An Appreciation Of Green

Just in case anyone who read my post of yesterday thinks I am down on Dr. Michael Green, I am not. In the two-part interview he has given to Peter Ennis ( Part I , Part II ) he demonstrates his incredibly fine-grained knowledge of the political arena, policy structure and technical demands constraining the operations of the Japan-U.S. alliance. The reader may not like the assumptions Green and his counterparts make (the nonchalance in Abe's justification of reinterpretation over revision takes the breath away) but knowing that the PM, his advisor and military planners on both sides are thinking ante- and not just post-facto is reassuring.

Underappreciated also is "Japan is Back: Unbundling Abe's Grand Strategy," the analysis Dr. Green produced for the Lowy Institute (Link). I am eternally grateful for the devastating anecdote (in the "Values, History, and The Korea Problem" section) on the effect Abe's weekend golf partners have on the PM's thinking.

And yes, the above statement is true, too. My favorite opera is also by a guy named Green, for good measure.

Rex Omnis Qui Videt, Shinzo Abe Est

© Jeff Cable Photography

O Fortuna!
Velut luna
Statu variabilis!

O Fortune!
Varying in state
like the Moon!

- Carl Orff, Carmina Burana (1935-36)

Yesterday morning I was seated in the far left side of the Ascot banquet hall of the Hotel Okura. From out of the dark on the far right, avoiding a piece of equipment dropped in his path (the special police had something to say about that afterward) walked in Abe Shinzo, the prime minister of Japan.

Or at least that is what my eyes, my program and everyone around me was telling me.

The man delivered a set speech for fourteen minutes and fifteen seconds, then sat down in an armchair answering questions from the chairman of the day's proceedings for another ten and a half minutes.

I have had Abe Shinzo in my line of sight since October 2005, when I attended a conference on Japan's defense at the hotel nearest the Kantei. Abe, the then Chief Cabinet Secretary, was the keynote mealtime speaker.

The speech then was unimpressive. The phrase best describing its delivery: "still wet behind the ears."

Halfway through Abe seemed to lose himself, using the expression ware-ware ("we" "us") to explain what his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke was doing during the build up toward the signing of the revised Security Arrangements between Japan and the United States.

I turned to my tablemate (Dr. Richard Samuels of MIT) with a look on my face of "Did Abe Shinzo just refer to himself as a comrade-in-arms of his grandfather during the Ampo struggle, when he was all of six years old?"

I had Abe Shinzo right in my face every day during his first year as prime minister. I recall the expression of utter, contemptuous boredom on his visage on last day of the Diet session, as he sat on the dais watching vote after railroading vote in the House of Councillors plenary session, the opposition having left the chamber (except for the Communists, who stayed) after the insult of the morning votes -- and the look of his eyes, visible just over the shoulder of a desperate and sweating SP, as he was driven to a specially prepared ward in the Keio University Hospital just seven weeks later.　(Link)

I have watched him on a daily basis in the fifteen months since his return to the premiership: struggling to remember his routines, spluttering in Diet interpellations on the simplest of questions, mawkishly flailing his way through some simply embarrassing speeches. (Link)

That man, the Abe Shinzo I know, or thought I knew, did not show up at the Japan Summit 2014.

Someone else did.

The person called Abe Shinzo at the dais and in the armchair yesterday was not Abe Shinzo, grandson of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, grandnephew of Prime Minister (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Sato Eisaku. He was Abe Shinzo, Prime Minister of Japan, President of the Liberal Democratic Party -- pure and simple. When he sat down in the armchair to answer the hard ball questions thrown at him by The Economist's Asia chief Dominic Ziegler, throwing them right back at his interrogator when when answering was not in his interests ("Since what you are asking pertains to what tactics my country will be using [at the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations] I obviously cannot provide details") -- Abe owned that chair like I have never seen any Prime Minister of Japan own a piece of furniture. Not quite a Vladimir Putin slouch -- but Abe still sat in that chair as if he had brought it with him from home.

This was not your "wet behind the ears" botchan, acting out the role of prime minister with the shadow of imposture looming over him. Those who still look at Abe Shinzo that way are living in the past -- and it might as well be the distant past.

