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Thu 21 Sep, 2006 08:56 am
Posted on Wed, Sep. 20, 2006
Japan gets an ardent conservative as its new leader
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers
TOKYO
Japan's ruling party on Wednesday chose Shinzo Abe, an ardent conservative who's unapologetic about Japan's wartime past, as its new leader, ensuring that he'll succeed retiring Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi next week.
Abe (pronounced AH-bay) trounced two opponents in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party internal election and will begin governing on Sept. 26.
Abe, who turns 52 Thursday, pledged to "take hold of the torch of reform" lit by Koizumi, his mentor, whose term is ending. During five and a half years in office, Koizumi pulled the world's second-largest economy from deep malaise, shook off its timidity in the global arena and deepened a security alliance with the United States.
Abe is known for his nationalism. On Wednesday, he promised to reform the educational system based on patriotic values. Abe hasn't yet spelled out a full vision, and analysts say he may face difficulties in repairing frayed relations with key trading partners China and South Korea because of his refusal to cast judgment on Japan's wartime behavior.
China and South Korea criticize Japan for atrocities committed during colonization and World War II, saying past apologies have been inadequate.
Any new frictions among Japan and China and South Korea would affect the United States, Tokyo's strongest ally and military protector. Washington has urged Tokyo to mend ties with Beijing, saying it needs healthy relations with both countries.
Reserved and cautious, with a full shock of dark hair, Abe has relatively little management experience and will be the first prime minister born after World War II. He has served in the Diet, or legislature, since 1993, and he's held his present job, chief cabinet secretary, his first ministerial post, for less than a year.
Yet Abe seems groomed to lead. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was prime minister in the 1950s, and Abe's father, Shintaro Abe, served as foreign minister in the 1980s. Abe graduated from the political science department of the Faculty of Law at Tokyo's Seikei University in 1977, going on to study at the University of Southern California, then getting a sales job at a steel company. He quit in 1982 to work for his father.
In 2002, when Koizumi tapped Abe to negotiate with North Korea over a series of abductions of Japanese nationals, Abe impressed voters with his uncompromising stance.
While Koizumi focused largely on domestic issues, Abe is seen as having firmer foreign policy credentials, determined to make Japan stand more confidently and to revise the pacifist constitution to transform the Self-Defense Forces into a conventional military.
"People think, `Abe is good because Abe is tough,'" said political analyst Tsuneo Watanabe of the Mitsui Global Strategic Studies Institute in Tokyo.
North Korea's nuclear ambitions and its series of ballistic missile launches on July 5, which most Japanese viewed as menacing, solidified public support for Abe.
"North Korea's nuclear belligerence has been a great aid in pushing the Japanese political climate toward what Abe is proposing," said Malcolm Cook, an East Asia specialist at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia.
One of Abe's first goals may be to repair relations with China, tattered by anti-Japanese riots last year and further frayed by Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors some 2.5 million war dead, including Class-A war criminals. One commentator, Takao Toshikawa, said he believes Abe's advisers are seeking to arrange a quick meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Abe's unwillingness to rule out a visit to Yasukuni himself and his refusal to judge Japan's wartime role, however, prompt his opponents to forecast greater frictions between Japan and its neighbors.
"As prime minister, if he says his true feelings, that would be a disaster," said Hirohisa Fujii, a former secretary general of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. "It will give an uneasy feeling to East Asian people."
Abe's closest advisers say Japan's rivalry with China, despite soaring trade, is destined to increase.
"I view the future of Asia as a confrontation between the U.S.-Japan alliance and China," said Hisahiko Okazaki, an Abe foreign policy adviser who's so close to him that he is referred to as "Abe's brain." Speaking in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Okazaki said that leaves an imperative for Japan: "We have to strengthen."
A U.S. expert said Japan and China both must make concessions.
"China can't go around lecturing Abe," said Gerald Curtis, a Columbia University expert on Japan, speaking to reporters in Tokyo. But he added that Japan "cannot sweep history under the rug," nor should it do anything to imperil U.S. relations with China.
"The biggest problem for the U.S.-Japan relationship is that Japan's relations with China will deteriorate further," Curtis said. If the United States can't have good ties with China "because the Japanese have drawn a line in the sand over the history issue, that is not going to serve Japanese interests," he added.
