Strange days

Perhaps showing just how serious China is about not mentioning the war and acknowledging Japan's "consistent pursuit of the path of a peaceful country," not to mention illustrating just how dire the situation in Szechuan is, the Chinese government has reportedly asked the Japanese government to dispatch planes to China in order to deliver tents, blankets, and other relief supplies.

It apparently doesn't matter whether those planes are civilian or JSDF.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura, answering questions about the request in his daily press conference, could confirm only that Beijing made the request, that the Fukuda government is considering its response, and that the request appears to be for planes to deliver the supplies to Chinese airports instead of directly to affected areas.

What a dilemma for the Japanese right — a new opportunity for the JSDF to show its quality...by aiding "the grotesque superpower, China." (The Social Democratic Party of Japan, as if to rub this dilemma in the right's face, has quickly stated its opposition to using the JSDF to deliver supplies, declaring that "the JSDF is not a disaster relief organization.")

In short, this request is another blow to those in Japan and the US who see a belligerent, dangerous China that must be contained — and want Washington and Tokyo to take steps that will guarantee a belligerent, dangerous China.

Here's hoping that the Fukuda government swiftly agrees to provide China with the requested supplies, borne on the wings of JSDF transport planes.

The race for defense ministry reform

Back in February, when Defense Minister Ishiba Shigeru was threatened with censure for his ministry's dilatory response to the Atago incident, Prime Minister Fukuda gave Mr. Ishiba a firm vote of confidence, calling upon the defense minister to "review the organization from its very foundation."

It appears that Mr. Fukuda's support for comprehensive defense ministry reform has lapsed.

Mr. Ishiba is still eager, of course. Earlier this week he appeared on TV to argue for a thorough reform that mixes civilians and JSDF personnel in the ministry to strengthen communication among them.

But now Mr. Ishiba faces competition from two different directions. From one side is the defense ministry reform subcommittee of the LDP - PARC's national security investigatory committee. Chaired by former JDA chief Nakatani Gen and staffed largely by boei zoku, the subcommittee issued its recommendations on Thursday.

The subcommittee report is less far-reaching than that envisioned by Mr. Ishiba. The word of choice seems to be "strengthening," especially the prime minister's office. The subcommittee revives Abe Shinzo's project of creating a Japanese National Security Council, and calls for naming a defense ministry/JSDF member as prime ministerial secretaries and military aides. (It also calls for a new adviser to the defense minister, who would could be a civilian from outside the ministry.) Instead of merging uniformed and civilian personnel, the subcommittee draws clearer lines between the two. It calls for shutting down the ministry's operations planning bureau and moving its functions to the Joint Staff Office (JSO), while strengthening the ministry's responsibilities for strategy and policy. It also calls for changing rules to allow JSDF personnel to testify to the Diet on specific military questions and for measures to improve morale in both the ministry and the JSDF.

This may be an improvement on Mr. Ishiba's plans. It seems to me that blurring the lines between civilians and uniformed personnel undermines civilian control of the military.

However, Mr. Ishiba also faces competition from the Kantei, which has announced the creation of a reform council of its own that will be more focused on tackling the air of corruption at the ministry.

The current political situation may result in the Kantei's winning the race to defense ministry reform with a more limited plan that does less to shake up the ministry (which will necessarily invite opposition from uniformed and civilian personnel).

But what outcome is the best for Japan? I do not share Michael Penn's bleak assessment of the consequences of various ministry reform proposals. (Unfortunately I have no link to Mr. Penn's latest newsletter in which he discusses the Nakatani proposal.) His argument is that the response of JSDF personnel to Judge Aoyama Kunio's statement on the ASDF Iraq mission, in addition to reported JSDF involvement in spying on antiwar groups, should raise red flags about the nature of the JSDF — and as a result the mooted reforms should be rejected. He wrote:

Come now! Criminalizing the act of handing out antiwar fliers to SDF families? Spying on peace groups? Growing links to international role models like the Pakistani military? Mocking civilian judges? A direct pipeline to the prime minister? Active units under the direct command of the Chief of Staff?

Is this really a good start for Japan's new Ministry of Defense? Where are the effective countervailing political forces here? What about the lessons of Japanese history in the 20th century? If unchecked now, where does this kind of thing lead in the future?

I think alarms about the JSDF are overwrought. Without denying the troubling involvement of the GSDF in domestic espionage against peace groups, which was revealed in June 2007 but has since vanished from the media, the Japanese defense establishment does need reform. It needs a clearer chain of command, swifter information collection and processing, and better decision-making in response to crises. (And beyond this, it needs a more transparent procurement process.)

