American Dominance is Being Challenged

I've enjoyed reading the Economist less and less these past few years, as the formerly august news magazine has succumbed to collectivist progressivism.

But I'm amazingly pleased with this analysis. It's good.

See, "Great-power politics: The new game."

Fight Breaks Out as Japan's Parliament Approves Overseas Combat Role for Military (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "Japan Approves Overseas Combat Role for Military":

TOKYO — In a middle-of-the night vote that capped a tumultuous struggle with opposition parties in Parliament, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan secured final passage of legislation on Saturday authorizing overseas combat missions for his country’s military, overturning a decades-old policy of reserving the use of force for self-defense.

The legislation had been expected to pass; Mr. Abe’s governing coalition controls a formidable majority in the legislature. But analysts said the grinding political battle and days of demonstrations that accompanied the effort could hurt his standing with a public already skeptical of his hawkish vision for Japan’s national security.

The debate often doubled as a forum for airing views about Japan’s most important ally, the United States. Many were hostile.

“If this legislation passes, we will absolutely be caught up in illegal American wars,” Taro Yamamoto, a leader of a small left-leaning opposition party, said in a committee debate on Thursday. The debate ended with lawmakers piled on top of one another in a melee for control of the chairman’s microphone.

On Friday, Mr. Yamamoto held up the voting by taking a slow-motion “cow walk” to the podium to cast his ballot. Other opposition groups entered symbolic censure motions against Mr. Abe and officials in his Liberal Democratic Party or made long, filibuster-like speeches, often repeating the conviction that a military with expanded powers would end up being dragged into an unjustified American war.

“We must not become accomplices to murder,” said Mizuho Fukushima of the Social Democratic Party. Similar sentiments have been echoed — usually in less provocative terms — by newspaper columnists, political scientists and members of the general public.

The opposition’s obstructionist tactics delayed Mr. Abe’s victory until after 2 a.m., but could not prevent it.

." Mr. Abe’s critics have a variety of grievances against the defense legislation. Not least is the question of its constitutionality: In multiple surveys of constitutional specialists, more than 90 percent have said they believe that it violates Japan’s basic law, laid down by the United States in the postwar occupation, which renounces the use of force to resolve international disputes.

But a less abstract fear of being “caught up in war” has been just as important in fueling opposition to the legislation, exposing a strain of public unease about the United States-Japan alliance that is usually kept out of view...

The war ended 70 years ago. I think Japan can change its constitution and join the status of normal countries who defend their own national security.

Still more.

PREVIOUSLY: "U.S. and Japan Tighten Alliance in Face of Surging Threat from China."

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Following-up from yesterday, "'Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, wanted officers to wear their daily service clothes — khaki button-up shirts with open collars and no ties...'"

Here's Herbert Bix's book on postwar Japan, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.

'Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, wanted officers to wear their daily service clothes — khaki button-up shirts with open collars and no ties...'

A cool story, at the Los Angeles Times, "A look inside the WWII surrender ceremony: 'My job was to make sure we did not screw up'":

James L. Starnes, navigator of the battleship Missouri, was 24 years old when he learned he would play a key role in the ceremony to mark the end of World War II.

After the Japanese conceded defeat, President Truman announced that "Mighty Mo," the behemoth 58,000-ton flagship of the 3rd Fleet, would host the signatories of the instrument of surrender in Tokyo Bay.

"My job was to make sure we did not screw up," said Starnes, 94, who performed the role of officer of the deck the morning of Sept. 2, 1945.

A former lieutenant commander in the Navy who now lives in a retirement community in Stone Mountain, east of Atlanta, Starnes is one of the few remaining veterans who organized the ceremony on the Missouri 70 years ago.

Five years after joining the Navy Reserve's officer-training program as a student at Emory University in Atlanta in 1940, Starnes was responsible for working out the logistics of the ceremony to mark the formal end of the six-year war that had killed more than 60 million people.

At first he prepared for an elaborate, formal affair with ceremonial dress and gleaming sabers. "We thought, well, this has never happened before," he said. "We'll have a big celebration, put on the white uniforms and polish up our swords."

Before the ceremony, however, Starnes got word that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, wanted officers to wear their daily service clothes — khaki button-up shirts with open collars and no ties. "We fought them in our khaki uniforms, and we'll accept their surrender in our khaki uniforms," MacArthur was reported to have said...

