A Japanese General Takes on America’s Warmongers
Retired Gen. Mochida Kazuhito admires President Trump but distrusts Washington.
Work your way through a room full of Jieitai (Japan Self-Defense Forces) officers and defense contractor types at a cocktail party in Tokyo and you’ll likely feel either elation or disgust. If you like the way Washington runs and think the whole world should be franchisees of its warmongering-for-profit brand, then you’ll absolutely love how the Japan defense establishment operates. You couldn’t find more slavish toadies of America’s foreign-policy “Blob” even if you talked to every man wearing a suit inside the Beltway.
But if you think that killing foreigners for money is immoral, that exposing your own people to harm for the sake of Washington’s hegemonic schemes is bad, and that latching onto those schemes from a distant capital is even worse, then you’ll leave such cocktail parties wondering how the country that gave us the samurai and the warrior code could have fallen to such despicable depths as have the soulless hangers-on among the Jieitai officers and defense-industry urchins in Japan.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting a handful of retired Jieitai officers who decidedly do not run with the defense crowd here. These men think for themselves and put their own country, and not Washington, first in their thinking. A very good example of this kind of man, rare but invaluable, is Mochida Kazuhito, a former Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces (JGSDF) general and at one time the commander of the JGSDF Western Army, a region including Kyushu and Okinawa. I know Gen. Mochida from our appearances together on a news and politics program called Channel Sakura. His analysis of the Ukraine conflict, his knowledge of economic warfare and military hardware, and his overall view of geopolitical dynamics are superb. He is one of the best strategists and analysts in Japan today.
I recently met Mochida in his hometown of Fukuoka, in Kyushu, to learn more about how he sees Japan’s place in the emerging, multi-polar world order, especially given Japan’s eighty-year reliance on Washington’s security guarantees and the Japanese establishment’s unthinking cooperation with Washington. I was surprised to learn that, despite his skepticism of Washington’s motives in the western Pacific and elsewhere, Mochida admires President Donald Trump, has a deep respect for Christianity, and wants Japan to have a good relationship with the Americans.
“In grade school I went to a Christian institution and used to pray the Psalms with the rest of my classmates every morning,” Mochida tells me when I ask about his formative years. “I was in Fukuoka through high school and then entered the Boei Daigakko, the National Defense Academy of Japan. In the second year of the Academy, students choose a branch of service. I wanted to be in a tank, so I chose the Army.”
I mention that Col. Douglas Macgregor (Ret.), a contributor to The American Conservative, was also a tank commander. Mochida knows of Macgregor and sometimes cites his analysis with great approval.
“Most pilots operate alone, or with one other person,” Mochida continues, explaining how people in different branches of the service tend to think. “Pilots therefore are in the habit of deciding things by themselves. The navy is very similar. Captains of ships must have faith that they are in the right.”
“Like dictators.” I say.
“Yes, that’s right. Like dictators. But in the army, people are freer to think for themselves and to differ from what others are saying. You tell someone in the army what to do, and, well, there’s a chance that he may do something different.”
The desire to do something different is a theme in Japan right now. In three straight elections, voters have sent the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a message that it’s time for a change. But still the LDP seems not to understand that the world is changing and that business as usual is not going to work any longer. I mention to Mochida that I recently met a supporter of Takaichi Sanae, a high-ranking member of the LDP who is running in the party’s election and closing in on becoming Japan’s first female prime minister. To my mind, I tell Mochida, the LDP is a Washington tool, and nothing is to be expected from any LDP politician but more of the same subservience to Washington.
“There’s no use arguing with LDP supporters,” Mochida says. “As long as Takaichi remains in the LDP, she’ll be unable to solve any problems facing Japan.”
Another public figure who draws Mochida’s ire, the journalist Sakurai Yoshiko, is the very face of pro-Washington slavishness in Japan. “Takaichi is known for visiting Yasukuni Shrine, garnering the applause of people like Sakurai Yoshiko. But when someone asks Takaichi what she will do about Japan’s relationship with Washington, she has nothing to offer.
“I spoke to Takaichi once about defense matters. It was a waste of time. I have to ask myself, who is whispering in Takaichi’s ear?”
Sakurai, like Takaichi, is known to put on a patriotic performance while advancing Washington’s prerogatives, never seeking anything remotely resembling Japanese independence. Neither Sakurai nor Takaichi seem to have the faintest clue that Washington is not calling the shots in the world anymore. Mochida, by sharp contrast, is spending his retirement working to wake his countrymen up to the reality that Japan is already facing, whether its decrepit ruling class knows it or not.
