Researching how we reformed Japan’s constitution after World War II required a top secret security clearance to view the papers of the Supreme Allied Commander for the Pacific, or SCAP, which denoted Gen. Douglas MacArthur as well as the labyrinthine organization that executed his wishes. It was all hush-hush, as if we didn’t want the Japanese to learn the truth about their gaijin (foreigner) founding fathers. Even the Japanese were nervous: after I tracked certain pertinent papers to the locked safe of a Tokyo law office, it tested my best persuasive efforts just to see them.
Interviewing members of the small band of Americans at MacArthur’s GHQ who had been ordered to draft a new constitution for Japan, I was struck by how vivid the experience remained for them even 30 years later. Mostly young and earnest when tasked, they drew upon a broad variety of life experiences to inform their drafting. They had to: our fire-bombing had destroyed most of Tokyo’s libraries.
One young woman, who’d lived in Japan pre-war, did manage to scrounge a book or two containing various European constitutions drafted in the aftermath of World War I. Equal rights for woman and guaranteed health care came from those. Older men with legal training debated whether Japan should have a bicameral or unicameral legislature. The former was better suited Japan’s history; the question was how to formulate the second house so it would not become a refuge for the entitled and wealthy, notwithstanding that the nobility had been banned by SCAP.
What came through most strongly for me was the seriousness this conclave brought to their undertaking — and their passion for democracy. Like MacArthur, they believed that the Japanese would buy into a democratic system because it would be a fair one, with equality for all. Keeping the Emperor as a symbol but subordinating him and the executive to the rule of law was their primary goal. They were not naive in their view of democracy American-style, but they were reverential, believing that clear constitutional rules and democratic institutions might have prevented Japan’s recourse to war and would surely thwart a resurgence of bellicose nationalism.
I have lived now through three impeachments. This last, of Trump, would have sickened those members of “the Greatest Generation” who sought to remake Japanese governance in our image. Our image is no longer so bright nor so clear as it was in their day.
To hear Trump’s defenders claim he did nothing wrong, when the evidence speaks volumes otherwise, is to realize that today oaths to uphold one’s office mean nothing. Likewise with oaths of impartiality. To hear the claim that the Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump since his first day in office is to realize we seem to live in parallel universes. It wasn’t that Trump’s impeachment was desirable, but that it would become inevitable, given his manifest character (or lack of it).
To see Trump’s venality praised as patriotism; to see people (and lawyers who should know better) confounding the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” with statutory crimes and attempting to exculpate Trump because he hasn’t yet shot anyone on Fifth Avenue; to see tolerance of Trump’s bullying, lying, and undercutting of both the rule of law and our national security — these blow not only my mind but blast to rubble everything for which our country once stood.
Barry Goldwater, sick of the stink from Watergate and its cover-up, marshaled the courage to tell Richard Nixon it was time to go. What, I wonder, happened to bravery among today’s Republicans? Has the prospect of bullying by Tweet silenced your capacity for moral outrage? Or is it fear that Trump holds the purse-strings to your re-election campaign?
Frankly, if you won’t stand up for country over the narcissist who would be king, you don’t deserve your office, now or in the future. You’ve forgotten what American has been — and should be.
Dale C. Moss is author of “We, the Japanese People: World War II and the Origins of the Japanese Constitution,” published by Stanford University Press under her former name, Dale M. Hellegers.