Kumao Nishimura, Director of the Foreign Ministry's Treaty Bureau at the time of the conclusion of US-Japan Security Treaty, later characterized the nature of the Treaty as follows:
“The Security Treaty, in short, secures the defense of Japan, with Japan providing the facilities and the United States providing the military. It is a cooperation between goods and men.”
This paper examines how this “cooperation between goods (facilities, i. e., bases) and men (the military)” came to be re-recognized in the revised Security Treaty of 1960 regarding its treaty area and prior consultation.
Responding to a persistent criticism within Japan that the original Security Treaty was a one-sided, unequal treaty, the United States government decided to revise the Treaty into a more mutual one in 1958. Japan, however, could not even appear to promise to defend American territories because of its Constitutional restrictions. Both governments realized that the real mutuality of their security relations lay in the “cooperation between goods and men.” Still, it was not an easy task to express such “cooperation between goods and men” in a mutual treaty in the light of other mutual security treaties, Japanese Constitution, and the strategic needs of the United States.
Regarding the treaty area, the United States government suggested “the Pacific, ” with Japan acting in the extent possible under its Constitution. Japan objected to this, and in the end, the mutual defense in the “territories under the administration of Japan” was decided upon. The clever part of this is that the actions for mutual defense in that treaty area can be explained to the Japanese public as the exercise of the right of individual self-defense, while at the same time they can appear to the United States as that of the right of collective self-defense.
The point of prior consultation regarding the use of bases was to make the Treaty appropriate to a cooperation between two equal sovereign states while not diminishing the effectiveness of the “goods” part of the cooperation. The United States, while presupposing its free use of the Okinawan bases, accepted prior consultation and a certain degree of limitation on the use of bases in mainland Japan. Secret arrangements were made, however, with respect to the two main issues of prior consultation, issues of the introduction of nuclear weapons, and of the military combat operations in case of emergency in the Far East: one arrangement pertained to the entry of nuclear-armed vessels into Japanese ports and waters, and the other, the exemption from prior consultation of the United States military operations under the United Nations Command in case of emergency in the Korean Peninsula. These arrangements were necessary to make the bases in Japan remain attractive to the United States.
It seems that the ambiguous elements in the revised Security Treaty, as shown in the above, were a result of trying to give appearance of a normal mutuality to the essentially asymmetrical mutuality of “cooperation between goods and men.”
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