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Japan: Hawks coming out of the
woodwork
By Axel Berkofsky
Can a self-declared pacifist country attack
another country preemptively and go nuclear?
Japan may have to do both as far as parts of
Japan's defense establishment and right-wingers in the
country's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are
concerned. While LDP defense hawks and the country's
Defense Agency chief Shigeru Ishiba himself were
allegedly flirting with the idea of attacking North
Korea before it pulls the trigger first, it was recently
revealed that Japan was looking into the feasibility of
joining the nuclear-weapons club even back in the 1990s.
In 1995, after the first nuclear crisis on the
Korean Peninsula in 1994, Japan's Defense Agency
reportedly compiled a 31-page "internal" (read secret)
report looking into the pros and cons of having nukes in
Japan. The report, drawn up during the administration of
socialist prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, whose party
was strongly opposed to even maintaining armed forces
before coming to power in 1994, concluded that Japan's
neighbors don't have to worry about a nuclear Japan.
"The discussion in favor of owning nuclear weapons lacks
sufficient study into the negative impact, while the
idea that not possessing nuclear weapons is detrimental
is not sufficiently backed by military theory," the
report said.
Japan's own experience with nuclear
weapons, however, might have suggested a somewhat
different explanation why going nuclear should not be an
option and the country's allegedly sacred three
non-nuclear principles - not introducing, not possessing
and not producing nuclear weapons - did not seem to be a
problem back then. Instead, the report concluded that
nuclear weapons are not in the "nation's best economic
and political interest" - producing and storing nukes
were not only considered too expensive, but would also
upset the United States and the regional balance of
power.
Japan's Defense Agency insists that there
have been no other studies on Japanese nuclear weapons
after 1995 and claims that that study was only
undertaken to "reassure" neighbors in East Asia that
Japan would not go nuclear even if North Korea
threatened to do so.
If that sounds pretty
implausible, that's because it is. It seems that the
Japanese press found nothing unusual about the fact that
the report was leaked just as Pyongyang was flexing its
military muscles threatening to inflict "total war" over
East Asia.
On the other hand, who can really
blame Japanese hawks for discussing nuclear options when
even South Korea's outgoing president Kim Dae-jung,
usually soft-spoken and dovish when dealing with his
cousins in the north, got carried away in the heat of
the moment. "If North Korea gets nuclear weapons, the
stance of Japan and our country toward nuclear weapons
could change," he said on February 18, advising
Pyongyang not to "even dream of getting nuclear
weapons".
CNN changed the "could" into a "would"
in Kim's statement, while US commentators believed that
Japan and South Korea could indeed be obliged to get
nukes rather sooner than later. "If Pyongyang is allowed
to go nuclear, there will be strong pressure on South
Korea and Japan to go nuclear as well," James E Goodby,
former US diplomat in residence at Stanford University,
wrote in the International Herald Tribune two days after
Kim's remarks.
Kim himself had second thoughts
about his belligerent rhetoric and toned down his own
remarks on the very same day, saying, "I believe the
danger of war is slight - in fact non-existent."
Not as far as Shigeru Ishiba, Japan's defense
hawk-in-chief, is concerned.
During a
parliamentary debate last week, he announced that Japan
might consider attacking North Korea in "self-defense"
if there were "sufficient evidence" that Pyongyang was
preparing to launch a missile attack on his country.
Attacking North Korea preemptively?
That's what parts of the non-Japanese media
heard, thereby "relying on mistranslations between the
original Japanese and the English idea of 'preemptive
strike'", said Chris Hughes, senior research fellow at
the Center for the Study of Globalization and
Regionalization at the University of Warwick in England.
"Neither Kawaguchi [Japan's foreign minister] nor Ishiba
have used the word 'preemptive strike' [sensei
kogeki] when speaking in the parliament," he added,
indicating that the foreign press made Japan more
bellicose than it really is.
Ishiba, known for
hawkish rhetoric and, as a Japanese political
commentator put it, his belief that
"a-shut-mouth-catches-no-flies attitude" is for
weaklings, reconsidered his line and published a
statement on his agency's website denying that his
remarks meant that Japan was preparing to launch a
preemptive strike against North Korea.
"If North
Korea said it was going to turn us into a sea of fire
and were about to load their missiles with fuel, Japan
would start to consider whether North Korea had started
an attack," said Ishiba, trying to defuse his explosive
rhetoric.
Even Robyn Lim, professor of
International Relations at Nagoya University, usually in
favor of a tough line toward North Korea, fears that
Ishiba might have leaned too far out of the window. "His
statement doesn't help matters because it is not a
credible threat. Japan doesn't have aircraft capable of
attacking North Korea and returning home," Lim wrote.
Japan's defense establishment hopes that won't
be true for much longer. By 2005, a couple of US-made
in-flight-refueling aircraft will become part of the
Japanese air force, allowing it to operate farther from
home.
For now, however, Japanese Aegis high-tech
destroyers, currently cruising in the Sea of Japan
conducting "anti-North Korea drills", as Japan's Yomiuri
Shimbun reports, would not even be able to shoot down
incoming rogue missiles. "The ability of Aegis cruisers
to actually shoot down missiles at this time is zero,
since Japan's missiles on the Aegis vessels are not yet
configured and developed for missile defense. It will
need US assistance to shoot down anything at all,"
Hughes said.
A North Korean missile is only a
10-minute ride away from downtown Tokyo and, fearing
that its military would indeed merely be reduced to
cleaning up the mess, the Japanese government recently
filed an emergency report instructing the armed forces
on what to do in an after-impact scenario.
While
six younger LDP hotheads filed a bill suggesting to
impose economic sanctions on North Korea on the spot,
Yasuo Fukuda, chief cabinet secretary, urged his
colleagues to remain "calm" and hold off on economic
sanctions for now. A good idea, indeed, as cautious
political commentators in Japan fear that imposing
economic sanctions might encourage Pyongyang to make up
for the loss of legal revenues by exporting missiles to
other "rogue states" and smuggling drugs in the Sea of
Japan.
Japan wants first-hand information on
these activities as well and on March 28 will launch its
first spy satellite to check on "suspicious" ships
(usually North Korean spy and smuggler ships, says the
government) in Japanese territorial waters. (See Look up, Mr Kim: Japan's spy in the
sky, January 15.)
When the United
States and Japan held another round of bilateral
"strategic dialogues" last week, Washington informed
Tokyo that the US is considering increasing its military
presence on Japanese soil. Japan's government, unlike
the majority of the country's public, "welcomed" the US
advice to better have one finger on the trigger when
dealing with North Korea.
Japan's public,
however, seems less paranoid about North Korea attacking
Japan. Most of them think Tokyo is not in charge anyway
and is reportedly confident that the United States will
solve the crisis with North Korea bilaterally.
"Not in my name" read the banners of anti-war
demonstrators all over the world a week ago, and the
Japanese public might consider getting a couple of those
flags the next time its government elaborates on its
North Korea policy.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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