In January 1999, when I was an arch-Conservative Junior in the Department of Political Science at Winthrop University, one of those trifling incidents occurred which raises the hackles and the ire of young Conservatives, eager for a chance to point out the stupidity and unwarranted sensitivity of their Liberal antagonists. David Howard, head of Washington, D.C.’s constituent services office, referred to a budget item as “niggardly.” In the fine tradition of intellectual juggernauts in D.C., Marshall Brown, another aide to Mayor Anthony Williams, complained that it was racial slur and Williams, whom I thought should have fired Brown for being quick about casting aspersions and slow about using a dictionary to compensate for his stunted vocabulary, accepted Howard’s forced resignation.

This was a political issue. It was political because Anthony Williams was an intelligent man. If nothing else, Williams knew how to use a dictionary and valued Howard’s intelligence and skill highly enough to rehire him once the kerfuffle had been spread throughout the American press and not one literate person of any race or political persuasion had done anything other than defend Howard. It was political because it took pressure from gay lobbying groups to get Howard, who was gay, reappointed. It was political because Williams was running the predominantly Black Democratic District of Columbia, where even the appearance of racism would, quite rightly, be a political liability.

In the end, in addition to pressure over Howard’s sexuality, it took a statement from then-NAACP head Julian Bond, whose job called for letting no offense go unchallenged, to point out the absurdity of the issue. Dr. Bond said, “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding. David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back - and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them.”

As a young Conservative, I was outraged that anyone would lose his job simply for having a good vocabulary. We arch-Conservatives believed that in the Liberal establishment of the 1990s intelligence was tantamount to criminality, but that did little to assuage my indignation over Howard’s firing. After all, Howard had put his robust vocabulary to use in irritation over the niggardly spending of the D.C. government on its predominantly Black constituents. For him to have used a racial slur in such a context simply wouldn’t have made any sense.

Eight and a half years have gone by. I have become a good bit more Liberal and have joined the rest of mainstream America in finding both sides of the country’s political spectrum equally loathesome. I cringe to think that I once agreed with things R. Emmett Tyrrell wrote.

Having spent pretty much my entire adult life in Tokyo, readers of this site will not be surprised to learn that I have transferred much of my one-time passion for the minutiae of American politics to my new home. Readers of this site will surely also have noticed that I still have my biases, this time in a decidedly more Liberal direction, and that I have no trouble finding instances of irritating stupidity and duplicity in the Japanese government.

I had, until quite recently, always thought of Japanese politics as being wholly different from American politics in nearly every regard. I had naively thought that choosing sides in Japanese politics was simpler, that the politicking going on was purer in the sense that it was political maneuvering and one-upmanship, not sniping at minor slips in image maintenance.

I was quite mistaken.

Observers of Japanese politics love to point out that former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi ushered in a new era in Japanese politics. Koizumi himself was not the natural choice, the Prime Ministership having been, for most intents and purposes, a position gained through seniority and attrition. The sprightly Koizumi sought reform by (gasp!) criticizing and challenging the people actually responsible for Japan’s woes - members of his own Liberal Democratic Party. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan started advertizing the relative youth of its candidates, plastering their ages on campaign posters (a tactic now adopted by the LDP.) The DPJ tried to outflank the LDP and take advantage of the stodginess of most of the LDP by running candidates who could campaign on charisma, or at least relative charisma.

While popularity contests make for a warped kind of meritocracy, they are at least some kind of meritocracy. They are at least an improvement over representative parliamentary democracy by seniority, which isn’t all that democratic. I was happy to see the change. I thought Japan would maintain the good points of its electoral system without necessarily adopting the glaring negatives of popularity contests in, say, the US.

It seems that, in the still-young post-Koizumi era, the tolerance for skulduggery has decreased. Behavior once considered business as usual, such as blatant bid-rigging, lying on political fund reports, and housing one’s mistress in one’s rent-free government accommodation, now draws ink, if nothing else, and results in resignations.

Mistress-housing Tax Chief Honma and political fund cheat Genichiro Sata resigned. They were joined by others. Incompetent MEXT Minister Bunmei Ibuki is still around, but corrupt Agriculture Minister Matsuoka is not (although resignation and apology would have been preferable to suicide.) Bid-rigging governors and mayors, even former governors, were being investigated, even prosecuted.

