Southern comfort

PATTERN RECOGNITION is crucial to the successful conduct of foreign policy. Identifying, recognizing, and then anticipating recurring behavior eliminates the need to speculate about another party’s objectives and facilitates decisions on ways to respond to those parties.

Though it should be obvious that pattern recognition is a survival skill, some people continue to survive despite an inaptitude at spotting patterns that repeat so often they might as well be on a tape loop. One group of American politicians, for example, is incapable of recognizing the two or three patterns employed by Russians over the past few centuries, regardless of whatever state format the rulers in Moscow happen to be employing at the time. The inability of others to recognize the one and only pattern from North Korea causes wonderment at how they manage to cross the street unaccompanied.

The Japanese have become adept at pattern recognition because their nationhood has been in a state of suspended animation since the end of the Second World War, their most amicable neighbor is a Drama Queendom whose leaders view hysteria as a diplomatic trump card, and they are still in the process of scraping off a Constitution that contains the uplifting buncombe of entrusting national security to the goodwill of the peace-loving peoples of the world.

Then again, that part was written by some of those Americans unable to recognize Russian behavioral patterns.

Japanese pattern recognition skills are especially useful in bilateral ties with South Korea. The realization that they’ve seen it all before and know what happens next enables them to skip a few steps in the diplomatic process — particularly because they realize that doing nothing works splendidly.

Those skills have been useful again over the past year, as South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who entered office pledging a policy of realism and focusing on the future in foreign affairs, finally succumbed to the vapors in the penultimate year of his term. Perhaps he should be commended for resisting as long as he did.

Here’s how it started: During his first three years in office, Mr. Lee’s approval ratings settled in the 45-50% range, but started to side last year.

January 2011: 42.9%

February: 38.8%

March: 36.6%

April: 31.4%

June: Into the 20s

The figures were buoyed after the IOC announcement of 6 July that they had awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics to Pyeongchang, South Korea, but stalled around the 31% level. The Dong-a Ilbo commissioned a poll for this year’s April legislative and December presidential elections, which found that 48% of the respondents said they’d switch their vote from the previous ballot. People in their 20s supported the opposition Democratic United Party by 42.6% to 19.3%. More ominous for the ruling Saenuri/New Frontier Party was that even those 50 and older had switched allegiances.

The reasons were multitudinous and variegated. One was a severe outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease that resulted in the slaughter of 12％ of the nation’s pigs — some of which were buried alive — and more than 100,000 cattle. The losses from the unanticipated butchery were estimated at KRW 3 trillion (about $US 2.6 billion).

Another was that consumer prices rose 4.5% in February 2011, the highest increase since 2008, and continued to climb after that. The price of Chinese cabbage, essential for winter kimchee, skyrocketed by 94.6% in one year, while pork soared 35.1%, oil products 12.8%, and industrial goods 5.0%. Unemployment was at its highest level in 2010 since 2002; the official unemployment rate was 3.6%, but under the ILO standards used in Western countries and Japan, it was closer to 13%.

Wrote the Dong-a Ilbo on 7 March:

“The government is starting to hear criticism that it is amateurish, and they have no reply for that criticism”.

In addition, several large national projects boosted by the Lee administration were either defeated or abandoned, including a proposed canal across the peninsula (which would have partially traversed North Korean territory), and the construction of a new airport in the southeast part of the country. Further, a large oil development project in Kurdish Iraq has been de facto suspended, but not before a substantial amount of money had been invested in the enterprise.

The English-language media has been full of reports over the past year describing how some large Korean companies have overtaken their Japanese competitors, particularly in the field of consumer electronics products. Few of those reports examine the negative aspects of that story, however. Exports account for 43.4% of South Korean GDP, the highest percentage in the G-20, but the profits do not enrich the nation as a whole. Much of those exports are accounted for by inexpensive goods with low profit margins, and the real competitor nation is often China, not Japan.

The relative poverty rate for working class urban residents is 11.4%, up from less than 8% in the 1990s. A government-affiliated think tank estimates that 9.9% of households nationwide spend 40% of their income on debt repayment.

So: Widespread dissatisfaction due to the failure in domestic governance…the failure to respond to Pyeongyang’s sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of South Korean territory…the failure to improve the economy…

What is a South Korean government to do?

The Japanese have seen this pattern before. The South Koreans do what a failed South Korean government always does when its support craters:

Talk the comfort women talk!

*****

The groundwork for the Lee administration shift was laid in August 2010, when then-Prime Minister Kan Naoto, one of the luminaries of the local Blame Yourself First faction, slipped into his hair shirt and issued a statement on the 100th anniversary of the Japan-Korean merger:

“We again keenly reflect on our errors and (humbly) express our heartfelt feelings of apology for the immense damage and anguish we brought about through our colonial rule.”

Mr. Kan used the word “again” because the Japanese have repeatedly apologized to the Koreans, who repeatedly pretend they aren’t sincere. It is precisely what helpful Western commentators have repeatedly insisted that Japan should do to “heal the wounds” of a condition that lasted all of 35 years, ended 67 years ago, and was part of a world that no longer exists.

What the commentators repeatedly ignore, however, is the Korean response. One apology is enough in normal human intercourse, especially when it’s accompanied by the equivalent of 800 million 1965 U.S. dollars. Not on the Korean Peninsula, however — holding han grudges is more satisfying than forgiving and getting on with it. The Democratic Union Party response was not atypical: “It’s just a repetition of what they’ve said before, and nothing more than an apology for show.”

So much for Western commentators, and so much for Korean perceptiveness: Kan Naoto and his chief cabinet secretary at the time, Sengoku Yoshito, were the politicians most likely to give the Koreans what they really want — abject servility in perpetuity — and to congratulate themselves for that servility. They are also lilely to be the last leaders from Japan’s mea maxima culpa generation. That’s not looking gift horse in the mouth; that’s failing to recognize a gift horse when it nuzzles them.

President Lee was more conciliatory in those days. He praised the statement as a “step forward” on 15 August, though that praise presumes the Japanese are taking baby steps toward the servility sought. The same Koreans who think that Japanese apologies are insufficient also thought Mr. Lee’s response was insufficient. They asked if he was going to go along with the “phony apology”.

Two weeks later, at the end of August, it was announced that a Seoul-based group planned to build a memorial to the comfort women in front of the Japanese embassy. The construction was approved by the Seoul city ward where the embassy is located, on the recommendation of the health and welfare minister. The memorial depicts a young woman next to an empty bench. It is called The Monument of Peace.

Remember, this was after Mr. Kan apologized. Again.

That same month, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled the 1965 Basic Treaty between that country and Japan was “unconstitutional”, for whatever reason, though that has nothing to do with Japan. It’s just quasi-legal cover to repudiate a deal that legally stymies the rent-seeking of today’s leaders. Under the terms of that agreement, Japan paid South Korea $US 800 million, more than 600 million of which was an outright transfer of funds. The treaty specified that South Korea thereby relinquished the right of individual citizens to make claims on the government of Japan. President Bak Jeong-hui used part of the money to compensate some families whose property was confiscated by Japan, but gave no money to any of the comfort women.

The treaty also provides for the resolution of disputes by recourse to a neutral third party. If either side is dissatisfied with the terms of the pact, or with the response of the other party to their requests, they can employ a mechanism by which the dispute can be resolved by a neutral third party.

In September 2010, the South Korean Foreign Ministry asked the Japanese government to ignore the terms of the treaty and recognize individual claims. Yet in the 47 years since the treaty was signed, South Korea has never sought neutral third party resolution.

Such is the nature of the polity and political discourse in South Korea.

One year down the road, the foreign ministry said President Lee would broach the subject with Prime Minister Noda Yoshiko at their New York summit in September 2011. Mr. Lee seems not to have mentioned it then, but the South Korean government began preparations to have the matter discussed at the UN.

The next steps by both governments are as described in testimony in the Japanese Diet earlier this year.

Diet questioning

Yamatani Eriko, an upper house member of the opposition LDP, questioned both the prime minister and Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro in the Diet about the so-called Kono Declaration, a 1993 document that admitted state responsibility for the comfort women. It should be noted that in the following, Mr. Noda is speaking for himself, and Mr. Gemba is presenting the view of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Ms. Yamatani was once a member of the DPJ (the current ruling party), and was even in their Shadow Cabinet, but left after two years. She later served as an aide to LDP Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

Yamatani: (The next question) is about the so-called “comfort women monument” that has been erected in New Jersey, in the United States. The problem of the military and sexual matters is an extremely vexing one for all countries in every era. We must be modest before history, but we must also clearly explain what is not true and disseminate that explanation. I beg your pardon, prime minister, but I would like you to read four lines from the foreign ministry’s provisional translation.

Gemba: You asked that it be read as is, so I will: “We will fix in our memory the more than 200,000 women and girls abducted by the armed forces of the government of Imperial Japan during the period from the 1930s to 1945, which resulted in the violation of the human rights for these women, known as the comfort women, which no one should overlook.”

We have filed an objection about the construction of the monument with the appropriate people involved. This monument is in a town (in New Jersey) of about 17,000 people, of whom about one-third are ethnic Koreans. It has the highest percentage of ethnic Koreans of any city in the United States. Therefore, we will continue to monitor the situation and respond appropriately.

Yamatani: This question is addressed to the prime minister. The more than 200,000 women abducted on the intent of the Imperial Japanese government, is it a fact that they were abducted by the military?

Noda: More than 200,000 women abducted by the military…I do not think there any grounds (for this claim), including the numbers and the circumstances.

Yamatani: The only one without lobbyists in Washington is Japan. The South Koreans are tireless. (We should conduct) diplomacy by clearly explaining the facts as part of our foreign relations strategy. There is a statue of a girl in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, called the Monument of Peace. The weekly Wednesday demonstrations in front of the Japanese embassy to resolve the sexual slavery issue of the Japanese military began on 8 January 1992. The 1,000th demonstration was held on 14 December 2011. This peace monument was built to commemorate the spirit of the Wednesday demonstrations over their long history.

Diet members from the DPJ (i.e., Mr. Noda’s party) have taken turns participating in these Wednesday demonstrations. Private sector businesses at the time (during the war) submitted advertising in mass market publications that solicited comfort women. They specified the monthly salaries, the destinations, and the ages of the women sought. But there were no abductions, and there were no sex slaves. Answer, prime minister — was there Japanese military sexual slavery?

Noda: There are different explanations about the circumstances and the conditions, but if you ask whether this is an accurate record, I think there is a great divergence (from the facts). I also asked the president (Lee) to quickly have this monument removed.

Yamatani: But President Lee, during the Japan-South Korea summit in Kyoto on 17 December, said there would be a second and a third memorial. What explanation did you give him?

Noda: It is true that the president expressed his concerns about the comfort women issue to me, but I would prefer to refrain from commenting on what and how much he said. I clearly conveyed to him the Japanese position that the matter has been legally resolved.

Yamatani: That’s the Basic Agreement between Japan and South Korea. But morally speaking, we have provided money to the women from the Asian Women’s Fund. Successive prime ministers have apologized. Is your recognition of this state of affairs the same?

Noda: Successive governments have consistently said that the issue has been legally resolved with the 1965 treaty. Beyond that, another perspective is that the women have received private sector cooperation as humanitarian assistance under previous governments through the Asian Women’ Fund. It is a fact that follow-up efforts continue to this day.

Yamatani: No documents have been found indicating forced removal by the military or the authorities. A cabinet official testified to that effect in 1997, and a member of the government gave the same testimony in the Diet in 2007. Is the present Noda Cabinet in agreement with that?

Gemba: Basically, the government conducted an investigation. And (our position) is basically in view of the results of that investigation. As you say, no evidence has emerged, but I think we just can’t repudiate it.

Yamatani: What’s that supposed to mean?

Gemba: Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono’s statement says that businesses were subcontracted by the military to recruit the comfort women, and that is chiefly what happened, but there were many cases in which the women were gathered against their will, through cajolery or coercion. Also, the authorities and others were complicit in this. The Korean peninsula was under our rule at the time, and in general, the solicitation, transport, and management of the women were done in opposition to their will, through cajolery or coercion. That is my understanding of the Kono statement.

Yamatani: So there’s no proof, but you won’t repudiate it. That’s a strange answer. If this government is going to create all sorts of cabinet ministers, how about creating a minister for recovering the national honor?

Gemba: The government’s basic position is as recorded in the Kono statement.

The brass tacks

Ms. Yamatani didn’t mention another key part of the story. The South Korean government told the South Korean comfort women that anyone who accepted compensation from the Asian Women’s Fund in Japan would thereby become ineligible for South Korean government assistance.

One reason the foreign ministry is hesitant to disavow the Kono declaration — based in part on evidence that was found to have been fabricated — is that they realize the corrupted Western media will not report that half of the comfort women were Japanese, who certainly weren’t abducted. Nor will they report that the evidence is tainted when they can have and eat their J-school cake by dabbling at tabloid journalism on the legit and flashing the phrase “sex slaves”.

Journos that they are, they prefer the much larger 200,000 figure, though it is an estimate at the high end of the range, and the person who came up with it gave 50,000 as the low end of the range. (In other words, no one has any idea how many there were.)  Nor will they mention that the US Army knew all about the system in 1944.

This year

Kuroda Katsuhiro, the Seoul correspondent for the Sankei Shimbun, wrote an article for the April edition of the monthly Will in which he asserted that the recent South Korean conversion of the surviving comfort women into dashboard saints has rendered any solution to the issue impossible. No South Korean politician is capable of crossing the anti-Japanese elements in South Korea, which includes that country’s industrial mass media. The essence of his piece is that they have been made “sacred” and elevated into heroes of the independence movement against Japan.

Mr. Kuroda cited several examples. First, it will require special permission to remove the so-called Monument of Peace, which will not be forthcoming. All the comfort women who die now get full-scale obituaries with photos in the South Korean papers. President Lee gave a special address on 1 March, the Independence Movement Day holiday, which included attacks on Japan. This year, he also sent individual letters for the first time to the roughly 60 surviving comfort women. The letter said the issue was addressed “from the start to the finish” during the Kyoto bilateral summit meeting. The South Korean president referred to this issue as “more urgent than any other foreign policy question”. That would mean he considers it a matter of lesser urgency that North Korea shelled his territory and sunk a naval vessal during his term of office, killing both civilians and military personnel. But that was before the North Koreans began jamming the Global Positioning System of commercial and military air and sea traffic.

That would also mean his countrymen either agree with him or are too unconcerned about the truth to object.

Mr. Kuroda said he was startled to receive a call early one morning from a female reporter at the Munhwa Ilbo (Culture Daily). She informed him that the Dong-a Ilbo had attacked him the day before in an editorial titled, “Japan – Take Part in Discussions about the Comfort Woman Problem”. Half of the editorial, he said, was rehashed Japan bashing using comfort women as the stick. The other half was Kuroda bashing. He had already been savaged on the Korean Internet; one person thought the article was “another absurdity from Kuroda, the absurdity machine”.

Mr. Kuroda spoke to the reporter for half an hour, explaining both the official Japanese position and his view that the real problem is the activist groups and mass media who use the comfort women to brainwash the people and promote anti-Japanese sentiment.

She must have believed him. The woman’s next article for the Munhwa Ilbo had the following headline:

It’s South Korea’s Fault the Comfort Woman Issue Isn’t Resolved

The text noted that Japan had prepared financial compensation and apologies, including those from prime ministers, but the government of South Korea refused to accept them. Yet Mr. Lee still wants an apology.

She concluded:

“Hardline anti-Japanese sentiment caused this country to miss its chance.”

Mr. Kuroda concluded that she had more sense than the president of South Korea.

