From feeling no regret for wartime atrocities to nuclear rhetoric and military expansion?
How far will Japan's Prime Minister push a bellicist mindset, and who will bear the consequences?
Welcome to Road Today, the panel discussion with Mika Anna in Beijing.
Newly released interrogation records have once again exposed the horrors of Japan's Unit 731, this time in the perpetrator's own words.
Confessions from senior officers reveal how biological weapons were produced and used against China during World War II, reminding the world that history is neither distant nor settled.
For decades, Unit 731 has been remembered as one of the darkest chapters of World War II.
But few accounts are as detailed or as damning as the confession of Kiyoshi Kawashima As a senior commander within the unit.
What he admitted was a deliberate system of killing built in secrecy.
Kawashima was a Japanese bacteriologist, doctor, and military medical major general.
From 1941 to 1943 he held responsible positions in multiple departments of Unit 731, including the General Affairs Division, the 1st, 3rd and the 4th Division.
The fourth division of Unit 731, namely the bacteria production division, is mainly responsible for the production of plague anthrax, typhoid and cholera bacteria.
The unit was capable of producing 300 kilograms of plague bacteria, 800 to 900 kilograms of anthrax and up to 1000 kilograms of cholera bacteria each month.
The bacteria would first be used on the so-called experimental subjects or leaving people detained in cells run by Unit 731.
Kawashima confessed that in Unit 731 research on each infectious disease has been assigned to separate cells.
The facilities in the cell were very simple.
There was nothing but a straw mat.
Kawashima said hundreds of people were sent to the cells of Unit 731 each year during his tenure.
None are known to have survived.
Kawashima labeled Unit 731 what it truly was, a factory of death.
He said no one could leave this death factory alive.
During the bacterial experiments.
If someone was fortunate enough to recover after being infected with bacteria once, it wasn't actually their good fortune, because they would be subjected to repeated experiments infected with other bacteria, until death.
The document confirmed the so-called experimental subjects were living.
People were dissected, preserved as specimens and cremated.
In 2024, another former member of Unit 731, Hideo Shimizu, returned to Harbin for the first time in over 80 years.
Standing at the ruins, he identified key sites and admitted what he had seen.
I remember catching a glimpse of this room by chance once.
Inside I saw specimens of pregnant women with fetuses still in their wombs, as well as human hands, gastrointestinal organs, brains and nearly every other type of human tissue imaginable.
Besides indoor atrocities, Kawashima also confessed to large-scale field experiments.
Kawashima said that in the Ande town, 100 kilometers away from Unit 731, there were 10 to 15 people tied to pillars and there were hundreds of white mice.
There were about 100 people involved in the experiments, and all the Japanese soldiers stayed in safe shelters.
As a senior officer, Kawashima had direct access to Unit 731 Commander Shiro Ishii and knew how bioweapons were deployed in China, from Ningbo to Changde and along the Zhejiang Jiangxi Railway and in other locations.
In southern China, Changde's 78-year-old Ms.
Xiong Jingzhi still carries memories of her family that suffered.
My father told me that my grandmother died of the plague.
She had fevers and swollen lymph nodes everywhere.
My granddad's brother died the same year.
Our family was poor, selling snacks just to get by.
Of course I still feel that hatred today.
This diary, found in the Japan Defense Agency Library by a Japanese scholar, was written by an Imperial Army staff officer.
It records a Type 97 aircraft departing on November 4th, reaching Changde at 650 am and carrying out the mission below 1000 meters due to fog.
By November 6th, infections had begun, and by late November, the outbreak was spreading violently.
This is concrete, irrefutable evidence.
A Chinese investigation report released in 2010 estimated that around 650000 people died as a result of Japan's repeated bacteriological attacks in China.
With many key records destroyed by Japan, the true number of victims remains unknown.
However, history speaks clearly through the confessions of men like Kiyoshi Kawashima.
Taken together, his words reveal crimes that were systematic, top-down and deliberately designed to kill on a massive scale.
Together with China's existing archival materials and physical evidence, they constitute irrefutable historical proof of the atrocities that were committed.
Yet, even as this past resurfaces, Japan's president path is raising fresh alarms.
Tokyo is accelerating military deployments, floating nuclear rhetoric and framing China as a pretext for remilitarization.
Chinese defense and foreign ministry officials warn these moves send extremely dangerous signals, undermining regional stability and Japan's own pledge to peaceful development.
Inside Japan, civil groups and atomic bomb survivors are also pushing back, condemning costs for nuclear weapons and urging the government to uphold the three non-nuclear principles.