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McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent Emi Doi contributed to this report.
Anxiety chipping away at Japan's nuclear taboo
Posted on Mon, Sep. 18, 2006
Anxiety chipping away at Japan's nuclear taboo
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers
TOKYO - A few weeks ago, a former prime minister said the once-unspeakable, suggesting that it may be time for Japan to study whether to acquire nuclear weapons. The remark caused barely a ripple.
As the only nation devastated by nuclear weapons, Japan has long held to pacifism. There's been virtually no public debate about whether the country needed nuclear weapons, although they're well within its technological grasp.
But a combination of factors - including the nuclear threat from North Korea, the rise of China, the ebbing of once-strong peace movements and Japan's rightward drift - have chipped away at old taboos.
Underlying the shifting mood is public anxiety that the U.S. security blanket on Japan may unravel. Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone evoked that uncertainty Sept. 5 when he said Japan should look into obtaining nuclear weapons.
"There are countries with nuclear weapons in Japan's vicinity," the 88-year-old elder statesman said, adding, "We are currently dependent on U.S. nuclear weapons (as a deterrent), but it is not necessarily known whether the U.S. attitude will continue."
Japan has the tools to build nuclear weapons quickly if it desired, including abundant nuclear material, a tested rocket and vast experience dealing with nuclear energy.
"Japan has a virtual nuclear deterrent. Every country in the region knows it can produce a nuclear device, a rather sophisticated one, probably in six months," said Richard Tanter, a Japan scholar at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
Some experts go farther, suggesting that Japan may have a design on the shelf.
"I'd be surprised if they didn't," said Frank Barnaby, a British nuclear physicist and nonproliferation advocate who's studied Japan's nuclear energy industry. "They have stocks of plutonium. They have the know-how. All that is lacking is the political decision."
Japan is third, after the United States and France, in nuclear power output. Its 54 reactors produce as much as 35 percent of the electricity consumed here, and its 43 tons in plutonium stockpiles are among the largest in the world. A nuclear bomb can be built with 17 or 18 pounds of plutonium.
Japan's pacifist impulse is still strong, and observers see almost no public support for obtaining nuclear weapons. Yet major figures in Japan's political firmament all have talked about the issue, including the likely incoming prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who's backed Japan's right to launch pre-emptive strikes against enemy states and said Japan has the legal right to possess small nuclear weapons.
Their attitude hardened after North Korea launched seven ballistic missiles on July 5, including a long-range Taepodong-2, into the Sea of Japan. The launches sent jitters across East Asia, and reports have followed that North Korea soon may test a nuclear device.
Japan's view of nuclear weapons has evolved markedly since the 1980s.
"In those days, if any political figure said, `I'm in favor of nuclear weapons,' you were considered a complete lunatic and a moral reprobate," Tanter said.
Debate about the issue is couched in cautious language, reflective of public sensibilities in a nation that lost 210,000 people in two U.S. atomic bomb attacks at the end of World War II.
Opposition to nuclear energy and armament has ebbed, however, as threats to Japan rise.
"To tell you the truth, the anti-nuclear campaign in Japan is not so strong," said Hideyuki Ban, the co-director of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear group.
Under its long-standing "three non-nuclear principles," Japan has renounced the right to own or produce nuclear weapons or allow them on its territory. But Ban said the principles never were codified into law, and legislators act as if they are irrelevant.
"At least three times in legislative sessions, there's been discussion whether having nuclear weapons would violate the constitution. The Liberal Democratic Party always asserts that it would not be a violation," Ban said.
Washington opposes Japan's acquisition of nuclear weapons, saying it would destabilize East Asia. Yet Vice President Dick Cheney and the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, Thomas Schieffer, have suggested in recent years that North Korea's push to build a nuclear arsenal may pressure Japan and South Korea to go nuclear in response.
Japanese scholars who study the nuclear calculus say moving to build such weapons would unsettle the United States and speed a military buildup in China.
"In the foreseeable future, the nuclear option is not an option for the Japanese security strategy," said Nobumasa Akiyama of the Japan Institute for International Affairs.
