For the defense of Japan

After eight months of deliberations, the prime minister's defense ministry reform council, hastily convened after a series of scandals rocked the defense ministry in 2007, has released its final report on reforming the ministry.

The report is available for download here.


In the report, the council sought to address two issues. First, it investigated various institutional failures in the defense ministry and the Self-Defense Forces and recommended fixes. Second, it studied the organization of the ministry and the SDF and offered recommendations for enhancing the ability of both to defend Japan.

The former is ostensibly the reason for this council's existence, as demonstrated by the list of cases it investigated: the scandal surrounding MSDF refueling mission in the Indian Ocean, in which the JSDF and the defense ministry paid less than close attention to how the US was using fuel provided by Japan; information leaks by JSDF members, especially the Aegis leak; the Atago incident, in which a Japanese warship collided with a fishing vessel; and the biggest scandal of all, corrupt dealings by Moriya Takemasa, the disgraced former vice defense minister.

To address these failings, the council offered three broad principles for reform: (1) total adherence to rules; (2) the establishment of professionalism; and (3) changing the bureaucratic culture to emphasize the execution of duties.

Under the first heading, the report admonishes senior officials to set an example for their subordinates by following the rules. It then proposes increasing workplace education so that staff will spontaneously follow the rules. It also proposes strengthening laws governing the protection of classified information. In regard to procurement, it proposes introducing greater transparency and competition into the procurement process and more direct contracts with foreign arms makers (presumably side-stepping the trading companies that currently serve as middle men for the defense ministry).

Interestingly, buried in this section is a discussion of the ministry's inspector general (IG) office, which was created with little fanfare in September 2007. As of yet, however, the IG's purpose in the ministry appears unclear.

Having spent a summer in the inspector general's office of the US Department of Defense, I have an appreciation of the role played by inspectors general in inspecting, uncovering, and punishing cases of "fraud, waste, and abuse." The DoD IG serves under the secretary of defense but plays an independent role in policing the department and often works with members of Congress interested and concerned about how the defense establishment uses (or misuses) taxpayer dollars. The US government's IGs, including cabinet department IGs and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), play an important role in creating transparent government in the US, making it easier for the public and elected representatives to hold the government accountable for its misdeeds.

The report calls for the strengthening of the newly created IG office by giving it the power to conduct surprise inspections. That's a start, but it's not nearly enough. The IG needs to be independent and needs to be free to communicate with legislators. Whistleblowers need to be protected so that they can report to the IG without fear of reprisal. Strengthening the IG should be at the center of this reform package. A strong, competent IG would do more to stop corruption in the ministry than centuries worth of workplace education about obeying the ministry's regulations, because an IG is founded on the idea that wrongdoing will occur and standing agencies should be in place to ferret out and punish perpetrators quickly.

It's fine to call for more professionalization in the defense establishment. Considering the sordid tales of JSDF members compromising classified information by using work computers to trade pornography, it is clear that Japan's defense establishment is woefully lacking in professionalism. But moral injunctions and more education will not fix the ministry's problems.

Nor, for that matter, will Defense Minister Ishiba Shigeru's pet proposal of mixing JSDF members and civilian bureaucrats in the ministry's bureaus, which constitutes the second section of recommendations.

The second section addresses national strategymaking in addition to deficiencies in the defense ministry. The report's central proposal is that the role of the Kantei in strategymaking must be strengthened in order to better cope with the changing regional and global environment. The council made a number of recommendations to this end: drafting a national strategy, instituting regular meetings among the foreign minister, the defense minister, and the chief cabinet secretary to discuss national security, reviewing the defense procurement process, enhancing the system of prime ministerial advisers, and strengthening the chief cabinet secretary's foreign and defense policy staff. This section also includes proposals for strengthening the defense ministry's defense council, such as the inclusion of the chiefs of the joint staff office and the three services in the council's deliberations. It calls for the expansion of the ministry's policy bureau and enabling JSDF officers to serve in civilian bureaus in positions below vice-director. In expanding the policy bureau, it calls for enhancing intelligence and analysis skills.

It is unclear if and when these proposals will be implemented, but one thing is certain: this report punted on the issue that prompted the reform council in the first place, ministerial corruption, of which Mr. Moriya is but the most prominent example. While the report mentions the need to review the defense procurement process, the trading companies that are a major source for waste and corruption are not mentioned whatsoever. The details of procurement reform are left for another time, suggesting that they won't be addressed at all. It is encouraging that the government recognizes that it simply wasn't enough to call the former defense agency a ministry, that making it a proper ministry means instituting major changes in the ministry's mindset and ministerial culture. But more is needed, starting with, as the report suggests, a strategic review (perhaps something akin to France's recent white paper on defense). What are Japan's primary national security goals, and what capabilities does the defense establishment need to meet them? A discussion must proceed from these fundamental questions, starting from scratch and looking at the region and the world in specific terms, instead of relying on vague terms like "uncertainty."

Given that the defense budget will continue to fall, it is imperative that both the Japanese government think seriously about how it spends its increasingly limited defense appropriations. Funds are too limited and the defense of Japan too important to tolerate plans that line the pockets of the trading companies while doing little to enhance mational security.

In this regard, I must issue a mea culpa to US Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer, who I criticized in this post for telling Japan it should spend more on defense. Thanks to a link from Shisaku, I was able to read the whole speech, which is less about how much Japan spends than the process by which Japan decides what to spend. The ambassador called for Japan to be smarter about procurement, to cooperate more with the US on developing weapons systems. In short, he calls for a bilateral version of the process I called for above: "...We must regularly engage in strategic dialogue to define our mutual goals. From there we must analyze our respective strengths and maximize productivity and savings. No one benefits when we take separate paths to reach the same point. Creativity and innovation are the byproducts of collaboration and teamwork." Press reports that focused on the sum of expenditures missed the point of the speech. I wholeheartedly support the ambassador's call for better defense procurement processes in both countries.