Meanwhile, concerns over nuclear safety persist, after reports of another recent radioactive water leak at a Japanese reactor prompted many to call for transparency and international oversight.
So how should the world rate Japan's actions today and what are the implications for regional and world security and historical justice?
To delve into this.
Joining us on the line is Mr Sultan Hawley, a retired Air Force officer and author in Pakistan.
Dr Liu Kuangyu, researcher at Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Dr Joseph Mahoney, professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University.
Let's begin with the rhetoric and political conduct of Prime Minister Sanae Takeuchi herself.
She has repeatedly made hard-line and openly hawkish remarks and taken actions that echo wartime Japanese fascist language, invoking claims such as threats to Japan's survival to justify military expansion and to push against longstanding nuclear restraints.
So, from the perspective of political discourse and considering her position, Professor Mahoney, have such moves already crossed the post-war boundary of Japan's doctrine of exclusively defense-oriented policy?
Well, I think, on the one hand, when we talk about policy, there's a difference between talking and actually doing.
I think there are some concerns that Japan has already started moving beyond simply the rhetoric in terms of missile deployments that would effectively, by some analyses, begin to link what are called the first and second island change strategies used by the United States against China.
And there's some concern, of course, that this is being encouraged to some extent by Washington.
But at the same time, we know that this is something that has been a concern for a long time.
She considers herself something of a follower of Abe.
Abe was someone who was moving Japan in this direction slowly.
And we know that she has been saying these sort of things to her own constituents for some period of time.
And now that she has managed to achieve high office, and perhaps done so at a time when the United States is maybe open to some of these developments.
We see the inclinations of Abe and her own inclinations, and perhaps those of the Trump administration, intersecting in ways that do go beyond the exclusive defense-oriented policy and do raise new risks of a return to Japanese militarism in East Asia.
Mr. Hawley, what's your take?
How would you characterize Takayuchi's hawkish behavior today?
You see, when you hear of survival talk from the top, a person of the highest position like Takayuchi, then survival talk from the top turns deterrence into normalization and crossing the spirit of Japan's defense-only doctrine, even if the law still says self-defense.
So therefore, I think that the more Tokyo leans on survival language, the harder it becomes to convince others that changes are purely defensive, raising action and reaction risks.
So the bottom line is that legally, it sits within Japan's evolving self-defense paradigm.
Politically and strategically, it crosses a post-war discursive boundary.
In my opinion, this boundary was meant to prevent remilitarization by narrative.
Dr. Liu, how do you define recent Takahashi's remarks and moves?
It is evident that Takahashi's advocacy for military intervention in the Taiwan Strait and also the nuclear weapons development, under the so-called pretext of Japan's survival, is fundamentally a justification for his military actions aimed at undermining regional security and also interfering in other countries' internal affairs and pursuing offensive or even weapons of mass destruction.
So this clearly violates Japan's principle of the so-called exclusive defensive.
And also we know, as Japan's current prime minister Takahashi's words and actions represent the government's stance and policy and leaving there's no room for any ambiguity or speculation.
Dr Liu.
Are her remarks best understood as an individual radical stance or do they reflect a broader right-word shift within Japan's political establishment today?
Of course, her remarks are by no means so-called isolated behavior or gaffe, but rather an inevitable outcome of Japan's political spectrum accelerating its shift to the right.
Its ideological roots lie in Japan's pre-war so-called imperial nationalist historical view, which fundamentally denies the aggressive nature of Japan's modern wars of aggression and rejects, of course, the outcomes of the Tokyo trials of the wars defeated.
So this perspective advocates restoring Japan's former glory as a powerful nation and translating to policies centered on escaping the post-war framework to drive constitutional revision and achieve national normalization.
And this ideology gained traction in the 1980s, in the post-war era, as Japan grew increasingly dissatisfied with its status as a so-called economic giant and political dwarf.
Therefore, under the prolonged administrations of Koizumi and Abe, the right-wing thinking, they were propelled to the center of the post-stage.
And so the current right shift in Japan's overall political landscape provides pretty fertile ground for this genetic growth.
First, we see that External threats perceived from China's rise and also the Russia-Ukraine conflict has overwhelmed the pacifist consensus.
And second is the political spectrum and the power center within the LDP has been shifted rightwards.
And the third is that collective mutinies and failed checks and balances from opposition parties.
And finally, the current wave of cyber populism of Japan society, which has also acted as a catalyst for the unchecked growth of Japan's right wing.
Professor Mahoney, how do you see this?
At this particular moment.
What does Takeuchi's rise and visibility reveal about Japan's domestic political climate and ideological trajectory?