That said, I share Mr. Penn's concern about the lack of "countervailing political forces." As far as I'm concerned, any defense ministry reform that does not include provisions for the creation of an inspector general's office and more robust Diet oversight is insufficient. The DPJ should be taking this position in the reform debate, agreeing that the ministry needs reform but insisting that reform must be matched by better oversight. The creation of a more effective defense establishment must be accompanied by the creation of stronger institutional checks to monitor its activities.

Missing the point on Japan's normalization

Using the occasion of Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilots participating in live-bombing exercises with the US in the Marianas, Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has a prominently featured article in today's edition (also on the front page, top of the fold of today's IHT) on Japan's shedding "military restraints."

The NYT website also features a short documentary called Rearming Japan.

In general, Onishi's article provides a fair summary of the contours of the debate, taking care to note, for example, that Japan, while ranking high on annual league tables of defense expenditures, has actually been letting its defense budget stagnate over the past decade.

And yet there are a few things that bear noting about this article.

First, Onishi premises the problematic nature of Japanese normalization on its "rattling nerves throughout northeast Asia." And yet the only example Onishi provides to support this is South Korea's recent launching of its first Aegis cruiser and President Roh's comments about an arms race in the region. It seems that if concerns about Japanese normalization are so prevalent, Onishi might have been able to muster a few more examples to show it. (Devin Stewart at Fairer Globalization notes that if Onishi had talked to Southeast Asians, he would have found them more supportive of a more active Japanese security policy.)

Second, and this is a far more substantial problem, Onishi's article and the companion video are lacking in context, both in terms of history and Japanese politics. Regarding the former, Japanese militarism was a product of political developments in Japan occurring at a given moment in history, when colonization and aggression were the hallmarks of great-power status. Just because Japan's ultra-nationalists make this argument does not make it untrue (but it also does not excuse what Japan did). The idea that Japan is going to invade China again, mentioned by one of the interview subjects in the film, is ludicrous and divorced from the facts. With its stagnant defense budget that increasingly emphasizes high-technology air and sea platforms over the GSDF, which according to recent planning documents is set to see its numbers fall, the JSDF may have a hard time helping at the Snow Festival in Hokkaido, let alone invading China.

In terms of the domestic political context, while Onishi gets the change within the LDP right, thanks to an assist from Richard Samuels, he misses the far more significant domestic political change: the ousting of the Socialists from their position as the leading opposition party, the destruction of the Japanese left more generally, and the rise of the Democratic Party of Japan. He quotes DPJ Secretary-General Hatoyama Yukio criticizing the government for violating the constitution in its activities in Iraq, but he misleadingly fails to mention that Hatoyama and his party are less concerned about Japan's playing a more active role than they are concerned about Japan's becoming to close to the US, which they feel has become dangerously aggressive. The DPJ's critique, in general, is not a pacifist one by any means, although former Socialists in its ranks still stand by that position. Rather, the DPJ rejects the argument made by former JDA chief Ishiba Shigeru in this article: "I think the Japan-U.S. security relationship should be as unified as possible, and our different roles need to be made clear."

The DPJ, perhaps because opposition affords it the luxury of taking positions that could be more difficult to adopt in government, has emphasized Japan's need for more independence from the US (I discussed one particularly articulate discussion of this here).

In other words, the debate is far more interesting than Onishi notes — it is by no means simply a matter of pacifists versus nationalists.

This raises the larger question, addressed by Samuels and J. Patrick Boyd in the monograph discussed in this post, of why Japan tied its own hands in security policy in the first place. As they argue convincingly, it was a matter of the political balance within the LDP, with the pragmatic mainstreamers, who favored the Yoshida line, receiving assistance from the political opposition and public opinion in their fight against the LDP's revisionists. But they sought limits not out of pacifism, but because it made good strategic sense. In other words, to adapt a Marxist concept, Japan's postwar pacifism may well have been the superstructure that served as a more presentable face for the substructure, Japan's assessment of its postwar interests as enshrined in the Yoshida doctrine.

With Japan's interests changing as the balance of power in East Asia shifts, it is to be expected that Japan would reconsider its interests in the new era and adjust its grand strategy and defense priorities accordingly. The rise of the nationalist revisionists is one aspect of that, but their rise has been accompanied by the collapse of the left and the emergence of a political opposition that is also interested in seeing Japan's grand strategy change. It may be useful to think of the situation once again as a matter of superstructure and substructure. Today, the superstructure of Japanese normalization is provided by Japan's ultra-nationalists, who never cease cranking out material that leads Japan's neighbors (and ally) to question normalization. The substructure, meanwhile, is once again shaped by a realistic assessments of Japan's interests, threats, and opportunities. Having talked with enough officials in MOFA and the Japanese Ministry of Defense, as well as members of the Diet from both the LDP and the DPJ, it is clear that there are enough important policy makers in Tokyo who don't buy the rhetoric of the ultra-nationalists even as they acknowledge that Japan needs a new doctrine that reflects contemporary realities and may require Japan's acting as a security provider.