From this reform council's report, however, it seems that Ambassador Schieffer's call fell on deaf ears. The Japanese government has a long way to go before it can be said that the government is making procurement decisions on the basis of national defense instead of the enrichment of private interests.

Bush tries to reassure Japan

US President George W. Bush spoke with Japanese journalists before heading to Japan for the Toyako summit, and while he spoke about the summit, it seems that his interlocutors were more interested in last week's announcement that the US will proceed in removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

In what Mainichi describes as an effort to still Japanese fears of "abandonment," the president insisted that he remembers his meeting with the Yokotas and that the abductees will not be forgotten.

In his attempt to reassure Japan, Mr. Bush stated that the abductions issue should be resolved within the framework of the six-party talks (presumably as opposed to the framework of Japan-North Korea bilateral talks).

Will Japanese leaders and the Japanese public be reassured by the president's words? It seems that the time of relying on the president's words has passed, and even conservatives — who, if Abe Shinzo's reliance on Mr. Bush's promises on the abductees, once put considerable stock in the president's words — are no longer content to rely on the promise of President Bush. And why should they? How does the president propose to resolve the abductions issue in a multilateral setting? Are China and South Korea prepared to pressure North Korea on the abductees. If not, the president's desire to see the abductions issue solved multilaterally is meaningless. All it means is that Japan will continue to look to others for the answer to the problem instead of looking at its own policy and asking, "What constitutes 'progress' on the abductions? What will constitute 'resolution' on the abductions?" What if the proof Japan wants doesn't exist?

There are few signs that Japan is prepared to reckon with the consequences of putting its North Korea policy in the hands of the families of the victims — and fixing that mistake. As tragic as the abductions are, Japan has squandered its influence and outsourced its North Korea policy to the US as a result of this issue. Now that the US has changed course as a result of its — or the State Department's — assessment of US national interests, Japan's leaders are left with nothing, no plan B, no new ideas, nothing but railing at the US for its abandonment of Japan.

Is there a leader in Japan — aside from this man — with the courage to challenge the abductions-centered consensus, to tell the families that as sad as it is to say, they might not get the truth until after the collapse of the DPRK, and in the meantime Japan has other goals to pursue in the region that mean shelving the abductees for now, like North Korea's nuclear program? The prevailing deal is far from perfect, and only a first step, but why shouldn't Japan be engaged in seeing the deal through in the hope that this agreement will stick? Does Japan have nothing to gain from a stabilized Korean peninsula? As Sam Roggeveen noted, even if the agreement doesn't disarm North Korea — an unlikely goal — it might result in a less belligerent North Korea, which will in turn buy China, South Korea, the US, Japan, and Russia time to plan for what to do when Kim dies, a process in which Japan ought to be deeply engaged.

Yamasaki's lonely fight

What a difference fifteen years make.

In his memoir, Abe Shinzo wrote of his lonely fight — alongside Nakagawa Shoichi and a handful of other LDP conservatives — to oppose normalization with North Korea and place the abductions issue at the center of Japan's North Korea policy. They battled against the LDP, the media, academia, and the foreign ministry to force them to consider the plight of the abductees before providing North Korea with aid and clearing the way to diplomatic recognition.

Here we are in 2008 and Mr. Abe got his wish. Resolving the abductees issue has become a primary goal of Japan's North Korea policy, a goal that enjoys substantial support in the public, the media, and the LDP. The US is pilloried for giving (symbolic) ground to North Korea without resolution of the issue — and the Fukuda government is pilloried for letting the US shift happen. Mr. Abe, Hiranuma Takeo, and other conservatives set the tone on North Korea.

And Yamasaki Taku, an advocate of normalization with North Korea, is left to fight a lonely battle against a public largely opposed to his proposal.

His fight has become a personal one, as Mr. Abe has decided to make a mission of demolishing Mr. Yamasaki's argument.

Mr. Yamasaki appears happy to reciprocate. Appearing on a Western Japan TV program Saturday, he called Mr. Abe "the howling dog" of North Korea policy, whose baying has accomplished nothing. He further insisted that it was a mistake for Japan's North Korea policy to depend largely on US pressure; Japan, he said, had to take more proactive action itself in negotiations with North Korea.

Mainichi provides a longer quote from this appearance, that makes his argument even clearer: "America's greatest national interest is stopping North Korea's nuclear development, and compromise on the nuclear issue is possible. The Japanese abductee problem is a problem in Japan-North Korea relations, and it is not an appropriate attitude to depend on another country for the solution."

What a sensible — and rare — argument for a Japanese politician to make in the midst of the moaning about the "shocking" US shift. How ironic that conservatives, interested in an independent, assertive foreign policy, cannot tolerate the US government's taking a different position. Does Japan really need the US in order to solve the abductions issue, as implied by conservative dismay over last week's announcement (Japan has lost its "America card," Mr. Hiranuma said)?

Unfortunately there are few signs that Mr. Yamasaki's view will win out. The government is proceeding gingerly, emphasizing that nothing has changed yet and declaring that the Fukuda government will continue to make a priority of the abductions issue. (See statements by Machimura Nobutaka on Fuji TV's Hodo 2001 program.) But according to Mainichi, ambiguity surrounding the details of the recent agreement with North Korea to re-investigate the abductions has made the prime minister a target of public dissatisfaction.

Of course, the Fukuda government isn't alone in taking the blame. Plenty of blame is being directed towards the US. Over the weekend, Mr. Abe called on President Bush to honor his promise to the abductees. Ibuki Bunmei, the LDP's secretary-general, added his opinion, suggesting that the US has been "deceived" by North Korea. He suggested that the Bush administration may betray Japan further by repeating the Clinton administration's decision to send a senior official to Pyongyang.

Is there no other significant LDP official willing to support the Yamasaki line?

Another illustration of how the LDP has changed since the cold war ended. The party belongs to the revisionists now. Pragmatists like Mr. Yamasaki are tolerated but marginalized.

