Japan and the United States: A Memoir by Yukio Okamoto
A review of the English-language memoir by the well-known Japanese diplomat and political commentator
If you watched the political analysis shows on TV in Japan from the 1990s through the 2010's, you couldn’t miss Yukio Okamoto. He was seemingly everywhere, especially in times of international crisis or war, on TV and in the newspapers in both Japanese and English.
Okamoto was perhaps the best translator to the outside world of the complex inner workings of Japanese politics. This memoir highlights his decades of efforts as a Japanese diplomat, maintaining Japan and America as treasured allies instead of rivals.
Okamoto was born in Kanagawa in 1945 at the end of WW2. He joined the Japanese Foreign Ministry in 1968 where he worked as a diplomat until 1991, serving in Paris, Cairo, and Washington. He eventually became responsible for maintaining Japan-US relations during the rocky periods of the Gulf Wars.
After leaving the ministry, Okamoto became an advisor to Prime Ministers Hashimoto and Koizumi, directing the government on the sensitive issue of the Okinawa military bases as well as Japanese collaboration with the US military during the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq. He died in 2020 from Covid.
This memoir, written in English rather than translated from Japanese, was the result of a study group first convened in 2013 at the MIT Center for International Studies where Okamoto was a research fellow. His text was edited by Elisabeth Rubinfien, Daniel Sneider, and Richard J. Samuels, all veteran journalists specializing in Japanese politics.
What makes this memoir a joy to read is Okamato’s personality. Unlike the gray politicians and bureaucrats of Kasumigaseki who play their cards close to their vest and regurgitate the official government position, Okamoto is a storyteller unafraid to state his honest opinion. Where Japanese politics is often a black box, Okamoto gives us the inside view of how important decisions were made, both the good ones and the bad, and explains the nuance of complex situations that often get reduced to simple sound bites.
The book starts with a personal biography of his family. His father joined the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to help poor farmers, but during the war, was drafted into the military and sent to China where he was a member of the infamous Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical warfare research group in the Imperial Army. The shame of this family history seems to propel Okamoto to dedicate his life to working toward peace.
He discusses WW2 in detail, both the causes and the ending, as it sets up the American occupation and the US-written constitution that includes Article 9 renouncing warfare and a standing military. In Okamoto’s view, Article 9, especially when interpreted narrowly, cripples Japan’s ability to act as a regular, modern country and “impeding Japan’s ability to respond to the global situation.”
But Article 9 is a cornerstone of Japanese politics. The citizens overwhelmingly support pacifism, ignoring the reality of belligerence of North Korea and China, and relying entirely on the US defense umbrella. This conflict between the ideals of peace and the complexity of the real world propels much of the negotiations between politicians and bureaucrats within Japan and between Japan and the United States.
“While Japan continues its unique debates, the global security environment grows more dangerous by the minute. Japan’s security system, with its patchwork of laws and cabinet decisions that did not change the constitution, cannot meet the task.”
Okamoto makes declarations startling for a former high official of the MoFA, such as responsibility for the unconditional surrender at the end of WW2 “lies heavily on Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki for declaring silent contempt (mokusatsu) of the Potsdam Declaration and pushing forward (maishin) war efforts even as he was already willing to surrender. The responsibility of the Army and some members of the Navy who insisted on continuing the War is even heavier…In the course of procrastination, millions of soldiers and citizens were killed.”
So was Japan’s intransigence responsible for the unfolding tragedy? Nothing for Okamoto is without nuance: “However, none of these episodes justifies the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and another on Nagasaki on August 9.”
He then lays much of the blame for ongoing sweeping under the rug of any discussion about the war to “Japan itself has never conducted its own trials of its war criminals…The government and military, which did not delve into their War responsibilities, passed on the responsibility to all Japanese citizens…This despondency of Japanese that remained across generations has hindered the establishment of the external relations of a healthy nation. Japan, thus, has been shrouded in excessive pacifism.” Refreshing analysis from someone who’s spent his career inside the Japanese government.
As he gets into the stories of his own work at the MoFA, we get a fly on the wall view of the high-stakes but often absurd negotiations between the ministry, the Prime Minister’s office, other ministries, and the US government.
Sometimes, the stories veer into more detail than I care to know. But then there are episodes, like the aborted development of a fighter jet that I was personally involved in, where the details of everything I couldn’t see from the outside is exhilarating to learn.
His stories dive into the need for Japan to support the American coalition during the Gulf War while navigating internal politics that prohibited Japan from warfare. Donating money instead of people to the effort brought Japan in for criticism that it was nothing but an ATM shirking its responsibilities. In the second Gulf War, Japan was better prepared but still faced difficult internal hurdles to cooperating with the US military.
The personalities of the prime ministers during each crisis made a large difference. Still, Okamoto makes clear that while he’s confident in America’s commitment to Japan’s defense, he believes Japan needs to update the constitution to take a needed role in maintaining peace in the world through collaborative peacekeeping activities.
If you’re interested in Japanese politics, this book is an invaluable guide to understanding how the sausage is made, often in secret meetings. Even if your interest is limited to post-WW2 history, there’s much to learn in these pages about how the US coalition functioned, or often failed to function, as America dragged its allies to war.
The book does, at times, feel hastily assembled, with a lot of typos and a few factual errors. But that’s well worth overlooking to read how critical decisions are actually made in Japan as described by an insider unafraid to tell the full story.
Japan and the United States: The Journey of a Defeated Nation — A Diplomat’s Memoir by Yukio Okamoto. Available from Tuttle Publishing from December 31, 2024. Order here: