Koike Yuriko: Japan’s Condi?

Newsweek has some questions for Japan’s first national security advisor, Koike Yuriko [ja]. Unfortunately they’re none too illuminating. The point of the piece seems to be, “Wow, a female national security advisor? Say, that’s just like Condi!” I should be more forgiving. After all, the ground rules for the interview could have precluded serious questions.

But here’s the sum of the good info: Koike graduated from Cairo University and speaks Arabic and English. She opposes starting a debate over whether to go nuclear.

So what about it: Is she Japan’s Condoleeza Rice?

No, that’s impossible. The U.S. system has a long history, and its [NSC] has been staffed by impressive figures from academia. I’d like to serve as a national-security adviser with a broad perspective. We have a lot to learn from the U.S. system.

OK. So she’s modest too.

A Bit of U.S.–Japan History on Water-Boarding

In the United States, “water-boarding,” an interrogation technique considered by many (including myself) to be torture, is back in the news. Vice President Dick Cheney either said it was fine, or journalists misinterpreted his statement—depending on who you ask. I don’t think it’s terribly important what Cheney thinks, but a week and a half before a key election, it’s turned into big news.

I’m allowing this election-season pettiness to creep into this site because I haven’t seen anyone in Japan mention the U.S.–Japan history on water-boarding. Namely, a Japanese was convicted of war crimes for water-boarding a U.S. citizen after World War II. He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor. From the Washington Post via my friends at Think Progress:

[I]n 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.

This must be fuel for someone’s anti-Bush administration sentiment in Japan. Possibly these guys, from Sept. 11, 2004, on Omotesando:

A Progressive Response to North Korea

This piece originally appeared on CampusProgress.org. It outlines the argument set forth by Joe Cirincione, the head of national security and international policy at my day job—the Center for American Progress.

Ask the Expert: North Korea’s Nuclear Test

A progressive response to North Korea’s actions.

By Graham Webster
Thursday October 12, 2006

North Korea’s report of a nuclear test represents a failure of U.S. nonproliferation policy under President George W. Bush. Campus Progress recently interviewed Joe Cirincione, an expert in nuclear proliferation and senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. In a separate article on the American Progress website, Cirincione outlines a progressive response to North Korea’s actions. Here, based on additional discussion with Cirincione, are a few quick points and answers to common questions.

How big of a threat is North Korea?

North Korea’s missiles may possibly have the capacity to reach Alaska; they definitely can reach South Korea, China, and Japan, among other countries in the region. But the test of a nuclear explosive device, while a dangerous escalation of North Korea’s nuclear confrontation with the United States and other nations, isn’t a major escalation of the threat to the United States in military terms.

The device that exploded underground had a relatively small yield for a nuclear explosive, and it is likely too large to fit on a missile. North Korea could potentially offer a nuclear bomb to a terrorist group, but the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il knows that any attack—whether direct or through a terrorist supplied by his regime—would, in Cirincione’s words, produce a “swift, certain, and devastating” response by the United States.

How did it come to this?

A few days before North Korea’s claim of a test, Cirincione explained to Campus Progress how the world confronted nuclear proliferation since World War II, and how the Bush administration’s policy undid years of U.S. and international efforts:

“You know, for 50 years Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives have worked together to build this interlocking system of treaties and export control regimes and bilateral agreements that have slowed, if not altogether stopped the spread of these weapons. In 1960 President Kennedy was worried that if we didn’t do something, there would be 15, 20, or 25 countries. But we did something. We designed and implemented the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We put all these other arrangements in place. As result, there are only eight nuclear weapons states today, with possibly North Korea being the ninth. That’s nine too many, but it’s a lot better than 20 or 25.

“When the Bush administration came in, they rejected this whole approach. They wanted to replace negotiations with forced regime change. They said the problem isn’t the weapons, it’s bad guys with the weapons. So they were going to go off and knock-off the bad guys. Iraq was the first implementation of that strategy. It was supposed to be the beginning of a process of serial regime change. First Iraq, then Iran, and then we get to North Korea. That’s the way we settle the problem. It was okay for our friends to have nuclear weapons, like Israel, India, or Pakistan, but it’s not okay for our foes. Who was going to decide? We were. We would pick the good guys and let them have the weapons; we would punish the bad guys.

“The problem with that is obviously this is a very expensive and failed strategy. The mess we made in Iraq is just part of the problem. In the last five years Iran and North Korea have made more progress in their programs than they made in the last 10. This policy has actually accelerated proliferation. It’s convinced other countries that they better get nuclear weapons faster.”