No surprises

When is a shock not a shock?

Sankei Shimbun's front cover this morning proclaimed, in large print, "Shock to the Japanese nation."

The headline, of course, referred to President Bush's announcement Thursday that, in keeping with the principle of "action for action," the Bush administration will (1) lift "the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to North Korea" and (2) inform Congress of its intent "to rescind North Korea's designation as a state sponsor of terror in 45 days."

Is there a set of criteria to determine when an event counts as a shock to the Japanese people?

This has been a shock more than a year in the making. As early as May of last year, there were rumors that the US government was prepared to link the "terror sponsor" designation to the nuclear issue, instead of the abductions issue (i.e., a "terrorism" issue). While the rumors last May were subsequently denied, the possibility had been broached that the US would reward North Korea for progress in nuclear negotiations with removal from the list. Japan has had a year to either dissuade the US from doing so — as recently as February, conservatives were prepared to do a victory dance over the carcass of the six-party talks — or to shift its position accordingly in preparation for a move by the US.

Is a crisis still a crisis if it is wholly predictable well in advance?

The response of each of the actors was equally predictable. The abductee families responded with anger and disbelief. Prime Minister Fukuda emphasized that US-Japan cooperation on the abductions issue and North Korea policy more generally will be unaffected by the announcement. The response in the Japanese political system was equally predictable. Yamasaki Taku's study group for normalization with North Korea welcomed the step; Hiranuma Takeo's abductee problem study group warned about cracks in the alliance; Ozawa Ichiro said the US was ignoring Japan; and unspecified young LDP Diet members warned that if the delisting proceeds without North Korea taking appropriate actions, Mr. Fukuda's popularity will suffer yet another blow.

As I argued previously, this is unquestionably a positive step, even if the report filed by North Korea left out information related to missile production, nuclear testing sites, the uranium refinement program, or possible proliferation activities. It was unreasonable to expect that the process would wrap up in one fell swoop, with North Korea handing over information about all of its dubious activities and the US responding by rushing to full diplomatic recognition. This is a complicated dance, now moving forward, now back, now standing still. Secretary Hill and the State Department more generally deserve credit for their perseverance, not just in the face of North Korean intransigence, but also sniping from Japan (the "Kim Jong Hill" moniker, for example) and from within the Bush administration.

This process is not about full disarmament, but buying time, finding a way to reduce tension on the Korean Peninsula, freeze North Korea's nuclear programs as much as possible (and prevent proliferation), and possibly get North Korea to open its door to the world ever so slightly. Yes, there is also the possibility — based on North Korea's behavior in the past — that North Korea will not keep its end of the bargain. But lacking good alternatives (sanctions are useless as long as China opts out, war is extremely unlikely both because of the US position in Iraq and because of the immorality of America's launching a war in which South Korea would bear the brunt of the costs) negotiation is the last bad option. North Korea doesn't follow through? Fine, then it doesn't receive any of the benefits of negotiating with the US. North Korea delivers something concrete? Okay, the US responds by lifting one of its many sanctions on North Korea.

As President Bush said Thursday, "North Korea will remain one of the most heavily sanctioned nations in the world. The sanctions that North Korea faces for its human rights violations, its nuclear test in 2006, and its weapons proliferation will all stay in effect. And all United Nations Security Council sanctions will stay in effect as well."

In short, North Korea is only slight less of a pariah today than it was yesterday. But the process will move forward.

So I second Steve Clemons's congratulations to Christopher Hill, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, the former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns and his successor William Burns. They have made the best of a bad situation, even if their opponents in Japan and the US will not pay them the slightest compliment for their deft work.

UPDATE: In this post, Sam Roggeveen at The Interpreter asks a question I meant to ask.

"...What I'm not seeing from the critics is a plausible alternative plan. Nobody is suggesting military action to disarm North Korea, because given the geography, Pyongyang effectively holds the city of Seoul hostage. Isolating the regime also seems to have done very little good.

"And what harm can be done by this approach? Yes, North Korea gains economic aid and a sense of legitimacy from being brought out of its pariah status, but those are favours that can easily be stopped or revoked.

"To paint these negotiations as if the US is being held over a barrel by the crafty Stalinists in Pyongyang is at best a partial reading. The US and its negotiating partners have a lot of what North Korea wants — wealth. That remains an important point of leverage."

UPDATE TWO: It seems that Machimura Nobutaka, in a phone conversation with Stephen Hadley, US national security adviser, informed Mr. Hadley that the Japanese people were "shocked" by the US decision.

Again, assuming that it's true that the Japanese people are shocked — and having seen no evidence showing how they're shocked, I'm not accepting this claim at face value — why didn't the Japanese government do more to prepare them for the US decision, given that the US has advertised its willingness to remove North Korea from the list for nearly a year now? The Fukuda government will try to shift as much blame to the US as possible, but will anyone buy it? The conservatives certainly won't: they'll be happy to blame both the US and the Fukuda government.

Abe charges in

Less than a week after the Fukuda government announced a new approach to the North Korea problem, Abe Shinzo, self-appointed defender of the abductees, has charged into the fray to criticize Yamasaki Taku, head of a Diet members' group advocating a normalized relations with North Korea. Mr. Abe claimed that Mr. Yamasaki's comments have diluted the government's bargaining power in the midst of negotiations.

Responding to Mr. Yamasaki's dismissing his thinking as "infantile," Mr. Abe admonished Mr. Yamasaki to "think and act in the national interest."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Abe also admonished the government (and the US) not to act unless North Korea moves substantially first.

Mr. Abe and his conservative colleagues are undoubtedly displeased with a foreign ministry announcement Wednesday. The foreign ministry declared that the Japanese government would view the launch of a reinvestigation into the abductions issue by North Korea as "progress," a far lower bar for lifting sanctions than the conservatives want. I will be curious to see who stands up to question Machimura Nobutaka and Saiki Akataka (head of MOFA's Asia-Pacific bureau) in the lower house's ad hoc committee on the abductions problem at a hearing being held today. Will LDP conservatives rake the government over the coals?

