NYT: Yanks Invade Japan!
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March 1, 2000 -- For the second time in the past century, the United States today occupied Japan.
The U.S. landing force was led by the newly designated Secretary of Defense, Robert Rubin, and
the newly designated Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lawrence Summers. The U.S.
force immediately seized control of the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance.
The invasion came 30 days after America's trade deficit ballooned to an all-time monthly high of $35
billion. In the wake of the enormous U.S. deficit, the financier George Soros triggered a 25 percent
drop in the value of the dollar by selling huge amounts of dollars and buying the new European
currency, the euro. As investors followed Mr. Soros out of the dollar, they also dumped their U.S.
Treasury bonds, sending U.S. interest rates up to 12 percent, overnight.
"Let's face it," one hedge-fund manager said, "with the Japanese refusing to spend any money,
American consumers for the last two years have been the only ones in the world buying up everyone
else's exports. Everyone was dumping their goods on America, and American workers were being
put out of their jobs left and right. It was O.K. as long as the soaring stock market made Americans
feel rich, but after Amazon.com crashed, and took down the whole stock market, Americans just
couldn't go on being the world's buyers of last resort. The Americans had to invade Japan to force
them to start spending some of their savings, and to start importing."
This explains why the first thing U.S. troops did after breaking into the Bank of Japan was to begin
passing out yen on the streets of Japan's major cities. American B-52's also carpet-bombed Japan
with Visa cards.
A Pentagon spokesman said the occupation, dubbed "Operation Make Them Spend," would
continue until Japan had increased its imports from the rest of Asia by 50 percent.
U.S. troops went house to house, forcing Japanese to take the yen out of their mattresses and spend
it within 48 hours. People caught hoarding cash after 48 hours were told their money would be
handed over to someone who could spend it properly.
Those Japanese who refused to spend were rounded up and taken to re-education camps: Japanese
age 50 and over were taken to schools run by the Home Shopping Network, where they were
taught how to make purchases from TV, while Japanese under 50 were taken to Amazon.com
school, where they were taught how to make purchases over the Internet and outfitted with AOL
accounts.
General Summers, a former Harvard economist, was personally handling the re-education of Japan's
Vice Minister of Finance, Eisuke Sakakibara, in a back room of the U.S. Embassy. According to
rumors, Mr. Sakakibara was being made to read aloud from the works of Milton Friedman,
nonstop, with his eyelids taped open. Horrible screams were heard coming from Mr. Sakakibara's
cell.
General Summers said: "My predecessor, Douglas MacArthur, transformed Japan from a
dictatorship to a democracy, and I will transform Japan from a producer-driven society to a
consumer-driven society. MacArthur said 'Charge'; I say 'Charge it.' "
China denounced the invasion, calling it U.S. "aggression," and insisted that it cease immediately --
unless 25 percent of the yen being spent by Japanese was on Chinese-made goods, in which case
Beijing said the operation would be "a contribution to the harmony and stability of Asia."
The commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Brig. Gen. Charlene Barshefsky, was
splitting her time between Narita airport and Tokyo's main port of Yokohama, where her team of
engineers was systematically blowing up Japan's trade barriers and arresting Japanese customs
officials. General Barshefsky told reporters, "Let this be a warning to the Europeans, if they continue
to refuse to buy our bananas."
Ironically, General Barshefsky, who in her previous job as America's top trade negotiator had often
angered the State Department by her tough negotiating with U.S. allies, was the only casualty of the
operation. She was shot in the back and wounded by friendly fire from the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
The State Department spokesman, James Rubin, described the incident as "an unfortunate
accident." |
