Japan : Janus-Faced

Japan, as a nation-state, is the only victim of premeditated nuclear attack. The experience of the bombing helped to sustain the ideal of the no-war clause in the Constitution. But this position of a peace-loving nation is only one face of this Janus-faced nation. For Japan already possesses one of the world's leading military forces; the government has repeatedly said in public that if she adopts nuclear armament for defence purposes it would not be in violation of the principle of the peace constitution. The People's Republic of China and many other Asian nations are warning about the resurgence of Japan's militarism.

And, as if to confirm the prophecy of Herman Kahn that Japan may come to possess nuclear weapons in late 1970's, the government keeps expanding its arsenals. At the same time, the Japanese government has tried to hide the real picture of the suffering caused by the atomic bombing; it tries to rid the people of their "nuclear allergy" through manipulating public opinion with an ultimate aim of the nullification of the no-war clause in the Constitution.

Then, what kind of world is Japan joining with its military potential? It is a world, as the late President Kennedy stated at the 16th U. N. General Assembly in September 1961, where "Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation, or madness." It is a world in which there hangs over each inhabitant a nuclear weapon that is equivalent to twenty to thirty tons of conventional high explosives. It is also a world where five big powers are developing hydrogen bombs that are 50 to 5,000 times stronger than the Hiroshima-Nagasaki type; they are accumulating and using them in international power politics.

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