Was Abe's astonishing poise, humor and self-confidence all an act?

Maybe. But then he and his handlers should be triply congratulated for having him put on this act in front of not just the domestic and international news media but an overflow crowd of the world's investment community -- at a time when Abenomics in need of a PR boost...and furthermore on the eve of an incredibly important official visit by U.S. president Barack Obama.

If the Abe Shinzo who showed up yesterday meets an Obama delegation believing that he has to ingratiate himself to them, then the Americans are going of find out what the phrase "hitting a brick wall" means.

Failure at the final push for a TPP agreement this weekend? Abe Shinzo will not give a damn -- and nobody around him will either.

Abe's Cabinet is enjoying an insane 60% support rating (latest Kyodo News poll). His party holds the commanding heights in the Diet, the policy debate and the public's imagination. The number of persons answering the question of "Why do you support Prime Minister Abe?" with the plaintive and honest, "Because there is no other suitable person around" is climbing. "Because there is no other suitable person around" is indeed now the most common answer to the question of why voters support the PM, outdistancing the "high expectations for the economy" response (29% of respondents versus 21% again in the latest Kyodo poll).

And now even the Chinese and the South Koreans are trying to make nice. (Link)

Abe Shinzo 2.0, Spring Edition is so comfortable in his own skin he is even letting his beloved hair go, allowing the gray to show.

Fortune.

Changeable like the Moon.

Indeed.


Later - provisional translation of the Prime Minister's speech to The Economist Japan Summit 2014: "Japan towards 2020: time to get started." (Link)

--
Partial reproduction of photo image of 15 April 2014 "blood moon" by professional photographer Jeff Cable. Click here for the original image and here to read the explanation of how it was created.

Photo image of Abe speaking at the Japan Summit 2014 courtesy JapanRealTime.

AMPO 2

Update @ 19:00 - Using the majority it holds in the House of Councillors, the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic and the New Komeito voted down the motion of censure against Consumer Affairs Minister Mori Masako. In a further harassing action to prevent consideration of the Official Secrets Bill, the Democratic Party of Japan has submitted a motion of no confidence in the House of Representatives. The motion has no hope of passage. However, all House of Representatives action is suspended until the no confidence measure is voted down.

-----

It is so wonderful being wrong.

Despite or perhaps because of an unsightly railroading of the Official Secrets Bill through committee of the House of Counicillors, the goverment had to abandon its plans of voting on the bill in plenary session today. Faced with the procedural blockage of the submission of a motion of censure of Minister of Consumer Affairs Mori Masako, the secrets bill's sherpa, the ruling coalition has decided to extend the Diet session to the 9th, in order to have the extra time necessary to pass the bill.

The extension has risks for the goverment. Public protest against the bill has been rising at an exponential rate, with long-dormant civil society suddenly finding a reason to wake up and say "No" to Abe & Company. Performing artists ("Yoshinaga Sayuri!" the scandal rags shouted yesterday, an indication of the government's peril, having roused Japan's greatest actress to come out forcefully against the law), writers, lawyers and local and prefectural assemblies (Okinawa's prefectural assembly joined Fukushima's yesterday in passing a motion against the bill) are finding common cause against the incipient law.

This could be a wild weekend - with possible burgeoning marches and demonstrations.

If the Abe government prevails in the passage of the bill on the 9th, it may find the victory Pyrrhic. It has taken its eye off the economy and economic policy -- its supposed most important foci. It has given a skeptical public a reason to fear and loathe the Liberal Democratic Party. Come the next election, the LDP and its disgraced ally the New Komeito may find themselves again on the street -- this only after an election in July that made them seem bullet proof.

As for Abe himself, he must imagining himself leading the second coming of the Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements, with the him replaying the role of his grandfather, dragging a kicking and screaming country into a new era of security and prosperity.

If does, he has fallen prey to the worst of vices of any leader: believing his own PR nonsense.