In light of these considerations, one has to ask why the NYT thinks this article is so important as to merit page-one coverage.

Is Japan really poised to threaten its neighbors anytime soon, if ever? Is Japan truly ready to follow the US into combat in the "arc of instability" (and refueling in the Indian Ocean, as important a mission as its been, does not count)? Is Japan really even close to possessing even a conventional deterrent in its showdown with North Korea? These are the questions one must keep in mind while reading this article. As unnerving as Japan's ultra-nationalists are, for the moment they are still more of a menace, if that, to the Japanese polity than to Japan's neighbors (see earlier posts on Abe here and here, and Sakurai Yoshiko and the ultra-nationalists more generally here).

The cuts continue

No, not Japan's budget cuts, because, according to this article in the IHT, the government's draft budget shows that next year's budget will increase slightly.

Rather, I'm referring to this other article in the IHT, which reports that Japan's defense budget will continue to carry the burden of budget cuts. Makes you wonder why people are so alarmed about Japanese remilitarization, doesn't it?

How is a country with a shrinking defense budget -- and, within the defense budget, more spending on missile defense and expenditures related to the relocation of US forces from Okinawa to Guam -- supposed to become a major power in the region in terms of power projection? Under Koizumi, and now under Abe, Japan's defense establishment has been forced to accept budget cuts despite being asked to do more than ever before.

What reason does anyone have to think that this will change anytime soon, as Japan continues to age, with all the expenditures that an aging society entails?

From 庁 to 省 (From agency to ministry)

Aside from the highly controversial education reform bill, the special session of the Diet now concluding -- it was extended an extra four days -- also passed a bill elevating Japan's Defense Agency from an agency subordinate to the Cabinet to a ministry with full status equivalent to other government ministries.

This reform has been in the pipeline for a while now, and constitutes an administrative reform more than a policy reform: the new Defense Ministry will have its own budget, the ability to submit legislation without having to go through the Cabinet, and less concretely, symbolically raises Japan's defense establishment not only in relation to other countries' defense ministries, but also vis-a-vis Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moreover, as a careful observer of these matters with whom I correspond regularly suggested, the Defense Ministry will have access to a better crop of recruits from elite universities than it had as the JDA.

In many ways, this legislation simply ratifies changes that the JDA has undergone over the past two decades. In particular, since the end of the cold war the JDA has gone from an agency that was effectively used to cordon the JSDF off from the Japanese political system to an organization staffed by security policy experts better able to manage Japan's defense policy in a fluid and uncertain international environment. The JDA went from an agency staffed by bureaucrats seconded from the Foreign and Finance ministries to an organization in which a core group of young policy experts from within the agency rose to positions of prominence, improving the JDA's ability to fight for preferred policies and secure an important seat at the table, particularly in discussions with the US.

Beyond the symbolic change from agency to ministry, the law passed last week makes "international peace cooperation activities" a fundamental mission of the JSDF, which means that for the first time in its history the JSDF's core purpose necessarily involves missions outside of Japan. (Thanks to my aforementioned correspondent for comments on this change.) As with the elevation of the JDA, this simply makes the JSDF's shift from a static defense force to an active force fit for overseas deployment de jure -- it doesn't actually change government policy, at least in the short term.

I think it's imperative for the international media to break itself of the habit of conjuring up Japan's post-war past whenever anything related to Japan's changing international position comes up, as this CNN article does. Yes, we get it; Japan has a controversial past. But anyone paying attention over the past fifteen years would notice that Japan has gotten into the habit of contributing its armed forces to UN peacekeeping missions. Rather than hint at the specter of Japanese "remilitarization," the international media should be talking about how this fits into a re-envisioning of Japan's international role as a country that specializes, in part, in peacemaking and reconstruction missions abroad.

In any case, the big, fundamental change underlying both of these reforms is a greater willingness in Japan to study the changing international and regional environments and determine how changes impact Japan's national interests. As this Yomiuri editorial on the Defense Ministry bill suggests, there's plenty for Japan's national security policymakers to consider.