Keep reading.

Also from Ms. EBL, "Never Forget: 70th Anniversary of the surrender of Imperial Japan."

Magical Thinking and the Real Power of Hiroshima

From Jeffrey Lewis, at Foreign Policy, "A few thoughts on the psychological effect and utility of nuclear weapons":

HIROSHIMA, Japan — I am in Hiroshima, as is my usual practice in August. I am a member of the governor of Hiroshima prefecture’s Roundtable on Nuclear Disarmament. Each year, the city and prefecture mark the bombing with both a high-level dialogue about the state of things and public events about our nuclear predicament.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the bombings, which feels like a big moment to take stock of where we are, how we’ve gotten here, and where we’re headed.

Hiroshima is a better place to do that thinking than Washington, D.C. The weather isn’t particularly nice in either place, but Washington’s August is doubly marred with nakedly ideological polemics on the bombing. You’ll hear that the bombings ended the war and saved millions of American lives, or that President Harry Truman knew the war was over and was just trying to frighten the Soviets, a move that starts the Cold War. I don’t think the historical evidence supports either view or even the stark duality both views presume, but what is really galling about these arguments is that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reduced to the role of mere extras at their own murders.

I find a visit to Hiroshima deeply centering. It offers a chance to think again about the history of the bombing and to put the people who suffered most back at the center of the story.

It is easy to argue about the bombings with hindsight. We know the bombs worked and that they inflicted terrible suffering on the people of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Our entire modern debate about whether the bombings were intended to end the war or frighten the Soviets is premised on our contemporary conviction that nuclear weapons are awesome in the traditional sense of that word.

But Robert Oppenheimer and others didn’t know that. They were not sure, in advance, that a nuclear explosion would inspire awe. If you look back through the documents, you can see scientists worrying about picking a target to show the bomb’s best effect. There is even a dark passage where Kyoto is discussed as a target because the highly educated population would be better positioned to grasp that this bomb was different. “From the psychological point of view,” the document notes, “there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.” Consider that Oppenheimer’s first question to Gen. Leslie Groves after the bombing was whether it had occurred after sundown. He was still worried the locals wouldn’t be able to tell it was not a run-of-the-mill bombing unless the big fireball turned night into day. Groves explained that a night bombing hadn’t been feasible. The locals still noticed.

Our modern conviction that nuclear weapons are different only came later. While the construction of the norm against nuclear weapons, I think pride of place goes to John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker, it was eventually published by Alfred A. Knopf press. The fact that I was assigned this text repeatedly in high school and college probably explains my choice of careers. I have a slim 1946 first edition that is one of my prize possessions.

The creation of this norm was slow and contested. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried very much about a growing taboo against nuclear weapons use. They worried the taboo would deny the United States a weapon that they believed was essential to meeting defense commitments around the world.

Over time, we’ve come to see nuclear weapons as Hersey saw them, as the ultimate expression of material and spiritual evil of total war. The bomb has come to represent the ability of our civilization to destroy itself and our nagging fear that our political and social institutions are inadequate to save us from the abyss.

This norm, really this fear, helps explain why nuclear weapons have not been used again in anger in the intervening 70 years. One might point to deterrence, but nor have we used the bomb against states with no nuclear weapons. Even Eisenhower hesitated in response to suggestions nuclear weapons night help relieve French forces trapped by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

The implication of this norm, of course, is that we can’t actually use nuclear weapons. It’s hard, for example, to imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on the Iraqis we claimed to be liberating from Saddam Hussein. That’s certainly what Air Force Gen. Chuck Horner, who ran the air war during the 1991 Gulf War, concluded. Asked by an interviewer whether he considered using nuclear weapons, he responded, “You could use nuclear weapons but for what targets? The nuclear weapon’s only good against cities; it’s not any good against troops in the desert. I mean it takes too many of ’em, so the problem you have is, you have a war where if you kill a lot of people, particularly women and children, you lose the war no matter what happens on the battlefield.” Nor, obviously, did the United States use nuclear weapons in 2003.

