The National Interest
Summer 2001

Power Houses

by Kurt M. Campbell

 

The most recent construction is the Japan Defense Agency headquarters in Ishigayia, a Tokyo suburb. (Japan's defense organization was downgraded to an "agency" from a "ministry" after World War II, as a purposeful bureaucratic reminder of the dangers of militarism.) Ultra-modern and bristling with antennas, it could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of one of Japan's commercial giants. However, the choice of location was anything but random. "Ishigayia has great significance in the martial history of Japan", according to Michael Green, an expert on the Japanese military at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Ishigayia is where the war crimes tribunal was held, the scene of the military's great shame. It is also the site of [noted Japanese author and nationalist] Yukio Mishima's 1970 call for a military coup and his subsequent ritual suicide after his appeal went unheeded." Indeed, there are frequent lines of Japanese visitors waiting patiently in front of the new building to visit the military-maintained shrine to Mishima inside. Still, Green sees Ishigayia as being "more about the future than the past. They had to bury a lot of rubble, literally, to create the foundation for that building."

Building on top of the past, it turns out, is a common practice. "There is a long tradition of architecture being called upon to construct a new reality, one that superimposes upon and supersedes utterly a previous meaning", explains Scott Cohen, associate professor of architecture at Harvard's School of Design.

Much of Asia interprets the new Japanese military digs as another step along the road toward rehabilitating the self-defense forces. One Chinese military official reported that he was "shocked by how unapologetic and proud the Japanese defense people were about this new building. I half expected that they would be somewhat sheepish about showing me around, but I was taken right in the front door-there was no sense of ambivalence." But the construction has struck an ambivalent chord across the region and subtle questions have been asked about Japanese plans to play a larger security role in Asia. Several Asia hands speculated that the Chinese would have made a bigger stink about Ishigayia had they not opened their own new lavish Ministry of Defense virtually in the same month. . .