Reasonable people will say that allowances should be made for Mr. Lee in view of the difficulties of navigating the sometimes surreal, hothouse nature of public debate in South Korea. Until one reads this bit of guerilla theater pretending to be news:

South Korea wants Japan to take steps to address long-running grievances of elderly Korean women who suffered as sex slaves. Lee has strongly urged Japan to resolve the issue, stressing it is becoming increasingly urgent as most victims are well over 80 years old and may die before they receive compensation or an apology from Japan.

No allowances should be forthcoming for a politician who frames an issue in shrouds of mendacity.

The three issues

Lee Myung-bak publicly states there are Three Great Issues for the Korean People: Historical Awareness, Takeshima, and the Yasukuni Shrine.

Taking those from back to front, whatever happens at Yasukuni is the business of no one but the Japanese. Takeshima was Japanese territory illegally seized by force because the Koreans couldn’t convince the Allies it was theirs when the Treaty of San Francisco, which disposed of the conquered Japanese territory, was drawn up. The courageous sons of Jeoson knew they could safely snatch it because the Japanese/American Constitution prevented a Japanese response. Refer to the two articles on the masthead for more information.

Finally, let us agree with the South Korean president when he insists on Historical Awareness, because that is the real issue. Koreans themselves are all too aware of their history, and Mr. Lee must deconstruct it, revise it, and turn it inside out, because accepting that history would be emotional hemlock for the nation.

The Koreans know that some of their mothers and grandmothers were willing prostitutes for Japanese Imperial forces. How could they not? The newspaper advertisements for a then-legal activity still exist. So do articles in Korean newspapers in which Japanese authorities warn the public of unscrupulous Korean brokers.

They know the Japanese were the ones to bring them out of their Hermit Kingdom spider hole into the 20th century. They know there was a pro-Japan faction during the merger period, inspired not by the base motive of “collaboration”, but by a desire to join the modern world. They know some of their great-grandparents saw it as their version of the Meiji–period opening of Japan.

They know that roughly 90% of the Koreans who went to Japan did so voluntarily to seek a better life in same the way that Europeans emigrated to the United States in the previous century.

They know that some of their grandparents fought willingly in the Japanese armed services during the war, and that some even volunteered as kamikaze pilots.

They know that had Japan not stepped in when it did, it is possible they would all be speaking Russian now. They know another possibility is that they would have spent several more decades in darkness as black as the North Korean night, but without the gulags.

But at least their cousins in the north provide public education for girls. They know that was another Japanese innovation on the peninsula, too.

Perhaps most galling of all, they know that they were incapable of achieving independence on their own and owe it to the Japanese defeat in the war.

The intensity of contemporary Korean anger toward Japan is not derived from what Japan did or did not do. It is derived from what Korea did and did not do. The emotion is all the more intense because it is self-anger projected onto contemporary Japan.

As the Munhwa Ilbo reporter now understands, the issue of comfort women and all that it represents is no longer a Japanese problem. It is a Korean problem.

Indeed, in some ways, it always has been.

Afterwords:

* It would seem that the attitude toward international agreements south of the 38th parallel differs from the attitude in the north only in degree, not in kind.

* Nathaniel Branden wrote the following in Six Pillars of Self-Esteem:

“In addition to the “adult-self” that we all recognize as “who we are”, there is within ourselves a “child-self” — the living presence of the child we once were….But we may have repressed that child long ago, repressed his or her feelings, perceptions, needs, responses, out of the misguided notion that “murder” was necessary to grow into adulthood. This recognition led to the conviction that no one could be completely whole who did not reconnect with and create a conscious and benevolent relationship with the child-self. This task is especially important for the attainment of autonomy. I saw that when this task is neglected, the tendency is to look for healing from the outside….Does it need to be argued that we cannot have healthy self-esteem while despising part of who we are?”

Perhaps that book needs to be translated into Korean.

* Mr. Lee’s party wound up doing a lot better than everyone expected in the April elections, but only because party leader Bak Geun-hye (President Bak’s daughter) politically disowned him. The opposition picked up 47 seats, falling a whisker short of a majority. The ruling party wound up losing two more seats in post-election horse trading, eliminating the majority.

* Geopolitical affairs in Northeast Asia are much too complex for drive-by commentators, particularly the industrial mass media and its four-panel comic strip approach to the world. But it would be too much to expect them to leave well enough alone. They have to sell all that advertising space somehow.

For example, we cannot overlook the difficulties level-headed people in South Korea face when they try to do something sensible. Japan and South Korea are on the verge of signing a pact to achieve military cooperation. It is in the interests of both nations to do so. But:

A Seoul analyst said military accords with Japan would spark strong opposition from China and North Korea.

“China would consider it as an expansion of (the US-led) alliance in the Northeast Asian region,” Baek Seung-Joo, of the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses, told AFP.

“South Korea also faces unfavourable public opinion at home over any military agreements with Japan, regardless of their contents,” he said.

There are more subtexts to relations in the area than found in Moby Dick. The recent trilateral summit in Beijing resulted in a pledge by the leaders of Japan, China, and South Korea to pursue a free-trade agreement:

A “milestone” investment agreement between China, Japan and the Republic of Korea was signed in Beijing yesterday, after years of negotiations, while the leaders of the three nations announced that talks focusing on a free-trade agreement (FTA) would be launched within the year.

Aside from substantial economic benefits, experts said that the FTA, if realised, could help ease regional tension and possibly lead to a more integrated Northeast Asia.

Beware of the chirpiness in that article, however. The Chinese are trying to blunt the effect of the Americans’ TPP proposals on Japan. South Korea is more interested in a bilateral agreement with the Chinese to narrow the gap between their companies and the Japanese in the Chinese market. They’re not as interested in a bilateral FTR with Japan because they have a JPY 2 trillion trade deficit with the Japanese and continue to rely on Japan for advanced electronics parts and materials.

Meanwhile, President Lee brought up the comfort women yet again (or said he did) with the Japanese at the summit, while the Chinese complained about the Tokyo Metro plan to purchase the Senkakus from their private owners (they’re getting a lot of volunteer funds to pay for them, too), and the Uyghur conference now being held in Japan:

Beijing yesterday lodged strong protest over Tokyo’s permission for the separatist World Uygur Congress meeting to be held in Japan, and slammed Uygur separatist Rebiya Kadeer’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Fancy that. Japan’s doing more for human rights in China than the U.S. or Europe. Imagine the American self-congratulation if the Congress were being held in Los Angeles.

To his credit, Mr. Noda diplomatically deflected them both. He even politely told Mr. Wen where to get off:

In their meeting in Beijing, Wen took up the issue of the Senkakus, reiterating China’s claim that the islands have been Chinese territory since ancient times, according to a senior Japanese official who briefed journalists about the talks.

Noda stated Japan’s position that the islands, which China calls Diaoyu, are an integral part of Japanese territory, the official said.

Noda called for China to respond in a “cool-headed” manner on the issue, citing China’s growing activity in waters near the Senkaku Islands, which has provoked the Japanese public.

Considering that public contributions to purchase the Senkakus have likely passed the million-dollar mark by now, it would be more accurate to say that the Japanese public has woken up, rather than been provoked.

*****

Percy’s not the only one who could stand some comforting.

 

Japan’s back pages

THE Japan that emerges in stories printed below the fold and in the back pages of newspapers, or on less frequently accessed news websites, is a different place than that presented in the industrial mass media. Here are some stories that demonstrate why.

Water business

The phrase “water business” in Japan is usually a euphemism for the enterprises conducted in entertainment districts at night, particularly drinking establishments.

But most people outside the region are unaware that Japan is a global leader in another sort of water business — that for the technology used in water supply and sewage systems. In fact, a paperback was published a few months ago with the premise that Japan is the global leader in water technology systems. Whether that claim is true or not, several entities in the country have established a reputation for expertise in the sector, and they are working to expand their operations.

For example, the Fukuoka City government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for joint research in water supply and treatment.

The Kyushu city developed the technology for reusing waste water from the necessity to deal with its own chronic water shortages. They became so successful that they now want to make a paying business of it. Fukuoka City was also the first municipality in Japan to process waste water for use as water in the toilet, and they also are known for building a network of tunnels that carry off the water from the heavy summer rains to prevent flooding.

Meanwhile, the growth of the economy and the population in Vietnam strained that nation’s water systems infrastructure, and they chose to look to Japan for help. In fact, the city of Haiphong is already working with the city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka City’s neighbor, to prevent leakage from their water supply systems.

Kitakyushu has been active in this sector in Cambodia for some time. As of last December, they were serving as the technical consultants for water technology in nine Cambodian cities, and last month they began helping two other cities in that country to expand their water supply systems.

Fukuoka City is also involved in the water business in Burma. The Water Department dispatched a technician to Rangoon last month to conduct surveys and provide guidance, and they’ll send a full team later. The Burmese government also sent one of their technicians to Fukuoka City for training.

Apart from altruism, one objective is to increase the opportunities for local businesses to receive contracts from the Southeast Asian countries for infrastructure improvements. The Fukuoka City project in Burma is being conducted in tandem with the UN Habitat Fukuoka office. That organization is particularly interested in water purification and desalinization systems.

Rare Earth

The temporary Chinese suspension of rare earth metal exports during the standoff over the Senkakus in the fall of 2010 certainly got the attention of Japanese industry.  They wasted no time to start looking for new sources for the metals that couldn’t be used as a political weapon. For example, it was announced earlier this week that imports of rare earth metals would soon begin from India. Also, Mitsui Mining and Smelting Co. and Kurume-based Shibata Sangyo have teamed to launch the world’s first business for recovering and recycling the rare earth metal tantalum from discarded electronic products. Tantalum is used primarily as a material for condensers in PCs and Smartphones, but all of it is imported. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimates that recovering the tantalum from products discarded in Japan in a year would yield about 64 tons, accounting for 14% of the amount used here annually. Fukuoka Prefecture and Mitsui plan to commercialize the recycling technology and to create a structure that enables electronics parts manufacturers to procure the metal without concerns of interrupted supply.

More than a year ago, Japanese researchers announced they had produced the first artificial rare earth metal, an alloy similar to palladium. That metal is essential for making electronic parts, and is also used as a catalyzer to clean exhaust gas. While their method is not feasible for the commercial production of palladium, the researchers intend to apply it to create other alloys as rare earth substitutes. They say they’ve begun joint research projects with automobile manufacturers, but are keeping the details under the hood for now.

Power

A ryokan, or Japanese-style inn, in Yufuin, Oita, will generate electricity from the hot springs on the site using a 70 kW generator that Kobe Steel put on the market last fall. They plan to sell some of the power generated to Kyushu Electric Power through the system for the sale of renewable energy at a fixed cost that will begin in July. Kobe Steel says that if the power is sold at JPY 20 per kW, the spa could recover the costs by 2015.

Space

Japanese astronomers using a Hawaii-based telescope said last month they had discovered a “proto-cluster” of galaxies 12.72 billion light-years away from Earth. They claim that’s the most distant cluster ever discovered, which would also make it one of the first structures formed by the Big Bang.

“This shows a galaxy cluster already existed in the early stages of the universe when it was still less than one billion years into its history of 13.7 billion years,” the team of astronomers said in a press release.

But the discovery may already have been superseded.

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have previously announced the discovery of a possible cluster of galaxies around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, but that has not yet been confirmed, the Japanese researchers said.

Vanity

What Japanese women call with a smirk the “bar code” — the hair style created by follically deficient men, otherwise known as a combover in the English-speaking world — may, along with toupees and implants, be obsolete a decade from now:

Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by Professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.

The process has the potential for applications greater than flattering oneself in the mirror, however:

Tsuji and his researchers found hair follicles can be grown with adult stem cells, the study said.

“Our current study thus demonstrates the potential for not only hair regeneration therapy but also the realisation of bioengineered organ replacement using adult somatic stem cells,” it said.

Stop the snickering, ladies — before long another recent discovery in Japan might produce more satisfying answers when you interrogate the mirror about the fairest of them all.

Two different teams of university researchers have found the gene that causes freckling and skin blotches after exposure to the sun. One team was from Osaka University (working with cosmetics manufacturer Kanebo), and the other team, using different methods, combined researchers from Nagasaki and Kumamoto universities.

Both groups focused on ultraviolet hypersensitivity, a rare condition of which only five cases are known in the world. The condition was first identified in 1981 in Japan, but little effort was put into treatment because the only problem it causes is sunburn. The Osaka-Kanebo group inserted mouse chromosomes in the nuclei of cells from two patients with the condition to determine which would provide better protection to ultraviolet rays. Exposure to the rays would prevent multiplication of the cells, which would die after six weeks, but cells with the new chromosome were resistant to ultraviolet rays.

Crab computing

Here’s a story that made a lot more sense after spending the past week trying to make sense of the functions on my new PC:

A team of scientists from Japan and England have built a computer that uses crabs as information carriers, to implement basic circuits of collision-based computing.

The explanation:

Researchers at Japan’s Kobe University and the UK’s University of the West of England, Bristol, found that when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means that swarms of crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment.

And:

The swarms were placed at the entrances of the logic gates and persuaded to move by a shadow that fooled them into thinking a predatory bird was overhead. Results closely matched those of the simulation, suggesting that crab-powered computers are possible.

The experiment builds on a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls.

That set the author of the article to wondering:

The paper’s authors did not say whether public money was used to fund their experiments.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem as if the experiment would be so expensive that a university couldn’t fund it on its own. The author might be suggesting that futzing around with crab-powered computers is a frivolous enterprise with no apparent application, but there might be some there there.  Explains Josh Rothman:

What’s the point? Increasingly, computer scientists are interested in the ways that natural systems solve computing problems. Often, they do so in surprising (and surprisingly effective) ways. Other researchers have investigated the ways in which honeybees compute the most efficient route through a field of flowers (see a well-reasoned take on that research here); one of the crab-computer researchers, Andrew Adamatzky, has been exploring the possibility of slime-mold computing. Future generations of computers, they argue, may well be inspired by nature.

Kampai!

The Moji Customs Office in Kyushu reports that the value of beer exported through the Port of Hakata in 2011 totaled JPY 1.225 billion, an increase of 6.3 times from the previous year. The volume of exports totaled 10,960 kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 9.2 times. That set a record, and it was the first new record in 10 years. South Korea accounted for 57% of the exports, and there’s a story behind that. Premium Japanese beer has become popular in that country, which is closer to the Port of Hakata (also in Kyushu) than to Tokyo. Sapporo also established a sales company in South Korea last June. And don’t forget that the Japanese built the first breweries on the Korean Peninsula to begin with when the two countries were merged a century ago.

Does this mean tastes are changing in South Korea? The mass market beer in that country may be even weaker and thinner than the adult soft drink that pretends to be beer in the United States. That’s perhaps due to the robust and hearty nature of Korean food, with its industrial grade spices. It would make sense that people preferred something less intense to wash it all down with.

Hand grenade hotline

To conclude, here’s something I’ll bet nobody expected. The Fukuoka police became the first police department in the country to institute a hot line for tips on hand grenades. They’ll pay JPY 100,000 for each hand grenade found or confiscated as a result of a tip.

Concerns have been growing lately over the use of hand grenades to attack companies or in gang fights. Hand grenades were used in six incidents in the prefecture last year, the most in the country. Rewards will also be given for the discovery of homemade bombs. They’re serious — the police have printed 2,000 posters and 5,000 flyers.

They’d better be serious if gangs are bringing grenades to a gunfight.

Afterwords:

This clip of an English-language news report provides further info on the changing Joseon tastes for beer. They mention that 60 brewpubs have been established (by then) in South Korea since laws were relaxed in 2002. Pardon the goofiness with the Youtube link.

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Considering (a) that microbrewing had already taken off in Japan at that time, and (b) the substantial but largely unacknowledged influence that Japan still has on Korean culture, it is quite possible that the Korean laws were changed after the Koreans sampled some of the Japanese beverages.

Not that they’d ever admit it.

*****

Here’s another change: When I arrived in Japan in 1984, most funerals were still conducted in the home of the deceased. Now, however, they’re usually held in funeral parlors.

I attended a funeral in one of those establishments a week ago today for a pleasant man who passed away at the age of 86. I’ve been to enough of them by now to be familiar with the customs, but I was intrigued when I recognized the song the pianist was playing just before the service started: Hana (Flower), by Okinawan roots rocker Kina Shokichi. It is interesting to reflect on which things eventually become accepted as part of the common culture. No English translation can do the lyrics justice, so I won’t even try, but the song works in that context.

Here are three different versions spliced into one video.

 

Blackballing the red ball

Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
- Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing

THOUGH some of us are loath to admit it, all of us love lowbrow humor. We always have and we always will. It’s marbled throughout the Canterbury Tales, the existence of Fawlty Towers and the Gong Show depended on it, and Shakespeare loved it, as the line above shows. In fact, the lowbrow humor in that play starts with the title: the word “nothing” in Shakespeare’s day is said to have been a euphemism for the female genitalia.

One of the highest forms of low humor results when some people try to engage in serious sociopolitical discourse. During his brief campaign for president of the U.S., for example, Herman Cain offered a proposal to rework the American tax system into three segments with a rate of 9% each, which he called the 9-9-9 plan. A few people otherwise inclined to support his candidacy were apprehensive, however, because turning 9-9-9 upside down results in 6-6-6…

There’s also the buffoonery of some Barack Obama supporters, convinced since 2008 that racism is the reason for every criticism of their man. That racism is found in charges that he acts too “professorial”, is “elitist”, “out of touch”, or “skinny”. Just as amusing is that they like to refer to this disguised nastiness as a “dog whistle”. (If that’s the case, how come they hear it?) Then there’s the whole topic of political correctness, which might as well be Comedy Central.

Anyone looking for laughs in Northeast Asia can dip into anything that Hatoyama Yukio says about anything, listen to the arguments that Ozawa Ichiro is being railroaded by prosecutors, or eavesdrop on the perpetual South Korean domestic conversation about Japanese phantasmata.

The latest installment of the latter circulated last month when South Korea’s Grand National Party, known locally as Hannara, was in the process of remaking its image. The party, which holds the most seats in the national assembly, changed its name to Saenuri in Korean and the New Frontier Party in English. They also adopted a new logo in conjunction with the new name, and the changes took effect this month.

The old design featured a red circle with a blue line underneath. Here’s what it looked like.

That’s an artistic representation of a human figure, right? Nah. This is South Korea. The posse irritati complained that the red circle in the logo was something that a Japanese company would use.

Some comments from the Internet:

* Doesn’t the red of the Hannara logo symbolize the Japanese flag?

* The Hannara logo is just like the Japanese flag!

* The Japanese flag is hidden in the Hannara party logo and Seoul city logo!

Apparently those wily Japanese imperialists and their traitorous allies will stop at nothing to sneak their national symbol into the very heart of Korean politics.

The criticism wasn’t confined to the Internet —- politicians never pass up an opportunity to stoop as low as they can to pick up a vote or two. Besides, they had evidence!

That shows a comparison of the party logo with those of a few Japanese companies. Residents of the region know that type of stylized human form has often been used in logos and symbols for close to 20 years now. (It probably started in Japan. Most regional fashions of that sort do nowadays.) The choice of some of the companies also provided unintentional humor. Herald Pictures disappeared into Kadogawa Herald Pictures in 2005. KKC Wellness (logo at bottom left) operates healthcare facilities in the Kinki region and is mostly unknown anywhere else. Finally, the red circle in all of those logos, the Korean ones included, is clearly meant to represent a human head.

Recall that one Koreanetizen referred to the Seoul logo, which some people have been indignant about since its adoption in 1996. It consists of a red circle to symbolize the sun and arty blue and green swatches to represent the sea and the mountains. City officials in Seoul have somehow managed to weather the criticism for incorporating the Japanese motif, and it’s still the municipal emblem:

The Japanese became used to all this long ago, so their comments were characterized by polite bemusement. One journalist wrote, “I can’t say I don’t understand” that the party symbol might be mocked for looking Japanese, but added that the idea any red circle = the Japanese flag is rather extreme.

Still, the Hannara/Saenuri/Grand National/New Frontier Party has to face a general election in April and a presidential election in December while down in the polls. Accusations that their logo contains the Mark of the Beast might offset any of the benefits of an image change. So their official logo now looks like this:

While we’re on the subject of national flags and symbols, it’s worth noting that the South Korean flag contains hexagrams from the I Ching. I’ve always thought that was a cool thing to put on a flag. Maybe it’s time for some of the local Dogberries to take up the I Ching for a remedial reading assignment instead of just looking at the pictures.

*****
There’s a reason both the Globe Theater and the Gong Show had groundlings. Who knows what they’d think in Seoul of that semi-sunburst at the back of the stage?

Peace-loving peoples

We, the Japanese people, desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationships and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world.
- From the Preamble to the Japanese Constitution

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
- Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution

The United States has some 70 bases — in Japan. This (state of affairs) is not that of an independent country. I want to eliminate this abnormal state of affairs, and have Japan capable of defending Japan. Absent that concept, how can we conduct discussions with other countries?
- Yamada Hiroshi, former chief municipal officer of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward

(A)n editorial cartoon published during the war years in London’s Daily Mail…shows a neat little man in a bowler hat unhappily shaking hands with a dishevelled colossus. The caption reads: “Ah, Mr. Policy, young Side Effect here has been anxious to meet you …”
- George Jonas

ONE use to which the late author, student of psychology, and man of the world Idries Shah put his many books was to convey certain perspectives on form, function, and how they are frequently misapprehended. Shah held that forms have limitations, and that among those limitations are time, place, culture, and language. If they are neither changed nor discarded, they become fossilized, becoming both museums and exhibits. Some choose to become attached to a form rather than its content. They are unable to make the distinction between the container and its function, and assume the fossil still functions as it did in the past.

The creation of the Japanese Constitution as a way to bend the nation’s behavior is an excellent illustration of the perspectives on form and function Shah wished to convey.

Consider the language of the preamble shown above, which some Japanese find more objectionable than Article 9, the “peace clause”. The nation is supposed to rely on the “justice and faith” of the “peace-loving peoples of the world” for its security and existence. Pluralizing the word people, assuming that peoples are peace-loving, and proclaiming that national survival can be entrusted to their goodwill identifies the sort of people who wrote it, their worldview, and the general time period in which it was written. It belongs in a vitrine in a corner of the museum near the quill pens and dialed telephones, rather than as the first statement of principle atop a document that would express the national consensus for the survival of the state.

In retrospect, it’s curious that people expected a Constitutional requirement in that form to function at all. The authors knew well that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact also prohibited the use of war as an “instrument of national policy”, so only an ideologue would have thought the Japanese Constitution in isolation would succeed. By 1945, technology had enabled the Europeans to realize the objective inherent in centuries of behavior and turn the continent into a smoldering ruin of a charnel house. Justice and faith in the love of peace were not the motivation for the Western world’s colonization of East Asia. Nor were they the motivation that impelled them to eliminate the East Asian nation that would usurp their position. Such were the high ideals controlling the human relations of the age.

Further, there is no real consensus on what Article 9 even means. Some people claim it was to make Japan a pacifist nation, but that’s difficult to see when the commonly accepted meaning of pacifism is applied. Here’s a brief description of how the Constitution was put together:

Although an American directive allowed him to order reforms “only as a last resort,” with the first postwar general election just two months away and with an 11-nation commission due to take over the issue of a constitution, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, intervened.

He ordered his own 24-member Government Section staff to draft a constitution, and on Feb. 4, his aide, Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, convened a meeting and declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic occasion. I now proclaim you a constitutional assembly.”

Lieut. Col. Charles Kades, who had been in Japan since a week before Japan’s formal surrender the previous summer after taking part in the invasion of France in 1944 and serving on the War Department’s General Staff, was put in charge of the steering committee and told to produce a constitution by Feb. 12.

But Kades denied that it was strictly pacifist in intent when Japanese journalist Komori Yoshihisa visited him at his Wall Street office in New York in April 1981 and spoke with him for three hours:

“I myself wrote Article 9, including the section about the renunciation of war. I was given a page from a yellow legal pad by Whitney with instructions on three or four main points. I think they were notes he took from a conversation with MacArthur. But every nation has the right to its own self-defense. That’s why I thought (the part prohibiting self-defense) was illogical, and I took the liberty to remove it.”

The references to military forces, war potential and the “right of belligerency” were as written on the paper he was given. Kades admitted, however, that he didn’t understand the meaning of the “right of belligerency”. He said that if Japan had objected to that phrase, he intended to remove it.

“The intent of this Constitution was at first to keep Japan disarmed forever, but that had the effect of tying America’s hands in bilateral relations with Japan, and for the United States, that created a situation that was ill advised.”

Now there’s the unanswerable question: how is a nation disarmed forever supposed to defend itself? By some interpretations, Japan is ranked ninth worldwide in military strength, yet to take the language of the Constitution at face value would mean that it has the world’s largest and most potent police force.

The Constitution also enables the United States to use Japanese territory for its own ends. Here it is from the horse’s mouth. In this case, the pony is Kevin Maher, the former director of the Office of Japan Affairs at the US State Department:

“I don’t think Article Nine of the Japanese constitution should change. If the Japanese constitution was changed the United States would not be able to use Japanese land to advance US interests. The high host nation support the Japanese government currently pays is beneficial to the US. We’ve got a very good deal in Japan.”

Regardless of what one thinks of the Japanese left, their caricature of their own country as an American aircraft carrier has some justification.

Another function of the Constitution has been to contribute to the neutering of the Japanese political class. With domestic policy largely in the hands of the bureaucracy and foreign policy outsourced to the Americans, the Japanese political class has devolved into a group of parasites engaged primarily in emitting gusts of hot air, concocting Byzantine power struggles, and consuming the nation’s time and money.

Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki

Typifying the problem is that the Noda Cabinet has already had two Defense Ministers since its inception five months ago. The criterion for their selection was to balance intraparty factions rather than their ability to oversee the national defense. The first, Ichikawa Yasuo, was known to be aligned with the Agriculture Ministry and had little expertise about defense matters. Mr. Ichikawa insisted this inexperience was the ideal demonstration of civilian control of the military. He was replaced four months and a half-dozen verbal pratfalls later, though he blamed it on bureaucratic backstabbing.

His successor is Tanaka Naoki, another AgMin zokugiin. He is distinguished only as the husband of former Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko, who knew as much about diplomacy as her husband knows about national defense. Mr. Tanaka stepped in it even more quickly than Mr. Ichikawa. During a live interview on NHK the first weekend after his selection, he confused a question about relaxing the standards for the use of weapons by self-defense forces overseas with the reexamination of weapons export prohibitions. Asked specifically about the first by the NHK moderator, he talked about leaving behind construction equipment after participating in peacekeeping operations overseas. Struggling to rescue Mr. Tanaka, the interviewer asked him whether he had a positive attitude about the use of weapons by self-defense forces. The Defense Minister answered that it was neither positive nor negative.

The one function the Japanese Constitution has not performed, however, is the one it was created for: to prevent the “peace-loving peoples” in the neighborhood from piecemeal attacks on the country to seize or attempt to seize Japanese territory outright. Meanwhile, the Americans either declare it isn’t their business and look the other way, or have been actively complicit in that seizure.

Who indeed are the peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia?

* The peace-loving people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Persons of sound mind can stipulate that the North Korean government neither qualifies as a member of the region’s peace-loving peoples nor can be trusted to behave as if they were. Persons of sound mind also know there are some who will disagree with that characterization, but taking them seriously isn’t worth the time or trouble.

While North Korea has no apparent designs on Japanese territory, they have, for reasons that make sense only to them, threatened to turn the country into a sea of fire. They also occasionally fire missiles in a direction where only Japan exists. (To be sure, Pyeongyang actually attacks only South Korea, but in an erratic manner that gives the Americans an excuse to bug out on their promise to defend South Korea as well.)

* The peace-loving people of the People’s Republic of China

It would be possible to agree with the Chinese assertion they are peace-loving people if we overlook their post-WWII invasions of the Korean Peninsula, India, and Vietnam, and their current buccaneering from southern Japan to the South China Sea.

The Chinese boosted their defense budget by 12.7% in FY 2011 to roughly 601.1 billion yuan. That was a resumption of 22 consecutive years of double-digit defense budget increases, a string that ended briefly in 2010, when defense expenditures were limited to a single-digit rise. In contrast, the Japanese Finance Ministry wants to cut the 155,000 members of the Land Self-Defense Force to 141,000. Japan is the only major country whose defense budget has continually declined since reaching a peak in 2002.

The Chinese cited as their reason increases in equipment and military training, personnel training/education, and salaries and benefits for the military.

When asked by reporters whether the increase was to apply pressure to neighboring countries, a government spokesman replied it was still less than 2% of GDP and lower than that of many countries. He also said that China was pursuing defensive policies and would not threaten any country.

Shortly thereafter, the Chinese had their first trial flight of a new stealth fighter. Here’s a look at some more of their new defensive infrastructure.

They didn’t behave as a peace-loving people in the fall of 2010, when they were the belligerents in the Senkaku islets , which they and the Taiwanese recognized as Japanese territory until seabed resources were discovered circa 1970.

This behavior should not have been unexpected. Noted Shimizu Yoshikazu in the monthly Chuokoron:

President Hu Jintao said at the Communist Party Conference in March 2009 that the country will staunchly defend its sovereignty, security, and territory. He also said the country would be more assertive in defending its maritime interests. Mr. Hu modified the dictum of Deng Hsiao Ping, who said, “Hide our abilities, build our strength, and move forward little by little.” The new policy is “Maintain hiding our abilities and building our strength, but be more aggressive diplomatically.”

Mr. Shimizu said that few people noticed because the full text of his address was not published. A senior official in the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it meant the country would perform a more aggressive role in international affairs.

Here’s what the Chinese mean by their “maritime interests”:

“Japanese government officials are weighing China’s intent after the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party, called the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea part of Beijing’s “core interests.”

“…The People’s Daily article said Japan’s plan to name uninhabited islands near the Senkakus, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands, “is a blatant move to damage China’s core interests.””

The Chinese also refer to Tibet and Taiwan as part of their core interests.

Chinese newspaper editorials reflect a similar peace-loving attitude. For example, Hu Feiyue was one of four “experts” who presented views in a one-page special on the Senkakus dispute in the China Daily:

“Since Japan has been continually strengthening its control over the Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus), it is not enough for China to only send patrol boats to the islands. Instead, China should continue to modernize its navy. Considering Japan’s actions and the effect of China’s countermeasures, Beijing should think of employing another strategy,”

He also referred to the Japanese arrest of the Chinese fishing boat captain after ramming two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as “Tokyo’s affront”.

More specific was this from the Dongfang Ribao (Oriental Daily) in Hong Kong on 5 April last year:

There will not be peace between China and Japan unless China shows the resolve to use nuclear weapons. Japan is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear (weapons) in the past century twice. The first was when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb, and the second was during the Fukushima nuclear accident. The Japanese are extremely sensitive to nuclear issues, and China is not without the means to employ this means…For most Japanese, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a nightmare that can not be forgotten, and it has wounded their spirit. The uneasiness and dread due to the nuclear accident has paralyzed Japanese officials and the public, and politicians continually spout nonsense.

Japan can say no to China, but it cannot say no to nuclear weapons. For China to gain Japan’s respect it must refer to these weapons and present an attitude of not renouncing their use…Japan is a country with a high degree of self-regard, and it bows only to those who defeat it. Even though it lost to the U.S. in World War II, it does not think it lost to China, and pressures China with this strong approach….Now it challenges China through its textbooks on the Senkakus issue. Why should China promise a country such as this that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons?