I once had the opportunity to ask a four-star general a pointed question: Are there any targets that the United States cannot destroy without nuclear weapons? I got an interesting response, one that I found a bit convoluted and that involved a nearby chair as a metaphor. He said something like, “Take this chair — there are a lot of ways I can destroy the chair as a chair, but does destroying the chair have the unique psychological effect of using a nuclear weapon?” I wasn’t quite sure I was as intimidated by our ability to nuke the chair, or even the whole dining room at Restaurant Nora, but I took that to be a “no.” There are no such targets...

That's a little soppy for me, although he's absolutely right about the norm against nuclear use. No rational state will use nuclear weapons today. That's one reason why you want keep them out of the hands of state leaders in, say, Pyongyang and Tehran.

Still more at that top link.

And ICYMI, "The Defeat of Japan Was Anything but Inevitable. Dropping the Bomb Was the Right Thing to Do."

Hundreds Protest Against Bill to Reform Japan's Peace Constitution (VIDEO)

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to end Japan's pacifist role in international politics, and to do that he needs to change Japan's "peace constitution."

At the Sydney Morning Herald, "Shinzo Abe's 'war' reforms draw wave of Japanese protesters":

Tokyo: They are polite, persistent and determined. Shinzo Abe's constitutional reforms have drawn a wave of protesters on to the streets of Tokyo, a rare occurrence in Japan that could take the shine off what should have been the prime minister's crowning achievement: a package of national security bills to expand the role of its military.

The most controversial aspect of the legislation is a reinterpretation of Japan's pacifist constitution, limiting its military's role to self-defence. The reinterpretation will allow Japanese troops to come to the aid of allies under attack, and fight overseas for the first time since World War II.

"Japanese democracy is in danger right now because of Prime Minister Abe," said Mana Shibata, who is part of a loose network of university students leading the protests. "What we as citizens can do is go on the streets and tell the society and tell the world that we care about our peace that we protected for 70 years since the war."

It comes at a sensitive time. With the milestone anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II next week, all eyes are on the detail of his anniversary address, expected to be released on Friday.

Carefully combed each year for keywords like "apology", "repentance" and "colonial aggression" – any dilution in language will be considered incendiary by neighbours China and South Korea.

More.

Also at the Japan Times, "Nagasaki bombing remembered, but doubts emerge over anti-war, anti-nuke policy."

The Defeat of Japan Was Anything but Inevitable. Dropping the Bomb Was the Right Thing to Do

Screw the fascist leftists attacking the U.S. for defending its interests in August 1945. The numbers from the Battle of Okinawa are enough to justify the bombing alone. And remember, women and children were being armed with bamboo spears. The home islands were prepared to fight to the last. Is that what leftists want? Is that what they would have preferred? Millions of Japanese would have died, to say nothing of the quarter-million Americans who would have been killed in the invasion.

Realism. It's what's for dinner.

An outstanding essay, from Francis Pike, at the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Rethinking ‘The Bomb’ 70 years later":

Was dropping the “A” bomb moral, and did the technology it demonstrated make American victory in the Pacific war inevitable?

In the postwar period, some commentators have averred the United States need not have dropped an atomic bomb. They argue that it was only dropped to demonstrate American power to the Soviets and that it could have been demonstrated on unoccupied land. Furthermore, it is suggested that the bombing of a civilian city was a war crime. In other words, it was an unconscionable and immoral act.

Some contemporaneous commentators such as Adm. William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Chester Nimitz, Gen. “Hap” Arnold and Adm. Bull Halsey thought the use of the atomic bomb was barbarous and unnecessary. These views are not convincing; the Japanese government in August 1945 was a very long way from accepting the unconditional surrender both President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, had demanded, and which the vast majority of Americans supported. Time and again, the U.S. military had been proved wrong in its anticipation of a Japanese surrender.

Japanese diplomats may have been keen to call time on Japan’s military adventurism but the die-hards were still intent on victory. Even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, Japan’s war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, suggested, “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” Japan’s ultranationalist army leaders had built a death cult that was incomprehensible to Western logic.

Waiting for American soldiers on the shores of Japan’s four main islands were 2.5 million troops plus a vast civilian reserve. Japan had assembled a force of 11,000 planes and thousands of suicide boats to thwart the American invasion and Adm. Onishi, the main architect of the kamikaze campaign, believed victory on land was possible “if we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives.”