“I used to take information coming out of the United States at face value,” Mochida tells me. “But now I think differently.
“What began to change my mind was when I was part of the group crafting defense plans for the Ryukyu Islands (Nansei Shoto). The United States has a multi-domain task force in place for the Ryukyus’ defense, including anti-aircraft missiles and attack capabilities against enemy ships. I was at the table when this defense package was put together.”
The Ryukyu Islands are among the most dangerous places on earth today. The waters around the Senkakus, islets owned by Japan, are routinely invaded by vessels dispatched by the People’s Republic of China. And as tensions between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland continue to simmer, it becomes obvious that any outbreak of open hostilities between the two countries will quickly spill over into the Ryukyus, wreaking havoc on Japan’s national security and either activating, or exposing as an empty letter, the alliance between Japan and the United States.
“I gave briefings to the then-commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, the then-commander of the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan, and the then-commander of the U.S. Army in Japan. They came to the headquarters of the JGSDF Western Army in Kumamoto to hear about the ‘Ryukyus Wall’ [Nansei no Kabe] plan for the defense of the southwest of Japan,” Mochida tells me. “I spoke to them late into the night, sans interpreter. I had a great deal of help from the then-commander of the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan in setting up the meeting. I was particularly keen to convey to the then-commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet the details of the defense plan, and to have him understand them.
“As the Seventh Fleet commander was leaving he told me something I’ll never forget. He said that people in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces, as well as people in the U.S. Navy, expressed surprise that he would travel to a far-flung Japan Self-Defense Ground Forces command post. But he added that he was glad he ignored their naysaying and was very happy that he traveled out to Kumamoto. I asked him to spread the word in the U.S. about the ‘Ryukyus Wall’ defense plan.
“But I later came to understand that, as a matter of basic strategy, the U.S. was not going to fight on the front lines when it came to the defense of Japan. The Americans plan to fall back, to Australia, for example, if anything happens. We in the Japan Self-Defense Forces have an important job to do holding down forward positions, but those positions are not defensible in a protracted battle. And so, when we too are forced back, then what will happen to the Japanese territory in front of our retreating lines?”
These kinds of thoughts are expressed a bit more openly now in Japan, but they remain, among the establishment, absolutely taboo. I once broached the topic with a notorious LDP politician here, an acolyte of Washington and a supporter of Takaichi Sanae, but she brushed me aside as though I were spouting heresy. I was, in fact. She simply didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to consider, that Washington might not be 100 percent committed to defending every last square inch of Japanese soil and sea. Mochida, though, faces such facts unafraid. As politicians and pundits watch the Chinese trespass in Japanese waters day after day with no response from the Americans, I suspect that Mochida says out loud what many others must surely be fretting about in private.
“The Americans are afraid of a nuclear war with China,” Mochida continues, getting down to brass tacks. “In 2015 I was in the U.S. and I had debates at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), the Naval War College (NWC), and the National Defense University (NDU). I spoke frankly with my counterparts, and they seemed pleased to have my honest assessments. I was told that the American side was not prepared to launch an attack on the Chinese mainland because of fears that it would escalate into an exchange of nuclear warheads. It doesn’t matter who the American president is, a nuclear war with China is unwinnable, and so must be avoided—that was their view.
“It was also in 2015 that I met Ito Kan for the first time,” Mochida says, mentioning the name of another Japanese thinker who is, like Mochida, unafraid to look the geopolitical truth square in the eye. “That was in Washington. Ito has been saying for a long time that the U.S. is not going to get into a nuclear war with China, and so Japan had better think about getting its own nuclear weapons for self-defense.
“What I thought then, when I heard Ito say that to me, was that Japan is not ready even to make a decision about whether to possess such weapons. If we did try to make them, then there’s a good chance that we’d meet the same fate the Iranians did in June, when Washington tried to snuff out Iran’s nuclear weapons program with precision strikes.
“I understood, conceptually, that the U.S. was not going to fight China in a nuclear war, but I didn’t see any way forward beyond that conceptual understanding.”
And yet, despite knowing that Japan was, defensively, out to sea, Mochida still could not break with the ingrained habit of relying on the U.S. for protection. It’s the postwar way, after all. To be a Washington skeptic in a JSDF uniform is somewhat like being an atheist in a Trappist monastery. People around you are just not going to listen to what you have to say, and you will inevitably acquire at least some of their mental habits.