China is thought to have deployed 300 nuclear warheads, by the way.

This rhetoric has been backed by the Chinese military harassment of Japan, which began in the Senkakus long before the 2010 incident.

In September 2005, the Chinese sent five naval vessels, including a guided missile destroyer, to the vicinity of the Chunxiao gas field. That’s four kilometers into the Chinese EEZ, but the Chinese have been using it as a platform to siphon off gas from the Japanese side. One of the ships aimed a gun at a Japanese P3-C surveillance aircraft.

A day before the resumption of Japanese-Sino talks on the status of the gas fields, China revealed it had established a “reserve vessel squadron” in the East China Sea capable of “fighting during wars” and equipped to “eliminate obstacles at sea.”

They’ve been engaging in similar activities near or in Japanese air space, particularly in the past five years. From April to December 2010 alone, Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces scrambled 48 times against Chinese aircraft. That was the highest total of the past five fiscal years (starting in April), and did not include the January to March figures. More recent incidents have involved a refusal to provide identification after entering the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The Chinese military aircraft used to stay outside the ADIZ, but that changed in October 2010.

Last March, a Chinese State Oceanic Administration helicopter flew to within 70 meters of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) destroyer Samidare. Then-Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi said, “It was an extremely dangerous act.” That was countered by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, who replied that China’s right to claim the islands was “indisputable” and that its actions were in accord with international law.

On 30 December 2010, the Asahi Shimbun reported on People’s Liberation Army planning to land on and seize the outlying islands of other countries. The envisioned operations would include the use of bombers and amphibious vehicles.

On 2 January 2011, a commenter in the Communist Party-run Global Times claimed that the Japanese were just trying to worsen relations and suggested the Asahi ran the article at the government’s request.

*****
More troubling still is the Chinese interest in Okinawa. Some in China are now calling for the establishment of a Ryukyus Autonomous District. In other words, they think it’s Chinese manifest destiny to swipe the islands from Japan. Here is a public announcement of an apparently well-funded group to work toward that objective:

Former National Police Agency investigator Bando Tadanobu translated into Japanese an essay that appeared in the Chinese media calling for such a scheme as part of the PRC’s launch of a national strategy — the so-called Ryukyus Millennium.

“The Ryukyu islands must be recovered and a Ryukyu Autonomous District of the People’s Republic of China established for the millennium development of China. The law guarantees China sovereignty of the Ryukyus under the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Declaration. It must be turned into a forward base facing the Pacific Ocean….China will build the Ryukyus, the Japanese and American military shall depart from the East Sea (i.e., what everyone else calls the East China Sea) and the Ryukyus will be a breakwater for Chinese security.”

The essay also asserts that the time to seize Okinawa is now, and the Ryukyu Islanders, who are part of the Chinese people, also seek this. Mr. Bando reminds his Japanese readers that the Chinese government insists the Senkakus are Chinese territory and that senior PLA members openly discuss planning for an invasion of Japan.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The same argument has also appeared in other Chinese media sources, including three times in the Apple Daily and once on the Boxun News website.

Tang Chungfeng, a specialist in Japan research at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce who also served in the Chinese embassy in Japan, has championed the cause in the aforementioned Global Times, as well as the Ifeng.com news site (for Phoenix TV). Mr. Tang claims that the real Japanese objective is not to maintain control of Daioyutai (Senkakus), but to legalize its “illegal control” of the Ryukyus.

He lists four reasons for this.

1. The Ryukyus become the starting point for Japanese territorial waters.
2. It is a strategic move to obtain maritime resources and to keep northern Taiwan in check.
3. It draws their territorial line in the East China Sea.
4. It wipes away the shame of having been defeated in World War 2 by an “inferior race”, the Chinese. The Japanese still say they were beaten by the Americans and the Russians, not us.

Mr. Tang says this is the signal flare for the resurgence of Japanese militarism, in which Japanese bushido will again rule the world. It is a psychological demand of the Japanese right wing, which is more important than natural resources.

With two university professors, Mr. Tang wrote a similar article for the Global Times of 10 November 2010. In the same newspaper two days before that, he urged China to support the Okinawan “independence movement”.

Demonstrations were held in Chengdu in October 2010 after the Senkakus Incident of 7 September. Student leaders said they had been organized a month before with the help of the government. Some of the demonstrators carried signs saying, Recover the Ryukyus, Free Okinawa.

Occasionally the well-meaning superficialissimos of the Western mass media and thinktankeria get nosey and parade their wonderfulness by advising the countries involved it would be so much better if everyone got along and shared the wealth of the sea near the Senkakus instead of fighting about it. The Japanese have always been amenable to that. Now to get the Chinese to match their behavior with their words:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told reporters Wednesday that Japan protested to China after a flare was seen Tuesday at a Chinese structure at an undersea gas deposit. Japan has made similar complaints several times in the past.

“We have detected a flare, a sign that it is highly likely that there is a gas development going on,” Fujimura said. “Any unilateral exploration is unacceptable.”

The deposit, known as Kashi in Japan and Tianwaitian in China, sits near a median line of the two countries’ overlapping exclusive economic zones.

Japan and China agreed in 2008 to suspend unilateral digging in that field while continuing talks, but talks have stalled since 2010, following a diplomatic spat stemming from a maritime collision near disputed southern islands claimed by both countries, as well as Taiwan.

Two (back-translated) comments allow us to draw conclusions from all this. The first is from Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (The emphasis is mine.)

China has of course warned that Japan is positioned as part of the American alliance, but we must recognize that is not the only point. I interviewed a general with the People’s Liberation Army, who said, “We might be able to achieve accommodation and cooperation with the U.S., but that will not happen with Japan. For China, Japan will likely remain a military threat”. There is a special historical animus towards Japan.

Meanwhile, Dan Blumenthal, current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said:

In China, there is a memory and anger at Japan based on history, and an intense awareness of revisionism. That awareness is strengthened and inflamed by Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Now, the Chinese think this should be rectified, even with military force, by becoming superior to Japan, and having the ability to threaten Japan.

* The peace-loving people of Russia

Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Commerce, Navigation and Delimitation on 7 February 1855. The treaty both established official relations between the countries as well as their borders. The Russians confirmed that the islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, and Shikotan, and the Habomai Islets (just seven kilometers from Hokkaido), were Japanese territory, distinct from the Kurile Islands.

Article 2 of the treaty states:

“Henceforth the boundary between the two nations shall lie between the islands of Etorofu and Uruppu. The whole of Etorofu shall belong to Japan; and the Kurile Islands, lying to the north of and including Uruppu, shall belong to Russia.”

Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai Islets are to the south of Etorofu. They were not mentioned in the treaty because they were understood to be part of Japan.

They stayed part of Japan until after World War II ended. The Soviet Union renounced its neutrality treaty with Japan and declared war on 9 August 1945, three days after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally on 15 August, and on 18 August the Soviets started occupying what Japan calls the Northern Territories. That process lasted until 5 September, three days after the surrender documents were signed.

For reasons impossible to explain, the English-language mass media finds it impossible to simply state these facts. Though the Soviet occupation of the islands occurred after the Japanese surrender, Reuters uses the expression “near the end of the war”. Even though the Japanese position is that the islands are not part of the Kuriles, based in part on the 1855 treaty language, the New York Times accepts the Russian formulation and calls them the South Kuriles. (Then again, the Times thought it was copacetic for the Americans to write the Japanese Constitution, as the text at the above link about Charles Kades shows.)

The Soviets occupied the islands because American President Harry Truman allowed them to. Stalin wanted the entire island of Hokkaido to create a Communist North Japan, as he did with North Korea and East Germany. Truman made a deal to prevent that by tossing Stalin the four smaller fish. This has been confirmed by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (an American citizen) from diplomatic cables and detailed in his book Anto. (That can be translated as Secret Strife or Hidden Battle).

Thus, the Soviets chose to exact their revenge for losing the 1905 war by kicking Japan when it was down. In the 1956 agreement between the two countries that ended the state of war between them and restored diplomatic ties, the Russians agreed to give two of the islands back as part of a future peace treaty. They show no signs of fulfilling their promise.

The Russians saw that the Democratic Party-led government of Japan flinched badly in its confrontation with China in the fall of 2010. Should it be surprising that one thug state would imitate another? Their own military testing of Japan’s territory and defensive posture began almost immediately thereafter and continues to the present.

The Russian navy sent 24 ships through La Pérouse Strait, which separates the southern part of Sakhalin from the northern part of Hokkaidō and connects the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. This was the largest group of Russian ships to make this passage in 10 years, and included cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, tank carriers, and hospital ships.

In September 2011, the Russians conducted their largest military exercise off Kamchatka after the end of the Cold War — with 50 ships and 50 aircraft — to maintain the defense of their continental shelf area. One never knows when the Japanese or the Canadians are going to attack. It is curious that Russian exercises of this sort pass with little or no comment overseas, but the Japanese dispatch of an airplane to observe Chinese provocations is the signal for Western academics to write papers calling for the joint peaceful development of resources.

In early December 2010, Russian maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft flew directly above a joint U.S.-Japanese military drill. The main sea drill continued, but the air drill was halted to prevent the exposure of any tactics.

Though it is natural to observe military drills of neighboring countries, the Russians chose to be obnoxious in their observation and their justification afterwards. Said fleet spokesman Roman Markov:

“The area is our zone of responsibility. The airplanes carried out a planned flight in an area of the Russian Pacific Fleet’s regular activity.”

That was a month after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made the first visit of a Russian/Soviet head of state to the islands since they became Russian territory. Previous leaders had refrained from doing so to avoid antagonizing the Japanese, but discretion in bilateral relations is no longer a priority. A more recent visitor was Nikolai Patrushev, former director of the FSB (the new KGB) and secretary of the Security Council of Russia. This visit, also seen as out of the ordinary, was ostensibly to check on border security and economic development. These two men were followed by the first deputy premier, the regional development minister, and the defense minister.

One reason cited for Mr. Medvedev’s visit was to boost his image of strength before elections. That is standard operating procedure for the countries of East Asia — if the national government’s popularity needs a tonic, bash the Japanese. That’s been the drink of choice of Chinese and South Koreans for more than 60 years.

The timing was also right. Japanese defense policy at the time called for a shift in focus from defense of the north and a reduction of equipment and personnel in Hokkaido to upgrade security around the Nansei Islands of Okinawa and in the East China Sea.

What was then-Prime Minister Kan to do? He and his government had already been flayed for their mishandling of the Senkakus incident, and now the Russians were capitalizing on his demonstrated weakness. But Mr. Kan had to trust “in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”. He lacked options for dealing with people who are ambivalent about peace and act with injustice and in bad faith. Having only a single dimension as a politician, he reached into his bag of trick and reverted to his origins as a street-corner loudmouth by criticizing Mr. Medvedev’s visit as “an unforgivable outrage”. (He got away with that sort of language in Nagata-cho for years because no one took his New Left grandstanding seriously.) He also said it was “an act of violence”.

The Russians, knowing all about shouting shoe-pounders in diplomatic venues, easily swatted that one away. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded that the Japanese prime minister was being “undiplomatic”. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko noted:

“The Russian president independently selects routes of his domestic trips. Any recommendations from abroad are inappropriate and unacceptable.”

The time for using the phrase “unforgivable outrage” came that summer after Mr. Medvedev signed a law passed by the Duma making 2 September an annual holiday to celebrate the Soviet victory over Japan. In other words, it took the Russians 65 years to commemorate their week-long struggle in 1945, their postwar seizure of the Northern Territories, and their postwar use of 600-700,000 Japanese servicemen as slave labor from 1946 until 1956 (though most were released by 1949). An estimated 10% of those Japanese died in Soviet captivity.

Why now? Don’t look to Reuters or the New York Times for an explanation.

Mr. Kan might also have chosen to take a stern view when the Russians conducted Vostok 2010, their operational/strategic military exercises, from 29 June to 8 July in the Kuriles over Japanese objections. Or when the Russians established three new artillery and missile testing areas near the Kuriles and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

But it’s too late for that — especially now that there are signs of an anti-Japanese alliance among the peace-loving peoples of the region.

On 8 September 2011, Air Self-Defense Force jets scrambled to meet Russian *and* Chinese military aircraft approaching Japan. Two Russian TU-95 bombers flew around Japan accompanied by refueling aircraft. They started flirting with Japanese airspace from the Tsushima Strait off Nagasaki prefecture, passed south of Okinawa, and then swung up along the Pacific Ocean coast northward to an area near the Northern Territories. It was the first confirmed circumnavigation of Japan by Russian military aircraft, and it was obviously intentional. They passed Fukushima Prefecture in the Pacific at precisely the time Prime Minister Noda was there to view the damaged nuclear plant. The entire flight, including refueling, took 14 hours.

While the Russians were still airborne, a Chinese Y8 intelligence-gathering airplane flew across the dividing line between China and Japan in the East China Sea and came within 100 – 150 kilometers of The Senkakus.

(The Russia must have enjoyed their aerial tour of Japanese territory, as military aircraft made another circuit just outside Japanese airspace last month. Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro called his Russian counterpart to ask for self-restraint and more information; three days later it was reported that his call hadn’t been returned.)

One year before, on 27 September (shortly after the Senkakus Incident), Mr. Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao met in Beijing to sign a joint statement calling for “mutual support for each other’s core interests, including national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

It also contained these passages:

“During the war (World War II), people in China and Russia sustained major aggressions from the fascists and militarists, and they endured the cruelest ordeals and suffered the heaviest casualties…The fascists and militarists schemed to conquer and enslave us two nations, other countries, and the whole continent. China and Russia will never forget the feat of those who checked those two forces…

Most telling of all was this sentence. It’s worth reading twice:

The glorious history, imprinted with the friendship the people of the two countries forged in the war and their mutual help, has laid a sound foundation for today’s strategic partnership of coordination between China and Russia.

The Russians have even teamed up with the North Koreans. When the late Kim II visited Russia in August 2011, they finalized an agreement for joint military exercises, an unusual step for Pyeongyang. Kim suggested full-scale military maneuvers, including offensive exercises, but that was too much even for the Russians. They also did not respond to requests for aircraft and parts. Meanwhile, the North Koreans kept interaction with Russian forces at a minimum for lower-ranking soldiers. That limited the initial exercises to pilot rescue operations.

It is not clear what peace-loving purpose the Russians — whose navy obtained access to a Sea of Japan port through a 2010 agreement with the North Koreans — think this serves. Only allies conduct joint military operations, after all.

* The peace-loving people of South Korea

Birds of a feather, they say, flock together, so one might assume that South Korea, the only other nominal free market democracy in Northeast Asia, would think its best interests lie in an alliance of some sort with the Japanese. That assumption would be mistaken.

The Japanese suspect that when Chinese pushing comes to shoving, the Koreans will accommodate themselves to the Chinese, regardless of the specifics of the situation. An example is the language in an editorial from the Joongan Ilbo of South Korea. They’ve noticed that today’s Chinese are acting like the Imperial Japanese a century ago. They’re also aware that Chinese behavior could cause nearby countries to behave as Finland traditionally has toward its Soviet Union/Russian neighbor. But that was fine with them:

“(We) must act judiciously. China’s existence is a threat to our security, but essential for us economically. Therefore, for several decades at least, we must ride the wave of an economically prosperous China. That will require South Korea to stay neutral in the struggle between Japan and China.”

They seem to have overlooked that the struggle in East Asia is not between Japan and China, but between China and everyone else in the region with territory the Chinese claim.

Not that the South Koreans are immune from junior grade militarism of their own. They’ve already chosen to stick their saber in the face of the one country that won’t fight back. As detailed by two posts on the masthead here, South Korea seized the Takeshima islets by force after they failed to convince the United States to include it in the San Francisco Peace Treaty specifying what would and would not be Japanese territory. So, despite having ignored the rocks for centuries, they took the islets while the taking was good — knowing the Japanese were relying on the justice and faith of peace-loving peoples.