As some 12,000 Americans had been killed at the Battle of Okinawa when faced with just 80,000 Japanese troops, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff realistically estimated that the conquest of mainland Japan would cost 267,000 U.S. lives. Meanwhile, the War Department estimated up to 800,000 dead – more than double the American deaths in Europe in World War II. Japanese casualties, based on the universal refusal of their troops to surrender, were estimated at 3 million dead plus 5 million to 10 million civilians.

Presented with these forbidding numbers, no president of a democratically elected country could have spurned the use of the atomic bomb. Not using the bomb would have been greeted with utter incomprehension by nearly all Americans. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson observed, “No man … could have failed to use it [the A-bomb] and afterward have looked his countrymen in the face.”

For the GIs about to ship out to Japan, it was a reprieve. As Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old officer recalled, “We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Furthermore, with only two atomic bombs available, a demonstration could not be afforded. Lastly, while the conspiracy theorists are adamant the bomb was used as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, the reality was that at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman was urging Stalin to attack Japan so that America alone would not bear the burden of its defeat....

Keep reading.

Atom Bomb: The Logical Outcome of Total War

From Alonzo Hamby, a review of Charles Pellegrino's, To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima, and Susan Southard's, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, at the Wall Street Journal:

‘The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin told Britain’s House of Commons in 1932. “The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” Baldwin was no warmonger. His purpose was to underscore the indiscriminate horror likely to come from the air in an era of big military airplanes carrying large payloads of explosives. His declaration reflected the thinking of theorists ranging from the Italian general Giulio Douhet to the popular novelist H.G. Wells. It also acknowledged the truism that wars are ultimately between peoples and societies, not just armed forces.

War came within a few short years, and the bomber was its most feared weapon. In Europe, Germany showed the way—first in Spain with Guernica, then in Britain with the Blitz against London, Coventry, Hull and other cities. Revenge followed in the form of British and American bombers plastering German population centers with equal indiscrimination. Japanese bombers killed or wounded thousands of Chinese at Shanghai in 1932 and wreaked havoc at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

In late 1944, Japan began to be attacked by the most formidable of the World War II bombers, the American B-29. Japan’s defenses were weak and its provisions for civilian shelters grossly inadequate. Its wood-and-paper buildings were terribly vulnerable to incendiary bombs. Few had basements to which their inhabitants could retreat. On the night of March 9, 1945, more than 300 American B-29s raided a working-class area of Tokyo that was laced with small factories. The incendiary bombs set off firestorms that laid waste to nearly 16 square miles of the city and killed approximately 100,000 civilians and left the survivors demoralized.

Other Japanese cities endured ordeals similar to Tokyo’s. Two, however, were relatively untouched—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their inhabitants never realized that they were being saved for a terrible new weapon. The reprieve came to an end on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, in each case with single atomic bombs that probably produced fewer deaths than the Tokyo firebombing but spread greater fear.

Charles Pellegrino’s study of Hiroshima, “To Hell and Back,” and Susan Southard’s “Nagasaki” give scant attention to the larger military and diplomatic issues of the atomic bombings. Instead they recount the ordeals of ordinary and altogether sympathetic citizens coping with a sudden, devastating event that destroyed the world they had known. The lucky were killed instantly, some simply vaporized. Others displayed mute testimony to the event. Mr. Pellegrino describes one such example, drawn from the account of a survivor: “A statue, standing undamaged, . . . was in fact a naked man. . . . The man had become charcoal—a pillar of charcoal so light and brittle that whole sections of him crumbled at the slightest touch.” Another survivor, we are told, gathers the bones of a young woman, resolves to return them to her parents and manages to catch the last train to their home—in Nagasaki.

Ms. Southard gives us similar stories and provides photographs of aged Japanese still bearing horrible physical scars from their burns. She notes that the scars could also be psychological—feelings of “bitterness and outrage,” the mockery that could come with disfigurement. For some, she writes, the “fear of illness and death never ceased.” Both authors describe the harrowing effects of radiation sickness.

The maimed survivors of each city devoted much of their lives to evangelizing against the bomb. It is easy to write off such narratives as exercises in victimology, but it is also important to understand the effects of nuclear weapons in an age when they have become vastly more powerful and have been developed by nations of dubious responsibility.