Well, I'm inclined to agree with the analysis that was just given, but I would say that I don't think everyone in Japan shares her position.
And I realize you asked the question does it reflect a broader rightward shift of Japan's conservative political forces?
And indeed, I think that these sorts of values have always been harbored amongst them.
I also agree with.
I'm not sure I would use the word cyber populism, although that's certainly a problem.
In some of my conversations with Japanese diplomats before we saw her take her position, they were lamenting to me that they understood that it was in Japan's strategic best interest, both in terms of national defense and security, but also in terms of economic well-being, to move forward in positive ways with China.
And yet one of the things that they were facing was not just the problem of cyber populism, but the extent to which Japan is essentially a data and information colony of the United States, the extent to which the Japanese electorate is constantly bombarded by negative messaging and fearmongering about China.
And it makes it very difficult for policymakers, for diplomats, for officials who understand the reality of the past but also the present, to craft good policies that really reflect Japan's best strategic interests.
That said, I think we understand absolutely that Japan is in a pickle of sorts, that they are in a security trap vis-a-vis the United States.
They are in an economic trap, largely due to the US which, of course, Trump has made even more difficult for them with his trade war and the concessions that he extracted.
So, as we look at it, we need to be careful not to demonize all of Japan, to realize that there are a lot of people who don't want Japan moving in the direction of nuclear weapons.
They don't want Japan violating the defense-only policy.
They want to have good and positive relations in East Asia.
But there is this trap and there's also this historical legacy and there are also these right-wing opportunists who are either responding to the moment at hand, given the US's own fear China pushing back against US hegemony but also there are these people, these legacy people, who do want to go back to sort of an old japanese militarist past.
As a human being who struggles to understand how anyone could want that sort of history, of how anyone could want to go back to something like 731, i recall that recently i was in greece, in northern greece, and i was talking to a professor who was he was a right-wingist, he was the son of the of one of the former military dictatorship leaders.
And he was nostalgia for that old period.
There are people that carry this forward generationally, generationally, generationally.
It's shocking to me as a human being that this sort of nonsense perpetuates, but indeed it does.
And unfortunately, it has risen to high office in Japan.
Mr Hawley, what's your thoughts from the perspective of a retired Air Force officer?
Do you see, right-wing voices are louder than before in Japan right now.
Do you think this is an alarming trend?
Well, first of all, as a footnote to one of your previous questions, I want to make it clear that Takeuchi's hawkish tone is not just personal.
It mirrors a broader conservative drift in Japan, where security anxieties and alliance pressures continually amplify hardline voices.
First of all, Japan's assertive turn tightens escalation dynamics across core flashpoints.
What are these?
The Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, by shortening decision timelines and increasing the salience of counter-strike and denial capabilities.
So, as a retired Air Force officer and as a defense analyst and security observer, For me it raises the probability of action-reaction cycles and misreads during these surveillance, air policing and maritime interdictions, especially where grey zone tactics blur thresholds.
It also complicates South Korea's hedging pressure, ASEAN's neutrality and pushes China to harden its posture, making crisis management more brittle.
Now the deterrence-reassurance gap must be addressed because, as capabilities and rhetoric scale up, reassurance lags behind eroding trust and widening perception gaps with neighbors.
The arms racing contours when expanded missile defense, long-range fires and ISR that is, intelligence surveillance and recce investments, invite parallel upgrades by China and North Korea.
They are increasing not only the cost, but the complexity.
Then there's the alliance entanglement.
Deeper US-Japan integration enhances combined deterrence, but it raises the entrapment risks in fast-moving contingencies near Taiwan or the island area.
Now the incident risk.
You see more frequent close proximity operations, the heightened collision, miscommunication and escalation by accident hazards.
So what are the implications for a broader international order?
A more forward leaning Japan reshapes, Indo-Pacific balancing, accelerating many lateral networks and defense industrial linkages that recalibrate power distribution.
Well, this can strengthen collective deterrence, but it also hardens blocks, weakens non-proliferation signaling and, if nuclear adjacent rhetoric persists, as pointed out earlier by one of our colleagues in this talk show today, thus the crisis de-escalation norms.
The net effect is a world order which is more reliant on military deterrence and less on cooperative security, but the higher volatility in contested domains like cyber space and maritime chalk points.
So the norms trait give mixed messages on pacifism and deterrence but dilute the moral authority and disarmament and humanitarian law.
Let me very quickly give you the key risks which are to be watched.
First of all is vague red lines around survival threats.
They enable discretionary escalation.
And then deployment of long range strike and unmanned swarm alters adversary threat calculus.