Rather than worry about Japanese "remilitarization," the proper response should be relief that Japan is finally moving positively in the direction of bearing a greater share of the burden to provide global peace and security.

Thankfully the DPJ, after some initial grumbles about this bill, came to its senses and largely supported a piece of legislation that not only makes sense, but is also consistent with the DPJ's interest in a more autonomous Japan.

New survey on Japan's Iraq mission

The Yomiuri Shimbun reports today on a government survey that shows that among those surveyed (around 1800 people), 71.5 per cent said they "valued" the JSDF's reconstruction operation in Iraq, with only 22.6 per cent saying that they didn't value the mission.

Among those who said they valued it, as with earlier polls, they pointed to the mission's contributions to the Iraqi people, its role in improving the security environment, and its contribution to improving Japan's position in the world.

At the same time, the survey shows what I've said before: the Japanese people will support a Japan that cooperates by sending troops abroad to uphold stability, keep the peace, and rebuild shattered societies, but it will not support dispatches to fight -- not yet. As the JDA concluded from this survey (my translation), "There has been increasing popular recognition of how the JSDF helped Iraq, but the public also highly values that the JSDF troops left Iraq without suffering any fatalities."

Abe reviews the fleet

On the 29th of October, Prime Minister Abe reviewed the Japanese fleet at Sagami Bay in Kanagawa. In this week's issue of his email magazine, Abe poetically recounts the review, speaking of clouds giving way to an autumnal blue sky, of the deep azure of the sea, and of the majesty and magnificence of the line of warships preparing to return to the Indian Ocean, where, thanks to a recent extension of the enabling law, they will continue to provide refueling capabilities in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan.

The real meat of his message, however, is towards the end. He writes [my translation]: "In our country, we cannot do without the Self-Forces in their capacity for crisis management and disaster relief and reconstruction. Abroad, the Self-Defense Forces exert great effort [literally, 汗を流しています, to sweat] around the clock to contribute to international peace and stability. I am working to develop a system by which international peace cooperation operations are the primary function of the Self-Defense Forces [emphasis added]."

This statement is consistent with the broad thrust of Japanese security policy is the past fifteen years, since the passage of the International Peace Cooperation Law. Japan will develop a military force that can serve as a pillar of international stability, which reflects Japan's dependence on trade, especially energy imports from the Middle East and limits imposed by its massive debt burden. Let the US invest in major platforms suited to inflicting massive amounts of damage over incredible distances; Japan will excel in providing humanitarian assistance in failing and failed states and providing rear-area support to warfighters when the situation requires it.

The only question that remains is whether the Japanese public will support such a role for Japan. Indications suggest that the Japanese people can countenance the JSDF being sent abroad to help stabilize troubled countries. While this poll, conducted by the Asahi Shimbun in June 2006, showed that those surveyed were pleased to see the Ground Self-Defense Forces leave Iraq (and a majority wished they had left sooner), the same poll showed that 49% of those surveyed felt that the Iraq deployment was "good for Japan." Among those who said that it was good, 46% said it was good because it "contributed to the rebuilding of Iraq," with the second-greatest response being the 30% who said that it "demonstrated Japan's presence in the international community." (Both figures were considerably greater than the 14% who said it was good for relations with the US.)

This confirms the impression I got from speaking with Japan Defense Agency (JDA) officials in May: they told me that the Japanese public will support a more active JSDF, but only in activities that contribute to peace and stability.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether public support would hold up should a soldier die in the line of duty. The Japanese people's resolve to see their country play a greater role in upholding the international system has yet to be tested.

UPDATE: I want to add a brief note to emphasize to readers just how extraordinary Abe's fleet review is. Consider that sixteen years ago, during the Gulf crisis, JSDF officers could not even consult with the prime minister, because he feared that receiving advice from the armed forces would skew his judgement in deciding how Japan should respond to the crisis. At that time, civilian control of the military, exercised through the director-general of the JDA, meant using civilian officials to cordon off the military from the rest of society. Until recently, senior bureaucrats were not even from within the JDA itself -- they were seconded from other ministries. Aside from some cooperation on anti-submarine warfare with the US during the 1980s, the JSDF was expected to sit with its tanks up in Hokkaido and wait for the Russians to come.

And now Abe is reviewing the MSDF fleet, dressed in morning coat and top hat, and issuing public messages full of effusive praise -- and there is no negative reaction in the press or in the Diet.

So while Japan's security policy remains restricted in many ways, public and official attitudes about Japan's playing a greater role in the region and the world by contributing armed forces to operations overseas have changed substantially, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before Japan loosens the constitutional restrictions that have tied its hands.