What is missing from both books is context. Neither author properly discusses the factors that went into the American decision to use the bomb. Nor do they venture an opinion on whether the bomb shortened the war. They focus on the ways the bomb affected civilians who had to cope with a catastrophe.

“To Hell and Back,” one may remember, appeared in an earlier form, in 2010, as “The Last Train From Hiroshima.” The publication of that book was suspended when the authenticity of one of Mr. Pellegrino’s sources—a man who claimed to have been on a plane accompanying the Enola Gay bomber on its Hiroshima mission—was called into question. That source and his assertions are gone from the new book. A foreword notes that he had indeed “tricked” the author, who later admitted his mistake.

In a preface to “To Hell and Back,” Mark Selden, a scholar of East Asian studies, declares that Mr. Pellegrino’s narrative “encourages us to reflect anew on the ethics and horrifying outcome of World War II strategies of massive civilian bombing, whether by Germany, Japan, or England, or by American fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His statement reminds us that the atomic bombs were the logical outcome of a style of war taken for granted on both sides by the summer of 1945. Britain suffered heavy bombing and massive property destruction, but civilian deaths for the nation were less than 45,000. The port city of Hull (population, 320,000), roughly analogous to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, endured damage to an estimated 95% of its housing stock but lost only 1,200 civilians. Unlike Britain, Japan seems to have made little or no provision for the protection of its civilian population.

Were the bombs necessary to compel surrender? U.S. policy—laid down by Franklin Roosevelt, followed by Harry Truman and supported by most Americans—was uncompromising. The U.S. would accept only unconditional surrender, to be followed by military occupation.

In Japan, advocates of a last-ditch resistance could not promise victory but could guarantee heavy casualties for the invaders. The last battle of the war—Okinawa—made the point. Okinawa was a small island, and the U.S. possessed overwhelming ground, naval and air superiority. Even so, the battle raged from April 1 to June 21, 1945, with 92,000 Japanese troops fighting to the death and kamikaze planes inflicting significant damage on the offshore American fleet. U.S. casualties (killed and wounded) were approximately 45,000.

The experience made an impression in Washington. The Japanese home islands were next. Japan’s leaders made no secret of their plans to wage a dogged resistance that would mobilize the civilian population, right down to teenagers armed only with clubs and sticks; and the leaders clung to the fantasy of a negotiated peace brokered by the still-neutral Soviet Union. They rebuked their ambassador in Moscow for telling them that the Russians, who were moving troops to attack Japan in East Asia, would be of no help.

American military planners focused on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu as a first target, to be followed by an invasion of the island of Honshu and a final campaign across the Tokyo plain in 1946. Meeting with his military chiefs in Washington on June 18, 1945, President Truman expressed his hope of “preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” A month later, the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert. Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly followed.

Critics of the atomic bombings often assert that Japan was “ready to surrender.” Clearly this was not the case...

No, it was not the case, at all.

But keep reading.

Thank God for the Atom Bomb

From Bret Stephens, at the Wall Street Journal, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t merely horrific, war-ending events. They were lifesaving":

Hiroshima

The headline of this column is lifted from a 1981 essay by the late Paul Fussell, the cultural critic and war memoirist. In 1945 Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had fought his way through Europe only to learn that he would soon be shipped to the Pacific to take part in Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled to begin in November 1945.

Then the atom bomb intervened. Japan would not surrender after Hiroshima, but it did after Nagasaki.

I brought Fussell’s essay with me on my flight to Hiroshima and was stopped by this: “When we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live.”

In all the cant that will pour forth this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs—that the U.S. owes the victims of the bombings an apology; that nuclear weapons ought to be abolished; that Hiroshima is a monument to man’s inhumanity to man; that Japan could have been defeated in a slightly nicer way—I doubt much will be made of Fussell’s fundamental point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just terrible war-ending events. They were also lifesaving. The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists...

That's really worth savoring for a second. Imagine especially if we'd never defeated authoritarian Japan and the Chrysanthemum Throne?

Yeah, no nation of Japanese peace activists. And no peace.

But keep reading.

American Hegemony Is Here to Stay

Never heard of this Salvatore Babones dude, but this is great.

This is the "BIG ARTICLE" - please read, everyone - "American Hegemony Is Here to Stay" @thenatlinterest http://t.co/nQstPrdSvX

— Salvatore Babones (@sbabones) June 11, 2015

Japan Confirms Major Shift in Military Doctrine

At Euro News, "Japanese government confirms major shift in military policy."