As this post describes, some South Koreans have their eyes on Tsushima too, and senior members of their military use the invisible Japanese military threat to Takeshima to urge the expansion of their military capabilities. Meanwhile, the North Koreans are the ones who are actually sinking their naval ships, shelling their territory, and murdering their tourists.

But Seoul is buckled up and ready to do battle with the Japanese. On 5 July 2006, their Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs sent a ship to survey ocean currents in Japan’s EEZ near Takeshima. Japan responded by sending a Coast Guard patrol boat to monitor the ship, contact it by radio, and ask them to stop. The Koreans ignored the Japanese request and dispatched their own Coast Guard vessel, which sailed between two ships. Nothing untoward happened, but the Japanese prime minister at the time, Abe Shinzo, said at a symposium in the fall of 2010 that the Japanese government was told the Korean captain had been given permission by South Korean President Roh Mu-hyon to fire on the Japanese ship. The expression used was “attack with the intent to harm”.

Mr. Abe consulted with the Foreign Ministry and the Coast Guard and decided not to stop the Korean ship by abordage. He later explained:

“With China, we would understand what they’re going to do because diplomacy to them is completely a game. One side can predict what the other will do if one does certain things…Roh, however, was strange and even other Korean officials and military men found him somewhat confusing. We didn’t know what he would do, because there seemed to be no logical thought or calculation of profit and loss, and the situation could have escalated beyond imagining.”

Of course, that’s not how the South Koreans remember it. (The emphasis is mine.):

Roh Moo-hyun instructed the military to destroy unauthorized Japanese ships heading for Dokdo while in office, a close aide to the late President said Friday.

This indicates that President Lee Myung-bak’s predecessor braced for the worst possible diplomatic relations with Japan to thwart the neighboring country’s territorial ambitions of Korea’s easternmost islets.

The revelation came amid escalating criticism of the government’s stance of dealing with the issue in a low key manner.

Kim Byung-joon, a former senior presidential secretary for policy planning, said in an article posted on the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation’s website, “In April 2006, when Seoul-Tokyo relations were chilled by Japan’s territorial claim of Dokdo, President Roh instructed his secretaries to consider destroying Japanese ships crossing into our territorial waters without permission.”

Among considered measures for destruction was using a Korean military ship to ram the targeted vessel from Japan, Kim recounted.

What to do?

Many Japanese have always known what this situation requires. When the Liberal-Democratic Party was formed in 1955, its new charter called for Japan to rewrite the Constitution. The members eventually found it easier to indulge in the more profitable political activity of pork distribution, and turned into the Japanese version of RINOs in the bargain. The LDP could have served as the role model for the American GOP to become stealth social democrats.

Somura Yasunobu, then a professor of international politics at the Tokyo University of Science, wrote an op-ed for the January edition of Keizai Orai in January 1991. It was rendered in English by the Translation Service Center Asia Foundation and run in the 23 April edition of the Japan Times that year. (That predates the Internet as we know it today, so it is not online.).

Prof. Somura said then all that needs to be said. Note how one passage echoes the statement of Charles Kades.

During the Persian Gulf War, Americans accused Japan of hiding behind the postwar Constitution to avoid involvement, while liberals here claimed the administration of Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki was ripping it up in an attempt to send troops overseas. The Americans were right and our poor, pacifist Constitution was both more controversial and ridiculous than ever.

The document was foisted upon Japan when it was still under the thumb of the US occupation (1945-1952). Common sense tells us that the policies pursued by even the most benevolent of conquerors are not designed entirely for the benefit of the conquered. By the same token, a national charter adopted when Gen. Douglas MacArthur ruled Tokyo is irrelevant today.

When Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, all legislation imposed by the Occupation should have become null and void. Anyone who still wants to preserve this Constitution in effect favors perpetuation of American rule….

…Until recently, many people have justified retaining this made-in-USA instrument as expedient, and in terms of realpolitik, Japan’s most advantageous option. I admit that I have not been among those clamoring for revision. Patchwork reform of a document so fatally flawed makes no sense…

…The heart of the Constitutional issue is the famous war-renouncing Article 9, which says in part, “the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” From the standpoint of international law, this makes no sense.

…In the old days, the concept of a belligerent party was used, for example, regarding rebel separatists. It provided the basis for subsequent recognition of a group as a legitimate government or the territory under its control as an independent nation. The 1947 Constitution did not even accord this minimum standing to Japan.

When Japan regained its pro forma independence in 1952, we entered into a mutual security treaty with Washington that left national defense and internal security in the hands of the U.S. military. The pact was later revised, and the Japanese government assumed the latter responsibility.

Nevertheless, the treaty made Japan, for all intents and purposes, a U.S. protectorate. Any Japanese eager to maintain this relationship after all this time is like a middle-aged man who still wants to be breast-fed by his mother.

Of course, the notion of a right to wage war has been rendered absurd by weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and conventional. The only just wars are those of self-defense; the right of belligerency simply means that a nation can protect itself.

It is contradictory to argue that Japan has the right of self-defense but not the right to wage war….This anachronistic document belongs in the national archives, not on the books as the supreme law of the land.

What to do? The Japanese should rip up the American neo-imperialist document dashed off in less than a fortnight and become a nation again.

After all, based on actions rather than words, they’re the only peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia.

Afterwords

* It is easy to identify the peace-loving peoples of the world even at international sporting events.

Japan has hosted the Olympics in exemplary fashion three times. It is beyond the realm of imagination that the incidents in Seoul and Hangzou could have happened anywhere in Japan. It is inconceivable that a Japanese crowd would boo another country’s national anthem, boo a national team throughout a sporting event, throw garbage on players and fans, and behave so badly the army is required to keep them in line. International sporting events in Japan have never been cancelled due to public health concerns. And no Japanese officials have ever thrashed a judge from another country because they were unhappy with the decision.

* Here’s a report of how American soldiers in Japan keep in training.

* The drive-by academic, Walter Russell Mead, drove by again:

“Japan, Russia Build Ties As Asian Balance Shifts”

Note that he calls the islands the Kuriles and says nothing about how they were occupied. Does he know? His wishful thinking is based on a few quotes in one Kyodo report that could have been recycled by every Japanese and Russian foreign minister for the past half-century.

He missed this in the rearview mirror as he drove away:

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba said on Saturday that a heated, decades-long territorial dispute with Russia was far from solved even as they agreed to boost security and economic cooperation.

Gemba said the territorial issue must be solved before Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, invests further in the islands and Russia’s underdeveloped Far East region.

“We would consider joint business activities if it helps solve the sovereignty issue,” Gemba said.

“But we must not violate Japan’s legal stance…In that sense, the positions (between Japan and Russia) remain far apart.”

*****
The day the other countries in the region can produce an indie band like Kiwi and the Papaya Mangoes is the day they reach the level of Japanese internationalism.

On their previous album, KPM did a Brazilian forro tune with Indian percussion and a flute. The Korean writing seen briefly in this video spells out the name of the Japanese national anthem.

By jingo

At the moment, we lose, but in ten years, the U.S. will lose. We can be more patient than a U.S. administration,
- Shen Dingli, a professor at the Center of American Studies at Fudan University

The tremendous defeat at Hawaii was first ascribed to treacherous Japan, launching an attack at the very time that the American government was trying to lead the erring war lords of Nippon into the ways of peace. The administration conveniently forgot to remind the American people of the part played in bringing about the result of December 7 by its campaign of economic warfare, its secret diplomacy, its covert military alliances, the submission of demands which Japan found “humiliating,” and its own complete abandonment of neutrality in favor of non-declared war.
- George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War

THE world is entering a new age of imperialism, according to a former Japanese Foreign Ministry official in an article written for a monthly magazine currently on the newsstands. Perhaps the term he should have used was neo-imperialism. Just as today’s neo-socialist eschews such overt efforts as the nationalization of industry in favor of subtle and incremental changes to the economic and cultural wiring behind the walls, the modern neo-imperialist no longer works through trading empires or the combination of colonialism and mercantilism favored by the Europeans and later imitated by others, including the Japanese. There is a preference instead for the semi-subjection of satellite states in which the hegemons exert their power and manipulate those states for economic and political advantage without having to assume direct administrative control of their neo-fiefdoms. Both past and present, however, the justifications and self-congratulation are the same.

That China is exhibiting many of the symptoms of the neo-imperialist syndrome is apparent to the casual observer and need not be explained. But the Japanese commentator was referring to an “age” inhabited by more than one neo-imperialist actor. What was apparent to the commentator, but less so to the casual observer, is that the United States is presenting the same symptoms as well.

Consider: Again the world is sinking into the quicksand of Depression, and again the Americans are sticking pins in the heads of rattlesnakes in East Asia. The strategy of the current occupant of the White House is to focus on economic issues while outsourcing cultural and foreign policy matters to others in government. As a result, Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is moving along the same rails laid down by his gloriously initialed predecessors FDR, JFK, and LBJ, and, to a lesser extent, the more singular and sober W. It isn’t just Asia, either — in addition to making the Middle East safe for Islamicism last year by leading in Libya from behind and encouraging the Arab Sprung, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate dispatched 100 troops to Uganda in October. Imperators need not trouble themselves to obtain Congressional approval when issuing commands to the legions for overseas operations.

As troubling as the behavior is the enthusiasm with which that behavior is hailed by the court heralds. Again, the Chinese taste for hegemony and their belief in the local version of Manifest Destiny is apparent to the casual observer and need not be examined. What is now becoming apparent, however, is the American enthusiasm for the mission.

More troubling still is that some members of the credentialed American “opinion leaders” are serving as willing cheerleaders for Team USA’s feats on the geopolitical gridiron while either grossly exaggerating or ignoring the facts.

One of those now shouting through a megaphone is Walter Russell Mead. Prof. Mead has a wall covered in credentials — he serves in an endowed professorship at Bard, teaches at Yale, is the editor of American Interest, and writes for all the Big Top journals, magazines, and newspapers. He also wrote an article for a website in November with the incongruous title of Softly, Softly, Beijing Turns the Other Cheek — For Now. Its tone is so extreme one wonders if the point of the exercise were to lead the underclassmen in cheers of Yay, Eagles!

Take a deep breath:

The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever. The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.

Does he — or anyone — really think China’s leadership was “shocked” by any of this? The Chinese were building dynasties long before people in the West were numbering their years; an understanding of this behavior is inherent in the East Asian version of the classical education. Considering that the timeline of “ever” for unpleasant shocks encompasses everything China’s been involved with for the past 60 years, including great leaps forward, cultural revolutions, and massacres at Tiananmen Square, it is unlikely to have caused little more than a raised eyebrow in Beijing.

Let’s examine the specifics of the American counteroffensive.

The Marines in Australia

The initial deployment is 250 troops this year in the tropical north, rising eventually to all of 2,500. The mission of Marines is not to serve as defenders, much less defend Australia. Their mission is to attack, and the only reason for stationing them here is to threaten an attack if the Chinese behave unacceptably in the South China Sea. The status quo is therefore a faceoff of the neo-imperialists: the Chinese claiming “indisputable sovereignty” over the region, and the United States, through Secretary of State Clinton, countering with the new idea that international law in the South China Sea is a matter of American national interest. In other words, Globocop holds that the Monroe Doctrine now extends to the other side of the world.

As Sam Spade observed to Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, however, the threat of force is meaningless unless the other party believes the threat is real. That is by no means a given in this situation, if only because the Americans are threatening a country larger than itself that can inflict serious damage on it in return. Now then: Does anyone think this American saber swishing is credible? Does anyone believe that Marines in Australia will make the Chinese reconsider? It’s been a while since anyone seriously thought the Americans would come to the defense of Japan in the event of an attack, and the American military infrastructure here consists of nearly 40,000 troops at 100 installations. The Chinese are unlikely to become alarmed about the possibility of a robust American military response to their behavior in the South China Sea.

It makes one wonder how much thought was invested by the people responsible for the American policy. The Marines are a formidable force, but 2,500 of them are insufficient to either deter China beforehand or push them back afterwards. They’re certainly not meant to serve as a tripwire in Australia, either.

As for the Australians selling uranium to India, the Indians have had nuclear weapons since 1974. Will they not buy uranium from somewhere?

Indonesia

By the “deepening” military ties with Indonesia, Prof. Mead seems to be referring to the dispatch of 24 F-16s to that country. Rather than being one of the bold new initiatives in a geopolitical That Was The Week That Was, it represents an ongoing development that gained impetus after Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s visit in the summer of 2010.

Congress cut off military training assistance to Indonesia in 1992 after Indonesian security forces shot and killed East Timorese demonstrators in November 1991. The restriction was partially lifted in 1995, but military assistance programs were suspended again after violence and destruction in East Timor following an Aug. 30, 1999, referendum favoring independence from Indonesia. Though normal military relations between the United States and Indonesia have resumed, the issue of providing training for Kopassus remained unresolved until earlier this week, the official said.

“I was pleased to be able to tell the president that as a result of Indonesian military reforms over the past decade, the ongoing professionalization of the [Indonesian armed forces], and recent actions taken by the ministry of defense to address human rights issues,” Gates told reporters after his meeting with Yudhoyono, “the United States will begin a gradual, limited program of security cooperation activities with the Indonesian army special forces.”

If wading into the surf up to the calf is your idea of deep, then these are deepening ties. This again is unlikely to have jolted the Chinese, even taken in combination with the assignment of the Marines to a pleasant duty station in Oz. In fact, that combination may not have had the desired effect in Beijing at all — especially after the Indonesian foreign minister said the announced deployment of Marines to a neighboring country could create “a vicious circle of tension and mistrust”.

Japan

Assertion: Japan “is stepping up military actions”. Reality: Japan will assign some Land Self-Defense Forces to the small island of Yonaguni, the westernmost part of the Japanese archipelago, 110 kilometers from Taiwan. Rather than being a part of a grand strategic mosaic, it is a move the Kan administration began talking about last February after the contretemps with the Chinese in the Senkakus in September 2010.

Placing troops on the island had been under discussion for some time, as then-Prime Minister Aso Taro made a reference to it in July 2009. The Japanese have been carefully monitoring that part of their territory for years. When serving as foreign minister in 2006, Mr. Aso told local government officials from Yonaguni that the Japanese government had dissuaded Taiwan from conducting a planned naval artillery exercise west of the island. Concerns about Taiwan began as early as 1996, when the Taiwanese navy began moving their exercises northward. Local fisherman complained that the artillery was scaring away the fish.

Myanmar

Is Myanmar really “slipping out of China’s column”?

Myanmar vowed on Saturday to address concerns raised by President Barack Obama, outlining far-reaching plans to make peace with ethnic rebels, gradually release all political prisoners and relax controls on freedom of expression.

But its government, fearing an Arab Spring-style revolution if it moves too quickly, stressed reforms must be gradual after nearly a half century of isolation and authoritarian rule that ended when the army handed power in March to a civilian parliament stacked with former generals.

Mr. Obama himself said only that the country, which has a border with China, was making “flickers of progress”. Again, someone forgot to tell the Chinese that they were supposed to be shocked:

Vice President Xi Jinping of China welcomed the leader of Myanmar’s military on Monday in a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and called for closer military ties between the countries, in what appeared to be a response to the visit by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar later this week. (Emphasis mine)

Mr. Xi, the heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, met Min Aung Hliang, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s military, and said that China would “work with Myanmar to further bolster the comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation,” according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.

Others offered a better perspective on this bilateral relationship than Prof. Mead:

Myanmar’s past isolation meant it sought friends only where it could find them. It became heavily reliant on China for weapons, international diplomatic support, trade and investment. But the relationship with China has never sat well with Myanmar’s military rulers. While some exploited the situation for personal gain, others became very concerned about Beijing’s growing presence and commercial influence.

