A primer on the US-Japan defense treaty
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The United States-Japan Security Treaty at 50Still a Grand Bargain?
By George R. Packard
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/japan/2010-03-01/united-states-japan-security-treaty-50On January 19, 1960, Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter signed a historic treaty. It committed the United States to help defend Japan if Japan came under attack, and it provided bases and ports for U.S. armed forces in Japan. The agreement has endured through half a century of dramatic changes in world politics -- the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spread of nuclear weapons to North Korea, the rise of China -- and in spite of fierce trade disputes, exchanges of insults, and deep cultural and historical differences between the United States and Japan. This treaty has lasted longer than any other alliance between two great powers since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
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LABOR PAINS
Back in 1952, when an earlier security treaty (which provided the basis for the 1960 treaty) entered into force, both sides thought it was a grand bargain. Japan would recover its independence, gain security at a low cost from the most powerful nation in the region, and win access to the U.S. market for its products. Without the need to build a large military force, Japan would be able to devote itself to economic recovery. The United States, for its part, could project power into the western Pacific, and having troops and bases in Japan made credible both its treaty commitments to defend South Korea and Taiwan and its policy of containment of the Soviet Union and communist China.
But there was also much to be unhappy about, especially for the Japanese. This was an agreement negotiated between a victor and an occupied nation, not equal sovereign states. The Japanese government, which had never in its history accepted foreign troops on its soil, was now forced to agree to the indefinite presence of 260,000 U.S. military personnel at more than 2,800 bases across the country. Practical arrangements for the troops' stationing were left to an administrative agreement that did not require the approval of the Diet, the Japanese parliament. This gave the United States the right to quell large-scale internal disturbances in Japan. Against their better judgment, Japan's leaders were also forced to agree to recognize Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China on Taiwan as the government of all of China. Meanwhile, the U.S. government made no specific commitment to defend Japan and retained the freedom to use its troops anywhere in East Asia.
The United States also came to have misgivings about the terms of the alliance. Under Article 9 of Japan's 1947 constitution, which General Douglas MacArthur had forced on the country, Japan renounced "war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force in settling international disputes" and undertook never to maintain "land, sea, and air forces as well as other war potential." The U.S. government soon regretted this language: Japan could invoke it as an excuse to stay out the United States' future wars. Indeed, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida found ways to resist Washington's urgings to build up Japan's army. Not only had the United States undertaken to come to Japan's defense in case of an attack while Japan had no reciprocal obligation, but Japan insisted that its constitution prohibited it from exercising the right of collective self-defense and thus from ever sending troops or vessels to help Americans in combat operations.
By 1957, buoyed by the country's rising prosperity and new nationalism, the postwar generation of Japanese college students, Marxist intellectuals, and labor unionists, among others, started to chafe at the inequalities embedded in the treaty. The U.S. troops living on bases in Japan had brought crime and caused accidents; the agreement still risked dragging Japan into war with China or North Korea or the Soviet Union. Kishi staked his political life on improving the agreement's terms for Japan. After three years of hard bargaining, a revised treaty, which could be abrogated after ten years, was hammered out. The U.S. government committed to defending Japan if it was attacked. It agreed to consult Japan in advance of any major changes in the deployment of its troops or equipment or in its use of its bases in Japan for combat operations.
Although the revised treaty improved Japan's leverage, Japanese left-wingers, among others, used the ratification process to express their disapproval of the entire U.S.-Japanese alliance system. Kishi battled his left-wing critics for months, melees broke out in the Diet, and thousands of Japanese protested in massive street demonstrations. On May 19, 1960, Kishi suddenly forced a vote to ratify the treaty in the lower house, calling on the police to remove his Socialist opponents for staging sit-downs and blocking the Speaker from calling the Diet to order. Too clever by half, the maneuver aroused even greater and more violent street protests, and a state visit by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, timed to coincide with the revised treaty's ratification, had to be canceled. The treaty was eventually approved, and it was ratified on June 23, but Kishi announced his resignation the same day. The Liberal Democratic Party, the dominant conservative party, had learned that it could not impose its will on the opposition on matters of war and peace.
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