And absence of robust hotlines and incident at sea protocols, they magnify missteps.
So what are the steps that could stabilize the trajectory?
Pair capability changes with clear rules of engagement and non-aggression pledges.
Then expand hotlines, notification regimes, and joint incident prevention exercises. pilot domain-specific talks like maritime gray zone, cyber norms, and space deconfliction, then there must be an assurance diplomacy, increase the survivor-centered historical engagement, and humanitarian commitments to rebuild trust.
Yes, it's deeply concerning.
Dr Liu, from a regional security perspective, what implications do such moves carry for Northeast Asia and potentially for the broader international order?
There is an old Chinese saying that one word can bring prosperity to a nation and also one word can bring ruin disaster, to a nation.
So this might be the case happening.
We know that Takahashi's dangerous assertions will only make Japan once again an unstable factor, undermining regional stability and world peace as well.
First, we see that, historically speaking, behind Takahashi's stance lies the opposition and the arrogance of Japan's right-wing forces seeking to breach the peace constitution and also pursue the status of so-called military power.
And we see in recent years, Japan has raised down the path of military expansion and also revealing dangerous signs of militarism resurgence
Japan's militarism has repeatedly used the pretext so-called survival or existential crisis to launch external aggressions, including the September 18 incident that ignited the invasion of China.
And also resurgence of such rhetoric today should prompt vigilance across the whole region regarding Japan's potential and intent to repeat its historical mystics.
And second, Takeuchi's actions blatantly violates the UN Charter and the One China Principle, which is compelling the neighboring nations to once again view Japan as a potential threat.
That might escalate regional armed races and regional tensions.
Should Takeuchi's ambition to materialize into real intervention, Japan itself will face catastrophic consequences.
Finally, from Japan's own perspective, Takeuchi's re-militarization policy will inevitably deepen Japan's strategic dependence, worsen its surrounding environment and trap itself in a so-called security dilemma.
Since Japan has already converted dozens of airports from Hokkaido to the north of Okinawa in the south into due-use military civilization facilities.
So any involvement, like in so-called Taiwan Strait conflict, wreaks turning the entire nation into this battlefield.
Indeed, this is a gradually worsening process rather than an isolated development.
Professor Mahoney, do you share the same stance?
What does Takayuchi's ambition mean for the regional and even the road security picture?
I wrote an article recently where I was discussing the line of defense that Tojo Hideki, the wartime prime minister of Japan, at his war crimes trial, where he was arguing the reason Japan had to do all of these terrible things, to aggress against its neighbors, is not because its neighbors were dangerous to Japan, but rather because the West was dangerous to Japan.
That Japan was forced by the model of Western imperialism, by the model of Western colonialism hegemony, that Japan was forced to move into that model and to emulate that model themselves in order to protect themselves against Western aggression.
And it's interesting that, in this new era where we're trying to move into and solidify a multipolar world versus a unipolar world, that it is precisely the United States that brings risk to East Asia and it's precisely the United States that brings risk to Japan.
Japan is already in a security and economic trap with the United States.
And this is part of the legacy of World War II and how that war was concluded, with US occupation and the continued presence of American military bases in Japan and the continued dependence that Japan has on the US.
So it's interesting that Japan is displacing.
It's taking what is actually the real threat, just as it did in the past that it took threat of the West And then they're externalizing that threat onto the East.
This is really a repetition of that tragic historical line of thinking.
So it's not just a simple, I think, militarist perspective.
Japan is in trouble.
They are facing both an economic and a security crisis.
And again, they're facing that crisis from the West, from the United States.
But how are they going to respond to that?
By externalizing that onto once again Asia, and this time again, principally China.
Thanks, gentlemen, for those valuable insights.
We've explored Takeuchi's aggressive conduct and his reflection of Japan's broader right-wing shift.
Coming up.
We'll examine the enduring impact of the historical denial and the real-world costs of Japan's remilitarism and nuclear risks.
This is Road Today.
Stay with us.
Welcome back to Road Today.
I'm Ge'anna, joined by our guests Mr Sultan Hawley, a retired Air Force officer and author in Pakistan.
Dr Liu Kuangyu, researcher at Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Dr Joseph Mahoney, professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University.
Let's continue our discussion, gentlemen.
Professor, even under pressure from the United States, is there any other path open to Japan?
Because we're talking about history repeating itself.
I'm sure Japanese politicians understand this as well.
Are they concerned about once again, you know, driving Japan toward catastrophic consequences?
