CLIMBING FUJIYAMA

It was an interesting way to spend the 4th of July.  And instructive.  I climbed Fujiyama – Fuji-san, as the Japanese reverently call it – once before when I was 17.  That was in 1961, and I still have the climbing stick I used with the year burned into the wood.

It's funny that I have no recollection of the climb being hard.  It requires starting from 7,900 feet at 4 in the morning, and trudging steeply up through volcanic scree to reach the rim at 12,200 feet some five hours later.  No problem when I was 17.  I guess 45 years does make a difference after all.

Actually, the big difference is in coming back down.  Going up it's your lungs that take a beating, going down it's your legs – and I'll take the former any time.  My lungs still work OK, but the endless, endless steep pitch down, down, down, hour after hour made it achingly clear I don't have teen-age legs any more.

But my 14 year-old son Jackson does – and standing on top of Fuji with him made all the effort easily worthwhile.

For the rest of his life, Jackson will remember the 4th of July in 2006.  Fujiyama, one of the world's most famous mountains, is now a part of his life.  Hopefully, it will inspire him to learn more about the country of which Fujiyama is the symbol:  Japan.

The Japanese love to believe in a myth that they are an ancient people, that Japan was founded in 660 BC by Emperor Jimmu, a descendant of the Shinto Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, and whose descendants have ruled Japan in an unbroken line to the current Emperor Akihito today.

The reality is that the original inhabitants of Japan, called J­omon after their distinctive pottery, were not Japanese, but Caucasian.  They migrated across land bridges from Northeast Asia well over 10,000 years ago.  Their descendants, the aboriginals of Japan known as the Ainu, live in a few settlements in the northern island of Hokkaido.

The Japanese as we know them seem to be a mix of migrants from Korea and China starting around 300 BC.  A society emerged of competing military states run by warlords and based on the Chinese Imperial Court system of centralized bureaucracies.

The first written mention of Japan comes in 57AD in the Eastern Han Chronicles of China, as Wa or "dwarf state."  Writing, based on Chinese characters, and Buddhism were introduced by the Korean Kingdom of Baekje around 450 AD.  About 200 years later, Japan adopted Chinese Confucianism as its cultural philosophy and adhered to it for well over a thousand years.

A distinct culture began to rise in 700's ruled by a class of warriors called buke, which we know as samurai.  They were grouped into clans whose leader was known as a shogun.  The Kamakura Shogunate became legendary for repelling the Mongol invasion of Japan in 1281 with the help of a storm that devastated  the Mongol fleet.  The Japanese called the storm that saved them Kamikaze, the Divine Wind.

The Shoguns warred against each other until the late 1500s, when Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) unified all of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, which established a closed medieval-feudal state for two-and-a-half centuries.

The epochal turning point in the history of Japan came on July 8, 1853 when Commodore Mathew Perry sailed four warships – the "Black Ships" – of the United States Navy into Uraqa harbor of the capital, Edo (now Tokyo), and forced the Tokugawa Shogunate to begin trading with America and the West.

This led to the overthrow of the Tokugawas and the "Meiji Restoration" from 1866-1869 which restored the Emperor to the imperial throne.  Emperor Mutsuhito adopted the name Meiji, meaning "Enlightened Rule."  The shoguns were abolished and the samurai made to work for a living rather than being a parasitic ruling class.

An incredibly rapid industrialization followed, together with building a modern military.  In little more than 20 years, Japan felt ready to take on China for control of Korea.  In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Chinese Ching Dynasty's navy was decimated, resulting in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in which China turned over Korea, much of Manchuria, and the island of Taiwan to Japan.

Czarist Russia then tried to take advantage of the situation and invaded Japanese Manchuria, triggering the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 in which the Russian Navy was repeatedly defeated.  The Russians surrendered and the Japanese victory was consummated in the Treaty of Portsmouth – negotiated by President Teddy Roosevelt for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Japan was now recognized as an emerging Great Power.  It embraced democracy under a Taisho (Righteousness) movement and fought on the side of the Allies against Germany in World War I.  But when Crown Prince Hirohito became Emperor in 1926, the Taisho period ended.

Hirohito (1901-1989) allowed a faction of fascist-nationalist military officers led by Hideki Tojo (1884-1948) to increasingly seize power, to occupy all of Manchuria in 1931, form the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1936, invade China in 1937, and attack America at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

After the Japanese defeat in World War II, Tojo was hanged, but Hirohito was allowed to keep his throne.  The US occupational government of Japan, led by General Douglas Macarthur, established a democratic government and ensured there would not be any more Tojos.

The latter was done through Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan (adopted in 1947), stating:  "The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."

Nonetheless, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces are now one of the strongest militaries in the world, albeit kept very quietly under wraps.  And we should be pleased.  All you need do is look at the current craziness in North Korea to see why.

The public reaction by both the Japanese and American governments – serious anger – is tempered by the private one.  In the White House and the Kokkai (Japanese Parliament), there is a lot of laughter.  GW really had to suppress his smirk in a press conference when he noted that the dreaded Taepodong-2 (which the press calls an "Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of reaching the US with its 6,000 kilometer range") blew up 40 seconds after launch.

"What a bunch of bozos," is the private assessment here in Tokyo and in DC.  "All their missiles failed.  It's even more of a spectacular flop than their Taepodong-1 test back in 1998, where the first two stages went off ok until the third stage blew up.  These clowns can now barely get their popguns off the launch pad."

Yet everyone has to bite their tongues and resist the overwhelming temptation to publicly ridicule the North Koreans and laugh in Baby Kim's face.  Doing so would make it much harder to get international sanctions on Pyongyang.

The bottom line to all of this is that Japan is right now and will be for some time America's strongest and most important ally in Asia.  This goes well beyond the personal friendship – which is very real – between George Bush and Junichiro "Elvis" Koizumi.

Koizumi's Prime Ministership ends this September, and will likely be assumed by current chief cabinet secretary Shinzo Abe, who will continue the alliance.  The cementing and deepening of this alliance is one of the most significant achievements of the Bush presidency.

Japan has the second largest economy in the world (we're the first, obviously).  It is pro-American and is the principal bulwark blocking Chinese and Russian influence and hegemony in Northeast Asia. 

The lesson Japan can teach other cultures of how it emerged from medieval feudalism and fascist militarism to become a modern rich democracy – while still preserving its cultural traditions and identity – is of enormous importance.

It's a lesson that Moslem, particularly Arab, societies must learn if they are to survive.

There's an Israeli joke about a man taking his son to a museum in 2106, the early 22^nd century.  There's a display with a man in a robe and a red-and-white headdress.  The boy asks, "Who's he, Dad?"  "That's an Arab, son," the father replies.  The boy then asks, "What's an Arab?"

You can be sure that no one will be asking a similar question about the Japanese 100 years from now.  Japan is one of the world's great success stories.  It has flaws and problems just like every other country.  They are unimportant compared to the achievements of which the Japanese have every right to be proud.

In a sense, all of Japan has climbed Fujiyama.  And Americans should be proud of how they helped the Japanese do it.  Yes, climbing Fuji was a great way to celebrate the 4th.