PREVIOUSLY: "U.S. and Japan Tighten Alliance in Face of Surging Threat from China," and "Japan Shifts Military Posture to Defend Against Chinese Threat."

U.S. and Japan Tighten Alliance in Face of Surging Threat from China

This is fascinating, although Japan's not a political pygmy, and folks should stop treating the Japanese as such.

Japan's a powerful country that could deploy a nuclear arsenal at virtually a moment's notice. Time to cut the cord, if anything.

In any case, at LAT, "Japan's Shinzo Abe visits U.S. to discuss new threat: China":

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe rises to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, it will represent a diplomatic sea change so great that it may seem incomprehensible to the lingering members of the "Greatest Generation."

To those who lived through World War II, Japan was once seen as such a menacing enemy that upon the emperor's surrender in 1945, America imposed a severely pacifist constitution to ensure that the Asian nation would never again become a world power.

Today, that world has turned upside down. And the U.S. and Japan are finding it necessary to draw even closer to confront a shared threat.

China, a battered and enfeebled American ally during the war, has become a juggernaut that increasingly asserts its economic and military power across Asia and beyond.

Consequently, Abe's unprecedented speech to Congress is expected to focus on the once-unimaginable idea of increasing Japan's military strength with an eye toward putting muscle behind the two countries' vision of an American-led order in Asia.

The 60-year-old prime minister will also urge support for a Pacific Rim free-trade deal led by the U.S. and Japan, the world's No. 1 and No. 3 economies, respectively. The 12-nation pact, which would bring together a number of China's large trading partners but not China, is seen as a form of economic containment aimed at the world's No. 2 economy.

Though the trade deal faces stiff resistance from America's trade unions and many Democratic lawmakers, the Republican-led Congress is moving to give President Obama greater power to resolve final sticking points with Japan. Administration officials said Friday that "substantial progress" has been made in negotiations, but that there won't be an agreement announced on the Trans-Pacific Partnership during Abe's visit.

At the center of the trip will be the first speech by a Japanese prime minister to a joint session of Congress. Abe's weeklong visit also includes a meeting with Obama and stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Abe studied public policy at USC.

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Abe's trip will no doubt rekindle painful memories for some Americans and key allies.

Abe is expected to address Japan's history of military aggressions, a particularly sensitive subject for Beijing and Seoul.

Chinese and South Koreans have repeatedly criticized Japan for what they see as a glossing-over of wartime atrocities in Japanese textbooks, the honoring of war criminals at Japanese military shrines and the failure to adequately compensate so-called comfort women from Korea, China and other Asian countries forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops.

Foreshadowing what he might say on his visit, Abe expressed "feelings of deep remorse over the past war" at a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, last week.

Korean American civic groups and others that oppose the congressional invitation to Abe will want to hear much more than that, and are planning protests on both coasts. But eager to focus on the future alliance, U.S. officials are not expected to dwell on the issue.

"As long as he says something regarding the past that seems sincere and contrite, people will take that and say it's enough," said Jeffrey Kingston, a professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University's Japan Campus. "Chinese and Koreans will be scrutinizing every comma, dot and word. He knows no matter what he says, he can't satisfy them. What he wants to do is say enough to satisfy Washington. And the mood coming out of Washington is quite positive."

To understand why, it helps to consider another Asian leader's speech last week to a different foreign legislature.

Keep reading.

Japanese Human Experiments on American POWs in World War II

This is just whoa.

All of the U.S. airmen died, and Japan's been covering up the whole thing since.

At the Telegraph UK, "American POWs used for live experiments in Japan, according to new museum: Eight crew of a US bomber shot down in May 1945 used in medical experiments in a case that Japan has tried to forget."

Hostage's 'Apparent' Beheading by #ISIS Stirs Anger in Japan — #KenjiGoto

Well, you think?

At NYT:

TOKYO — Japan reacted with sorrow and outrage on Sunday to the posting by the Islamic State of a video purporting to show the grisly killing of the journalist Kenji Goto, bringing an end to a hostage standoff that has horrified this usually tranquil nation.