It will also be curious to see what Christopher Hill, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, will say when he arrives in Japan today for talks — especially in light of Secretary of State Rice's statement Wednesday that she expects North Korea to declare its nuclear weapons program "soon."

By lowering the bar on what constitutes progress, is MOFA clearing the way to assist the US on the nuclear question? And will Prime Minister Fukuda survive the storm of criticism that will greet such a move?

Prisoners of war

Lester Tenney, commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a veterans organization, who spent most of the war as a prisoner of war in Japan working in a Mitsui mine, spoke yesterday at a hall in the shadow of the Japanese Diet.

Mr. Tenney is currently visiting Tokyo, hoping to raise awareness of what he and his fellow American POWs suffered and to receive apologies from the Japanese government and the companies that employed POWs as slave labor.

Before a largely Japanese (and largely elderly) audience, Mr. Tenney shared stories — both bad and good — from his time in captivity, explained why he was in Japan, and expressed his hopes for Japanese-American friendship. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mr. Tenney is how positive he was, something that was not lost upon the audience. When he said that he had forgiven the Japanese for what he suffered, there was no doubt, no wavering in his voice.

But more interesting was the question-and-answer session following his remarks. Three questioners were Japanese war veterans, who used their questions to speak at length about their own experiences in the war. One, a private, said that after the war he was imprisoned in an American camp in the Philippines for suspected war criminals, who were made to carry heavy logs for hours on end, presumably, he thought, as retribution for the Bataan Death March. Another, who said that he had been a guard on the march, tried to explain why it had been so terrible. Too few guards for too many prisoners, he said. A third didn't have a point to make: he just told the audience about his own experience in the war, and told Mr. Tenney that he thought that the Americans fought bravely.

Ultimately Mr. Tenney and his questioners shared something in common: they are all still prisoners of war. More than sixty years later they still carry the war with them. It still occupies their thoughts. It fills them with the urge to talk, to share their stories with strangers. And so it is with war. Wounds heal, but veterans, it seems, carry the experience with them for the rest of their lives, leaving them forever scarred. Even Mr. Tenney, who has, so to speak, made his peace with the war, is still marked by his experience as a soldier and POW; his comrades, some of whom have asked him why he goes to Japan, are even more marked.

And so it is with nations. Nations carry their experiences with war with them, as their members do. As the Japanese veterans last night showed, Japan still carries the war with it. It is still transfigured by the wrenching trauma of the war, because for Japan, World War II is The War. No matter how much Japanese politicians want Japan to become a "normal" nation, Japan will not be decreed into normalcy, not so long as the veterans live on, not so long as some of their children and grandchildren promise to carry on their fight, not so long as the older generation of pacifists, their worldview shaped by experiences on the home front and their commitment to peace enshrined in the constitution, persists in disseminating a view of war that views all conflict through the prism of Japan's war. Japan carries all of that in its collective unconscious, and nothing but time will heal the psychic wounds to the Japanese nation.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tenney's experience also highlights the skeletons in the closet of the US-Japan alliance. He is a living testament to the decision on the part of the US and Japan to leave history be for the sake of the alliance. Indeed, in response to a question, he noted that the US government ordered him and other POWs not to speak about their experiences as POWs in Japan a mere three days after the surrender in Tokyo Bay. The US government has repeatedly intervened to stop attempts by American POWs to sue the Japanese companies that used POWs as slave labor, with the State Department going so far as to serve as a witness for Mitsui in a suit filed by Mr. Tenney.

Such is the lot of men like Mr. Tenney. Abandoned by General MacArthur at Bataan, abandoned by his government when it decided that it needed Japan as an ally, Mr. Tenney was, like soldiers throughout history and (of course) on the Japanese side of the war, at the mercy of power politics and the decisions of distant leaders.

I don't know whether Mr. Tenney will get the audience he desires with Prime Minister Fukuda. I don't know whether he will get an apology from the Japanese government or compensation from Mitsui — or an apology from the US government for that matter. He certainly deserves it. Not only did he don a uniform for his country, not only did he suffer at the hands of the enemy for more than three years, he has carried his experiences with him for more than sixty years.

He and his comrades deserve justice not just from those at whose hands they suffered, but from the governments for whose sake justice has been postponed indefinitely.

Japan just as invisible as always

MOFA has released its latest Gallup-conducted poll of American public and elite attitudes concerning Japan. (English summary here; more detailed Japanese documents available for download here.)

Gallup conducted a telephone poll of 1500 Americans over age 18 in February and March of 2008, and telephone interviews with 250 "opinion leaders" in "the fields of government, business, academia, mass media, religion and labor unions."

The results are more or less unchanged. Both the public and elites view Japan as the most important US partner in Asia, with China trailing by roughly ten points among the public and twenty points among elites. Japan is still seen as a dependable ally, although the number among the public dropped seven points from 74% to 67%, even as the elite figure remained strong, improving one point to a record-high of 92%. Both public and elite see Japan as more of an economic power, and believe that the US-Japan relationship is sound, and will either improve in the future or remain just as sound as they think it is today. Elites are well disposed to Japan playing a more assertive role internationally, and have a stronger sense of shared values between the US and Japan than the public at large has.

Of interest to me, however, is that in every question that gave general public respondents the option of "don't understand/no opinion," that response gained. In the "dependable ally" question, the percentage of the general public answering "no opinion" rose from 5% to 15%. Asked whether Japan is playing an appropriate international role given its economic power, the percentage of the general public answering "don't understand" rose from 6% to 14%. Asked about the importance of US bases in Japan, the number of general public respondents with no opinion rose from 3% to 11%. The number who responded "don't understand" when asked whether the US should support the current US-Japan mutual security treaty more than doubled, from 7% to 15%. And I suspect that these numbers probably only measure those who are willing to admit that they either don't understand or have no opinion. How many American citizens have opinions about these questions before being asked by a pollster?

