再解釈
Reinterpretation

How would you describe the relation of the military to the rest of civil society in Hokkaido?
Hokkaido hosts something of the order of 40% of total SDF (Self-Defence Forces) ground forces. You have a difference between communities that are dependent on a base for their broader economic livelihood and communities that aren’t, so can take a freer role in supporting or criticizing the military on purely ideological grounds.

Do you have a sense of what direction it will go in Hokkaido, for instance, will a renewed emphasis on the military mean increased investment here?
I don’t think so. The recent collective self-defence reinterpretation is basically a slide toward revising the constitution. Abe can’t go the full leap now: he doesn’t have the mandate or support. So he just went for a lower grade reinterpretation. Given that Article 9 renounced the possession of war capability, Article 9 got ripped up in 1954 with the creation of the SDF, in my view. But the basic military allergy remains strong amongst the Japanese people, and I don’t think there’s any danger of Japan invading other countries as it did in the 1930s and 1940s. However, it’s about keeping the genie in the bottle. You only need an incident to spark something off. You only need one or two deaths to get a few thousand people saying “we need to militarize more,” and then another accidental death or two, or even a plane getting shot down over the Senkaku Islands to push it a long way in the wrong direction. My understanding of military psychology, when combined with nationalistic sentiment, is that anybody can be pushed. Anybody can go down the path of extreme violence if they are put in a corner. The key is avoiding going down the path in the first place. I don’t think that Japan is a special case here and despite pacifist sentiment now is capable of going down the path of war again if pushed.

But when you interpret self-defence as collective, if you tie it to the United States, they are basically always at war…
I don’t think Abe is thinking of sending troops to the front line to fight alongside America in places like Afghanistan. The Japanese people wouldn’t stand for that. The real danger is the Senkaku Islands. Or if a North Korean missile test goes wrong and a missile lands on a Japanese town.

I guess in both cases, in China and North Korea, there is a lot that is historically entrenched, but also with China there is a lot of economic rationale there?
With China, the irony is that if the territorial issue was shelved, both countries would save a huge amount of money. What we have is national pride and emotion trumping any kind of economic or military rationality.

You don’t see it as a containment strategy, being pushed by the US maybe? That might perhaps link these military changes to the trade deals, this is what we are trying to figure out.
What America is getting out of it is the sense of regional crisis, which in turn provides a rationale for keeping their bases here. If in East Asia everyone worked together to resolve historical issues and create an Asian Union along the lines of the European Union, what would be the point of having these bases? For America, there has to be a conflict, otherwise, it’s “Marines Go Home.”* Another theory, and one which I personally find very intriguing, is that removing all American bases would actually make Japan a much safer place, because what it would do is force a bilateral settlement on all issues, between Korea-Japan and China-Japan. In any conflict between China and America, or North Korea and America, the very presence of American bases makes Japan a target. But, America is not going to withdraw its basis on those grounds, so it just remains a hypothesis.

Did you see the recruiting ad featuring the AKB 48 girl?
The idea of the SDF using manga and popular culture to appeal to particular people is just a toned down version of the “chicks with machine guns” recruiting posters that you get in other places. The bigger reality is that in a place like Hokkaido that isn’t as economically prosperous as the rest of Japan, the military can be an appealing job opportunity. As a soldier, you are a koumuin (government worker). It’s a safe job as long as you aren’t being sent to a war zone, and as long as the expectation is that you will be involved in disaster relief and a few war games, perhaps putting on a nice military display from time to time. People are thinking a koumuin is better than being unemployed. Particularly in Hokkaido, it’s a much more accepted profession because so many of these communities are reliant on the bases. I don’t think that means Hokkaido is rampantly militarist. Military and civilian society have a higher level of interdependence here.

I am interested in why the TPP, which binds the country to trans-national rules, is being pushed by a nationalist administration?
I have not followed TPP particularly closely, but I think it links into military issues—Abe needs that strong support from America regarding what he wants to do with the constitution. America was supportive of both the Secrets Act and the revision to the interpretation of the Constitution. I think Abe is doing a bit of horse trading. Secondly, if you look at Abe’s policies, he is going for enriching big corporate Japan, not for enriching small-medium company Japan. The agricultural sector in Japan is not as big and powerful enough today to make as big a difference at the election as it used to. Hokkaido is a bit of an exception with large scale farming and specialist farms, compared to the small grandpa and grandma family farms (particularly rice growers) in the rest of Japan. Maybe Abe has decided that Hokkaido isn’t an important electoral area for him, and just lets it go. What he really needs is for big corporate Japan to succeed with the cheap yen and lower barriers to trade, and as long as he keeps that key voter group happy, he can afford to lose a few votes. He’s a politician. He does his maths. The protests to Article 9 in front of the Diet: he turns a deaf ear; those weren’t people who voted for him and they never will. They can wave their placards as long as they like… as long as it doesn’t swell to hundreds of thousands of people.

Can I ask you if you might give some speculation about the future, the biggest changes to Hokkaido and/or Japan?
If the trade deal goes through, I am expecting that it won’t be as big of a hit as people are thinking, because the economy will readjust. What we have seen in the clothing industry is that when Japanese people are walking down the street, they are still looking really smart and wealthy, carrying their Louis Vuitton bags and whatever. But what they are doing in private when nobody is looking, is wearing 500 yen Uniqlo shirts. Consumers have adjusted to having the really expensive, higher end goods for particular occasions and the cheaper stuff for other times. I think that’s what’s going to happen to the agricultural sector if TPP goes through. Japanese products will be way over-priced for the domestic market; there will be cheap rice coming from America, cheap beef from Australia, and cheap soy or whatever coming from China. The price differential is going to open up even more. The traditional sushi restaurants who definitely want to use Japanese rice will maybe bump up their prices, and Japanese-produced food will become more of a luxury category. When they just need to fill their belly on a daily basis, there is the Uniqlo product, produced overseas, sold cheap; it’s going to be California rice on the dinner table. People are already adjusting—they aren’t eating Kobe beef for dinner. It isn’t the death of the Japanese agricultural industry, but a reorienting of Japanese farming to a more luxury market. I don’t see disaster.
The other thing that you see coming is a consumer who is prepared to pay more for safety and knowing where their food is coming from—the latest Chinese food scandal involving chicken McNuggets is just the latest. The other thing is that the costs of agricultural produce are in transportation. Hokkaido therefore has an advantage, with its 200% calorie base—it doesn’t have to have expensive food compared to the rest of the country. Other places will suffer more because of transportation costs. So this place is vulnerable in some ways, but it’s all about turning risks into opportunities. The lower prices of imports might help out as well. It’s like any of these things: VAT, consumption tax price rise, oil price rise. People change. And I do believe it will go ahead.

(Discussion held July 23rd, 2014 at Hokkaido University.)

*the name of a film by Fujimoto Yukihisa, and article by Kageyama Asako, compiled, edited and translated by Philip Seaton on Japan Focus: http://www.japanfocus.org/-kageyama-asako/3335