Or do they think they have to take the gamble once more, hoping he might succeed and, as they talked about during the Second World War, realize their ambition of dominating Asia?
Let me give you a different point of view just to try to realize how complex this is.
We understand, for example, that in Germany today there's a relatively new political party that is gaining popularity from the right wing.
You have a lot of people in the center and on the left who are accusing this new political party of trying to go back to something like Nazism.
But at the same time, we have seen the government in Berlin.
You can see a similar development in France.
You see that they are not only creating conditions that are creating openings for the right wing.
In other words, Because of the failed policies, because of the failure to really advance security and common prosperity, it has created frustrations in the populace that then become vulnerable and even supportive of right-wing ideologies as a way to deal with broader problems.
Now, let me bring this back to Japan.
If I was a Japanese person, I would be very, very unhappy with the fact that, as a Japanese person, I don't have an independent foreign policy.
I would be very unhappy that I've been stuck in decades of economic malaise vis-a-vis the United States.
I would want to find some way to assert myself and to assert my own right to the national destiny in a way where I wasn't perpetually under the thumb of the US.
With that in mind, I think we can think as Chinese people, or as an American who lives in China.
I think we can be sensitive to what would it be like to be living under US control for so many decades, to have US troops, US bases in your country, to not be able to realize your full economic potential because that threatens US dominance.
So in this context, we can understand there might be reasons for some people in Japan to want real strength, even if that means being confused about the relationship with China or what have you.
We see the same thing in Germany, where you have a country now that's moving aggressively to expand its capacity to wage war.
This is something that a lot of countries in Europe are not happy with because of the history, even though there was a reckoning.
A lot of countries in Europe are not happy with the fact that Germany is now going to spend five percent of GDP and is launching all of these massive programs to build up its military capacities, because they all realize that that, plus the right wing element that is now rising in Germany, because they're also frustrated that this is a toxic mix.
But again I want to make this point because this is not just a problem in Japan, it's also a problem in europe.
Common element is the united states.
The common element is trump forcing countries in europe to spend more on the military and, at the same time, the us meddling in the local politics in europe, encouraging right-wing parties working with them.
Even steve bannon, the previous strategist for trump he worked very closely with the right wing is before Trump came to power.
And this is why when Vance, when Trump was reelected and Vance, one of the first things he did was when he went to Europe was to attack the Europeans for suppressing the right wing.
And again in the US, the new national security document.
We see the US saying Europe is going to fail because suppressing their own local politics.
And by that, they mean the right wing.
This is a broader global strategic problem.
And how we find a constructive means out of it where Japan is not dependent on the United States but can provide adequately for its own security and do so in a way that's economically sustainable and those breaks out of the economic trap that it already has.
This is a very, very difficult thing for them to solve and i have some empathy for them on this point, but from my position, the only way to really do that is to work within a collective security framework with asia, to sit down and have clear conversations with china, with south korea, with the philippines, other countries in the region, and to come to a mutual understanding of what's the best way to move forward together.
Unfortunately, I think that was the direction that Japan was starting to take again with the initial efforts to move forward with the trilateral free trade agreement.
And this is where the United States panicked and applied extraordinary pressure through the trade war.
And then we saw Japan adjusting and moving back into the U.S. strategic posture.
That's a very insightful perspective.
But for China and its neighbor, I think beyond the U.S. factor, there is another crucial question.
Can a country that hasn't fully confronted its history legitimately have a credible foreign military and security role?
Dr. Liu, what's your take?
Can a country that has not completed a genuine historical reckoning credibly pursue the normalization of its military and security role?
Of course not.
I think it's very simple logic.
In any modern civilized society, a violent criminal with let's imagine a violent criminal with blood on his hands, who has evaded justice, would never be allowed to possess any sort of firearms or even knives.
So yet this is the weird reality unfolding in Japan right now.
We must recognize the Japanese people nation possesses very strong, historically speaking, a very strong gambler and aggressor's gene, militarist tradition, in other words.
Whenever Japan faces internal crisis in history or gains at least it believes it gains expansionist capabilities, it will go all in.
It will seek to achieve its national goals strategic goals, through military aggression rather than peaceful, diplomatic and political economic means.
And this stems from deep-rooted national character and geopolitical origins.
And this is structural.
This is not accidental.
We must recognize that Japan's invasion of China was not isolated incidents, but occurred at least four times over the past 1300 years, each time with the explicit goal of complete conquest or even destruction of the Chinese nation.
And this demonstrated, Japan is not merely a repeat offender, but also a habitual, a persistent criminal in history, with no moral foundation on matters of peace, according to his behavior.
