OPINION:
A gaffe, so a wise man once said, is what happens when a public official inadvertently tells the truth. The scribblers in Washington, collectively known as “the Gaffe Patrol,” are fond of collecting gaffes, scolding the gaffes, and congratulating themselves for once more acting as the republic’s faithful watchdogs. Arf, arf.
Vice President Joe Biden, who as a major dispenser of gaffes has spoken some lulus, tempted the Gaffe Patrol this week when, admonishing Donald Trump for saying Japan might acquire a nuclear bomb some day to deal with enemies and offended a faithful American ally in Asia.
“Does he not understand,” asked good ol’ Joe, that “we wrote Japan’s Constitution to say that they could not be a nuclear power?”
A popular Japanese pundit, writing in Asahi, a large national newspaper, called the veep’s remark “unprecedented in its insensitivity” and “could even be considered arrogant.” Eyebrows, as the diplomats would put it, were raised.
This was truly a gaffe, correctly defined, because Mr. Biden was in fact telling a truth that the Japanese, who bowed and tugged at their forelocks in 1947 when the Americans were writing the Japanese constitution, find hard to get down in 2016. Many of them resent a document they now say was forced on them by the winners of World War II. But it’s true nonetheless. Winning a war is always better than losing one.
The 1947 constitution, adopted under the tutelage of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who administered Japan like an emperor, does not mention nuclear weapons but proclaims that Japan “renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation.” That has been taken to mean no nuclear weapons, and no conventional weapons, either, employed as an act of war.
“We thought only Trump was an insensitive guy,” says Hiro Aida, author of a book about the Donald. “Biden kind of misspoke. This is not something he should talk openly about in public.” The vice president, on the other hand, follows the American tradition of “letting it all hang out.” The Japanese do not, and expect leaders to speak in vague understatement, often to hide unpleasant meaning. When Emperor Hirohito, with Hiroshima vanished and Nagasaki in flame, announced the Japanese surrender in 1945 he said that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
It’s true that, as Japanese historians remember it, Japanese scholars were involved in reviewing the constitution and modifying it before it was presented to the Japanese parliament for adoption. But MacArthur passed on every dot and tittle before forwarding it to Washington for final modifications of the Japanese modifications.
Good ol’ Joe was correct, and, being good ol’ Joe, he spoke with a blunt honesty that his constituents, Democrat and Republican alike, expect from him. Sometimes Good ol’ Joe talks like Donald Trump.
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