I seldom agree with Prof. Buruma because of his mistaken preconception about Japan's past; he has often talked about Japanese fascism and revanchism or things like that; even before 1945 the West could not ahve found out a non-European part in the world so fond of American people, and so much Westernized and Americanized, or so an ardent learner and absorber of Western culture. It is generally thought, quite mistakenly, that democracy was introduced into postwar Japan by America. Japan had been developing democratic institutions and customs since prewar days. As Edwin O. Reischaur says in Japan: The Story of A Nation, everything that there is had existed in prewar Japan.

But I can accept the outline of what he seems to have to say here. Prof. Francis Fukuyama was a sort of Hegelian, writing The End of History, in maintaining the victory of liberalism as the future trend of the whole world. Liberalism would have to be a minority group as a value-system of the world.



The Cold War was defined as the impossibility of communication of any sort except nuclear deterrence between the two blocs. But President Eisenhower said that we needed a purpose (an aim) even in fighting the Cold War. He was right. What is the aim in the West's foreign policy toward Putin's Russia? Is it to bring down Putin from power? It would not be impossible. Is it to set up a democratic regime in place of his? Probably it woud not be possible. Is it to regain Crimea? It would be impossible. Is it to stabilize the relationship between Western Europe (including countries like Poland) and Russia, and court Russian cooperation for preventing nuclear proliferation and stabilizing the Middle East and other parts of the world? It would not be impossible but the present mindset and foreign policy are the right policy for it.



It is impossible to expect China to act as a responsible stakeholder in accordance with the Western value system of politics. But it is feasible for the Western countries to be accepted as a responsible tributary stakeholder in the Sino-centric tributary system; China would be most glad to accept it. "Chinese feelings of cultural superiority are monumental, deriving as it does from a three thousand year tradition (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese, Tuttle, 1978)."



Japan was not and is not a Confucian country. There are three Confucian societies in the world, China, Korea, and Vietnam. Korean culture is more Confucian that Chinese culture is and Vietnam is said to have fought Chine more than eighty times in the past two thousand years. Whether a nation is Confucianist or not makes millions of light years's difference.

Japan was not a totalitarian, fascist country even in the 1930s. "What we now have in Japan is the organization of society for the war in China, the mobilization of its resources and of its spirit. The Parliament still plays its role. Public opinion is not manufactured, as there are still independent sources influencing it. Censorship is strict, as is to be expected during a war, but magazines, even those for the wider public opinion, are not yet deprived of their freedom of expression. (Emil Lederer, State of The Masses, 1940)." "But, unlike the Italian and German cases, there was no dictator and the sytem was not the product of a well-defined, popular movement, but more a vague change of mood, a shift in the balance of power between the elite groups in Japanese society, and a consequent shift in national politics...(Reischaur, ibid)." "...the wartime regime of Japan, repressive as it was, was very different from the totalitarian states of that time in other places. When one realizes how tenuous and frail democracy is elsewhere in the world, and how strong is the tendency towards arbitrary rule, one may conclude by wondering not why democracy failed in Japan, but rather how, despite the undemocratic tradition and the pressure of war, a totalitarian dictatorship did not evolve there (Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics And Culure In Wartime Japan, Oxford, 1981)." "The Overthrow of Tojo (in July, 1944), the first and almost only orderly change of government among the major belligerent nations in World War II, was achieved smoothly, with no violence, no arrests, and no clashes (Shillony, ibid)."

Japan did not have a dictator like Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, nor despotic tyrants like Chiang Kaishek or Mao Zedong. It did not have a concentration camp like in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or Communist China or the police sytem like Gestapo or the Chinese Armed, Public Order Maintenance and People's polices of Communist China.

Japan wanted to withdraw from China and avoid military hostilities with the United States and proposed and entered into negotians in Washington DC. Japan made major compromises but Secretary of State Hull hardly moved from where he stood initially. A comment, Excellent Book, on Joseph Grew, Ten Years In Japan, amazon usa, says, "Many people who are familiar with WWII may think that the Japanse of the time were all solely fixated on going to war with the United States to win dominace in the Pacific, but Ambassador Grew reaveals that most Japanese actually wanted peace with the United States." British Ambassador Robert Cragie, in Tokyo at that time, sent his Tokyo report, but it infuriated Prime Minister Churchill, who wanted American entry into the European war as quickly as possible, and he prohibitied its publication.