The First Track Two

The article is uneven, zipping around some issues, such as, oddly, economic developments and the exclusion of American women from significant participation in the informal bilateral relationship. Nevertheless Professor Jennifer Lind has produced a readable account of the Kennedy Administration's reassessment and refoundation of the Japan-U.S. alliance, post-Ampo demonstrations. (Link)

It has been an age since I last read a "Kennedys as visionaries" piece...

Someone To Keep An Eye Out For

Kirk Spitzer is consistently the best journalist around for articles on Japan defense issues. (Link)

Not a particularly profound observation, perhaps...but since when has that ever stopped me from climbing atop my virtual beer crate?

The Washington Establishment Gets Worried, Boards Aircraft

Reading the below report makes me sigh:

In Asia Trip, U.S. Group Will Tackle Islands Feud
The New York Times

October 19, 2012 - The visit, backed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, follows a naval exercise by China on Friday to support its territorial claims and talk by a prominent candidate for prime minister in Japan about stationing personnel on the islands to improve security.

"As each side tries to assert its position, there is a risk of an inadvertent escalation of tensions and even confrontation,” said James B. Steinberg, who served as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration and is one of those on the trip. "The question is, how we get back to the relative stability in which the islands were in dispute but people were not trying to change facts on the ground."

Other members of the group include Richard L. Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush; Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser; and Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Pentagon and intelligence official in the Clinton administration.

The group is scheduled to meet with Japan's prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, on Monday and to visit with the Chinese leadership on Tuesday. China has not informed the group with whom they will be meeting.

The trip was arranged after Mr. Steinberg and other members of the group discussed what might be done to tamp down the tensions over the islands, which are called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

After the idea of a visit was pitched to State Department aides, Mrs. Clinton endorsed it, giving it a quasi-official status...

(Link)

Out of respect to the principle that if one has real problems with a person, one should keep one's opinions to oneself, I will refrain from saying what I think of these individuals. The exception would be Hadley, about whom I know nothing, save that he served on the Bush White House national security team, whose provision of nationial security was...mixed?

If the group is coming to the Prime Minister's Residence to deliver the message that the assertions heretofore made by the U.S. government -- that the Senkakus fall under the writ of the Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements -- are true only in theory, that would be something Prime Minister Noda needs to know immediately. As to any other ideas the quartet might present, the PM probably will listen to them and digest them -- not necessarily for what they say on the surface (one has to leave open the possibility someone in the quartet knows something about China the GOJ does not), but for what they say regarding the prejudices and preoccupations of the slices of America's transnational policy elite each member of the quarter of represents.

This Cabinet and the rest of the Japanese government are not the gang of uniformed innocents America's permanent foreign policy establishment believes them to be.

[An aside: one of the favorite demeaning tales with which members of the American policy elite regale themselves is the "amateurish" attempt by the Kan government to prosecute the Chinese fishing boat captain who rammed two Japan Coast Guard vessels off the Senkakus in 2010. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Kan government, the JCG and the Japanese judicial system behaved as true professionals, handling in an open, formal and neutral manner a situation no one had considered before as regards the Senkakus: an unprovocked attack on Japanese government personnel by a foreign assailant in an area under the administration of Japan. What was amateurish was rice-eating surrender monkey and then Chief Cabinet Secretary's Yoshito Sengoku's interference in the judicial process in the face of ham-handed Chinese pressure, then his denial of having done so.]

I cannot help but smile at the seeming pointlessness of the itinerary, at least as it is described in The New York Times. They do not know whom they are meeting in Beijing. I do not know what other folks do -- but when I walk out my front door I try to know in advance whom it is I am going out to meet. And even if the quartet did know, Beijing is in the midst of a leadership transition thrown into chaos by the Bo Xilai affair and Xi Jinping's mysterious disappearances. The quartet have no idea whether or not Madame Secretary of Ministry X will, come December, be Madame Nobody.

As for meeting with the Anaconda himself -- oh, why give the secret away...


Later - A much belated afterthought...but if there were a way for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to broadcast her lack of confidence in the skills and contacts of Ambassador to Japan John Roos and Ambassador to China Gary Locke, and all the other diplomats working in those embassies, it would be to give official recognition to an ad hoc Track II mission with only half an itinerary.

Where It's At At The Asahi

It may be just one long "just-so" story...but what a story!