So, as mentioned earlier, Japan has never underwent genuine post-war reckoning or revision with its militarism.
So it has never reflected or truly apologized.
So this means that sort of barbaric gene, under the disguise of a civilized nation, may carry a significant risk of resurgence.
Mm-hmm.
Building on that, let's turn to the deeper roots of this trend, especially the historical issues Japan still refuses to face.
Professor Mahoney recently transferred interrogation records from Russia contained first-hand confessions by perpetrators of Japan's Unit 731.
Detailing biological warfare crimes.
Why have such well-documented historical facts been constantly downplayed, avoided and even denied within Japan for decades?
Well, it's interesting, because this is I mean everyone in China.
If you say 731 or Qishan Yi to them, they know immediately what it means.
But I don't think anyone in the U.S. has any idea what that means.
What's interesting about that case, of course, is that it was really sort of the worst sort of atrocities committed against other people, although the scale of numbers would not be comparable to the Holocaust numbers.
The depravity in some ways exceeds that of what we saw at Auschwitz in terms of the so-called doctor of death at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele, by his Japanese counterpart in this unit in Harbin.
Now it's interesting to note that who was it that authorized, personally authorized it, signed the papers?
It was Emperor Hirohito.
And it was of course, one of the key strategies of the US in the desire to rapidly pacify Japan under an American occupation, to do so with the support of the emperor.
And that was the deal where the emperor would not be prosecuted for war crimes and members of his family would not be prosecuted for war crimes, even though they served as political commissars in the Japanese Imperial Army.
And indeed some of the worst abuses during the Japanese War of Aggression were ordered by the political commissars, including the rape of Nanjing was ordered by one of the members of the royal family.
By some estimation,
So we have this vast cover-up that starts with the emperor himself.
In the case of the senior officials in the biological and chemical research unit in Harbin.
They were captured by US forces.
The main leader was given immunity, with the understanding that he would give all of his information to the United States.
And indeed he was brought to the United States, to the notorious Fort Detrick, where he was asked to give lectures on how to kill vast numbers of people.
And there's even some argument that he was supporting US troops in the invasion of Korea, deploying various nasty tactics against the North Korean and the Chinese troops.
So the U.S. helped cover up war crimes.
They held some people responsible, but they led others off the hook and even used others to advance their own position in Asia, and certainly against China.
And this is a historical legacy that the U.S. is complicit in.
And it's also, of course, contributed to the fact that there's never been a full reckoning of what happened in Japan.
Certainly not the sort of reckoning that we saw in post-war Germany, where all of the crimes were exposed and where there's great horror today at any sort of possible resurgence of right-wing militarism.
In Japan, it's something that can come back.
They can come back to because a lot of people don't have any understanding of the past.
To illustrate this point, I was recently having dinner with three young Japanese students who were here visiting.
And they were nice kids.
They were teenagers.
And I asked them if they knew the name Tojo Hideki, and none of them had ever heard of this name.
So even the Class A war criminals who were held responsible for war crimes, who said we did these horrible things but we did so because we were trying to emulate the West, to save ourselves from the West, they don't even know about that.
So it's not a surprise that people are easily confused and misdirected and led down dark paths.
Professor, we often say that the internet age leaves no room for secrets.
And clearly Japan's younger generation, as you earlier mentioned, remains largely unaware of its own history, let alone audiences in the United States and the wider West.
But at the same time, More voices, documentaries and films are beginning to expose that past.
Do you see any real potential for change?
You know, it's a good question.
I think that it's too early to tell.
There is sort of a broader problem in so much as it's not just Japanese people who don't know their own history.
It's a lot of countries around the world.
The young people don't know their history.
And it's not simply because that history is suppressed or not well taught.
It's because we live in the type of consumer society as a Marxist, this would, of course, be a point that I would underline that is, perpetually trying to make people forget about the past in meaningful ways and sort of getting them stuck in the moment.
This is where you can make people vulnerable to various emotional pitches that aim really to motivate sales and other forms of exploitation.
That said, I would say that there is sort of a strange point to make alongside of all of this.
And again, if we look at the new US national security document, one of the things that it says it's a talking point from Trump, but it's in the document itself is that in the United States at least, they should embrace their past.
They should be proud of the terrible things that they did in the past, because that's what made the United States great.
It's worth remembering that Trump, both at his first and his second terms, hung the portrait of Andrew Jackson.
And Andrew Jackson who was responsible for the travesty known as the Trail of Tears, where Native Americans were dispossessed and faced a genocide as they were moved to the less desirable lands, the wastelands of the West and Southwest, the north central parts of the United States.