This was good. This was very good. This was a sign of some shred of accountability. This was the first nail in the coffin of cronyism.

The only thing tempering my enthusiasm for this new wave of intolerance for malfeasance was the fact that actual amakudari reform was nonexistent and likely never would be.

But then the biggest scandal of all was when Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare Hakuo Yanagisawa uttered the poorly-considered comment:

The number of women between the ages of 15 and 50 is fixed. The number of birth-giving machines (and) devices is fixed, so all we can ask is that they do their best per head.

Then he tried to cover his tracks by saying that a healthy couple should want at least two children.

People called for his head. I should have seen the furor over Yangisawa’s remark for what it was, but I, too, thought it best that he resign, even though I thought his comment paled in comparison to the despicable actions of some of his colleagues and the incomparably stupid statements of Foreign Minister Aso Taro, MEXT Minister Bunmei Ibuki, or Defense Agency Chief-turned-Japan’s first Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma.

Which brings us to the current topic.

Trans-Pacific Radio has been no friend of Fumio Kyuma’s. In fact, he rivals Ibuki for being the Government Minister TPR has most harshly and uncharitably criticized. I’ve all but called him stupid on Seijigiri, called his grasp on the facts related to his job “tenuous” on TPR News, said that his foolish remarks spoke for themselves in another edition of TPR News, on the grounds that “Kyuma is an idiot,” I defended and supported US Vice President Dick Cheney’s decision not to meet with Kyuma on his visit to Japan in February, and wholeheartedly supported my colleague Ken Worsley when he called for Kyuma’s immediate resignation or firing back on December 12, 2006. As Mr. Worsley put it then:

None [of the tin-eared, misspeaking, subcompetent politicians grabbing headlines late last year], however, approach the level of incompetence and dangerous bumbling that Defense Agency Chief Fumio Kyuma has reached.

. . . [W]e at TPR call for Mr Kyuma’s immediate resignation or firing. This country does not need, nor have time for, defense leaders who claim that they do not have enough knowledge of their own government’s stance on a war that they are meant to be leading on behalf of the nation’s citizens and taxpayers.

With the formation of a new Defense Ministry, it is time for some new blood and new leadership. Mr Kyuma is the product of seniority and LDP factions. We do not have faith that someone who makes such remarks will be able to lead such a crucial ministerial post. Japan is at a crossroads, and Mr Abe needs to choose: the future or the past. Proper diplomatic relations with skilled ministers, or the same old same old.

I stand by all of that. Fumio Kyuma is incompetent. He has no idea what is going on. Just to refresh your memory: He said Japan had not supported the US-led invasion of Iraq, that the appearance of such support was merely then-Prime Minister Koizumi’s personal opinion; he said that the US had invaded Iraq on the faulty supposition that Iraq had nuclear weapons, which was about the only justification the Bush administration didn’t use; he criticized the US for not knowing how to do “spadework” for not having obtained the blessing of Okinawa’s newly-elected Governor for a controversial base relocation despite the fact that the Governor in question had not yet been elected when the relocation plan was approved by both the US and Japan. He then said approval of the plan was in doubt after the plan had been approved.

Fumio Kyuma is an idiot.

After being promoted to Defense Minister when the Defense Agency was elevated to Ministry status in January, Kyuma presumably received a stern talking-to and kept his mouth shut, or at least out of the headlines, for a while.

Then, last Saturday, the diminutive moron grabbed everyone’s attention again. At a speech at Chiba’s Reitaku University, Kyuma said:

I have now come to accept in my mind that in order to end the War, it could not be helped that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy.

Oh boy, here we go again.

But wait. Let’s take another look at that.

I have now come to accept in my mind that in order to end the War, it could not be helped that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy.