In short, Japan became that much less familiar to the American public from February-March 2007 to February-March 2008. Interestingly, when general public respondents were asked where they get information about Japan, every category but education (improved one point from 51% to 52%), friends and neighbors (improved one point from 29% to 30%), Japanese friends (held steady at 29%), and experience of visiting Japan (held steady at 12%) fell. The big four — TV, magazines, newspapers, and Internet — all fall. TV fell from 80% to 74%, magazines from 72% to 64%, newspapers from 71% to 63%, and Internet 43% to 39%. The impact of these drops are magnified by the paucity of Japan coverage (i.e., not only are the news media providing less Japan coverage, but fewer people are seeing what little they cover). The drops were less significant or non-existent in terms of the elite, but elite awareness of Japan still suffers from the spareness of Japan coverage.

The survey ought to include a question along the lines of "did you have any opinions about the US-Japan relationship before being asked these questions." It might also have been helpful to ask about public awareness of events that transpired in the relationship over the past year (political changes in Japan, the abductee problem, the comfort women resolution, etc.). Without asking these questions, there is no context for these responses. This doesn't say much about what the American people think about the US-Japan relationship in comparison to a host of other foreign policy issues and bilateral relationships.

The campaign comes to Guam

This weekend, the US presidential campaign comes to Guam, the island territory closer to Japan than the continental US that will soon be home to a vastly expanded US military presence, if all goes according to plan.

Guam will be holding a Democratic caucus, and with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton struggling for every delegate, the two have given some attention to the island, thanks to its four delegates. (NPR provides a handy guide for the perplexed here.)

With Guam on the receiving end of the realignment of US forces in Japan, this might be the closest the US-Japan alliance gets to the presidential campaign all year. Both candidates have prepared statements on the relocation of US forces to Guam. Senator Obama promises to balance economic needs with social needs in the planning for the expanded military presence; Senator Clinton emphasizes a federal funding commitment and the appointment of a Guam liaison in the Pentagon. Both recognize that the relocation of US forces involves far more than building new facilities for military personnel.

Neither, however, mentions the bilateral dimension. Neither acknowledges that with Japan footing part of the bill, the process will be more complicated than it already is within the federal government.

In short, Guam's caucus will come and go, and the US-Japan alliance will remain invisible in the campaign.

Ashamed

I am back in Chicago for a bit, and have managed to make it out to Wrigley Field twice to see Fukudome Kosuke, the first Japanese addition to the Chicago Cubs roster. Readers will recall that I was quite pleased about this, and so far I haven't been disappointed. With a .317 batting average and .431 on-base percentage (and one of the highest pitches-per-at-bat averages in the National Leage), how could I?

What I am disappointed, nay, ashamed about is the behavior of some Chicago Cubs fans in regard to Mr. Fukudome.

Cubs fans have a reputation for being drunken layabouts (cf. Lee Elia), more interested in the Wrigley Field atmospherics than the game on the field. Marty Brennaman, Cincinnati Reds broadcaster, made this point earlier this week after an incident in a game between the Cubs and Reds, and at times I have a hard time disagreeing (despite being a Cubs fan myself).

But in addition to being obnoxious on occasion, are Cubs fans also racist?

The arrival of Mr. Fukudome in Chicago has been largely but not entirely incident-free, but the Chicago Sun-Times reports that some horribly offensive Cubs-related merchandise is selling heavily around Wrigley Field. I saw the t-shirt in this picture on a fan sitting a few seats away from me on Friday afternoon.



(Photo: Richard A. Chapman/Chicago Sun Times)

Mr. Fukudome was restrained in his comments on this merchandise.

"I don't know what the creator of the shirt meant this to be, but they should make it right," Fukudome said through his interpreter after being shown one of the shirts Thursday. "Maybe the creator created it because he thought it was funny, or maybe he made it to condescend the race. I don't know."

I will be less restrained.

This kind of thing is embarrassing in the twenty-first century: I am embarrassed as a Cubs fan, a Chicagoan, an American, and as someone whose life is spent, well, observing Japan.

I don't want to generalize about Cubs fans or Chicagoans — Mr. Fukudome's reception in Chicago has been quite friendly, and fans besieged the Cubs organizations with complaints about these items, prompting the team to stop their sale — but the fact that people find this sort of thing funny or cute is a blot on the US. I don't think it's a product of outright racism, just ignorance. But that ignorance is wide and deep, and is not without consequences for US foreign policy. The stunning ignorance about other countries — allies and "enemies" alike — means that ugly stereotypes like this have survived for far too long. (And then there's the question of the older generation of Americans, some of whom revert to embarrassing stereotypes of Japan perhaps in large part because their images of Japan were shaped by a horrendous race war.) Knowledge about Japan among Americans of all education levels is shockingly poor, allowing offensive (or dated) stereotypes to persist.

Perhaps I shouldn't take this so seriously, but it's that kind of attitude that allows this behavior to persist. A person wearing a shirt like this should be stigmatized.

It's small incidents like this that speak volumes about America's place in the world in the twenty-first century.

More trouble headed Fukuda's way?

According to the Washington Post, in exchange for North Korea's "acknowledging" US concerns about its nuclear activities, disabling Yongbyon, and provide a full accounting of its plutonium stockpile, the US will be prepared to "remove North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and to exempt it from the Trading With the Enemy Act."

The domestic obstacles standing the way of the US government holding up its end of the bargain are considerable, but this "agreement" could still cause trouble for Prime Minister Fukuda in the meantime.

The LDP's conservatives, now for the most part embodied in the Nakagawa Shoichi's "true" conservative study group, have spent the fourteen months since the US-DPRK Berlin agreement trying to ensure that the US does not remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terrorism list until the abductions issue is resolved. As I noted back in February, Mr. Nakagawa and comrades were quite pleased with the lack of progress in the six-party talks and open warfare in the Bush administration over North Korea policy.

