Jason Morgan
Work your way through a room full of Jieitai (Japan Self-Defense Forces) officers and defense contractor types at a cocktail party in Tokyo and you’ll likely feel either elation or disgust. If you like the way Washington runs and think the whole world should be franchisees of its warmongering-for-profit brand, then you’ll absolutely love how the Japan defense establishment operates. You couldn’t find more slavish toadies of America’s foreign-policy “Blob” even if you talked to every man wearing a suit inside the Beltway.
But if you think that killing foreigners for money is immoral, that exposing your own people to harm for the sake of Washington’s hegemonic schemes is bad, and that latching onto those schemes from a distant capital is even worse, then you’ll leave such cocktail parties wondering how the country that gave us the samurai and the warrior code could have fallen to such despicable depths as have the soulless hangers-on among the Jieitai officers and defense-industry urchins in Japan.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting a handful of retired Jieitai officers who decidedly do not run with the defense crowd here. These men think for themselves and put their own country, and not Washington, first in their thinking. A very good example of this kind of man, rare but invaluable, is Mochida Kazuhito, a former Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces (JGSDF) general and at one time the commander of the JGSDF Western Army, a region including Kyushu and Okinawa. I know Gen. Mochida from our appearances together on a news and politics program called Channel Sakura. His analysis of the Ukraine conflict, his knowledge of economic warfare and military hardware, and his overall view of geopolitical dynamics are superb. He is one of the best strategists and analysts in Japan today.
I recently met Mochida in his hometown of Fukuoka, in Kyushu, to learn more about how he sees Japan’s place in the emerging, multi-polar world order, especially given Japan’s eighty-year reliance on Washington’s security guarantees and the Japanese establishment’s unthinking cooperation with Washington. I was surprised to learn that, despite his skepticism of Washington’s motives in the western Pacific and elsewhere, Mochida admires President Donald Trump, has a deep respect for Christianity, and wants Japan to have a good relationship with the Americans.
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