Keio University professor Oguma Eiji offers The Asahi Shimbun's English-language AJW a rollicking, wide-ranging take on what's going on (Hurry up and copy, before link rot sets in).

Yes, Oguma's old university home page was way cooler.

The Morimoto Appointment

There are many stories to be chasing after.

There is the humanization of arrested Aum Shinrikyo fujitive Kikuchi Naoko in the news media and the implications the humanization of a mass murderer could have on the imposition of the death penalty in her case -- a given, considering the sentences handed out to the other members of the cult -- or even the death penalty's continued application. Can the state kill a person who has, during her life on the run, worked as an eldercare provider? Is there such a thing as redemption after committing great evil? And what of the National Police Agency's incapacity to capture anyone unless that person is handed to them on a platter* or in the case of Hirata Makoto, tries desperately (Link) to hand himself in on a platter? And what of the irony of the Kikuchi arrest coming the day after rededication of a monument to Sakamoto Kuniko -- the Sakamotos being the first of Aum's victims, whose killings, had they been investigated (it would not have been too hard. One of the cult members, horrified at what he and his fellow followers had done, left his Aum Shinrikyo badge at the scene of the crime) would have stopped the whole mad murderous machine in its tracks? (Link - J)

One talk about the flip side of the collapse of the economies in rural areas: that larger-than-one-would-imagine-in-a-country-with-a-population-as-big-as-Japan's tracts of uninhabited land are available for renewable energy resource projects -- nicely graded and leveled abandoned rice paddies, failed golf courses, unused rural economic development zones and perhaps even an underused airport or two make fine candidates for solar farms. (Link) **

However, the big story is the Cabinet reshuffle (Link) and the big story of the Cabinet reshuffle the appointment of academic Morimoto Satoshi as Minister of Defense.

For those looking for background on the appointment there is a wealth of material. Morimoto has been in the public eye for two decades as a public intellectual of the first rank, serving as the media's go-to conservative academic on matters such as the Japan-U.S. security alliance, the DPRK, defense systems, the revolution in military affairs and the rise of Chinese military power. If someone were looking for "gotcha" moments -- stunningly incorrect predictions, overblown rhetoric, rumor mongering, untenable analysis -- there are hundreds of hours of video and ten of thousands of words to troll through. Luckily for Morimoto and Prime Minister Noda, the organizations with the most reflexive tendencies to go trolling for items with which to embarrass Morimoto and the government -- the Yomiuri Shimbun and its Nihon Terebi terrestrial TV network and the Sankei Shimbun and its terrestrial network Fuji TV -- both have relied on Morimoto as the outside expert most likely to hew to their editorial line.

Morimoto is a hardline realist. He has little love for Article 9 and the limits placed upon Japan's ability to engage in multilateral security actions. A former Air Self Defense Forces (the most gungho of the services) officer and a graduate of the National Defense Academy, he has probably always dreamed of being Minister of Defense. Now he has the responsibility to be one. He will be the man in the cross hairs and the guy with his name on the dotted line when the government signs the contract for the acquisition of F-35 Lightning IIs, with the costs and delivery dates to be determined.

Morimoto has previous experience in government, having been appointed the first Special Advisor to the Minister of Defense after the position was created during the premiership of Aso Taro. As a former member of an LDP administration with no previously noted links to the Democratic Party of Japan, he represents a bit of wicked deviousness on Prime Minister Noda's part: after disgracing the position with two Ozawa Ichiro-nominated defense ignoramuses -- whom the LDP had the House of Councillors censure -- he gives the country a defense minister about whom the LDP can raise not a peep of protest.

Morimoto, despite his defense smarts, comes into office with severe handicaps that will limit his ability to transform his own ideas into action. First, he is a non-politician: he will facing the bureaucracy naked, without even a political secretary to back him up. Such support as he will enjoy will come from the Prime Minister's Residence (the Kantei) and in the person of the man who appointed him. Second, the cost of acquiring the F-35 threatens to upset the balance between the ASDF and the already beset Ground Self Defense Forces and the proud and dominant Maritime Self Defense Forces. After personnel costs and procurement costs, Morimoto will have little to spend on actual operations or any expansion of operations he might press the government to consider.