Gripped by anger and disbelief, Japan has so far shown support for the strong line taken by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who did not meet the hostage takers’ initial demands on Jan. 20 for a $200 million ransom, pledging not to yield to terrorism. Mr. Abe strongly condemned the murder claim made in the video released early Sunday, saying Japan “will cooperate with the international community and make the terrorists pay the price.”

“I’m outraged by the despicable terrorist act, and I will never forgive the terrorists,” Mr. Abe told reporters on Sunday at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo.

For now, the Japanese public seems to be united in grief and a desire to show support for Mr. Abe and other leaders. However, political analysts have said that as the shock wears off, there will be more questioning of how Mr. Abe’s government handled the crisis, which began with the appearance online of a video from the militant group threatening the lives of two Japanese hostages, Mr. Goto and Haruna Yukawa. In that first video, the group called the country’s pledge of $200 million to help shore up the government of Iraq and to assist refugees in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon a “foolish decision” and called for a ransom of the same amount.

The group dropped the ransom demand after releasing a video online days later showing the decapitated body of Mr. Yukawa, a 42-year-old adventurer. The militants changed tack, offering to swap Mr. Goto for Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman on death row in Jordan for a deadly bombing there 10 years ago. This seemed to offer hope that a way would be found to secure Mr. Goto’s release.

Those hopes came crashing down over the weekend, when another video appeared showing Mr. Goto kneeling in an orange jumpsuit in what appeared to be a dry riverbed. Next to him stood a masked militant who spoke while waving a knife, which he then apparently used to cut off Mr. Goto’s head.

While the video had yet to be confirmed as authentic on Sunday, the top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said the government had no reason to believe it was not real. He said Japan had had no contact with the militants, suggesting that the nation was relying almost entirely on Jordan to handle the fate of the hostages. During the 10-day hostage standoff, Japan said it was trying to establish communication with the militants via local tribal and religious leaders, but apparently to no avail.

The gruesome images helped feed an outpouring of sympathy for Mr. Goto, 47, a veteran journalist who entered Islamic State-held territory in Syria in late October in a doomed effort to rescue Mr. Yukawa, who had been captured in August, according to Mr. Goto’s mother. Local television stations showed clips from Mr. Goto’s reports out of Syria, Iraq and other conflict zones, where he often reported on the plight of children and other noncombatants.

“My son’s final act was to go to Syria to help a fellow Japanese,” Mr. Goto’s mother, Junko Ishido, said Sunday. “Please understand his kindness and courage.”...

After all this time, why everyone keeps saying the "apparent" beheading is beyond me. There's pretty much nothing "apparent" about it.

But keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Islamic State Hostage Kenji Goto Mourned by Family and Friends."

Islamic State Demands $200 Million Ransom for Japanese Hostages

Holly Williams reports, for CBS This Morning:

Japanese Unearth Remains, and Their Nation’s Past, on Guadalcanal

At the New York Times:

GUADALCANAL, Solomon Islands — Using a trowel to dig into the shadowy floor of the rain forest, pausing only to wipe away sweat and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, Atsushi Maeda holds up what he has traveled so far, to this South Pacific island, to find: a human bone, turned orange-brown with age.

Mr. Maeda, 21, was looking for the remains of missing Japanese soldiers at the site of one of World War II’s most ferocious battles. Others have done this work before him, mostly aging veterans or bereaved relatives. But he was with a group of mostly university students and young professionals, nearly all of them under 40 and without a direct connection to the soldiers killed here.

They had come to honor their countrymen, many of whom were no older than they are when they fell on the battlefield. The group was also searching for answers. “These young men who died here believed they were defending their family and loved ones,” said Mr. Maeda, a university junior in religious studies. “We need to rediscover their sacrifices and learn from them.”

As the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, there has been a surge in interest among young Japanese about the disastrous war that their nation has long tried to forget.

It is a phenomenon that crosses political lines, encompassing progressives who preach the futility of war as well as conservatives who question the historical record of Japan’s wartime atrocities. What these young people have in common is an urgent sense that they learned too little about the war, both from school, where classes focus on earlier Japanese history, and from tight-lipped family members, who prefer not to revisit a painful time.

