Japan

Japan to confront decades-old secret nuke pact with U.S.

A decades-old secret pact between Tokyo and Washington that allowed U.S. ships and aircraft to carry nuclear weapons on stopovers in Japan is the subject of an investigation by Japan’s new government. Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said that the findings of the investigation will be announced in January. “We’ll be unburdening ourselves of the insistence of past governments that a secret agreement did not exist,” Okada said in a speech November 21. The pact violates a Japanese law that prohibits nuclear weapons from being made, possessed or stored on its territory. Existence of the 1960s-era agreement has been generally known for years because of declassified U.S. government documents, but the Japan government’s insistence on an official investigation has placed new strain on U.S.-Japanese relations.

The traditionally close U.S.-Japan alliance has been knocked off balance in recent months by new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s insistence that Japan be more assertive in controlling the heavy footprint of U.S. military forces on its soil. The U.S. government is treaty-bound to defend Japan in case of attack, and it has about 36,000 military personnel based there.

During President Obama’s recent visit to Japan, he and Hatoyama agreed to create a bilateral working group of high-level officials to resolve a dispute over location of the U.S. Marine air station o

n Okinawa. Noise and pollution from the base annoys local residents. But the leaders have since disagreed over the working group’s purpose. Obama says it should focus only on implementing a three-year-old agreement to allow the air station to be relocated on Okinawa. Hatoyama has said he wants the air station moved off Okinawa or outside Japan.

The dispute over the air station has become a highly publicized symbol of Japan’s new forcefulness in negotiations with its most important ally. It is also an early political test of the leadership ability of Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which won a crushing victory in recent lower-house parliamentary elections and is preparing for another election in the upper house next summer.

Although both governments insist that U.S. vessels no longer bring nuclear weapons into Japan, publicity about the secret pact is almost certain to embarrass the Liberal Democratic Party. Until this fall, the LDP had ruled Japan as a virtual one-party state for nearly half a century and quietly decided in the 1960s to ignore the law when nuclear-armed U.S. ships entered Japanese ports.

– edited from The Washington Post, 24 November 2009
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2009

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Japan’s nuclear weapons taboo is fading

Ever since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the Japanese people have possessed a strong aversion to the idea of nuclear weapons. Public discussion of developing nuclear weapons has been practically nonexistent, and politicians have been chastised for mentioning the topic. As recently as 1999, Japan’s vice defense minister resigned after receiving overwhelming criticism for suggesting that Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons.

This “nuclear weapons allergy” has existed alongside a generally pacifist society that has highly constrained itself militarily and politically following World War II. Japan’s Constitution — drafted by U.S. occupation forces after World War II and unchanged since 1947 — bars the country from employing military force in international disputes and prohibits it from having a military for warfare. Article 9 — the “peace clause” — of the Japanese Constitution asserts that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.”

But Japan has been slowly shedding taboos linked to its war defeat. In recent years with growing nationalism, Japan has sought to become a more mainstream country, especially involving matters of defense and diplomacy. Japan has shown more interest in becoming a regional leader and global player — even expanding its military capability, with encouragement from the U.S.

The Japanese government first re-interpreted the Constitution to allow the establishment of a 240,000-strong “Self-Defense Force” to protect itself. The government presented a further re-interpretation of its pacifist Constitution in 1992 that enabled the dispatch of troops to participate in international peacekeeping operations in non-combat roles. Japan sent warships to assist the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In 2004, the dispatch of 600 Japanese non-combat troops to help with reconstruction in Iraq was the first since World War II to a country where fighting is under way. And in December 2006, Japan’s parliament passed a bill to create a cabinet-level defense ministry for the first time since World War II.

The “peace clause” of Japan’s Constitution has come under particular attack. Present and former members of the Diet (national parliament) have formed an organization to revise the Constitution by eliminating Article 9. Meanwhile, the Article 9 Society, established in 2004 by prominent intellectuals and public figures to save Article 9, has grown to 7,000 branches nationwide, rivaling as a grassroots political mobilization the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. The A9 Society promotes the existing Constitution as a global model. And to the dismay of revisionists, the more they attack Article 9, the stronger public support for it becomes, reaching two-thirds in a May opinion survey by the Asahi newspaper.