Now a deal is once again on the table that envisions North Korea removed from the list despite Japan's conditions not being met — in short, US abandonment of Japan on a fundamental issue for the conservatives. While they need not panic yet (their Washington allies will naturally do all they can to derail this latest attempt by Chris Hill to resolve the crisis), they will be watching Mr. Fukuda carefully in the coming weeks and months, ready to pounce on him if he deviates from the hard line on North Korea, which the prime minister embraced early in his term after suggesting that he might chart a new, more flexible course. At the same time, Washington — or the State Department, anyway — will likely be leaning on Tokyo to play a constructive role should the latest agreement go forward

Mr. Fukuda may be able to duck this pressure for the time being by claiming that his hands are tied thanks to the recently passed six-month extension of the economic sanctions originally implemented following North Korea's October 2006 nuclear test. But if this latest agreement somehow proves a success, that may not be a satisfactory answer for the US government, at which point the prime minister would be forced to choose between alienating the US or alienating the LDP's conservatives, one of whom is already measuring curtains for the Kantei. Provided Mr. Fukuda survives long enough to face that choice, will he buck the conservatives and follow the US? Or will he continue to hew to the Abe line of doing nothing until "progress" is made on the abductions issue, ensuring that Japan remains isolated within the six-party talks?

UPDATE: Gerald Curtis, Japanese politics specialist at Columbia University, visited North Korea last week and upon his return met with a nonpartisan Diet members study group to report that there is a "high probability" of Washington's removing North Korea from the terror sponsors list within the year.

The right laying low?

Since former prime minister Mori and Prime Minister Fukuda called attention to the crisis facing the LDP on consecutive days in mid-January — with Mr. Mori explicitly criticizing Nakagawa Shoichi's flirtations with Hiranuma Takeo — it seems that the ideological conservatives have backed out of the spotlight.

Part of the reason, I think, is because of the changing environment in the Six-Party talks. With North Korea recalcitrant since the start of the year, and the Bush administration seemingly in no hurry (or powerless) to restart the talks, the bilateral tension over North Korea has dissipated somewhat. With a lower risk of Washington's removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and pressuring Tokyo to follow along, the conservatives don't need to lean as hard on Mr. Fukuda to keep toeing the line on the abductions issue.

There is no doubt that Mr. Nakagawa is feeling confident regarding developments in North Korea policy. In a three-way discussion with Tahara Soichiro and Tanaka Hitoshi in the February issue of Chuo Koron (part one, part two), Mr. Nakagawa said, "Concerning the result, even Assistant Secretary Hill said last year while visiting North Korea, 'North Korea's level of verification is not good,' and as a result the agreement is delayed. I think that factors in President Bush's decision include statements of opposition to lifting the designation in both the House and the Senate in Congress, as well as the function of trends in Japanese public opinion. Lifting the designation in the face of this opposition would be too risky."

The Japanese right is probably thrilled at the fight over US North Korea policy growing after State Department criticism of a speech by congressionally mandated North Korea Human Rights envoy Jay Lefkowitz at the American Enterprise Institute — discussed in this Christopher Hitchens essay, in which he sides with Mr. Lefkowitz and dismisses the separation of human rights from denuclearization. After all, the greater the dissent in Washington, the less likely the administration will assume the risks of pushing harder for progress in talks with North Korea. The less the US pushes, the less the Fukuda government has to fret about gaps between the Japanese and US bargaining positions.

The other factor contributing to less conservative activism against Mr. Fukuda is, I think, good tactical sense on the part of Mr. Nakagawa and his comrades. After being criticized by party leaders last month and with diminishing chances of a general election being called before the autumn, I suspect that the "true" conservatives reasoned that unless they are prepared to take the ultimate step in undermining the government, joining with the opposition to pass an HR non-confidence motion, they are better off being loyal to the party and preparing for the fight for control of the party that will follow a general election. (For the record, I don't think that Mr. Nakagawa and his fellow conservatives are prepared to do anything so forthright as working with the opposition to bring down Mr. Fukuda.) The current environment on North Korea policy makes it easier to swallow their pride and support the prime minister.

Barring any radical changes in the policy environment, the stalemate will hold, with the conservatives plotting their restoration sub rosa.

The weakness of Fukuda's (and Japan's) carbon campaign

As the Fukuda government has insisted at every chance it has to remind Japanese citizens and foreign governments that the focus of this summer's G8 summit in Hokkaido will be climate change policy. Tokyo is eager to be at the forefront of the quest for a post-Kyoto climate change pact.

This weekend Mr. Fukuda took this message to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

(Incidentally, this week's meeting brought to mind "Ringing of Revolution," a song by radical folk singer Phil Ochs — nothing like a gala fest of the high and mighty on Swiss mountaintop while in the outside world the world economic system as we know it comes crashing down.)

In his speech at a closed meeting, Mr. Fukuda reiterated that climate change will be the main theme of the summit, warned darkly about the consequences of climate change, and explained his government's three-part approach on climate change policy — (1) a post-Kyoto framework, (2) international environmental cooperation, and (3) technological innovation.

All well-intentioned, all important, but ultimately mostly irrelevant, for a couple reasons.

First, as former UN official Shashi Tharoor, who attended the Fukuda address, wrote in his Davos Diary at Foreign Policy's Passport blog, "...The number of empty seats at the half-dozen tables around the PM testified to the declining salience of Japan, a country that two decades ago was seen as the world's economic powerhouse and, bluntly, no longer is." Mr. Fukuda and other Japanese officials speak before international audiences, everyone nods in agreement, and then moves on to more important matters and actors. Japan's good intentions and clever ideas are not enough to make the rest of the world pay attention.

Beyond Japan's undersized international presence, there is a much more concrete reason for Japan's environmental leadership being stillborn: forcing the world to rethink its carbon emissions means in practical terms forcing the US (its most significant ally) and China (its largest trading partner) to change their economic systems drastically. Does anyone seriously think that Japan or any other one country will be able to make this happen? Change will happen when both the US and China change domestically and become willing to make radical changes in how they use energy, in the process taking the lead internationally on climate change.