The appointment of Morimoto once again raises the question of whether or not Noda is his own defense minister. While he for once has less experienced in defense matters than person he has appointed as his defense minister, being only the son of an SDF man rather than a former SDF man himself, Noda still believes himself an expert in the nuts and bolts of defense policy.

The appointment seems more a tactical move rather than a strategic one. At a stroke Noda has neutralized potential LDP, right wing and center-right media and nationalist complaints about his support for a robust Japanese defense capability and outlook. Left-leaning and leftist news media have indeed been hopping up and down that the appointment of an academic rather than a politician means that the MOD bureaucracy and uniformed officers will be too powerful, undermining the concept of civilian control (shibirian kontororu***). He will win the applause of the American think-tank-political-appointee merry-go-round ridership, who will be thrilled by Morimoto's heretofore unshakable support of the Japan-U.S. alliance and his hardline security stances, ignoring Morimoto's rather weak bureaucratic and non-existent political support. He also removes from the commentariat one of his most potent and visible potential critics.

So Morimoto has the "right" views and the wrong attributes. We shall have to see which of the two initial conditions proves the more significant.


Later - And yes, I did notice. It was the first thing out of my mouth when I saw the Cabinet lineup in the paper this morning: "What? Again? Where are the women, you torpid [expletive deleted] sea slug?"


Later still - This post has been edited for greater clarity.

Way later - The Magnificent Kiwis have checked in -- Bryce Wakefield in Comments and Corey Wallace over at Japan Security Watch (Link) -- with far more intelligent things to say about the Morimoto apppointment than I have.


-------------------------------
* Until further notice, I will remain agnostic regarding the police story that a neighbor recognized Kikuchi and turned her in. The difference in appearances between the 1994 Kikuchi and the woman arrested on Sunday are significant (Link). It seems unlikely that anyone looking at her would see the chubby, smiling former runner, especially as Kikuchi, while living in Sagamihara, was, according to residents, always hiding her face by looking at the ground.

A more likely scenario is that her lover, exhausted by life on the lam, turned her in with a promise of clemency for himself and mercy for her, with police concocting the alert neighbor story to keep the public on the lookout for the last remaining Aum fugitive, Takahashi Katsuya.

** Note to The Economist: the title of your story about this subject has to be, "Huge...tracts of land..."

*** One critic whose opinions I value has said that whenever elites in this blessed land want to reduce the ability of citizens to understand certain concepts, they simply take the English word and transliterate it using katakana. The plague of katakana eigo terms in finance industry terminology (konpuraiansu, gabanansu...) would tend to support the "let's keep them in the dark" thesis.

TPP Thoughts

Corey Wallace, who is in Japan doing research for his doctorate, has taken a moment to consider the Trans Pacific Partnership and its role Asia-Pacific trade policy.
(Link).

I would not have very much to add, save that in Japan there is a striking contrast between the elite representations of the TPP and the grassroots reality of opposition to Japan participating in even discussions about joining the pact.

The recent approval of the Korea United States Free Trade Agreement was portrayed by the media as proof that Japan was in decline in world importance, even with its most important/only military ally the United States, and that the country had better gets its britches hitched on and get going on negotiating free trade pacts, if only to not be bested by the South Koreans.

The news media's immediate solution to this problem, a salve really, for a gaping national wound, is the TPP. Discussion of bilateral free trade pacts or Amaterasu forbid the Doha round is pushed aside. The TPP, and Japan's having to be on board in time for the Hawaii APEC meeting, is all that anyone in medialand is talking about.

However, on the ground, the forces for and against participation are more than evenly matched. While the manufacturer-heavy and highly influentially Nippon Keidanren business lobby considers participation in the TPP of the highest national importance, an array of equally powerful political players -- farmers cooperatives, the pharmaceutical industry, labor unions -- are against Japan entering into negotiations on the very reasonable basis that once Japan has jumped in it will find it very costly to jump out again, should the content of the trade pact become politically unworkable.

