Raining on Mr. Abe’s parade

FOR MOST PEOPLE, the events of the Second World War are water under the bridge. For many in Northeast Asia, however, the water that passed under the bridge 60 years ago keeps rippling down the river into the sea to be heated by the sun, turn into vapor, rise to the atmosphere, condense into clouds, fall as rain on everyone, and once again pass under the bridge in what seems to be an endless cycle of nature.

The latest person without enough sense to come in out of the rain and avoid a drenching was Japan’s (now) former Defense Minister, Fumio Kyuma. As everyone who follows Japanese politics knows, Kyuma last week explained away the American use of nuclear weapons on Japan during the war as sho ga nai. This phrase is routinely translated as “it can’t be helped”, but to fully understand the ensuing uproar, one has to realize that the expression shares more than a little of the same attitude as the French, “C’est la vie”, accompanied by a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.

Others have commented that only in Japan could someone get in such trouble for stating what seems to be obvious, but that position becomes obvious only in direct proportion to one’s distance from Japan—and exponentially so if one moves toward the countries west of Japan.

Mr. Kyuma is from Nagasaki, so his proximity to Ground Zero meant he really should have known better. While I generally agree with his statement, my position is not as cut and dried as it once was. Try reading some of the survivors’ testimonies from NBC radio in Nagasaki, linked on the sidebar at right, and you’ll see what I mean. For example:

“As time passed my burned flesh began to rot and fall away. I was lying on my front, so the flesh fell down at my sides and piled up there. Every day they had to come time and time again to clean that up. I think I suffered a lot more of this loss of flesh than the others. When you get a serious wound like the one I had, you would usually expect insects to gather. But at the worst stage, not even flies would come near me. My body smelled of burns and rot. Even now I can still recall that smell; it is always in the back of my mind. Every day I called out in pain and agony for someone to kill me. It took 3 years and 7 months before the doctors said I was well enough to leave the hospital. Most people would be happy to hear that news, but I didn’t feel anything like that at all. I only felt unease thinking about how people would look at me when I went back out into society with this body.”

Or

“A lot of glass shards had penetrated the victims’ lungs. I’m not exaggerating, but even without using a stethoscope, you could hear the glass shards jangling against each other every time they took a breath. There were many patients like that. Even now there’s no explanation for how the glass shards got in their lungs that way. …When the first truck came and I shone the flashlight to look at them, even the non-commissioned officers, who had seen all kinds of terrible wounds, suddenly froze in their tracks and couldn’t move. It was so terrible even they were shocked by the sight. We couldn’t just stand there, so all the officers climbed on the truck and began bringing down the patients, and finally everyone else followed them. You can tell how horrible it must have been when non-coms who had proven their heroism in battle were frozen stiff at the sight.”

Airily asserting that the atomic bombing of Japan was obviously the best course of action no longer comes so easily to me. It may in fact have been the best course of action, but the question does not lend itself well to armchair theorizing.

Mr. Kyuma followed the tradition of samurai who disgraced their masters by falling on his sword, and his resignation highlighted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s single glaring weakness since taking office—poor Cabinet minister selection. The ramifications of his personnel decisions have gotten him in more trouble with the electorate than anything he has done or said himself: in just 10 months, Mr. Kyuma is the second member to have resigned in disgrace, while another committed suicide, and Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa nearly got bounced when he referred to women as “baby-making machines”. (I saw the film clip of his comment and it was apparent that he thought he was being amusing in the clueless way that old men sometimes have. The Japanese call this an oyaji gyagu. I’m sure the prime minister wound up wanting to gag him.)

Actually, I almost choked myself when I heard the prime minister’s selection as his replacement: Yuriko Koike, one of his national security advisors.

My first impression was that Mr. Abe ripped off a page from former Prime Minister Koizumi’s playbook by pandering to female and independent voters less than a month before a difficult election test.

Some Japanese commentators have remarked that Mr. Koizumi always felt comfortable intellectually with women—his sister was one of his closest advisors—and this comfort was reflected in the people he recruited for his own Cabinet and as candidates in the last Lower House election. While that might be true, it is just as valid to say that his selections were equally derived from a sense of political cynicism and calculation.