It is unlikely that Naypyidaw intends to unilaterally ally itself with one great power over another. During its decades-long period of isolation and international condemnation, it has become adept at playing bigger powers off against one another, and has a long-established tradition of nonalignment in its foreign relations. The power games being played between Washington and Beijing, and also with New Delhi, are certainly not lost on Myanmar’s leaders.

Days before Clinton’s visit, military head General Min Aung Hliang travelled to Beijing in what was interpreted as a move to assuage Chinese fears of growing relations with the US. Despite a rift over the recent cancellation of the important Chinese-backed Myitsone dam project, the general held discussions with Vice President Xi Jinping, slated to become China’s leader next year, and chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, General Chen Bingde. Both sides pledged continued military cooperation and signed a new defense cooperation agreement.

Because the sincerity of Thein Sein’s reforms are far from certain, Clinton’s visit and concessions represent a diplomatic gamble.

The Philippines

Manila is also supposed to be deepening military ties to the United States, though Prof. Mead offered no specifics. A search of recent newspaper articles turns up one from the New York Times dated 16 November 2011, just before the East Asia summit. The first sentence reads:

During a high-profile visit to the Philippines on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stood on the deck of an American warship in Manila Bay and reaffirmed the strong military relationship between the United States and the Philippines.

That’s it.

Just as important, if not more so, were the last two sentences:

“The Philippines does not want to be the representative of the U.S. military in Southeast Asia,” (a local analyst) said. “I think the Philippine government wants to maintain its friendship with both these great powers and not become a ball in the middle being kicked by both sides.”

TPP

Prof. Mead refers to a “new trade group” that does not include China, by which he means the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What is new about the trade group is that the United States hijacked regional discussions among four smaller states to employ it as a double-edged sword. One side of the blade cuts against the Chinese, and the other stimulates the American economy while doing little for the other partners.

The American-decreed terms of the partnership make it unlikely China will be interested in participating. This letter to three U.S. Cabinet members signed by 257 academics offers one reason for that:

Many U.S. free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties contain provisions that strictly limit the ability of our trading partners to deploy capital controls. The “capital transfers” provisions of such agreements require governments to permit all transfers relating to a covered investment to be made “freely and without delay into and out of its territory.” Under these agreements, private foreign investors have the power to effectively sue governments in international tribunals over alleged violations of these provisions.

And this from a site in New Zealand:

Another secret document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations has been leaked, the first dealing with issues other than intellectual property and medicines.

This follows yesterday’s leak of documents showing the US is pushing for rules on healthcare products that would give its pharmaceutical giants new tools to attack national drug buying agencies like Pharmac

“We warned the government that obsessive secrecy surrounding the TPPA negotiations would spawn more leaks, and that’s what is happening,” said Professor Jane Kelsey, a critic of the proposed agreement.

The leaked regulatory coherence text sets out the agencies, mechanisms and processes that governments should use when deciding on domestic regulations. This has never been included in a free trade agreement before.

“It is totally inappropriate for a ‘trade’ agreement to dictate how governments should structure their domestic bureaucracy and procedures”, said Professor Kelsey.

The way the TPPA is shaping up, large, mainly foreign corporations and powerful lobby groups will have the right to exert undue influence over New Zealand’s (or any country’s) policy and regulatory decisions and demand minimalist regulation. There would be no equivalent rights to public interest groups that may have contrary views.”

Speaking of healthcare:

“The US proposals would allow drug companies to challenge every Pharmac decision as not appropriately recognising the ‘value’ of patents – a dangerous and undefined standard. Adopting this standard would open floodgates of litigation against Pharmac and will ultimately raise medicine prices and ration access.”

What the New Zealand critics are referring to has also been a point of contention among opposition politicians in Japan: the ISD clause, or Investor State Dispute (Settlement). That allows entities in Country A to initiate dispute settlement proceedings against Country B under international law, rather than in the courts of Country B, as has been customary in the past.

As you might expect, the Americans see it differently:

The trans-Pacific trade pact that the United States is negotiating with eight other nations is not directed against China, a top White House adviser says.

The Obama administration has made the Trans-Pacific Partnership a key plank of its enhanced engagement in Asia. But it does not include the region’s largest economy and rising power, China, which Washington has criticized for its currency policy and support of state-owned enterprises.

Does this mean the U.S. won’t export GM autos to East Asia?

But:

In a commentary published Tuesday in the Indian daily, The Economic Times, Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of economics and law at Columbia University in New York, criticized the U.S. trade policy, which he said aimed to marginalize an assertive China….

“A closer look reveals that China is not a part of this agenda. The TPP is also a political response to China’s new aggressiveness, built, therefore, in a spirit of confrontation and containment, not of cooperation.”

Froman recounted that Chinese officials at the November summit of Asia-Pacific leaders in Hawaii expressed concern that they had not been invited to join the pact.

“Our response is that TPP is not something you are invited to, it’s something you aspire to. If countries aspire to achieve these standards they’re welcome to (join) the TPP as well,” he said.

People understand that great powers behaving as neo-imperialists will try to stifle their adversaries. They understand that great powers will promote an international order tailored to their specifications with the primary benefits accruing to themselves.

What the Americans fail to understand, however, is that no one appreciates the arrogance of self-interest masquerading as the global gold standard of idealistic behavior.

Then there is the demand of one hegemon to another that the latter settle its claims in the South China Sea at a multinational venue, though the former makes no such demand of its client states. (e.g., the Japanese – South Korean dispute over Takeshima) But Prof. Mead does not stop there:

Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted. Rarely have so many red lines been crossed. Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast.

Rarely has a professor of foreign affairs indulged in such profligate exaggeration in three short sentences. The entire geopolitical and diplomatic history of nation-states is a cyclopedia of great power provocations, effronteries, and red line crossing. As for the idea that the Chinese lost face, it’s unfortunate that Westerners whose understanding of East Asian social concepts doesn’t extend beyond the words insist on parading a sophistication they don’t possess, but that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

Or are we to think that because “in your face” is a crowd-pleaser in the NBA, it will go down well when conducting foreign relations in this part of the world?

The timing turned out to be brilliant. China is in the midst of a leadership transition, when it is harder for important decisions to be taken quickly.

Harder for whom?

Prof. Mead is referring to Xi Jinping, who will become China’s general secretary next year and president in 2013. The former Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations does not mention this transition has been underway for almost three years. The Japanese knew he was to become the next Chinese leader when then DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro outraged many in late 2009 by breaching an informal protocol to finagle an audience for Mr. Xi with the Emperor. (He didn’t schedule a month in advance.) Mr. Xi has also toured Europe and Latin America.

He does not seem to be a man who is easily shocked. The Japanese consider him a hardliner who could shift from what they perceive as the softer line of the current leadership, though none of this has soaked into Western consciousness yet. Here’s a taste of Mr. Xi’s thinking:

“There are some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us. First, China doesn’t export revolution; second, China doesn’t export hunger and poverty; third, China doesn’t come and cause you headaches. What more is there to be said?”

Transitions in China might be quite different than those Prof. Mead and other Americans are familiar with. Four years before the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was a part-time Illinois state legislator and part-time adjunct law professor. He needed a crash course to serve as the chief executive of government (and it shows). Xi Jingling won’t.

Back to Prof. Mead:

The (Chinese) economy is looking shaky, with house prices falling across much of the country.

Unlike the robust American housing market:

Lender Processing Services reports that the percentage of mortgages in foreclosure is at its highest level ever. “Foreclosure inventories are on the rise,” LPS writes, “reaching an all-time high at the end of October of 4.29 percent of all active mortgages.”

Now for the truly appalling:

The diplomatic blitzkrieg moved so fast and on so many fronts, with the strokes falling so hard and in such rapid succession, that China was unable to develop an organized and coherent response. And because Wen Jiabao’s appearance at the East Asia Summit, planned long before China had any inkling of the firestorm about to be unleashed, could not be canceled or changed, premier Wen Jiabao was trapped: he had to respond in public to all this while China was off balance and before the consultation, reflection and discussion that might have created an effective response.

…The effect of this passive and low key response (the only thing really, he could have done) is to reinforce the sense in Asia that the US has reasserted its primacy in a convincing way. The US acted, received strikingly widespread support, and China backed down.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth:

China and Japan pledged Wednesday to boost political trust between the two countries during Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba’s visit to Beijing…

…China is ready to make joint efforts with Japan to further advance their strategic relationship of mutual benefit in a sustainable way, Yang told his Japanese counterpart, Gemba.

At Yang’s invitation, Gemba was in Beijing to pave way for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s planned visit to China in December. If his trip is made, Noda will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit China since the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in 2009.

And:

The Chinese premier attended the 6th East Asia Summit in Bali, Indonesia on Saturday and put forward a five-point proposal for boosting the regional economy, such as carrying out and improving agreed free trade arrangements, advancing the building of new free trade areas and opening markets further.

Here’s a photo of the Chinese foreign minister backing down with the Japanese foreign minister a week later:

Finally, we come to the professor’s agenda:

That (i.e.; backing down) is in fact what happened, and it was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see. Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team. The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy. They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power. In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be…(T)he effects of the President’s re-assertion of American primacy in the Pacific will reinforce the public perception that he has grown into the foreign policy side of his job. He looked very presidential in Asia; those things count.

Prof. Mead self-identifies as a Democrat and has stated that he voted for Mr. Obama in 2008.

You’ve heard of drive-by journalists, who make ex cathedra declarations on subjects they hadn’t heard of the week before? There are drive-by Thinktankers too:

But a successful opening is not the same thing as a final win. The opening American gambit in the new great game was brilliant, but China also gets a move. On the one hand, the sweep, the scope and the success of the American moves make it hard for China to respond in kind; on the other hand, the humiliation and frustration (and, in some quarters, the fear) both inside the government and in society at large over these setbacks will compel some kind of response.

China must now think carefully about its choices and to work to use all the factors of its power to inflict some kind of counterblow against the United States. Look for China to reach out much more intensively to Russia to find ways in which the two powers can frustrate the US and hand it some kind of public setback.

Two months before Prof. Mead drove by:

High-ranking military officials from China and Russia held talks here Friday, pledging to further step up bilateral military cooperation between the two countries.

During an official visit to Moscow, Guo Boxiong, Vice Chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, met with Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on bilateral military relations.

Guo noted that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the signing of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation, adding that the China-Russia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership have maintained the momentum of a robust growth.

He stressed that Chinese President Hu Jintao’s successful visit to Russia in June and the consensus reached by both countries’ leaders during Hu’s visit have determined the future direction of the development of bilateral ties and laid solid political foundations for the further promotion of military relations between the two countries.

But he got this prediction right:

Certainly any Chinese arguments against massive military build ups will be difficult to win. The evident weakness of China’s position will make it impossible to resist calls for more military spending and an acceleration of the development of China’s maritime capacity.

Sure enough:

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday urged the navy to prepare for military combat, amid growing regional tensions over maritime disputes and a US campaign to assert itself as a Pacific power.

The navy should “accelerate its transformation and modernisation in a sturdy way, and make extended preparations for military combat in order to make greater contributions to safeguard national security,” he said.

In a translation of Hu’s comments, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the president as saying China’s navy should “make extended preparations for warfare.”

…Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao last month also warned against interference by “external forces” in regional territorial disputes including in the South China Sea, a strategic and resource-rich area where several nations have overlapping claims.

The Pentagon wasn’t surprised either:

“They have a right to develop military capabilities and to plan, just as we do,” said Pentagon spokesman George Little, but he added, “We have repeatedly called for transparency from the Chinese and that’s part of the relationship we’re continuing to build with the Chinese military.”

Transparency? When two card sharps play high-stakes poker, does one expect the other to show his hand?

Prof. Mead presses on:

Longer term, the conviction in the military and among hard liners in the civilian establishment that the US is China’s enemy and seeks to block China’s natural rise will not only become more entrenched and more powerful; it will have consequences…China’s military or factions within it could begin to take steps on critical issues that the political authorities could not reverse. Islands could be occupied, flags raised and shots fired.

Yet Prof. Mead lauds American efforts to publicly humiliate the Chinese as brilliant and a sign that the Obama Administration has come of age. Is he having second thoughts before the essay is finished?

An intense debate in China will now turn even more pointed. There will be some who counsel patience, saying that China cannot win an open contest with the US and that its only hope is to stick with the concept of “peaceful rise”: eschewing all conflict with the US and its neighbors, behaving as a “responsible stakeholder” in the US-built international system, and growing richer and more powerful until such a time as alternative strategies can be considered. That in my opinion is China’s wisest course.

That in my opinion is one of the most futile efforts at propaganda and wishful thinking ever delivered from a credentialed academic writing about serious international issues. China sees itself on the rise and the US on the wane, but its wisest course is to do as the Americans say in a US-built international hegemony with US rules that give the biggest advantages to its own companies?

What’s next? All your base are belong to us?

The Obama administration and its successors will now have to deal with a long term contest against the world’s most populous country and the world’s most rapidly developing economy. The Obama administration may not have fully counted the costs of the new Asian hard line…

True, in the midst of a brilliant diplomatic blitzkrieg announcing that you’ve come of age, it’s not hard to lose count along the way.

…for one thing, it is hard to see significant cuts coming in defense spending after we have challenged China to a contest over the future of Asia.

That prediction didn’t pan out. Note the concern from a client state:

A new, more austere U.S. defense strategy unveiled Thursday gives up on fighting major wars overseas and reduces active-duty troops from 570,000 to 470,000. The aim is to cut more than US$450 billion in defense spending over the next decade. The new strategy would make it virtually impossible for the U.S. military to fulfill a pledge to South Korea to deploy 690,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula in an emergency.

By this time, Prof. Mead is neck deep in The Big Muddy, but that doesn’t stop him:

Given where things now stand, follow through will be as important as the first steps; the US must now try to make it as easy as possible for China to accept a situation that, in the short to medium term at least, it cannot change.

What situation is it that China can’t change?

Beijing wants to open full negotiations on a free trade agreement with Japan and South Korea next year, Chinese state media said yesterday, amid growing rivalry with the United States.

The report in the Global Times daily follows efforts by US President Barack Obama to woo countries from across the Pacific Rim into a US-led free trade agreement, which China has so far not been invited to join…

…Yesterday’s report said China’s Premier Wen Jiabao had pledged to speed up work on the agreement with Tokyo and Seoul during a meeting on the sidelines of last week’s East Asia Summit on the Indonesian island of Bali.

And here we were told that Mr. Wen was stunned speechless in Bali.

“Wen proposed that joint studies by governments, industries and experts on the FTA from the three countries be completed by the end of this year and that formal negotiations on the trade pact begin next year,” it said.

South Korea, Japan and China said in January 2010 they would conduct a feasibility study within two years on creating a single free trade bloc grouping their three countries.

Rather than going for the blitzkrieg — which didn’t work so well in the end for Germany — the Chinese are taking the long view and combining both hard and soft approaches. For example, at almost the same time Mr. Wen was making this proposal, six Chinese naval vessels made a show of sailing between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyakojima.

They’re taking another approach with the United States:

When we last checked in on the low-level trade war between China and the US, which was sparked by President Obama’s 35% tariff on Chinese tires, the Chinese government had ruled that American large cars and SUVs were being “dumped” on the Chinese market, but wasn’t doing anything about it. Now, Reuters reports that China is doing something about it, namely saying that it plans to impose tariffs of up to 22% on imports of American-built large cars and SUVs. And the “up to” is key: GM and Chrysler are being hit hardest (unsurprisingly), while American-made BMW, Mercedes and Acuras are receiving considerably lower tariffs.

