Are the Banzai boys sharpening their samurai swords again?

Typhoon "Milenyo" really walloped Metro Manila yesterday. Windows flew or shattered in classy condominiums on Makati’s Ayala avenue. Trees toppled, one falling right in front of the entrance to the Glorietta-Rustan complex’s underground parking lot. On posh Mckinley avenue, beautiful close-to-one-century old trees fell to block the road. Vehicles were rocked by the buffeting winds. Others were crushed under uprooted trees or battered by flying debris.

All flights were cancelled owing to the big blow. On EDSA, broken trees lined the sides of the road. The MRT stopped running, stranding thousands of would-be commuters. Most of Metro Manila – including Malacañang was hit by blackout.

I was able to deliver my speech at the Public Relations Society of the Philippines Congress in the Makati Inter-Con ballroom to a full house – a captive audience, really, since the storm had just hit and nobody was able to leave. Doormen and security men were hanging on to the glass doors to prevent them from popping open as the wind wailed like a banshee and wrought havoc among the groves surrounding the hotel.

However, the Inter-Con itself proved sturdy and safe. It had been constructed by Bechtel and designed by Lindy Locsin during the days when builders didn’t scrimp on steel girders. Today’s construction techniques, for all their glitz, often don’t seem to be that solid.

At 1:43 p.m. somebody texted me: Stranded at Market-Market (in Bonifacio global city, Taguig). Management here either panicky or nonexistent...One announcement says ‘stay in’, another says ‘rush out’ to Fire Exit. To where? Market-Market roof sheets flying around. Trees fallen, garbage, branches, etc. Miracle if my car not hit. Pipol (people) shouting everytime tile ceiling falls. Now parts of sheets in main building also ripped off. We are like rats running from one end to another. We all had to run inside since sheets began to fall. When will storm blow over? Lo bat! Some crying, a few resigned. No electricity. Thank goodness Jollibee open. No chix only drinks."

I don’t know what "chix" means although, from the above, I’ve tried laboriously to translate text-speak into understandable English. Anyway, Jollibee may have no "chix" but it distributes free Philippine STAR newspapers for every minimum purchase.

The text above may be a bit nervous and incoherent, but it gives you the general picture of what occurred in Metro Manila. It may have been worse in the provinces, but I can only testify to what I witnessed. Driving along gridlocked EDSA after the worst of the storm, I found billboards shredded and even one residential wall crumbled in North Forbes Park, its broken blocks and crumpled cement littering the side of EDSA. Forlornly, a security guard was standing by its swimming pool, exposed by the freak incident for all the world to see.

Man’s fury is terrible, we can only conclude, but nature’s fury is worse.

* * *

Last Wednesday morning, in the residence of our friend, British Ambassador Peter Beckingham, this writer addressed a visiting group from London, namely members of the Royal College of Defence Studies who were completing a seven-day tour of the Philippines. (They flew off yesterday for their next stop, Papua New Guinea. I ought to have warned them, really, if I had known earlier of their next destination – that’s where the Kuka-Kukas ate David Rockefeller).

The RCDS, I had been briefed, is the United Kingdom’s premier organization for training senior military, not only from the UK but also from other countries. The members of the group are chosen, Peter had told me, on the basis that they are "likely to become top leaders in due course in their own countries."

The RCDS group was led by John Tucknott MBE — the initials trailing his name means he was honored with the knightly title of "Member of the British Empire." (Thought the Empire, on which "the sun never set", had been destroyed on December 8, 1941, when Japanese torpedo planes and bombers sank the two great warships, HMS "Prince of Wales" and HMS "Repulse" off the coast of Malaya.)

In any event, that interesting bunch – who questioned me thoroughly in a frank and fascinating open forum – was composed of officers from the Royal Navy, the Royal Saudi National Guard, the Slovak Defense Ministry, the Moroccan Army, the Royal Air Force (RAF), the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Polish Army, the Canadian Navy, the UK Ministry of Defence, the Italian Air Force, the British Army and a civilian minder, namely Mr. W.G. Wilson, Directing Staff, RCDS.

One of the things they most wanted to know was whether our Presidenta, GMA, would be able to complete her term all the way to 2010, or whether a military coup, like the one just staged in Thailand, could overthrow her in the foreseeable future.

The final question was equally weighty: What could we in the region, expect of Japan, now that Mr. Shinzo Abe had just become Japan’s 37th Prime Minister, succeeding his mentor, the maverick Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who stepped down last September 20 after five years and five months in office.

I replied that surely Mr. Abe, the youngest P.M. ever, being only 52, would rearm Japan, by moving to revise the postwar Constitution which had rendered a defeated Japan weak and weaponless. This development in itself, I said, did not worry me, for I had proposed much the same thing in a speech I delivered in 1988, at a conference on Japan’s Role in Security and Regional Cooperation in the United Nations University in Tokyo. No nation, I had underscored, should be compelled to continue living on its knees half a century after the Pacific War ended.