So we see all of that and we see how Trump is cutting foreign aid, how he's criminalizing immigration.
We see how he himself has called for return to nuclear weapons development.
I think all of that is clear messaging that unfortunately, if you are the prime minister of Japan, if you are well aware that there have been prime ministers in the past who have tried to resist Washington and have found themselves pushed out of office,
And I think we all in China at least, saw the way in which the new prime minister turned into a cute schoolgirl when President Trump visited.
I think there are concerns that, to a large extent, Japan is not simply bringing up the ghost of its own past, but emulating what's happening in Washington.
When the person who guarantees your security is saying don't be embarrassed about your past, that's what made you great.
That unfortunately intersects very directly with sort of the worst sort of militarist thinking that we see in Japan.
Mr. Hawley, would you like to weigh in on this?
My two cents worth is that a country that has not fully confronted its wartime crimes, it can legally pursue normalization.
But it cannot legitimately claim moral authority in doing so, because moral authority requires reconciliation, transparency and survivor-centered justice.
Without these, normalization risks being seen as remilitarization cloaked in rhetoric.
Without confronting wartime crimes, Japan's pushed to normalize its military posture.
It lacks moral authority and deepens regional trust.
Now, you see, what is the paradox of normalization without reckoning?
The narrative contradiction shows that Japanese, or rather the Japan itself.
It positions itself as a peace-loving democracy.
Yet unresolved historical issues, they weaken that narrative.
And what are the strategic costs?
Lack of moral authority forces Japan to rely more heavily on hard power and alliance leverage, rather than soft power and trust building.
And what are the diplomatic consequences?
They call for constitutional revision and expanded military roles.
That they are met with suspicion abroad, complicating regional cooperation.
Then gentlemen, let's move to the real world costs of re-militarism of Japan.
Dr. Liu, Japan's right wing continues to push military expansion and threat-based narratives.
What tangible costs could this path impose on Japan itself?
Yes, of course, there are a lot of costs.
First, we should know that the Japanese militarism is a common enemy of all people worldwide, including the Japanese people themselves, like what I agree with Professor Mahoney earlier.
We should differentiate.
We should divide militarism and the common peace-loving people.
Of course, there is a military and right-wing government that is selected by these people.
So this is a very complex situation.
We all know everyone loves peace, but there are gods of wars in this world.
Someone is enjoying the invasion in wars to profit from it.
So this is a very complex situation.
The tangible cost is, I think, the first piece.
Takeuchi's remilitarization policies will inevitably intensify Japan's strategic dependence and worsen its regional environment, trapping the whole nation into a so-called security dilemma.
And second, Japan's defense spending has increased, we see, for 13 consecutive years, which is surging by approximately 60 over the past five years.
And also we see the 10 trillion yen defense spending recently.
So this?
We know that Japan's economy is facing multiple pressures, including sluggish economic growth and shrinking fiscal space.
So this huge defense budget is against the backdrop of high social security burdens, also the persistent inflation.
So this expansion can only be achieved through maybe tax or by diverting funds from essential publics services like education and health care, and infrastructure.
And so this is another cause the Japanese people may have to underburden.
And third is that Japan's approach will inevitably deepen distrust among its neighbors and the international community.
We see that nearly all of Japan's neighboring countries possess nuclear capabilities, while also harboring territorial and historical disputes with Japan.
So I think Japanese citizens should seriously reflect on why almost all their neighbors view them with maybe suspicion.
Is it others' fault or is it a warning sign for Japan itself?
Professor Mahoney, if Takeuchi's administration continue to push military expansion, etc.
These radical moves, how might this trajectory affect Japan's diplomatic, economic and strategic standing today?
Well, you know, Japan's biggest trading partner is China and you know we've already seen, because of these latest moves, a tremendous impact on Japan's tourism industry.
I was talking to some Chinese people who recently visited Japan for business and they were out for a late dinner and I forget which city it was either Kyoto or Osaka.
And they were coming into a restaurant and the guy standing at the front door hugged them and said we love China.
We're sorry about this.
Whether or not that's an authentic sentiment, I take it at face value.
Certainly there are people who are suffering already economically from this and welcome Chinese business and Chinese tourists coming to Japan.
I think it's really sort of an incredibly self-destructive policy, in so much as we know that in the early 1980s, when Japan was itself ascendant, it found itself targeted by the United States economically, not unlike the way China has been targeted by the United States in recent years.
And we know that those actions in part contributed to Japan being pushed into stagnation and the incredible debt problem that they currently have and still have found no effective solution for.