“After that trip in 2015 I still thought that the U.S. would let Japan host nuclear weapons,” Mochida tells me. “I worked toward achieving that. But in 2022, when Russia began its special military operation against Ukraine, then-president Joe Biden announced that the United States would not be sending its military to take part in the conflict, as that would mean war between the U.S. and Russia. I think this announcement, at the outset of hostilities, that Washington would not fight surprised many countries, including American allies. The U.S. would not fight a nuclear power, Russia, which was tantamount to saying that America would not fight China, another nuclear power, either. I think the result is that the United States’ ability to deter China fell apart with Biden’s hasty announcement. Japan did not react at the time, but both Taiwan and South Korea were shocked at what Biden had done. In South Korea, more than sixty percent of the public said that the ROK should develop its own, independent nuclear capabilities.
“Then, in 2023, Biden told then-prime minister Kishida Fumio that the U.S. would not be placing mid-range missiles in Japan. I was stunned. This was the same as what had happened during the Cold War, when the U.S. withdrew its Pershing-2 medium-range missiles from Europe. The Japanese government has been saying that it is prepared to launch attacks against enemy bases, but the fact is that launching conventional attacks on the Chinese mainland is suicidal. The United States has effectively announced the end of nuclear deterrence, so, if Japan were to send conventional warheads against China, Japan would get multiple nuclear warheads fired back at it in return. It’s simply unbelievable.
“I had hoped for a different outcome. I had put my faith in America. I thought we could depend on Washington’s protection. In the end, though, I was forced to admit that the only option for Japan was to make and hold our own nuclear weapons.
“One other thing has changed my thinking,” Mochida says. “I have seen how the Washington war machine has sucked up rivers of blood in Ukraine and the Middle East. The warmongers and war profiteers in Washington are now coming into Japan.
“Japan and the U.S. share a most unfortunate common feature: your generals and our generals are almost all warmongers. Many politicians, too. In the U.S., there’s former secretary of defense and retired Marine Corps general Jim Mattis, former national security advisor and retired Army general H.R. McMaster, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, retired Army general Keith Kellogg–what are these warmongers up to? In Japan, the generals are basically the same. Japanese generals get their information from Washington and furthermore lack the ability to use their own brains to think things through.
“Look at NATO, which Japanese generals tend to support to the hilt. NATO has been saying that Russia is going to try to take over Europe. It’s a bald-faced lie. People who say such things are warmongers, plain and simple. And now those warmongers are trying to open up shop in East Asia. What we have to do is keep them out.”
In June of this year, NATO quietly mothballed plans to open an office in Tokyo, plans which former prime minister Kishida and the pro-Washington defense network as a whole in Japan welcomed with open arms. Even now, though, NATO maintains its high reputation in Japan. To question NATO is almost as bad as questioning Washington. The only thing worse for the globalists who run Japanese politics and the Japanese media would be if someone were to—gasp!—look askance at the UN.
Mochida sees things very differently. He likes what Trump is doing in dismantling the globalist infrastructure worldwide, but he also sees that these bold moves will have consequences for Japan.
“President Trump is thinking in great power terms,” Mochida says, expansively. “He sees the dynamic actors in the world as China, Russia, maybe India in the future. Holding the first island chain is not part of Trump’s grand strategy. Defending Japan is not a priority. Japan does not figure into Trump’s great-power thinking much at all. This is simply a fact.”
“Also,” Mochida continues, “AUKUS is—let’s face it—an Anglo-Saxon alliance. Why include the UK, but not Japan, in a grouping ostensibly designed for the defense of the western Pacific?
“And Washington’s real strategy in the event that China moves against Taiwan is economic strangulation, cutting off the Strait of Malacca and the Sunda Strait as part of a long-term plan to force the Chinese to capitulate. If China surrounds Taiwan, in other words, then Washington surrounds China. When I was in the U.S. in 2015 and I understood what Washington was planning, I said to my American counterparts that choking off China by cutting off shipping through Malacca and Sunda would choke us in Japan, too. They said, ‘Sorry, but that’s how it will play out.’ The warmongers in Washington will get what they want in that case—a protracted conflict, very good for business.
“To be very realistic, China, too, is good for American business. China is not America’s enemy, but its partner. And the Pacific Ocean is not a venue for fighting China, but a giant buffer zone protecting America.
“We have to look at the world as it is, understand things for ourselves, and act as we see fit. It’s true that China is a threat to Japan. That’s beyond doubt. But we have to look at the problem on our own terms and think about the solutions we want to realize. Washington’s wars are not our wars. When it comes time to fight, we have to be ready to fight to defend our own country.”
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