The truth is that the 1946 Japanese Constitution, with particular emphasis on Article IX which forever renounces war as a policy and forbids Japan from having an army, navy, and air force, was written for the vanquished Japanese by the occupying American "Shogun," Gen. Douglas MacArthur and a few aides in six days, and imposed it on the Japanese. When Japan grew stronger, particularly when the need to use Japan’s manufacturing genius and back-up when the Korean War erupted in 1950, the Japanese circumvented this stricture but only in part by creating Self-Defense Forces. Shinzo Abe, as he’s stated often enough will have no more of this – he intends that Japan stop punching below its weight and build up a strong Army, Navy and Air Force once more.

What bothers me, though, is that Abe, the grandson of a former Tojo wartime Cabinet minister who was imprisoned for three years in Sugamo Prison, Nobusuke Kishi, resents the taint of "war criminal" which haunts Kishi’s memory. He has publicly expressed doubt that Japan’s "invasions" of China and other countries in Asia, like the Philippines, were any worse than Western imperialism and, indeed, had "helped" Southeast Asians overthrow their white colonial masters. In sum, Abe demonstrates neither acceptance of, nor remorse or repentance for Japan’s atrocities during the war. While proclaiming his adherence to the American-Japanese alliance, he berates the "American show trial" at which Japan’s military dictator, the executed Premier Hideki Tojo and others were condemned.

Thus, he vows that visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the 2.5 million war dead who perished in the Emperor’s name, including Tojo and 13 other "Class A" war criminals, are an honorable and necessary pilgrimage for all Japanese. For myself, as one who has visited this beautiful tree-shrouded shrine and park occasionally over the years, I see nothing wrong in this, but such pilgrimages continue to send China, Korea and other victims of Japanese aggression (except for us forgiving Filipinos) into a rage.

If it is Abe’s intent to reach out to China, he must realize he’ll have a difficult, almost impossible time of it. China has supplanted the US as Japan’s biggest trading partner, but a rising Japan – unrepentant and once more bellicosely rearmed – will send political temperatures in Beijing rising, too. Let’s not forget that the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army have, in song, legend, opera and dance, always hymned the glory of their valiant resistance to Japan’s imperial invasion, and their defeat of the evil Japanese armies. The rape of Nanjing remains a source of unending anger and indignation.

* * *

I guess there’s no escaping it. Abe’s beloved grandfather, Kishi was a ranking wartime official from an early age. In 1936, he was a ranking official of Manchukuo (as they renamed Manchuria after wresting it violently from China). In 1941, he was designated Commerce and Industry Minister in the Tojo cabinet, then Minister for War Production. As such, Kishi had co-signed the declaration of war on the United States.

Arrested by US occupying forces in 1945 and charged with war crimes, Kishi was set free after three years in jail. He was officially "banned" from public life even after Japan was declared independent once more in 1951, but this prohibition was lifted in 1952 and, within five years, Kishi had become Prime Minister. And a pro-American Prime Minister at that.

Abe’s granduncle, Kishi’s younger brother, Eisaku Sato also rose to Prime Minister. (They have deceptively different names since Kishi had been adopted by another family as a child, but the two were blood brothers.) Sato was P.M. for eight years. Abe’s own father, Shintaro Abe, who was Foreign Minister under former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, might have become Prime Minister, too, had he been more pushy, and had he not succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

Shinzo, thereby, tasted the Prime Ministership with his mother’s milk – and was inevitably destined to lead Japan by assuming the primacy in the Liberal Democratic Party his grandfather helped in founding.

What does his ascension to power portend? Abangan. They no longer shout, Tenno heika Banzai – the Emperor has been shorn of his divinity – but the spirit of Yamatodamashii, I suspect, is stirring once more, camouflaged by the bright neon and technological wizardry of the so-called New Japan, despite its aging population.

I feel that what Watanabe Taro said in 1969 remains true. As quoted by our old friend Richard Halloran in his book, "Japan: Images and Realities", Watanabe had confessed:

"We Japanese feel a strong sense of chugi, or loyalty to the Emperor and our country. We have many other loyalties to the family and the company and other groups. We Japanese base our loyalties much more on personal relationships than on principle. Loyalty to an abstract idea such as democracy is cold to us, like logic… We Japanese, it must be said, do not really respect the rights of other people and are motivated only by our obligations to them. If we don’t have obligations, then our relations are determined mostly by power… Our word for ‘skillful,’ jozu, is composed of two ideographs, one meaning ‘upper’ the other meaning ‘hand.’ Our word for ‘power’ is chikara, an ideograph that has been drawn from the shape of a sword. We Japanese do not have much respect for law, as we think power is more effective."

Of course the Emperor is no longer "god," and nobody is compelled these days to sing the national anthem, "Kimigayo" which prays that the Emperor’s reign "may last for thousands of years."

Yet there’s still, it seems, a growing, nationalistic spirit redolent of the "Umi Yukaba," the old Imperial Japanese Navy song, which went:

"If I die in the sea, may my corpse lie in water;

If I die on the mountain, let my body lie in the field.

I shall die only for the Emperor.

I shall never look back."

Abe hails from Shimonoseki, where a great Samurai battle was once fought, which brought the restrictive power of the old Shogunate down, and restored authority to the Emperor, in this case the great Meiji who brought Japan into the 20th century and built it up by adopting Western capabilities and methods, into a power capable of challenging the West.

The Abe "restoration" promises to bring good and evil simultaneously into the regional equation which is Asia today. Under him, Japan will be far less matomari, but more exciting – and dangerous.