As for the situation in the Diet, the gap between elite-sponsored perceptions of the importance, indeed the inevitability, of the government moving forward on participation in TPP discussions and reality were illustrated in the first open meeting of the Democratic Pary of Japan's Project Team on the TPP. After the members of the project team spoke, the floor was opened up for comment. The first person to pick up the microphone said, in a matter fact tone, "Hello, I am Yamada Masahiko, head of the 181-member group of DPJ Diet legislators opposed to Japan's participating in TPP discussion."

Kerpow! That number, 181, is within shouting distance of 50% of the DPJ's Diet representation. When the breadth and intrusiveness of the partnership agreement is better known, the number of doubters in the Diet is likely to grow.

What is going on, therefore, is a race, with the big business lobby, in collusion with a media complex transfixed by the narrative of Japan's relative decline, pushing hard for Japan's participation, against a range of less flashy, so far less organized and reactionary elements with a strong grip on the elbows of many legislators. The pro-TPP side, citing the looming spectre of the APEC conference and the disappointment the United States will feel should Japan, already in the doghouse over Futenma, ruin President Barack Obama's houseparty not committing to participation in TPP discussions, is trying to panic the anti-TPP side into surrendering to the TPP's inexorable force.

Will the pro-TPP fail in bum rushing the other side? Probably. They got a big boost from the KORUS receiving U.S. Senate ratification. There are no further big boosts on the horizon, and with every passing day, the arguments of those opposed to TPP participation get sharper and the ranks of persons aware of the challenges freer trade may pose grow more numerous.

Then again, there is nothing like the possibility that the South Koreans will run right past Japan economically to get Japanese minds focused on getting back into the fast lane.


Later - Yes, of course Masahiko Yamada is a former Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Did one even have to ask?

Three Views of the Empire, Faded

Three recently published views of Japan's security situation that together make a passably good read.

From Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation , an outline of the exasperated, post-Alliance Manager era view of Japan which is probably shared by quite a number of important folks in Washington these days.

From Doug Bandow of the ideologically anti-imperialist conservative Cato Institute, a most antiseptic and honest solution to the Futenma crisis: "eliminate the unrealistic expectations engendered by the alliance on both sides" (Gosh, I wish had thought of that line).

Finally, from Terashima Jitsuro, until last year the man widely seen as the leader of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's security policy brain trust, a call for a complete rethink of basis of the Japan-U.S. security alliance. Terashima takes an advocacy stance, not a scholarly one, that is to say his assertions do not stand up to scrutiny. His claim that that U.S. bases cover an area 1.6 times the size of Tokyo City, for example, is at once meaningless and wrong. However, knowing Terashima's views one can get a sense of how some in this blessed land are fumbling (and I mean fumbling) toward a new, more autonomous, yet non-militarized national security policy.

Tentative Notes Upon the Hatoyama Government's Statement on Non-Interference in U.S. Strategic Planning

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk passes on some good news: the Government of Japan is not in favor of the U.S. military’s retention of the TLAM-N nuclear-armed cruise missile and the development of the RNEP earth penetrator. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference of January 22 of this year, it was revealed that Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya sent letters to both U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on December 24 of last year. In the letters FM Okada declares that the Government of Japan has no opinion as to the retention or abolition of these two systems, or any other systems for that matter. The letter to Secretaries ask only that the U.S. consult with Japan regarding the cancellation or development of systems, explaining how U.S. actions will affect deterrence.

In his post on the Okada Statement, Dr. Lewis shows confusion over Foreign Minister Okada’s dismissal of an inconvenient truth: Japanese diplomats did actually lobby the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States for the retention of these weapons systems.

Dr. Lewis sees a “non-denial denial” going on:

"It was reported in some sections of the Japanese media that, during the production of the report of the “Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States” released in May this year, Japanese officials of the responsible diplomatic section lobbied your government not to reduce the number of its nuclear weapons, or, more specifically, opposed the retirement of the United States’ Tomahawk Land Attack Missile – Nuclear (TLAM/N) and requested that the United States maintain a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP).