Well, unlike Kyuma’s previous numbskulled statements, this one was not factually incorrect. It was clearly a personal opinion, it could be neither proven nor disproven, nor could it be substantiated or really debunked. It could be found distasteful, but even that would be a bit hasty. (We’ll get to that in a second.) Of equal import, it was, unlike some of his earlier statements, not in direct contradiction of clearly stated government positions. While then-Prime Minister Eisaku Sato first stated Japan’s three Non-Nuclear Principles: that Japan would not produce, possess, or host nuclear weapons, in 1967, and every subsequent Prime Minister has upheld them, and while Japan has clearly said it seeks an end to the threat of nuclear war, the government of Japan has never taken a clear position on the necessity, or lack thereof, of America’s use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II.

Moreover, Kyuma never said the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were anything other than terrible. He never said the plight of hibakusha, survivors of the bombings, should be taken any less seriously than� it has been. He never said the US was right to have used atomic bombs. He merely said that, in his mind, he accepted it as unavoidable.

Nevertheless, just as quickly as David Howard drew the bilious ire of those in D.C. well attuned to anything that could even rhyme with something offensive, those in Japan who wished to distance themselves from anything controversial and who wished to, perhaps wisely, stay away from anything that could possibly be misinterpreted or that would require thought, jumped all over Kyuma.

Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue, apparently not a man to let an opportunity for righteous indignation pass, handed a letter to Kyuma, which read, in part: “The comment was an insult to hibakusha, and I cannot ignore it as the mayor of the bomb site. I demand he know well that using nuclear weapons is not permitted.”

Japan has a clear policy against hosting, much less having, much less using nuclear weapons. Kyuma didn’t say anything about using nuclear weapons. He certainly didn’t hint that he wanted to. He said he thought that America’s use of nuclear weapons in WWII was unavoidable.

As the outcry against positing the idea that, maybe, some people thought there was a reason to use nuclear weapons mounted, Kyuma attempted to defend himself by saying that his remarks had been misunderstood (of course!) and that he had meant to say that the dropping of the atomic bomb could not be helped “from the American point of view,” and that the bomb prevented a Soviet invasion of Japan or a prolonged conflict with the Soviet Union as well as a US invasion of Japan, which would have cost more lives.

This is, it is true, more or less the American line. However, Kyuma’s explanation was unnecessary. This time around, amazingly, it was not Kyuma who was wrong.

Statements like that made by Mayor Taue in his letter are far from helpful. They create controversy where none exists. That’s right, I’m saying it was the reaction to Kyuma’s statement that caused the controversy, not Kyuma’s statement itself.

Mayor Taue demanded that Kyuma know well that the use of nuclear weapons was not permitted. Granted, in Kyuma’s case, it is not safe to assume that he knows what government policy is, but to spurn the use of nuclear weapons is as canonical a statement as saying that slavery was bad and that using the N-word is offensive. This is especially true in Japan.

At first glance, it makes sense that Japan would have an extraordinary aversion to nuclear weapons. Japan was, after all, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack. This is serious fact and the prevention of further nuclear attack is a noble and necessary goal.

Apart from hibakusha themselves, though, I don’t see that merely being from Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives one a special knowledge of or greater authority in speaking out against nuclear weapons. Fumio Kyuma, after all, is from Nagasaki. Until Tuesday, he was the highest-ranking person from Nagasaki in the Japanese government. Mayor Taue’s assertion that, being the current mayor, he has an authoritative view on the matter of nuclear weapons is nonsense.

It took great courage to make the use of nuclear weapons unacceptable. Those who were the victims of the attacks endured a suffering no one else will ever really understand. Likewise, the civil rights activists of mid-twentieth century America showed great courage in their work. Just as an impassioned speech against racism in the US today is cheap political pandering, it takes no fortitude to say, in 2007, that the use of nuclear weapons is wrong. Everyone knows it, pretty much everyone accepts it.

This has been a political issue from the start, though. Mayor Taue’s letter was political in that it raised his profile as a rather new office holder and allowed him cast himself in the popular role developed by his predecessors. When Prime Minister Abe refused to fire Kyuma, it was highly political. Ditto the Prime Minister’s acceptance, on Tuesday, of Kyuma’s resignation.

Obviously, the looming House of Councillors elections on July 29th play a big role here. The LDP, with its waning popularity and myriad scandals, simply cannot afford either another controversy or a firing. Every political party tries to keep up appearances before an election, so it is no surprise that no thought was given to what Kyuma said, only to what it might have seemed like he was implying.