Most surprisingly, the attitude toward nuclear weapons has begun to change. The attitude shift is evident in the growing prevalence and acceptance of the subject in public discourse. High-level Japanese officials, such as current Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and his predecessor Shinzo Abe, have made several public statements in recent years regarding the nuclear threat presented by Japan’s neighbors, the need for deterrence in the region, and the possibility of development of nuclear weapons. Just a few years ago, broaching these subjects openly would have been unpopular and near political suicide, but the Japanese public is now less critical.

While these developments mostly encompass asserting the right to debate nuclear options rather than debating the options themselves, they represent a major shift. Although Japan is by no means even considering nuclear weapons development seriously, still, as a fervent supporter of non-proliferation, Japan’s attitude change could harm the already teetering Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The 1970 treaty is the cornerstone of both non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament.

To date, Tokyo has been a foremost advocate of the NPT — as opposed to the current administration in Washington, which has rejected the treaty’s obligation to disarm. The binding nature of international agreements relies on support from its signatories. So although Japan may never violate the treaty, if Tokyo is perceived as being less supportive as it opens up domestically on the nuclear weapons issue, the effect on an already vulnerable NPT could be dire.

– edited from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists web edition, AsiaTimes.com and Pax Christi USA
PeaceMeal, July/August 2008

Breaking taboo, Japan creates defense ministry
New defense minister criticizes U.S. war in Iraq

Japan’s parliament passed a bill in December 2006 to create a cabinet-level defense ministry for the first time since World War II. Since its defeat by the United States, Japan has had a defense “agency” with lower standing than full-fledged ministries.

Japan’s Constitution — drafted by U.S. occupation forces after World War II and unchanged since 1947 — bars the country from employing military force in international disputes and prohibits it from having a military for warfare. But Japan has been slowly shedding taboos linked to its war defeat. The government first interpreted the Constitution to allow the establishment of a 240,000-strong “Self-Defense Force” to protect itself. The government presented a further interpretation of its pacifist Constitution in 1992 that enabled the dispatch of troops to participate in international peacekeeping operations in non-combat roles. Japan sent warships to assist the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. And in 2004, the dispatch of 600 Japanese non-combat troops to help with reconstruction in Iraq was the first since World War II to a country where fighting is under way.

Upon taking over as prime minister in late September, Shinzo Abe said his priorities would be to revise the U.S.-imposed pacifist Constitution and eliminate the longtime ban on engaging in collective self-defense. Abe has now already upgraded the country’s defense agency to a full ministry, introduced “education reform” to provide for nationalist indoctrination in Japanese schools, and is promoting a referendum to rewrite the Constitution to allow Japan to again have a military in name. Japan already has one of the world’s biggest military budgets at Ľ4.81 trillion ($41.6 billion) a year.

PM Abe’s constitutional revision idea is focused mainly on eliminating the clause that bans the use of force as a means of settling international disputes. Although a world economic power, Japan has relied heavily on U.S. military might and largely deferred to the U.S. in foreign policy. “Now is the time for us to boldly revise this postwar regime and make a new start,” Mr. Abe declared in a key policy speech to the Japanese parliament in mid-January. He said a stronger deterrent is needed to the threat posed by neighboring North Korea, which recently sent shock waves through the region with ballistic missile launches and its first test of a nuclear device.

Only the small opposition Social Democratic and Communist parties opposed the elevation of the Defense Agency. The change gave the former defense Director-General, Fumio Kyuma the new title of “Defense Minister.” Ironically, just weeks after being installed in that role, Mr. Kyuma openly criticized the U.S. war in Iraq as “a mistake.” Kyuma, who previously supported Japan’s participation in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, made his remarks within hours after President Bush delivered his State of the Union address defending his plan to escalate the Iraq war.

Mr. Kyuma’s comments were at odds with his government’s previous support for the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” and the deployment of Japanese troops to Iraq — a move that was deeply unpopular among the Japanese people. Japan pulled all its troops back out of Iraq last year.

The U.S. State Department immediately lodged a protest at the Japanese embassy in Washington DC over Mr. Kyuma’s criticism, and PM Abe warned Kyuma to be careful about his words.

However, Mr. Abe’s push for constitutional revision faces intense opposition in Japan over concerns that the changes he wants may lead to extreme nationalism like that of the pre-1945 years, divert funds to military growth and away from domestic social projects, and allow the country to be pulled into dangerous missions backing the United States in the Middle East or elsewhere.

– edited from Agence France-Presse, The Associated Press and World Socialist Web Site
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2007