Treasury Secretary Bessent's Repeated Visits｜Japan Cannot Sell U.S. Treasuries and Has No Fiscal Sovereignty

Provoke a party you have no need to make an enemy of, then insist you have done nothing at all. The Western powers have behaved this way again and again since the Age of Discovery, and the Japanese government now seems to have absorbed the habit so deeply into its bones that it can no longer overcome it on its own.

The very premise, the idea of an “enemy,” is profoundly Western. In the modern Western sense, an enemy is someone with whom dialogue must be refused, an evil to be despised. This is the same posture the West took in the colonial era, when it branded other nations and peoples as barbarous or uncivilized and justified occupying them one after another, and it is the posture of the Western nations today. In other words, they have overcome nothing and learned nothing from history. What they do has not changed in five hundred years. If anything, it has grown more sophisticated, and what drives it is the “fear” of losing their own privileges.

Casting China as a hypothetical enemy is a reckless act that brings Japan nothing of value. A crisis in East Asia is tightly bound up with certain vested interests within the U.S. government, and that is where the disease destabilizing the region lies. Naturally, the parts of the Japanese government that live off those interests like parasites are of the same nature, and so are parts of the Chinese government.

What we really need to watch, at the moment someone cries “That is the enemy!”, is whose finger is pointing at that imagined enemy. Behind the finger lies a complex structure of vested interests that never comes to the surface, and that structure reaches directly into postwar Japan’s subservience to the United States.

The age of thinking about the future at the level of nations and groups is over. Even so, “sovereignty” is a question we must keep asking and keep raising, and an event that symbolizes it has happened only recently.

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this past January, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sharply rebuked Japan’s finance minister with a threat, “Do not sell U.S. Treasuries as you please.” Bessent came to Japan again in May, and remarkably, he has now visited three times in about a year, meeting separately with the prime minister, the finance minister, and the governor of the Bank of Japan. This is a serious matter, and it should be read as a series of visits to drive home a warning. The message is “Do not do as you please without (America’s) permission.” Yet although he is plainly the very person stripping Japan of its fiscal sovereignty, the Japanese media describe him as “a great friend of Japan.”

Japan is the world’s largest creditor in U.S. Treasuries. That fact is itself a distortion in the structure that props up American public finances, and on top of it, the U.S. Treasury Secretary keeps coming to Japan, disregarding its fiscal sovereignty and pressing it to go on supporting America’s finances. In the name of diplomacy, conduct this blatant is imposing a servitude that ignores sovereignty entirely.

To break free of today’s ruinously weak yen, Japan would like to let go of its U.S. Treasuries. Yet neither the government nor the Bank of Japan can sell them without America’s permission, because selling would send American interest rates soaring and would amount, in effect, to a declaration of “non-submission” to the United States. In other words, the Japanese government is not looking at the faces of its own people. It is looking at the face of Washington, and this is one reason for the hopeless emptiness that hangs over our society.

To begin with, it is abnormal that America’s independence anniversary should be celebrated so lavishly in another country, Japan. Until now, Japan-U.S. relations have carried a certain reluctance to state openly that Japan is essentially a vassal of the United States, or rather one of its provinces. That reluctance existed because the anti-American spirit tied to the Anpo struggles of the 1960s, the protests against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, was still very much alive in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The bicentennial fifty years ago, for instance, fell in 1976, when the generation that had fought in the Anpo struggles still made up the working core of society, and such a celebration would have been utterly impossible. But since then, the occupation authority of GHQ, the Allied headquarters that governed postwar Japan, has passed to the U.S. forces at Yokota Air Base, and the people have been steadily tamed over more than half a century. My own view is that the arrangement can now be managed even when it is handled somewhat carelessly.

That carelessness shows in the spectacle of Japan lavishly celebrating this anniversary. On the very day that honors America for winning back its sovereignty from Europe and becoming independent, Japan is treated as a colony, stripped of its sovereignty and never permitted to hold it. And as long as Yokota Air Base controls the airwaves, the very heart of the mass media, the media will not report the truth.

Even at the cost of wrecking people’s livelihoods, the Japanese government must always ask what America wants before taking any action. Since the second Abe administration, Japan has followed a course that does not shrink even from the total mobilization of its people for America’s sake, and it has slowly and steadily worn society down. The last structural turning point before this era was the Democratic Party of Japan’s rise to power. When the party took office, Ichiro Ozawa and Yukio Hatoyama, its leaders at the time, openly declared that they would dismantle this structure. But they incurred the wrath of “someone,” and through the mass media that this someone owns, the two were thoroughly driven off the public stage.

So the Democratic Party government collapsed. The second Abe administration began almost at once, and from then on the stage belonged to the LDP’s Seiwakai faction alone, all the way to today’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. When she publicly pledged to continue the Abe administration’s policies, she was, read from the other side, announcing that she “will not defy the United States” and declaring that she “will work for the United States.”

Like the Abe administration before it, the Takaichi administration is wrecking people’s lives while pouring the money it collects from them, again and again, into America’s service. Tax increases and rearmament alike are for America, and Japan’s sovereignty has no place in them. Far from sovereignty, even the people have no place in them. For “whom,” exactly, are the politicians and bureaucrats working? This cold fact is what we truly must face and fight. Yet we, who are able to learn from the two defeats of the Anpo struggles, must not use the same methods again.

What matters is that Japanese society back then could not change anything, even though the young were the majority. In Japanese society today, the young are a minority, and the rigid leftist ideology of that era no longer exists on the surface. Instead, it is being optimized through social media. Leftist organizations once relied thoroughly on “Orugu,” their method of organizing and recruiting new members, and the same thing now seems to be capturing young people one after another on social media. In other words, algorithms are remarkably well suited to Orugu. Judged by “the durability of a movement,” such methods are, I would say, incomparably more fragile than those of the past.

Moreover, when things move along dualistic lines, they always flip into their opposite. Once we forget that the young people defeated in the Anpo struggles were the very ones who went on to shape today’s Japanese society, we move a step closer to a future that repeats the same mistakes. It was the same before the war. In other words, the leadership now mounting action against the Japanese government will become a force that falls in line with the militarism of the near future. Kinji Fukasaku once brilliantly exposed the true nature of this inescapable dynamic in his hit film Battle Royale (2000).

From here on, the focus will be whether a movement leader emerges who can see all of this in its full scope and genuinely think about the future. Yet the larger problem, one that many people overlook, is that a structural turning point on the American side is in fact close at hand.

Next time, I will think this through.