Indeed, one of the things that we have to talk about in tandem with the new prime minister is the extent to which she's going back to Abe's economic policies, which had already proven insufficient for bringing Japan out of its period of malaise, in so much as it's going to drive further deficit spending, but again without the reforms that would really make those deficit investments something that would generate real growth.
So Japan is indeed stuck in this trap.
And I'll go back to again some conversations that I was having with Japanese diplomats before all this slid sideways.
They were very optimistic that Japan would make the right decision and move into a trilateral free trade agreement with China and South Korea, that that's the overall trend, that that's the best way for Japan to move forward.
And yet precisely I would say precisely when not to be conspiratorial, but precisely when Japan began to think in those directions, we see an about face in terms of the policymaking and the decision making with regard to US strategic interest and how that is playing into perhaps, the thinking in Tokyo.
And again, I think the irony here is tremendously difficult for us to really wrap our heads around.
You have militarist Japanese who are playing into a strategy where the United States is effectively continuing to dominate them.
I don't know how that is so fundamentally self-contradicting.
I don't know how they're able to work through that unless they are, as my colleague noted, simply gods of war who are invested in the industries that profit from these types of policies.
One last question.
Dr. Liu, any final thoughts on what we've discussed today?
Well, we all know that Japan always labeled itself as a country that is out of Asia.
It's already a European country.
You're an American country.
That's what Japan has labeled itself.
But what I think is that, like the Chinese government always said, Japan and China are neighbors.
And also Korea and Russia, North Korea, we are neighbors.
We can move each other away.
So that means. whatever Japan sees itself, Japan is an Asian country, is an Asian Pacific country.
So Japan should locate itself back to Asia and think very well of the whole, like what we talked today prosperity, peace and mutual trust of the Asian countries.
And also the Asian countries.
We should avoid the negative impact of Japan's right-wing agenda by grounding their approach in historical justice and also framing it with multilateral mechanisms, and also safeguard it through strategic autonomy.
Like make Asia is like what we say Asia's Asia.
I think we should see one thing that whatever is the Taiwan question or the China-Japan relations, they're US factors, they're Western factors.
When the Western trying to contain China with the Taiwan card or with Japan militarism, they are aiming at a whole Asia, and Japan can never walk away from it.
When Japan, trying to be like the tool or like the pawn of the US, trying to into the East Asia, to make it maybe less prosperous, or even Asian wars.
Well, I don't think this is also at best. benefit of Japan itself.
So my point is that all Asian countries should shake hands together and walk to a brighter, peaceful future.
Mr. Hawley, what's your final reflection on today's topic?
Well, I'll give you four very brief points.
First of all, we should balance deterrence with reassurance.
Crisis guardrails first, rhetoric second.
Second, historical justice and security can advance together.
Facts in the archives guardrails at sea.
And then tie market to restraint.
Reward de-escalation with excess.
Raise the cost for brinkmanship.
And lastly, no single actor should set Asia's tempo.
Redundant institutions keep peace moving.
Professor Mahoney, what's your closing perspective on today's topic?
I think the question, I think for me as someone who focuses especially on political thinking in China, is what does China need to do?
I mean, this is a very difficult point because it touches on a number of Chinese red lines.
And China, you know, historically has held those red lines to be sacrosanct, whether it's the Taiwan issue or Japanese militarism and rearming it.
So the fact that these things are intersecting directly, I think it puts a lot of pressure on Beijing to respond in very strong ways.
And we know, on the one hand, that one of the ways in which China has dealt effectively with US aggression since Biden and continued now under Trump, is you have to stand firm, but you can't allow yourself to be drawn into a cycle that is going to create precisely the sort of conflict that the United States is trying to encourage or that the Japanese militarists are trying to encourage.
So how do you how do you stand firm without also creating more insecurity or what could be perceived as insecurity that would in turn drive not only militarism in Japan, but also potentially an eventual conflict.
And so far I think we've seen China being extremely mature and wise in terms of how they handled provocations related to Taiwan going back to Pelosi and the Biden period, and how they're handling now the various conflicts that have come out of Washington.
So this is sort of the key balancing act.
And this is what I'm trying to think about as I join conversations like this.
And as I talk to people in Beijing, is how can we be part of the solution and not suckered into being part of the problem?
Truly appreciate the clarity and depth of our panelists' analysis.
Mr. Sultan Hawley, a retired Air Force officer and author in Pakistan.
Dr. Liu Kuangyu, researcher at Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Dr Joseph Mahoney, professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University.
That's all the time for this edition of World Today with Mika Anna.
Thank you so much for listening.
Bye for now.