Driving this nationwide pursuit into the past has been China’s hostility toward Japan over control of disputed East China Sea islands, known in China as the Diaoyu and in Japan as the Senkaku. Despite recent diplomatic maneuvering to ease tensions, anxiety about China’s rise remains strong in Japan.

“For the first time since 1945, Japan is facing a small but real possibility of conflict,” said Yurie Chiba, a magazine editor who organizes talks by veterans, has written about the new interest in World War II and argues that Japan must never go to war again. “This makes people want to learn more about those who fought in the war, to rediscover how horrible war can be.”

Continue reading.

Fumiko Hayashida, Among First Japanese American Internees, Dies at 103

A tragic, yet fascinating, story, at LAT, "Fumiko Hayashida dies at 103; among first Japanese American internees."

Interesting obit: Fumiko Hayashida, 103, one of the 1st Japanese Americans in internment camps http://t.co/LGdtXRFOlx pic.twitter.com/TpuzUauGjM

— Lauren Raab (@raablauren) November 16, 2014

The APEC Happy Campers

Uh, not.

At Foreign Policy:

Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping’s painfully awkward meeting and handshake in Beijing. http://t.co/BHPUdX4vPZ pic.twitter.com/8UPOHnTXCv
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) November 10, 2014

Also at WSJ, "Frosty Handshake Between Japan, China Leaders Hardly Heralds Long-Awaited Détente."

'I feel morally compelled at a serious personal level to call for and defend the development of weapons of overwhelming power and sophistication and then to call for their employment against all nation states and ideologies currently waging wars against any liberal democracy...'

Heh, my friend David Swindle gets personal in the name of national self-defense.

At PJ Media, "When the Grandchildren of the Atom Bomb Wake Up, There Will Be No More 9/11s":

Whether Jew, Christian, secularist, or a tech-minded, neo-pagan confabulation of all three like myself, the broad reading of the history of war against nature-worshipping slavemasters from the Canaanites to the Nazis reveals that the way to achieve peace is to impose it on the enemies trying to destroy you with weapons which make surrender the only viable option.

And at the post --- indeed, what inspired the post --- is this clip from Prager University:

China and Vietnam Clash in South China Sea

The Philippines coast guard detained Chinese fishing boats as well.

At WSJ, "Vietnam, Philippines Incidents Raise Sea Tensions: Vessels Clash Over Chinese Oil Rig; Philippines Detains Fishermen Near Spratly Islands":

Strains between China and its neighbors burst to the surface in two parts of the South China Sea, taking the high-stakes struggle for control over the waters to new levels of friction.

Off Vietnam, dozens of Chinese military and civilian ships clashed with the Vietnamese coast guard, with Vietnamese officials complaining its vessels were repeatedly rammed. On the same day, Philippine police apprehended Chinese fishing vessels loaded with hundreds of sea turtles in disputed waters.

About 80 Chinese vessels moved into an area near the disputed Paracel Islands, where Hanoi has sought to prevent China from deploying a massive oil rig, said Rear Adm. Ngo Ngoc Thu, vice commander of the Vietnamese coast guard. He said the flotilla included seven military ships and that it was supported by aircraft.

He said the situation, which started brewing over the weekend, was "very tense" and said six Vietnamese officers had been injured in the standoff.

The confrontation—by far the most serious in recent years between the two neighbors—marked a significant escalation in Beijing's willingness to press its natural-resource claims, analysts said.

Theresa Fallon, a senior associate at the European Institute for Asian Studies, a Brussels-based think tank, said China's move represented the regional energy sector's "worst nightmare" and was bound to provoke Vietnam's anger.

"This is a huge rig—it's the size of a couple of football fields," Ms. Fallon said.

A senior administration official said the White House views the latest escalation as part of a pattern of behavior as China continues to try to advance its territorial claims. "We're obviously very concerned about it," the official said. "We have conveyed our concerns to the Chinese."

The standoff is "an unprecedented situation," said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The sheer number of Chinese vessels that appeared to be involved was a clear indication of China's "resolve to make sure this rig can operate in these waters."

China's state councilor described the move as part of Chinese business's normal operations and asked Vietnam to stop interfering, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said at a daily briefing.

China's Defense Ministry didn't respond to a request to comment.

Well, if Japan gets involved I wouldn't expect the Obama administration to lift a finger. They haven't been too forthcoming in the Ukraine situation, that's for sure.

More.