To repay Makiko Tanaka for her campaign efforts on his behalf, and to take advantage of her popularity among women, Mr. Koizumi tapped her to become his first foreign minister. It would be difficult to imagine a more undiplomatic choice than Ms. Tanaka, a combination of bulldozer and prima donna incapable of keeping a civil tongue in her head. When the inevitable occurred and she was forced out of office, he replaced her with another woman, Yoriko Kawaguchi. It was widely assumed in Japan, however, that Ms. Kawaguchi was window dressing, while the de facto foreign minister was Chief Cabinet Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

When the former prime minister dissolved the Lower House and called for a snap election to determine the fate of his postal privatization plan, he recruited attractive and articulate women from throughout the country to run on his platform and take out the politicians who opposed him. His gamble paid off—most of them won seats, and his party, the LDP, was rewarded with its second-highest postwar majority. One of those women was Ms. Koike, the new Defense Minister. (The link is to a YouTube video of a news report in English with typically abominable pronunciation of Japanese names. Competent Japanese pronunciation can be achieved with five minutes of practice. That suggests how seriously the broadcast media takes their jobs.)

She was already a Lower House member, but Mr. Koizumi prevailed upon her to switch from a Hyogo Prefecture seat to run in a Tokyo district, and she won there, too.

Facing a tough battle in this month’s election, did Mr. Abe choose to limit the fallout from yet another ministerial blunder by selecting the, yes, attractive and articulate Koike to be Japan’s first Defense chief? He’s going to need the female and independent vote.

Yet one of the long-standing desires of Mr. Abe’s party has been to elevate the body handling national defense affairs to a Cabinet-level ministry. The prime minister was the man who finally turned that desire into a reality just a few months into his administration.

Is he now so desperate to survive that he would vitiate this real achievement by entrusting the ministry to a woman whose professional career has largely been spent as a television news reader? There is nothing in Ms. Koike’s background to suggest any expertise in national security issues, her former position as a national security advisor notwithstanding. After spending about 15 years in front of the camera, she won a seat in Japan’s Upper House, which she left a year later when she won election to the Lower House. She shuffled through three small right-of-center parties before finally joining the LDP, and was eventually tapped as Minister of the Environment (a post also held by the former Foreign Minister Kawaguchi; perhaps it has become the entry-level Cabinet position for females). She later served as Minister of State for Okinawa and the Northern Territories.

The new Defense Minister also has written several books, one of which is titled Climbing the Pyramid in a Kimono, and she is said to be the person who initiated the practice of wearing more informal clothing to work during Japan’s sweltering summer weather, a trend known as Cool Biz.

Even more discouraging were Ms. Koike’s remarks after being named to the post. NHK radio broadcast parts of her first interview, in which she talked about her difficulty in deciding what to wear for her investiture. She also mentioned that she wanted to make the ministry a comfortable place to work for women.

Impeccable fashion sense and a sensitivity to gender equality in the workplace may be important for defense ministers in Europe, where politicians no longer pretend to take national security seriously, but those are not the priorities one wishes to see in a person who would have a major policy voice if Kim Jong-il were to start gassing up a Taepodong on the launch pad.

Of course she was asked about the same issue that got Mr. Kyuma in trouble, and the new Defense Minister replied that the atomic bombings were “unacceptable from a humanitarian viewpoint”.

In light of Japanese behavior during the war, the pending comfort woman resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the rain dances periodically revived by Chinese and Korean demagogues, the veteran broadcaster might have chosen better language for her script.

On second thought, however, all this might be an overreaction. Ms. Koike was not selected for her knowledge in this area, but that’s often the case with Cabinet appointments in Japan. The real work is done by the vice-minister, who is usually a career bureaucrat with field-specific expertise. The Cabinet minister’s job is to serve as a liaison between the bureaucrats and the politicians.

Ministerial assignments also are distributed to up-and-coming politicians for on-the-job training to learn about the workings of a particular ministry and the issues that it handles. The knowledge gained will be beneficial if the minister eventually climbs to the top of the political ladder.

That might be what has happened here. Ms. Koike is widely seen as the woman with the best chance of becoming Japan’s first female prime minister, so it behooves her to discover which end of a howitzer is which sooner rather than later. Yet one wonders whether she would have been chosen for the job had not an election critical to Prime Minister Abe’s political life loomed on the horizon.

There is no question that Mr. Abe’s actions to date as the head of government have been motivated by his sense of idealism, regardless of whether or not one shares his ideals. He already has achieved noteworthy legislative successes for issues he feels strongly about: the Constitution, defense, and education. The only step he has taken so far that did not sit well with the electorate was his readmission to the party of the rebels whom Prime Minister Koizumi booted out during the postal privatization debate—a move that Mr. Abe personally disagreed with, but publicly supported.

While the Koike appointment could indicate a certain LDP cynicism about contemporary Japanese voters, it is in accord with a long-standing Japanese political tradition that is not without merit—a tradition that even the celebrated maverick Junichiro Koizumi followed. Nor is it something that a ruling party in any other democracy hasn’t already done.

Perhaps the best approach is to take the attitude of the now-departed Fumio Kyuma–sho ga nai—and hope that Ms. Koike is a quick study.

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