there are two parties in coalition, aren't there?) it would be just as bad
When the US declared war on Japan in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it did not declare war on Germany; Germany declared war on the US three days after the US declared war on Japan. The U.S. was the ideological predecessor to Nazism [1] [2], and only joined the war when they were threatened.
Pure historical revisionism. Isolationism was a strong force in the US and it's not like popular sentiment was opposed to fascism. The attack was extremely convenient for "forcing" the US to participate without the isolationists being able to complain about getting "needlessly entangled in foreign affairs".
Not that I think the US did wrong by fighting Japan. I don't know very much about the state of the US military at the time but really my biggest qualm in terms of the start of the war is that they didn't start fighting the Nazis sooner.
So nice to see civil, substantive discussion instead of the trolling and insults you get from Hexbear users!
It's interesting. You can really feel that they are just despondent and upset about late stage capitalism and tired of the use of American exceptionalism as the lie to sell everything America did as perfect but they literally ignore all the gray for a simplified answer of everything ever done was bad.
They really are like conservatives in that they simplify a world view to black or white and denounce everything in order to react first and have critical thoughts never.
They really are obnoxious aren't they? Yet another group of shitty people who would let the world burn just so that they don't have to think or put effort into their system of morals
Yeah, you'd think I'd know better by now.
Free Ryukyu! Revolution of our time!
"Sure, it has popular opposition, but the capitalists like it, making it a divisive issue"
Imperialism is not the same thing as conquest, and US handling of the aftermath of WWII featured cartoonish levels of imperialism, though the starkest example is probably Korea.
That must have been a horrible experience for you.
Thank you for your service.
I wasn't a guard, but I know about it because a friend of mine was. IIRC the guard just stepped inside the shack and called in to report it. He was more confused than anything.
This part is ironic. The tankies will often argue that Japan shouldn't be expanding their military (and anything their military does they think is wrong), but also that the US shouldn't be involved. You don't get both. You can't just say a nation should have no way to defend itself, especially when you are defending Russia and China.
As a "tankie", if I had to choose one or the other between "Japan grows military" vs "US stays occupying Japan," the answer is absolutely the first one being preferable. However, as any of those dang tankies will point out, the two are not mutually exclusive. Japan can develop its own military while the US maintains its occupation, just look at the miserable state of South Korea.
They arent mutually exclusive, but absolutely one or the other are required. You can't have neither.
Just so it’s not lost on everyone, I can make shit up too:
The ghost of Carl Marx had crazy orgies with Stalin and Hitler and under aged boys of indeterminate ethnic origin. These geopolitical parties, as they were known, though they have nothing to do with Okinawa, explain much of the problems with Russian-Anglo-Italo crypto leftist socialists and general inferiority therein.
This is why they are continually ignored by all facets of superior civilized democratic capitalist society. Just in case my agenda was missed, I shall write the words “invisible hands of the free market.”