It is important that it is Shinzo Abe who is Prime Minister, though. This fact is just as, if not more important than the upcoming elections.

It is no secret that, in terms of certain aspects of foreign policy and, much more so, issues related to World War II, Mr. Abe is of a rather conservative bent. Some would even go so far as to call him a bit nationalistic or an historical revisionist.

What we know is that Abe and many of those closest to him have worked hard to derail any movement towards Japan’s openly acknowledging responsibility for anything that happened during the War or leading up to it. With rare exceptions, top-ranking officials have not strayed beyond the passive voice. It is always regrettable that things happened, never with profound regret that Japan apologizes for doing things. The shining exception to this is then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono’s 1993 acknowledgement and stunted apology for the Japanese Imperial Army’s sexual enslavement of women throughout the East. This, though, was never ratified by the Diet, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr. Abe and his cohorts, who worked doggedly to make sure that Japan continued to dodge its responsibility for its wartime aggression and the deplorable conduct of its government and armed forces.

As Prime Minister, Abe has continued such denials and those conservatives who would deny culpability have gained credence.

For actual hibakusha and hibakusha support groups, a focus on victimhood is legitimate. Victimhood is the glue that holds hibakusha together, that makes their group a group, just like the thing that makes a Mac-owners’ group a group is their mutual ownership of Macs. Hibakusha were the actual victims of finite, clearly definable attacks.

For the rest of Japan, though, especially for politicians who are the descendants and heirs of politicians who profited from the War, there is no legitimate claim to victimhood whatsoever. The only victimhood suffered by Japan in relation to World War II was that of the ordinary people of Japan at the hands of the Japanese government. Losing a war is not the same thing as being a victim, especially not when the loser was the aggressor.

Victimhood, though, is central to the denial argument. Claiming that the War was terrible and all who lived through it were victims together and that they should just try to move on is the only way the fact that it was the government of Japan that was primarily responsible for all of that suffering can be pushed into the background.

This Japan-as-victim mantra is so often repeated that it is as firmly a part of the canon of political correctness as more legitimate things such as the unacceptability of nuclear war and racism.

Back when much to-do was made over Minister Yanagisawa’s unfortunate “birth-giving machines” remark, I should have seen this dark side of political correctness rearing up its ugly head in Japan. Had people called for his resignation over his being part of a Cabinet with a deep disconnect with and disregard for the people of this nation, it would have made sense, but that wasn’t what happened. He said the wrong thing and it could have been sexist. That’s unforgivable.

Fumio Kyuma said something reasonable, if disagreeable. It could have been insensitive, though. More important, it violated the Japan-as-victim image Abe and other Diet members had worked so hard to maintain. After all, if the atomic bombs were unavoidable, that means something led up to them, which means the fact that those bombings were preceded by over thirteen years of war, in which Japan was the aggressor, would be dragged up all over again. That is not what the kantei wants, especially in the run-up to an important election.

Just think about it - not only has the pensions system been screwed up and those screw-ups kept quiet; not only has Abe readmitted the postal rebels to the LDP, largely because they were his buddies; not only have LDP members cheated and gamed the system of public funds to their own benefit, but Abe still says constitutional reform and building a more assertive Japan are his top priorities.

The LDP is one political party that has to minimize what it stands for prior to an election.

That’s what this was about. David Howard was punished for having too large a vocabulary and threatening the hair-trigger intolerance for intolerance upon which the Democratic party was based in D.C. Fumio Kyuma not only inadvertently contradicted the absurd worldview on which the LDP is based, he did so in a manner that, if you really stretched and twisted his words, could be seen as showing an improper lack of reverence toward a beatified group.

Fumio Kyuma was incompetent and as sharp as a volleyball. His departure from the Defense Ministry and replacement by Yuriko Koike can only be a benefit to the Ministry and to Japan. Nevertheless, he deserved to be hoisted on his own petard, not pushed out by lame sound bite politics.

The question now is whether, anywhere in the apparatus of the LDP, there is a Dr. Julian Bond. It’s too bad the solution to this instance of knee-jerk outrage isn’t as simple as a dictionary.

Listen Now:

 Shasetsu #21: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download