Japan might play a niche role in developing energy-efficient technologies and sharing them with the world, but I have a hard time envisioning Japan in the driver's seat, forcing its partners to make substantial compromises that will enable progress on reducing carbon emissions.

The fantasies of "true conservatism"

For a glimpse into the twisted thinking of the Japanese right — the revisionist right — in the aftermath of the downfall of Abe Shinzo, there is no better place to look than the conversation between Sakurai Yoshiko and Hiranuma Takeo published in the January 2008 issue of Voice.

The bizarre, distorted facts and outright fictions published in this article brought me to the point of laughter on more than one occasion, although I didn't laugh nearly as much as the discussants apparently did, judging by the little parenthetical laugh marks that followed all too many of their remarks.

The discussion did, however, give me another reason to be glad that Mr. Abe was forced to resign (for whatever reason — these two think that fault for Abe's resignation lies not with Mr. Abe himself, but with his secretary, Inoue Yoshiyuki, who Ms. Sakurai describes as being "like [Koizumi secretary] Iijima," apparently a bad thing). It's not that their ideas are especially dangerous, it's that they're so irrelevant. They continue to insist that what they know what the Japanese people want, and that is the abductees brought home and the constitution revised. Ms. Sakurai at one point castigates Prime Minister Fukuda for failing to act on constitution revision, which, she reminds us, has been one of the core principles of the LDP since its founding in 1955. True, but so what? Why should a government in 2008 by following an agenda formulated before 1955 when it has to deal with the problems of 2008 and beyond?

How many elections does the LDP have to lose before they recognize that the Japanese people don't share their priorities? Did the July 2007 defeat not register?

Of course, the discussion inevitably turned to Mr. Hiranuma's planned "true" conservative party, because both the LDP and the DPJ are rotten (even if, they say, there are capable individuals within both parties). When asked about the timing of its formation, Mr. Hiranuma was reluctant to say whether it would occur before or after a general election. Undoubtedly he will have to make that decision with the cooperation of his friends within the LDP, who I suspect would prefer to wait until a general election before acting. Instead of forming a new party, it seems to me that the ideological right is starting to hope openly for an LDP defeat in a general election that will take down Fukuda and give them an opportunity to retake control of the party, purging "fake" conservatives in the process.

Towards the discussion, Mr. Hiranuma very nearly veered into relevance when he broached the question of economics, but it turned out he only wanted to castigate the Finance Ministry before directing the conversation back to more familiar ground, puzzlement over the reaction to Nakagawa Shoichi's 2006 calls for a debate about the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

I don't want to linger too much longer over this, but there was one more nugget worth mentioning. The two of course talked at length about the US about-face on North Korea and had a good laugh about Christopher Hill. Mr. Hiranuma also spoke about his recent trip to Washington along with other Diet members and the abductee families, where they spoke with members of Congress about resolutions in the House and Senate calling for a linkage between the abductions issue and the removal of North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list. For some reason, these ideologues really take congressional resolutions seriously. Mr. Hiranuma spoke with pride about how Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-18) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) promised to push for these resolutions, and was impressed that the House resolution already had a whopping twenty-eight co-sponsors.

That said, they acknowledged the shortcomings of Diet members' diplomacy, thanks in part — wait for it — the influence of the Chinese in Washington, whose embassy has ten times more political specialists in their embassy than Japan's and who have significant numbers of Chinese-Americans whose support Beijing can apparently mobilize at will, as in the case of the comfort women resolution.

You would think from reading this interview that Japanese society was healthy and that there was not a long list of problems facing the government for years to come. And you would be wrong, just as the ideological right is wrong. The decisions made by the Japanese government in the coming years will determine whether Japan remains influential regionally and globally, whether it remains an economic power with a voice in shaping East Asia. Its power will not rest on a new constitution that enables Japan to send its robust military to fight abroad. It will not rest on its children being proud of being Japanese. It will depend on Japan's becoming a country that is more open to the world, more willing to take risks, better able to provide security for its aging citizens, and better able to educate Japanese children for the world in which they will live.

The vision of Mr. Hiranuma, Ms. Sakurai, and their compatriots in the mass media and the Diet is a vision from 1950. (I guess that's what they mean by "true conservatism). Too bad it's 2008.

Fukuda's "catch ball" diplomacy

Fukuda Yasuo is in China, and the contrasts, both with his earlier trip to Washington and Ozawa Ichiro's trip to China, are stunning, if not surprising.

Recall how earlier this month I criticized Mr. Ozawa for his over-the-top visit to Beijing, when he traveled with an entourage of hundreds and spoke in effusive terms about the Sino-Japanese relationship.

I think Mr. Fukuda has made my point about understated diplomacy. Without paying fealty and genuflecting before his Chinese hosts, the prime minister has indicated that he desires a new Sino-Japanese relationship that is treated with as much or greater care as Japan's relationship with the US.

Unlike his thirty-six-hour swing into Washington, Mr. Fukuda has stayed around long enough to make an impression. He met with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, on Friday afternoon, with the talks focused more on practical matters — economic cooperation, the environment, the "strategic reciprocal partnership" — than on praising the relationship. On Friday evening, Mr. Fukuda met with President Hu Jintao, in which he explicitly said that Japan does not support Taiwanese independence but rejects a unilateral solution to the problem.

On Saturday, Mr. Fukuda played catch with Mr. Wen. (I will not comment on what that might have looked like after seeing pictures of the two old men in throwing position here.) The symbolism of this should not be underestimated. Playing catch, after all, is one of the oft-cited bonds that united President Bush and former Prime Minister Koizumi. (They played catch at Mr. Bush's ranch when first meeting in June 2001.) What a pointed but understated way for Mr. Fukuda to signal to Washington that Japan's priorities are changing, an argument Mr. Fukuda made explicitly when he visited Washington in November.