In fact, however, what Prof. Mead presents as a new strategy by an administration coming of age is not new at all, but rather a limp extension of a strategy already in place. Here are excerpts from an article in Salon last year:

This summer, despite America’s continuing financial crisis, the Pentagon is effectively considering trading two military quagmires for the possibility of a third. Reducing its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as it refocuses on Asia, Washington is not so much withdrawing forces from the Persian Gulf as it is redeploying them for a prospective war with its largest creditor, China.

According to the defense trade press, Pentagon officials are seeking ways to adapt a concept known as AirSea Battle specifically for China, debunking rote claims from Washington that it has no plans to thwart its emerging Asian rival. A recent article in Inside the Pentagon reported that a small group of U.S. Navy officers known as the China Integration Team “is hard at work applying the lessons of [AirSea Battle] to a potential conflict with China.”

AirSea Battle, developed in the early 1990s and most recently codified in a 2009 Navy-Air Force classified memo, is a vehicle for conforming U.S. military power to address asymmetrical threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf — code for China and Iran….It complements the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a government white paper that precluded the rise of any “peer competitor” that might challenge U.S. dominance worldwide. The Planning Guidance is the Pentagon’s writ for control of what defense planners call “the global commons,” a euphemism for the seaways, land bridges and air corridors that are the arteries of international commerce. For a foreign power to challenge this American dominion is to effectively declare war on the United States, and that is exactly what China appears to be doing in the South China Sea, a resource-rich and highly contested waterway in Southeast Asia.

Also:

A U.S. mobilization in Asia is well underway, in faith with a spring 2001 Pentagon study called “Asia 2025,” which identified China as a “persistent competitor of the United States,” bent on “foreign military adventurism.” Three years later, the U.S. government went public with a plan that called for a new chain of bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, in part to box in the People’s Republic…

…Unlike America’s allies in Asia and Europe, however, China is not about to outsource its national security obligations to a foreign power, particularly when it comes to the South China Sea. There more than ever, and not without reason, Beijing identifies the U.S. not as a strategic partner but as an outright threat. In 2007, when China destroyed one of its weather satellites with a ballistic missile, it served as a warning to Washington after the ramming six years earlier of a U.S. spy plane by a Chinese fighter jet off the coast of Hainan Island…

…In March 2010, when a Chinese official was quoted by Japanese media as identifying the region as a “core interest” of Chinese sovereignty, the White House retaliated by declaring that freedom of maritime navigation is a U.S. “national interest.” As it turns out, according to the China scholars Nong Hong and Wenran Jiang, writing in the July 1 edition of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation’s China bulletin, the core interest to which the official referred was “the peaceful resolution” of the disputes in question.

The authors of this article in McClatchy agree:

The Obama administration pledge to shift American military strategy toward Asia overlooks a key fact: The United States never really dropped its focus on the region.

The authors are not blinded by the strategy’s brilliance, however:

But the current budget proposal that might flow from that pledge contains a potentially crippling contradiction: The plan might cut the big-ticket items the United States needs to increase its presence in Asia and counter China’s growing military capability.
The result, some analysts fear, is a muddled approach that could end up with a tough-talking United States saying it will do more in Asia but not committing the resources needed. That, they say, could leave America and its allies in the region exposed if China’s military moves aggressively in the future.

And that brings us to the most troubling aspect of this business that Prof. Mead calls a “game”:

U.S. alliances in the region have caused some in China, particularly in military circles, to charge that the United States is working to contain China’s rise. The phrase harkens back to the Cold War and the globe-as-chessboard strategy of “containment” toward the Soviet Union.

I submit that it harkens back to an even earlier era and a geopolitical game that required the expenditure of more blood than money to win: The American attitude and behavior toward Japan before Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover kept a contemporary account of what he viewed as American foreign policy blunders and FDR’s “lost statesmanship”, but he never published it. Edited by historian George Nash, it was finally released last year under the title, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. It is 920 pages long and meticulously documented. Here’s a description of part of the contents:

Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.

Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.

The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.

On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.

The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.

Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.

U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.

On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.

Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.

On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.

On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.

On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.

On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”

No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.

In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.

At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated.

That description was written by Patrick Buchanan, a notorious isolationist whose views I seldom agree with. I quote this excerpt because his review contains the most details pertinent to the issue available, and in any event, the sentiments are Hoover’s. Further, this is not to defend Japanese behavior before 1945 or Chinese behavior now. It is rather a historical comparison that must be made in view of American actions and the Veg-O-Matic salesmanship with which they are being plugged.

Prof. Mead continued his discussion in an article published in The Wall Street Journal (that requires a subscription). It plays the same notes, but in a different key. The first sentence reads:

The United States has quietly established a bipartisan Asia policy that may well be as influential on that continent as the Marshall Plan and NATO were in Europe.

If we examine the record and bet on form, the odds for this initiative (and other initiatives extrapolated into the future) are likely to favor a result more similar to the events of December 1941 than to a 21st century Asian version of the Marshall Plan and NATO (used in this case as triumphalist symbols of the Cold War victory). That would be a bet we should all hope to lose. It behooves us, therefore, to ignore the racetrack touts regardless of their academic credentials.

What are the Japanese to do if they are not to become a ball in the middle being kicked by both sides, as the Filipino analyst warned? Japan has the wherewithal to choose a course that is perhaps not available to The Philippines, but it is unlikely to do so until the status quo becomes untenable. That might happen sooner than we think.

But more on that in the next post.

Afterwords:

* From Global Security.org:

America has nearly twice as many aircraft carriers – 20 – as the rest of humanity combined – 12 – and America’s aircraft carriers are substantially larger than almost all the other’s aircraft carriers. The Navy likes to call the big Nimitz class carriers “4.5 acres of sovereign and mobile American territory” — and all twenty American carriers of all classes add up to nearly 70 acres of deck space. Deckspace is probably a good measure of combat power. The rest of the world’s carriers have about 15 acres of deck space, one fifth that of America’s.

At least ten of the American carriers are more than 100,000 tons, and the Enterprise is more than 90,000. The largest “for the rest of humanity” are the new Chinese carrier at more than 60,000 tons and the Russian carrier at more than 50,000. None of the others are even close.

That’s one reason the Chinese are focusing on submarines.

* Yan Xuetong, a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, wrote in the New York Times:

I am a political realist. Western analysts have labeled my political views “hawkish,” and the truth is that I have never overvalued the importance of morality in international relations. But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers.

I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage.

Prof. Yan was writing in Chinese for a Chinese audience that desperately needs to read it. It should also be required reading for the officials in Washington, but the Times’ translation will be wasted on them. They’re already convinced of their morality.

* The journos are joining the chorus, with their usual combination of ham-handedness and superficiality. Try the first paragraph of this piece by William Pesek in the Sydney Morning Herald and see if you can bother yourself to finish.

* Xi Jingling’s reference to people with “full stomachs” was a clever barb that might have gone over the heads of the porkers he was referring to.

*****
Here’s Peter “I’m a Different Species” Garrett and his band Midnight Oil of Australia performing live a song called US Forces. The lyrics start, “U.S Forces give the nod / It’s a setback for your country,” before falling down the elevator shaft of unintelligibility.

And here’s the lede of an article in The Telegraph of Australia following a speech by Barack Obama in that country last November as part of the Bali blitzkreig:

Labor minister Peter Garrett personally told Barack Obama his speech on an expanded US military presence was “inspiring” – almost three decades after he attacked the same armed forces in song.

Yeah, it’s the same Peter Garrett. Neo-socialists quite like neo-imperialism as long as it comes from another neo-socialist.

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Kiss

ONE segment on a Japanese television program tonight featured an experiment in kissing with participants from five different countries.

The program hired an attractive young woman in each of those countries, had each of them stand for an hour outdoors in an urban district with a lot of pedestrian traffic holding a sign that read, “Kiss me please”, and filmed the events that transpired. Of course they counted the number of kissers, but only kisses on the cheek were allowed. All of the models were very kissable. Women were free to kiss the model too. The results:

Italy: 24
United States: 11
Japan: 7
The Philippines: 4
South Korea: 0

That Italy was the champion by such a large margin isn’t surprising at all. Nor was it surprising that a large share of those 24 were old men who kissed quite stylishly.

Two of the seven Japanese kissers were young women who were photographed in the act by their women friends with cellphone cameras. One said she wanted to upload the photo on Twitter. Two college-aged men walked by the model, but only one kissed her. The other said he would be uncomfortable with people watching.

The South Korean woman attracted a crowd, but no kissers at all during the hour. One middle-aged woman briefly scolded her. A group of older men stood back and watched, but none could bring themselves to approach. Interviewed later, one of the men said he wanted to kiss her, but couldn’t because he was with his wife. The Japanese on the program thought the influence of Confucian culture might have been responsible for the Korean goose egg.

Some foreign residents and visitors say that Japanese television isn’t interesting.

Oh? Compared to what?

*****
Think I better dance now!

Back to front

ALL of the following stories appeared yesterday in the back pages of newspapers or the less well-traveled sections of websites. All of them present aspects of a reality quite different from the narrative of major news media outlets outside the region.

Linguistics

The National Institute of the Korean Language conducted a survey of the Korean language ability of foreigners in South Korea married to Koreans, based on the results of a language competence test conducted from 10 September to 20 October. The highest score possible for the test was 100.

The institute broke the results down by nationality and found that the Japanese had the best results, as 62.8% of that group scored 90 or better.

They were followed by Chinese of Korean ancestry at 55.7% and Mongolians at 45.6%. In last place were natives of The Philippines at 21.3%.

They also broke down the results by region of residence. (They do things like that in East Asia.) Foreign spouses in Daegu did the best with 45.5% scoring over 90 points. By province, Gangwon was at the top of the table with 40.8%, closely trailed by Gyeonggi at 40.0%.

Business

Speaking of Daegu:

Daegu City and Yeungjin College jointly launched an investment seminar on Dec. 8 for 11 invited Japanese-member companies of the Technology Advanced Metropolitan Area (TAMA)….

The investment seminar catered to 14 to 19 attendees representing a total of 11 Japanese companies. In addition, officials from Japan’s Kanto Economy and Commerce Department attended the event, with the number of participants estimated at 20. Another 30 local companies from Daegu participated in the seminar, providing one-on-one consultations with Japanese companies on technology and business partnerships.

The participating Japanese companies are located near Tokyo and specialize in electronics and mechanical metal parts. The participants were able to look forward to possible exchanges and cooperation with established auto- and machinery-parts manufacturers in Daegu and the North Gyeongsang Provincial region. According to Daegu City, the occasion paved the way for some Japanese companies to consider entering the Korean market.

The governments of Japan, South Korea, and China are talking about having talks about a free trade agreement, but local governments and the business sectors in both countries aren’t futzing around. Similar articles appear nearly every day in the middle or back pages of the Nishinippon Shimbun, with reports of South Korean and Chinese businesspeople coming to Kyushu for discussions and signing business agreements. Governments and business associations in Kyushu, the southern Korean Peninsula, and Northeast China have been working together for several years to create a de facto free trade zone.

Oh, and if you hit that link, you’ll see a photo of cherry blossoms in Daegu.

Sailing

Seoul-based Harmony Cruises has begun sales of cruise packages to Kyushu that will call at Fukuoka City, Beppu, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima (as well as Jeju) from home ports in Busan and Incheon. The initial sales are for 19 cruises between February and April. The company plans to offer almost 100 cruises per year. The Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport says they will become the first South Korean company to operate cruises to Japan.

There’s also been a sharp increase in the number of Chinese cruises to Kyushu over the past five years. They already call on six Kyushu ports 118 times a year, and more are planned. The Kyushu Economic Research Center says the economic effect for each city of each port call for each cruise is JPY 44 million.

There are plenty of things to do and see in Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima, ranging from theme parks to historical and cultural attractions. Beppu is famous for its hot springs, and many Koreans like to come to Kyushu to play golf.

Flying

Low-cost carrier Jeju Air of South Korea announced plans to inaugurate regularly scheduled daily flights between Fukuoka City and Seoul this year, beginning sometime after March. The number of flights and their times are undecided, pending authorization by South Korean authorities. (If the project has gotten this far, however, they’ll get the authorization.) Jeju Air has been operating three flights a week between Kitakyushu (Fukuoka City’s neighbor) and Seoul since March 2009.

Said a Jeju Air spokesman:

The Fukuoka Airport has many users from both Japan and South Korea, and it has excellent access because it is close to the city center. (It’s 10 minutes by subway.)

Jeju will be the second Korean LCC to operate flights to Fukuoka; the first was T’way, which also flies to Osaka and Nagoya.

And that’s in addition to the Japanese LCCs and the major Japanese and Korean airlines flying the same route.

Read the primary articles in the English-language media about Japan-South Korea relations, and you can’t get past the second sentence without them dipping into all the bad blood. Oh, it’s there all right, kept at a boil and stirred by the politicos and their Greek chorus in the commentariat and academia.

But read the newspaper back to front and you see that it’s a different story altogether on the ground.

Afterwords:

The Daegu story is a couple of weeks old, but I found out about it yesterday in an e-mail alert from the Korean Herald.

*****
Happy New Year is a Matsutoya Yumi (“Yuming”) song, but here she performs it in a duet with Suga Shikao

The Korean hue in Japan

ONE of the guilty pleasures this website provides is the chance to contribute to the disappointment of those people overseas, particularly in the West, who think it is a matter of received wisdom that the Japanese hate Koreans. It would be more pleasurable to think it contributes to their enlightenment, but that would assume they’re interested in being enlightened.

Page 38 of the 1 January edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun (which runs to 40 pages, with page 40 being an advertisement) has an article about the popularity in the Kyushu region of a Busan vocal duo known as Hue. The article reports that the duo, Kim Ji-hyeon (she) and Ryu (or Yu) Mu-yong (he), will make a concerted effort to extend their popularity throughout Japan this year. They’ll start with their first solo concert in the country in Fukuoka City on 6 March.

Once members of the Busan Municipal Chorus, they formed their duo in 2005 to perform what they call popera. Their repertoire seems to consist of pop music that requires sophisticated vocal technique, as well as some opera selections.

Hue’s first Japanese appearance was in Fukuoka City at a Fukuoka City – Busan Friendship Commemorative Concert in 2009. They’ve since performed here more than 10 times, mostly in Fukuoka City. That’s easily arranged, because the city is accessible from Busan by a three-hour jetfoil ship service, or dozens of daily flights that take less than an hour.

They were encouraged to step up their activities in Japan after Yoshida Fumi (56) formed a fan club for them in Fukuoka City. Ms. Yoshida cried when she heard them perform the Japanese song Sen no Kaze ni Natte with Korean lyrics. That’s a translation of the line “I am a thousand winds that blow” from the English-language poem Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep. The song, a tear-jerker suited to a semi-operatic performance, was originally released by the Japanese composer on only 30 privately-produced CDs. It became a national phenomenon in slow motion, however, and eventually inspired a special television drama with that name.

Ms. Yoshida’s fan club, which consists mostly of junior high and high school girls, turned out for Hue’s three Fukuoka City concerts last year, as well as a performance in Busan. Hue returned the favor with an expression of thanks to the club on their newest disc, which was released last fall. They also printed all the lyrics in Japanese and recorded the song Prologue, the lyrics of which are by Ms. Yoshida’s favorite poet, Yun Dong-ju.

Poet Yun studied English literature at two Japanese universities in 1942, but was arrested as a thought criminal by Japanese police and sentenced to two years in jail in 1943. He died in prison in 1945 in — get ready for it — Fukuoka. There’s plenty of information available about him on the Japanese-language part of the Web.

The newspaper report notes that the duo is almost unknown in South Korea.

Now roll all of the above information around in your head one more time and marvel at how amazing life its own self can be.