However, the Japanese Government is not in a position to judge whether it is necessary or desirable for your government to possess particular [weapons] systems. Hence, although the discussions were held under the previous Cabinet, it is my understanding that, in the course of exchanges between our countries, including the deliberations of the above mentioned Commission, the Japanese Government has expressed no view concerning whether or not your government should possess particular [weapons] systems such as TLAM/N and RNEP. If, hypothetically, such a view was expressed, it would clearly be at variance with my views, which are in favor of nuclear disarmament.

Nevertheless, if TLAM/N is retired, we hope to receive ongoing explanations of your government’s extended deterrence policy, including any impact this might have on extended deterrence for Japan and how this could be supplemented."

“Some sections of the Japanese media” almost certainly refers to Masa Ota’s excellent story, Japan lobbied for robust nuclear umbrella before power shift, in Kyodo News(November 24, 2009). Ota reported that senior Japanese diplomats told the Commission that the United States should retain the TLAM-N and develop low-yield nuclear options.

Although Okada seems to deny that Japan lobbied the Commission, it looks to be the classic non-denial denial. (It would be helpful to parse the original Japanese, but Okada admits to the exchanges, which in any event are listed at the back of the Posture Commission Report, denying only the expression of a “view concerning whether or not [the US] should possess particular [weapons] systems.”)

In any event, everyone in Washington knows that Mr. Akiba and Mr. Kanai expressed precisely such a view, even if it would be inconvenient, not to mention career-ending, for them to admit it now...

Looking at the original Japanese letter to Secretary Clinton, it seems that the source of the confusion is an imprecise translation. On the whole, the translation provided by the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center is fluid and correct. However, the translation of the face-saving pair of sentences beginning "Hence, although the discussions...” and ending ”...which are in favor of nuclear disarmament" contain what seem to be two significant errors in translation.

First, in the translated version, "the Japanese Government" is the subject of the subordinate clause in the first sentence. In the Japanese original, the subordinate clause has no subject due to the use of "the government of our country as itself" (Wagakuni seifu to shite) as a subordinate clause topic identifier and the sly replacement of the normal robust construction nobeta koto ga nai with the more diffuse nobeta koto wa nai. Under normal circumstance switching “wa” for “ga” would be a style matter, an affectation. Here, however, the writer seems to be intentionally choosing the smudgy nobeta koto wa nai construction. He/She is very careful to switch back to the robust "ga" form in the next sentence (“nobeta koto ga atta") when talking about the reality that Japanese diplomats did indeed make such requests.

Second, the words moshi and kari ni are translated “if, hypothetically…” I am not sure to what extent the most popular online dictionary’s translation of the phrase “moshi kari ni” as “hypothetically” has affected the word choice here. As there is a comma in between moshi and kari ni these are separate clauses, the moshi indicating the introducation of a hypothetical and kari ni indicating the idea of “temporarily” or “tentatively” -- this rather than a repetition of the hypothetical established by moshi.

Introducing these ideas, the sentences read something more like:

"Hence, although the discussions were held under the previous Cabinet, it is my understanding that, in the course of exchanges between our countries, including the deliberations of the above mentioned Commission, it was never the case that views were expressed as being those of our government concerning whether or not your government should possess particular [weapons] systems such as TLAM/N and RNEP. If, in some tentative way such a view was expressed, it would clearly be at variance with my views, which are in favor of nuclear disarmament."

I think that this clears up the problem of attribution Dr. Lewis identifies.

I of course invite readers to show me I am talking out of my hat.

Later - The FAS Strategic Security blog has more on the Okada letters.

Later still - Fixed the broken link to the original MOFA document.

Surveiller et punir

If Michel Foucault were still alive, he would get a frisson at the government's latest idea for a means of preventing U.S. servicemen and Defense Department personnel from committing crimes:

Surveillance cameras.

Engage the Panopticon!

Let me see if I understand this.

The Marines (and sailors and soldiers) are here to protect the nation from its enemies...and yet we are going to go to the expense of putting up surveillance cameras all around the exteriors of the bases to keep an eye on those Marines (and sailors and soldiers) at all times...because they pose a threat to the local population.

At some point, the imposition of ever more layers of security measures to counteract the unintended deleterious effects of previously imposed security measures starts looking a bit...bizarre.