OK, so the administration’s policy failed. We’re getting pretty used to that these days. What can the United States do from its weakened position to contain and roll back North Korea’s potential threat?

According to Cirincione, the United States should start at the U.N. Security Council with a strong condemnation and follow up with multilateral sanctions that hurt North Korea’s leadership and the country’s trade. Then U.S. diplomats should let newly-selected U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who is himself from South Korea, mediate in the international response, as he has already offered to do.

If multilateral pressure doesn’t work, what can the United States do directly?

The United States can strike a deal with North Korea just like the one it made with Libya, which means dealing directly with the Kim regime. If you don’t remember the deal with Libya, the United States gave the country diplomatic recognition, security assurances, and economic incentives in exchange for the total elimination of Libya’s nuclear program. The policy was inexpensive, no one was killed, and it worked—more than we can say for the process of “disarming” Iraq.

What about North Korea’s neighbors? Is this going to create an arms race in the region?

The new Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who before taking office had been somewhat more hawkish than his predecessor, has already said that Japan will not develop nuclear weapons in response to North Korea’s actions. But in a different situation, Japan certainly has the capacity to arm itself.

Indeed, Cirincione told Campus Progress that Japan already has the fuel: ” Japan’s nuclear facilities are under close international inspection. But the problem is that they separated out from their spent fuel, coming out of their reactors, about 10,000 kilograms of plutonium. It takes about five kilograms of plutonium for one nuclear weapon. That’s 2,000 weapons.” Given a more robust threat, Abe could potentially change his mind, and South Korea and Taiwan could decide to seek nuclear capacity as well. It is this very compulsion to keep up with one’s nuclear neighbors that makes an international nonproliferation regime so important.

Feeling Demographic Squeeze, Japanese Colleges Turn to Chinese Market

In an “aging society,” it stands to reason that some colleges and universities might have trouble attracting students in Japan. And, as we all know, institutions of higher learning need revenue like any other organization. For some schools, reports Tak Kamakura of Bloomberg News, this means recruiting Chinese students to fill classrooms.

Kamakura writes, “While 52 percent of Japanese 18-year-olds are attending college this year, up from 46 percent a decade ago, their numbers dropped to 1.4 million in 2005 from 2.1 million in 1992, according to the Education Ministry.”

Chinese diplomats educated in Japan have traditionally played a key role in the two countries’ understanding. When a new generation of internationally-educated bureaucrats and diplomats come to power in China and Japan, a generation for whom World War II is history, not memory, perhaps regional tensions will subside.

Reporters are fond of noting that Abe Shinzo is the first Japanese prime minister to be born after 1945, and already he has shown better cooperation with China and South Korea than his predecessors. This may be a coincidence, but it could reasonably also be a source of hope.

Cross-posted on the Campus Progress Blog.

What About the Trade Imbalance, Indeed

Is China growing at the United States’ expense? That is one of the most vexing questions about China for U.S. politicians, and that’s the question Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley and Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute are at work debating on cfr.org.

Short answer? Well, they’re not giving a short answer. In Roach’s opening argument, “Don’t Scapegoat China,” he argues that the United States needs to get its house in order before it can blame China. He says the culprit, by in large, is “a dearth of domestic saving” in the United States. “Lacking in domestic saving, the United States must import surplus saving from abroad in order to grow—and run massive current-account and foreign trade deficits to attract the capital,” Roach writes.

Lachman comes back with an indictment of China’s undervalued currency. The United States should save more, he agrees, but “it will also need a much cheaper dollar to promote its exports and to discourage its imports.” And China will have to let its currency reflect market value for that to happen. So in addition to better U.S. policy, Lachman says China will have to undergo currency reform for the good of everyone.

Roach counters that Lachman’s opinion reflects the Washington Consensus (which is more or less the idea of neoliberal reform), which he summarizes thus: “Sure, we in America need to fix our deficits—and maybe some day we will—but China needs to get its act together now.”

A small wrench landed in their civil debate today. Without specific reference to the currency issue, the Chinese Commerce Ministry has said it will attempt to eliminate China’s trade surplus in the next four years.

Until 2010, the world’s fourth-largest economy will target 10 percent annual growth in foreign trade, down from 24 percent growth in the first half of the decade, the commerce ministry said in a statement on its website Wednesday.

In the next four years, China will target a new foreign trade strategy where exporters abandon the blind pursuit of growth for growth’s own sake in favor of “quality growth,” the ministry said.