For the moment, concrete progress on disputed issues is beside the point. This is mood-setting, with its significance depending on Mr. Fukuda's staying around long enough to convert preliminary overtures into a lasting shift in Japanese foreign policy that will bind his successors. But the mood-setting is necessary. Japan is not in a position to choose between Beijing and Washington. It needs frank but cordial relations with both, although the two relationships are obviously different thanks to Japan's security relationship with the US. I remain unconvinced that grandiose rhetoric, which hints at a desire to prioritize the Sino-Japanese relationship to the detriment of the US-Japan relationship, is the way to change the mood in the Sino-Japanese relationship; by going to Beijing more quietly but no less determined to revive the relationship, Mr. Fukuda has, I think, embarrassed Mr. Ozawa yet again.

Now if he could only get certain US presidential candidates to realize that just as Japan has no choice between its largest trading partner and its most significant security partner, so the US has no choice but to maintain healthy relationships with both its long-time ally and trading partner and the emerging power.

Unease in Japan, yawns in America?

The Yomiuri Shimbun has published the results of a poll (conducted with Gallup in the US) that surveyed American and Japanese attitudes towards their respective national institutions and the US-Japanese relationship.

As the article summarizing the poll reports, Yomiuri recorded a 14% (to 39%) and 15% (to 46%) drops respectively in the number of Japanese and American respondents answering affirmatively to the question, "Do you think the current US-Japan relationship is good."

But when one looks that the detailed list of questions asked and the responses, it seems that American responses tend towards the noncommittal. In response to the aforementioned question, for example, 43.6% of American respondents either could not say or did not answer the question. A mere 10.4% said that relations were bad or very bad. Some 60% of American respondents, in answering the question whether they trust Japan, answered that they have great or some trust in Japan, compared to 30% who said that they have little or no trust in Japan. A quarter of American respondents did not answer the question about what impact Prime Minister Fukuda will have on US-Japan relations. (A better question might have been, can you name the prime minister of Japan.)

The survey also asked a number of questions about foreign policy, among which a few bits caught my eye. In a question about threat perception, there was a vast difference in the percentage of American and Japanese respondents who view the "Middle East" as a threat. (Let's leave aside the question of what this painfully imprecise response actually tells us.) 76% of American respondents said that they view the Middle East as a threat, while only 34.3% of Japanese respondents said the same. I think this illustrates one of the US-Japan alliance's underlying structural problems, namely that there is little public support in Japan for the transformation of the US-Japan alliance into a global actor active in the Middle East. Japanese threat perceptions are largely focused on (not surprisingly) two countries in its neighborhood, dropping off sharply the further one gets from Japanese shores. American threat perceptions are higher than Japanese perceptions in every instance except for North Korea and China. The US is a global security power, Japan is not. There is no way around this fact.

Also interesting was the question about US bases in Japan, which asked whether the US should reinforce its presence, hold it steady, reduce it, or completely withdraw. A sizable majority (58.2%) of Americans said the US should hold it steady, while in Japan, 52% said the US should cut or withdraw its troops (42.2% favored a cut, 9.8% full withdrawal), while 40% said the US should hold its troop presence steady. Only 1.3% said the US should increase its forces. It is unclear whether this question takes into account the cuts to which both governments agreed in 2006, but these responses do suggest that conflict over this issue remains considerable in Japan. (Another problem with this question is that responses would no doubt vary depending upon whether it was asked in a prefecture hosting US forces.)

In short, I don't think this survey tells us all that much about the US-Japan relationship, other than that the Japanese people pay a great detail more attention to the relationship than the American people do. Japanese responses tend to be more varied, suggesting the existence of real, studied opinions on the questions asked, whereas the American responses tend towards the status quo and benign responses, which appear to me to be the default responses when lacking information. ("I haven't heard anything about problems with Japan, so things must be ok.")

This is an unavoidable fact of life in the alliance. No Japanese politician could become prime minister without a considered opinion of the US-Japan relationship, at the very least. Given the frequency with which cabinet ministers are lauded for their "pipelines" to the US, much more is expected. Thanks in part to the enduring US presence, the relationship with the US is at the forefront of political discussions.

And in the US? Japan barely merits mention in debates among presidential candidates, and has even less visibility among the American people.

None of this is surprising, of course. There's nothing new about Japan's being less visible in the US than the US in Japan. But it's worth recalling when looking at numbers like this. I find it hard to believe that there's an American public opinion on the US-Japan relationship that exists independent of polls taken to measure supposed opinions.

Mr. Fukuda may desire greater intellectual exchanges between the US and Japan, but the impact of any expansion of bilateral intellectual and cultural contacts will be marginal at best — and while Mr. Aso touts the glories of Japan's cultural exports, it is unclear to me whether Tokyo can use this soft power to its advantage and raise its political profile in the US and the world at large. If anything, the cultural exports have contributed to the further trivialization of Japan in the eyes of the world. (Japan: manga and Hello Kitty superpower, political midget.)

The quiet shift

Ever so quietly, the Fukuda government appears to be altering its position in the six-party talks. Last week, Foreign Minister Komura suggested that the return of some (but not all) of the remaining abductees would constitute progress on the abductions issue. That wasn't much of a concession, but it was the first attempt by the Japanese government to define what counts for "progress."

Now Asahi reports that Sasae Kenichiro, Japan's negotiator in the talks, said in a meeting with Chris Hill, the US negotiator in Tokyo on Friday, "The US is presently at the center of the work [of disabling North Korea's nuclear facilities], but we are also in the process of considering participation."

Once again, not a huge step, but considering that Japan has opted out of the process for most of this year, it's an important step.

Perhaps by the time Prime Minister Fukuda visits Washington later this month Japan will be ready to announce a serious and sustained commitment to the process of denuclearizing North Korea and creating a stable modus vivendi on the Korean peninsula that begins the tricky process of opening North Korea to the world.