Amb. Rahm Emanuel insults Japan, jeopardizes U.S. ties

FPI / July 9, 2023

By Tetsuhide Yamaoka

Thanks to bad behavior on the part of America’s ambassador, a 70-year-old racket in U.S.-Japanese politics is now being exposed. In the words of a senior legislator, leading Liberal Democrats have “decided the issue by force” and have “left a mark on the democratic management of the party.”

The issue is America’s power to compel political choices in Japan. The choice concerns Japan’s acceptance of a national law defending the rights of transsexuals — a matter that was once considered and debated but became dormant in Japan before President Biden pressed it on us. And now, thanks to a ferocious campaign waged by Amb. Rahm Emanuel, both the lower house and the upper house of Japan’s Diet has adopted President Biden’s gay-lesbian-transsexual tolerance platform as the law of the land.

Emanuel’s campaign in Tokyo is the leading edge of an offensive that American diplomats are waging across the globe. In Guatemala, the U.S. Department of State under USAID director Samantha Power has been funding pro-abortion groups to the tune of $11 million, thereby undermining Guatemala’s constitution which explicitly guarantees the rights of the unborn.

Power and Emanuel, who rose to fame as cohorts of President Barack Obama, are trusted servants of the radical left. The policy they are implementing for Biden is fashioned from a radical agenda devoted to sexual preferences and reproductive rights. That agenda is now at the center of America’s diplomatic program.

When the bill passed in the cabinet committee of the Lower House, Emanuel tweeted on June 9, 2023: “Today’s committee vote in the Diet is Day 1 of a new day for Japan. Thank you, Prime Minister Kishida, for your leadership.” In an interview one day earlier with the Kyodo Express, he even stated, “Japan is in the process of evolution.” That statement, in particular, was intensely disliked by Japanese across the political spectrum.

He did not bother to hide that he is applying pressure on Kishida. No ambassador — American or otherwise — has the right to instruct a host nation in how to conduct its affairs. By law and custom everywhere, non-interference is the prime directive of diplomacy. Emanuel is crassly violating it.

A signal irony is that the Biden administration, through its interfering ambassador, is trying to impose on Japan a measure that Americans have never accepted in their own country. We Japanese, on the other hand, have long embraced homosexuality, and radical legal measures commanding us to do so can have no effect other than to oppress and dominate us.

A law of tolerance imposed by force cannot be healthy or constructive. It is only a prelude to suffering. This is especially the case with Biden’s policy, whose intent is not to make gay or transgender people equal but actually to give them privilege.

In America, the Biden policy has been creating strife wherever transgender women — meaning men dressed like women — force natural women to submit to their mercy. Japan’s lawmakers are tempting fate by exposing our people to this kind of abuse.

Meanwhile, Emanuel behaves like a plenipotentiary. On May 9 he proclaimed: “I welcome to Japan a new member of the diplomatic corps from the People’s Republic of China. Ready to engage Ambassador Wu on behalf of a free and open Indo-Pacific that enhances peace and security for all nations.”

Here Amb. Emanuel presumes to speak as the chief of the Indo-Pacific region. His behavior has raised to public awareness the uncomfortable specter of America’s continuing dominion over Japan and the region.

Every time the ambassador seems to be giving direct orders to our prime minister, he reminds us of an uncomfortable reality. Since losing our war against America, the Japanese nation has never had the occasion to stand on our own. Three generations of living under American domination have left us without the training or the talent for independent thought and action. Emanuel’s poor manners have allowed us to see — as Shakespeare’s Hamlet saw in Denmark — that something is rotten here.

Make no mistake: The authors of our present unhappiness are also the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party in power, who have covered our nation in dishonor totally intimidated by Emanuel. Despite a nearly two-to-one majority of opposition, the Liberal Democrat leadership decided by decree to accept the LGBT Understanding Promotion Act that Amb. Emanuel had been pushing on them.

As Mr. Shuichi Takatori, a senior member of the Diet, said to reporters: "In the end, the leadership decided the issue by force. It has left a mark on the democratic management of the party.”

The last phrase is a polite understatement. In a personal protest, the lawmaker walked out of the Lower House on the day of the vote.

This insanity never happened before. The Biden’s Democrat administration is rapidly generating distrust among the Japanese general public against the U.S. in the time of turbulence.

The road to rediscovering our nationhood is by cultivating our independence and self-reliance in cooperation with sensible people and parties not only in the U.S. but also throughout the world. That’s the only way for us to break free from the postwar regime and find our rightful place in the modern world. At the same time, it will be the real beginning of the mutually respectful relationship between Japan and the U.S.

Tetsuhide Yamaoka is a widely-followed conservative researcher and commentator in Japan who has focused on China's "silent invasion" and global expansionism. He lived for more than two decades in Australia where he earned postgraduate degrees.

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