My question for those with a better understanding of economics is: How will this policy, if executed as advertised, affect the feasibility of revaluing the currency?

Is the Nuclear Unity Hiding Ongoing Friction?

Dozens of reporters are working the North Korean nuclear test story. Dozens more, some on double duty, are covering Abe Shinzo’s tour through China and South Korea. I won’t try to duplicate or aggregate their work, but some of the key links appear at right in my Google Reader feed.

But there’s something going on behind the headlines that we shouldn’t overlook. Some commentators are hailing the current “fence-mending” tour and the region’s unanimity against North Korea’s actions as a sign of a new era in Japan’s relations with its neighbors. Maybe, but the jury is still out on the Abe administration.

When pressed by an opposition politician, Abe said he would not change the Murayama Statement of 1995, in which Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi expressed regret for Japan’s military actions during World War II on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war’s end. “I have no plans of creating a new statement that would rewrite what the 1995 statement said,” Abe said. “That statement was approved by the then Cabinet so it still lives on with my Cabinet.”

But just because Abe won’t redress the Murayama Statement doesn’t mean he won’t step on diplomatic toes. What’s certain is that he is being careful not to cross China and South Korea early on. During Abe’s visit to China, Hu Jintao raised Yasukuni then said obliquely, “I hope you will work to remove political obstacles.” Far from resolutely conciliatory, this statement echoes statements by Hu and others in the Chinese government during the Koizumi era, when phrases like “responsible view of history” were code, meaning, “Don’t go to Yasukuni, Jun!”

But the visit did go smoothly, and the leaders’ agreement that a North Korean nuclear test would be “unacceptable” dominated the agenda. Since the nuclear test apparently occurred while Abe was in the air on the way to South Korea, the nuclear issue—and the corresponding unanimity—promises to dominate Abe’s time there. There is little potential for the emergence of Japan–Asia disputes on this trip, but that doesn’t mean it’s clear sailing forever.
Asahi Shimbun notes that Abe has a history of differing statements on the Murayama Statement and another political statement on the “comfort women” issue:

Abe previously had been similarly vague on his own views toward Murayama’s statement. In February, when Abe was still chief Cabinet secretary, he offered a different interpretation of Japan’s actions during World War II.

“There is also the issue of how to define a war of aggression,” Abe said at a Lower House Budget Committee session. “I think the situation is one in which no set definition has been decided on by scholars.”

Abe had taken a similar path regarding the [Chief Cabinet Secretary] Kono [Yohei] statement that acknowledged the involvement of the Imperial Japanese Army in the management of brothels for “comfort women.” The [1993] statement accompanied a report by the government on the “comfort women” issue.

In 1997, Abe joined a group of young Diet lawmakers that took issue with Japan’s history education.

At a session of the Lower House Audit Committee’s second sub-committee in May 1997, Abe criticized Kono’s statement as being based on false information.

On Thursday, Abe said his Cabinet will now inherit that statement.

Abe has already changed his historical interpretations to fit the political tides. It is therefore hard to predict what he will do in the future.

White House in Support of Abe’s Asia Visits

The White House came out in support of strong ties among East Asian states yesterday, but emphasized Japan–South Korea ties more than better relations between Japan and China.

I read the reference to the United States’ “two key allies in East Asia, Japan and the ROK” as a way of emphasizing the continued distance between the United States and China. The statement could easily have been worded to emphasize strong ties between all three without introducing this element.

The full statement:

President Bush is encouraged by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s planned visit to the People’s Republic of China on October 8 and to the Republic of Korea (ROK) on October 9. The United States places utmost importance on close cooperation between its two key allies in East Asia, Japan and the ROK. Stronger bilateral ties enable closer trilateral U.S.-Japan-ROK cooperation, which only strengthens our mutual partnerships based on common values of democracy and freedom. Cooperation between Japan and China is also critical to dealing with the common challenges we face in Asia. Strong relations among these key nations in Asia can enrich the vibrant social and economic exchanges already taking place, and contribute to the region’s security.

The President supports the efforts of Prime Minister Abe and looks forward to continuing the strong relationship between the United States and Japan for the cause of peace, prosperity, and freedom in Asia and the world.

Obvious Headline of the Month

From the Associated Press comes a new penetrating analysis:

“1937 invasion hinders China-Japan ties.”

It’s actually a decent article for a general audience. Just not exactly an insightful headline from the AP desk.