Japanese security policy, however, has been evolving. Under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who leaves office Sept. 26, Japan has stretched the constitutional limits on the activities of the nation's Self-Defense Forces.
Japan deployed air and sea forces in support of the Afghanistan war, sent about 1,000 noncombat troops to Iraq and the Persian Gulf region until this past July, claimed a right to regional pre-emptive attack and pledged to help the United States deploy a missile-defense system. Less than two weeks ago, Japan launched its third spy satellite.
Abe, the likely next prime minister, pledges to alter pacifist Article Nine of the constitution and create a normal military and to upgrade the Defense Agency.
South Korea, once colonized by Japan, finds Japan's increased military profile distressing and bristles at the more open discussion of nuclear weapons.
"Given the determination of Abe's faction, Japan's nuclear armament is only a matter of time," South Korea's largest daily newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said earlier this month in an editorial, adding that a nuclear-armed Japan would "upset the power balance worldwide."
Japan imposes financial sanctions on North Korea
Posted on Tue, Sep. 19, 2006
Japan imposes financial sanctions on North Korea
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers
TOKYO
Japan on Tuesday froze some bank activity of a North Korean hospital that treats top officials and a state-run software company with extensive commercial contracts in Japan, joining Australia in tightening a financial noose around the Kim Jong Il regime.
In step with the United States, Japan and Australia imposed a series of financial sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear weapons development.
"This shows the resolve of the international community and Japan," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, who's likely to win the job as Japan's new prime minister in a party vote Wednesday.
Japan's actions restricted overseas remittances and bank withdrawals of 15 North Korean commercial entities and one Swiss individual, expanding existing U.S. sanctions to include three new companies. Australia targeted 11 companies and the Swiss man.
Abe said the actions were aimed at North Korea's weapons programs and were designed to force the nation to return to six-nation talks on dismantling its nuclear programs, which deadlocked last year.
"North Korea has to come back to the negotiating table as soon as possible," Foreign Ministry spokesman Tomohiko Taniguchi said.
The sanctions also appeared intended to hurt the health care of North Korea's senior officials and to pinch hard-currency earnings from at least one successful company.
Among the enterprises hit by Japan and as yet unaffected by U.S. sanctions were the Korea Tonghae Shipping Co. and Pyongyang Informatics Centre. Japan also froze accounts of the Ponghwa Hospital, Pyongyang's best-equipped clinic. Ponghwa treats Kim's immediate family and senior officials and appears to have overseas financial activity.
By targeting the Pyongyang Informatics Centre, Japan sought to cut off the foreign earnings of one of North Korea's few viable enterprises with operations abroad.
"It's a fairly high-quality software firm. They've done quite a few contracts in Japan," said Peter Hayes, a North Korea expert and the executive director of the Nautilus Institute, a research center that focuses partly on the dangers of nuclear war.
The company was set up in the mid-1980s with help from the U.N. Development Program and ethnic Koreans living in Japan. Thought to have around 200 staff members, it's designed management software for the publishing, shipping, insurance and hotel industries. Among its past clients reportedly is Nissan, the Japanese automaker.
Hayes said he thought the overseas contracts earned the company only "a few million dollars a year." He asserted that targeting the company will have "zero" impact on getting North Korea back to nuclear talks.
"It will just force them (the company executives) into informal networks and illegitimate forms of commerce," Hayes said, possibly including online gambling and pornography.
The new sanctions follow North Korea's tests of seven ballistic missiles July 5. Shortly after the tests, Japan banned a North Korean ferry from entering its ports for six months and barred North Korean officials from entering the country.
Australia, which maintains diplomatic relations with North Korea, unlike Japan, said in a Foreign Ministry statement that its measure complements "previous actions taken by the United States and sends a strong message to North Korea."
One Japanese expert on the Korea Peninsula, Hajime Izumi, cast doubt on whether the sanctions will have much impact on Pyongyang without broader support.
"If we want to stop (nuclear activity) by North Korea, all countries in the world have to take similar measures, especially South Korea and China, to halt the flow of money," Izumi told Japanese television.
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McClatchy special correspondent Emi Doi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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