Here’s a YouTube clip of an appearance they made on Kumamoto television promoting a concert in that city in December 2009. The interview before and after the song consists of the pleasantries you might expect; Ms. Kim (who now has red hair) says she looks forward to seeing the local tourist attractions, such as Kumamoto Castle and Aso. It’s easy to understand why they’re popular. They’re quite talented, though the style of music won’t be to everyone’s taste. But that isn’t the point, is it?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: They sing in English.

When they’re not singing in Italian, that is:

Afterwords:

Speaking of those in the West who either can’t be bothered or are too thick to get it, BBC introduces a Roland Buerk report this way:

South Korea’s K-pop music has overtaken Japanese music as the industry’s most popular genre in the country.

Relations between the two countries have been difficult after Japan’s colonisation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century.

But with the growing popularity of Korean culture, will attitudes to people of Korean origin, who make up a large ethnic minority in Japan, soften?

Let’s see…in the first paragraph, someone writes that South Korean pop music is more popular in Japan than Japanese pop music, but in the third paragraph asks if Japanese attitudes towards the Koreans living in Japan will change. Spit out that gum before you try walking, son.

Buerk even mentions the growing popularity of Korean restaurants in Japan, but still can’t see beyond the end of his nosenetwork’s pre-packaged narrative.

Further, he fails to provide actual statistics for his claim about K-pop dominance. Taking a mass media report on faith has been a suckers’ proposition for decades. Korean music could very well be the Top of the Pops in Japan, but he has to show us the numbers to be credible.

Finally, he still can’t competently pronounce Japanese place names, despite having lived in the country three years this month. Any native English speaker can learn proper Japanese pronunciation in a matter of minutes. Buerk’s failure to do so demonstrates his level of commitment to his assignment.

If you’re interested in seeing the clip, please hit the search engine of your choice. Links around here are reserved for serious journalism.

Ichigen koji (81)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

If Japan (the government) makes a political decision and shows even more good faith, (this issue) could be resolved at any time…If it is not resolved, Japan will forever bear the burden of its inability to resolve unsettled bilateral issues.

- Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea, referring to the comfort woman issue while speaking to a group of zainichi in Osaka during his visit to Japan for a summit with Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko

In contrast, most Japanese consider the issue to have been resolved long ago. In 1965, the Japanese government paid South Korea $800 million in grants and low-interest loans as war reparations. One of the terms of the agreement, reached with South Korean President Bak Jeong-hui, was that South Koreans would relinquish the right to make individual claims against the Japanese government.

Indeed, many Japanese insist that it should never have been an issue at all.

As I’ve written before:

“No one should be under any illusion that the issue of Imperial Japan’s behavior in the war is anything other than a convenient stick for the leadership in China and both Koreas to wield in their relations with contemporary Japan, or to cynically stir up domestic anger at the Japanese, deflecting attention from domestic problems.”

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Japan, the U.S., and the TPP: You don’t know the half of it

A free trade environment is beneficial for Japan. That is the national consensus…On the question of whether the prime minister has the ability to negotiate, however, the people don’t think so.
- Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo

Britain is a world by itself; and we will nothing pay for wearing our own noses.
- Shakespeare

IT didn’t take long for circumstances to expose the inadequacies of Japan’s new “prime minister”, Noda Yoshihiko. After a mere two crisis-free months, it’s obvious that he lacks the skills at either governance or politics demanded of a national leader. Indeed, it’s an open question at this point whether he is in fact the national leader.

When he took office, some touted the new choice as a safe Democratic Party driver after the vaporous insubstantiality of Hatoyama Yukio and the toxic cluster of erratic electrons that is Kan Naoto. But beyond a constitutional predisposition to ambling along at 45 on the expressway with his hands frozen in position on the wheel, this safe driver is now perceived as a chauffer for the dirigistes of the bureaucracy-that-is-the-government at home — particularly the Finance Ministry — and the delivery boy for governments overseas. Mr. Noda has compounded that problem by behaving as an inert gelatin too incurious to inform himself on the laws of his country or the policies of his own government beyond the instructions received over the horn from the back seat of the Brougham.

The events of the past week have created suspicions that this paleface is speaking to his fellow countrymen with the most forked of tongues about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. If those well-founded suspicions harden into belief, it could jeopardize Japanese participation in the TPP, as well as the survival of the DPJ government and the party itself.

ISD

The fun started hitting the fan last Friday on the afternoon of the 11th, when upper house Diet member Sato Yukari of the opposition LDP questioned Mr. Noda about the TPP. The “prime minister’s” performance was so inept that 30-minute clips of the session began circulating immediately on YouTube. (The industrial media, both in Japan and overseas, ignored it, but I belabor the obvious.)

Ms. Sato asked the “prime minister” about the possibility that domestic law would be distorted by the ISD clauses in a TPP treaty. She was referring to Investor State Dispute (Settlement), which allows entities in Country A to initiate dispute settlement proceedings against Country B under international law, rather than in the courts of Country B, as has been customary in the past.

The first treaty to allow developed nations this option was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. If the Party of The First Part has a beef against the Party of The Second Part in another country, they can demand arbitration under the Arbitration Rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law or the Arbitration (Additional Facility) Rules of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. Entities in both Canada and the United States have already created some unpleasantness by employing this option against each other.

Here was Mr. Noda’s answer:

We will negotiate in order to enable a response under Japanese law.

First, note the word “negotiate”. The “prime minister” has been trying to buy time at home, particularly with the TPP opponents in his own party, by insisting that Japan hasn’t decided whether it will “negotiate”. It is only going to hold “discussions” with the related countries first.

At that point the sound shuts off on the video when two men approach the presiding officer for a discussion. (Their conversation is not recorded, and it resembles the scene in an American courtroom when attorneys approach the bench.)

Someone seems to have spoken to Mr. Noda during that time, because when the recording resumes, he adds:

The treaty takes precedence over Japanese law, so we will think of how to respond within the reality that we must respond to that.

A heckler, probably Nishida Shoji of the LDP, retorts:

What are you talking about? How are we going to be able to respond? The treaty takes precedence, so we can’t respond under international law.

The “prime minster” continues:

I didn’t have a detailed knowledge of ISDS, but treaties do take precedence over Japanese law. Therefore, we will not kill or destroy Japanese law to conclude a treaty.

In other words, when Ms. Sato first asked the question about ISD clauses, “Prime Minister” Noda had no idea what she was talking about.

She also presented a hypothetical example of a local government putting public works contracts to bid and restricting the bidding due to concerns about local employment or the hollowing out of the economy. That could generate a demand by overseas contractors for resolution in front of an international body. How, she asked, would you deal with a situation in which a local government puts the national government at risk?

Justice Minister Hiraoka Hideo was the picture of matter-of-fact, banal self-satisfaction when he answered for the government. Of course, he said, they had every intention of allowing international rules to apply, because it would be discrimination against other countries otherwise. Japan would be a good international partner.

Ms. Sato dismissed the idea that Japan could negotiate favorable terms for the treaty framework. Japan’s participation would begin in six months, she noted, and by then it would be too late to have an impact on the general structure.

As for the issue of ISD, she dismissed Mr. Noda out of hand:

Constitutionally, this is an elementary matter, so I’m flabbergasted that you couldn’t give an answer based on what is in the Constitution. To declare our participation in TPP without understanding this is to disrespect the people.

TPP supporter Eda Kenji, the secretary-general of Your Party, understood immediately that this line of attack presented a legitimate threat in the arena of public opinion. He attempted a counterattack on his blog this week by pointing out that Japan is already a part of 20 treaties containing such clauses, starting with a 1978 treaty with Egypt. He reported that no one has sought international arbitration against Japan stemming from those treaties.

Mr. Eda’s mention of Japanese-Egyptian trade is instructive, however, if only to vitiate his argument. Japan has a trade surplus with Egypt. The Japanese embassy in Cairo states that the primary Japanese exports to that country are transportation equipment and electric machinery, while the Egyptians export petroleum, petroleum products, cotton, and cotton textiles. Considering the relative economic development of the two countries, none of these categories is likely to generate a dispute of unfair access. He does not identify the other 19 countries Japan has such treaties with, though the United States is not one of them. Until demonstrated otherwise, it would be reasonable to assume that many, if not most, of those countries have trade relationships with Japan similar to those of Egypt; i.e., concentrated in a few sectors that supplement mutual needs.

That is unlikely to be the case in any treaty relationship with the litigation-loving Americans, however.

What country are you the prime minister of?

Fukushima Mizuho, head of Japan’s Social Democrats, is almost always a waste of air, water, and space in the enclosed hothouse of Japanese politics. But to give credit where credit is due, she was pertinent, direct, and relentless in her questioning of the “prime minister” following Ms. Sato on Friday. She pummeled him for not saying a word about Japanese participation in TPP negotiations in the Diet, yet promising to people overseas that Japan would participate.

You’re going to get on a plane to go to the APEC summit later today, but we’re here in the Diet now. Why aren’t you saying anything?

She added, with perfect justification:

* “Why won’t you make the declaration to participate in TPP in the Diet?”

* “You won’t make the declaration in the Diet, and at home you’re just like a dojo fish in the mud, so why can you go overseas and make that declaration?”

* “Just what country are you the prime minister of?”

* “For whose purpose are you conducting politics?”

The safe-driving chauffer, unwilling or unable to deviate from the road map, only repeated that the government was in the process of reaching a consensus, and that he would discuss it sometime later. A particular favorite was this word game:

We will participate in discussions with the related countries with an eye toward joining TPP negotiations.

That night, Mr. Noda met at the Kantei with Henry Kissinger, who stopped by on his way to Okayama to participate in a forum. The Japanese media reports said he conveyed to Mr. Kissinger his government’s policy of participating in TPP negotiations (not discussions). Mr. Kissinger was delighted to hear it.

APEC

Mr. Noda flew to the APEC summit in Honolulu and back last weekend, and well and truly stepped in some very deep poi. After discussions with President Barack Obama, the Americans announced that the Japanese “prime minister” had placed all Japanese goods and services on the negotiating table for TPP. The repercussions were audible on the other side of the Pacific.

Japan’s foreign ministry complained to the Americans that Mr. Noda said no such thing, and insisted that he had only committed to participating in discussions. The ministry claimed they filed an objection with the American government and received an informal acknowledgement of the error.

Question Time in the upper house resumed after Mr. Noda’s Hawaiian weekend. On Tuesday, Yamamoto Ichita of the LDP took up where the Sato/Fukushima tag team left off and amped up the voltage. If anyone thought the “prime minister” was capable of salvaging the situation, listening to his answers soon disabused them of that notion.

Mr. Yamamoto kept pressing for simple answers to simple questions, but never got one. He asked Mr. Noda several times about the discrepancy between the American and Japanese versions of the Japanese promise. He wanted to know why the Americans had not formally withdrawn and corrected their earlier statement. Mr. Noda robotically repeated that the U.S. government “recognized their error”. No, he would not demand that the Americans change their statement. No, he never said that to begin with. Japan would keep stating the truth about their negotiating position. How did the Japanese government intend to do that, Mr. Yamamoto asked. No clear answer was forthcoming.

It is already past the point at which anyone will believe a Japanese government “statement of truth” on the matter, however. Here was the headline on a 15 November piece on the Voice of America website:

Noda Pledge to Join Trans-Pacific Partnership

The VOA tried to soften it a bit in the body, but the intent is the same. Note how they mention that everyone has concerns about Japan without mentioning everyone’s mutual concerns about them:

Noda’s endorsement of joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership is merely the first step in a longer process that still must overcome opposition at home as well as concerns from the nine other TPP member nations involved in the talks.

Mr. Yamamoto asked several more questions — several more times for each — but Mr. Noda played talking Tar Baby:

Q: Why is the U.S. saying that you made that promise?
A: I haven’t said a word about that.

Q: Will you clearly state that non-participation is an option for Japan?
A: Nothing is 100% certain.

Q: Will rice be an exception in the treaty?
A: It will basically be an exception, but I can’t give a 100% guarantee.

Q: If the government is going to compensate farmers for opening the market, where is the money going to come from?
A:….

A slight note of hysteria arose in Mr. Noda’s voice on two occasions, but he soldiered on with a story that no one believes.

The White House isn’t bothering to pay attention. The WH website hasn’t altered its account of Mr. Noda’s statement. In fact, they’re not going to, either:

The White House said Monday it stands by an earlier press briefing on a Japan-U.S. summit Saturday and does not intend to revise it, despite a protest from Tokyo that the Japanese premier was misquoted in it over his position on the issue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade initiative.

In response to reporters’ questions, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, “The readout that we put out was based on the private consultations that (U.S.) President (Barack) Obama and (Japanese) Prime Minister (Yoshihiko) Noda had. It was based also on the public declarations from Prime Minister Noda and other members of his administration.”

The statement is still accurate and “we don’t anticipate revising” it, Earnest said, while declining to clarify whether the White House has been asked to revise the statement.

The statement, available on the White House website, said Obama “welcomed Prime Minister Noda’s statement that he would put all goods, as well as services, on the negotiating table for trade liberalization.”

But the Japanese government said Noda had only explained the government’s basic policy in general on a comprehensive economic partnership and that the U.S. side misinterpreted it as an explanation of Noda’s stance on the TPP.

Who’s telling the truth?

Somebody’s lying. The United States government, regardless of the White House occupant, is certainly capable of that, particularly when it comes to squeezing an “ally” — but not this time. Here’s an excerpt from a Japanese Cabinet Decision rendered on 9 November 2010 following last year’s APEC summit in Yokohama. The emphasis is mine:

Basic Policy on Comprehensive Economic Partnerships

2. Concrete action to strengthen comprehensive economic partnerships
On the basis of the international and regional environment surrounding Japan, the Government of Japan will take the following concrete steps to strengthen comprehensive economic partnerships with major trading partner countries and regions.
With regard to EPAs or broader regional economic partnerships that are politically and economically important and will be of especially great benefit to Japan, the Government of Japan, while taking into consideration the sensitivity of trade in certain products, will subject all goods to negotiations for trade liberalization and, through such negotiations, pursue high-level economic partnerships.

“Prime Minister” Noda told Fukushima Mizuho in the Diet that the government was in the process of reaching a consensus when he should have known that the government’s own documents show the fix was in a year ago, unbeknownst to the public. (To be sure, the Senkakus incident was still dominating the news.)

Mr. Noda was serving in the Cabinet at the time as “finance minister”. One might expect that he would have read the decision of a Cabinet in which he was a key member, but let’s not forget whom we’re dealing with. This is the same guy who didn’t know the law about Bank of Japan purchases of government debt, and didn’t know about ISDs in international treaties.

So what’s going on here?

ASEAN +6

To find out what’s really at stake, let’s return briefly to Sato Yukari’s questioning of Mr. Noda in the Diet on Friday.

Ms. Sato presented a large chart with bar graphs and figures based on the research of someone affiliated with the Cabinet Office — in other words, someone in the government. The graphs compared the benefits of Japan’s participation in the TPP with the so-called ASEAN Plus Six. That’s an emerging free trade zone that would consist of the 10 ASEAN nations plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. (There’s also an ASEAN Plus Three that includes Japan, South Korea, and China only. ASEAN + 6 came about because the Japanese were worried about Chinese dominance of the +3 arrangement.) The chart also had a section showing the benefits that would accrue to the United States under TPP. America is not part of either ASEAN scheme.

As Ms. Sato explained using the chart, the Cabinet Office’s analysis clearly shows the benefits for Japan would be much greater with ASEAN + 6 than they would be with TPP. It also showed that America would benefit more from the TPP than Japan would.

Why then, Ms. Sato asked, is Japan not pursuing ASEAN + 6, but hot to trot with TPP? Mr. Noda tried to explain that the government had no preference for one over the other. He said they’re only “thinking about” ASEAN + 6 (kento was the word he used), but that TPP had already started, and they had to move on that one.

That’s another porkie, as the Brits would say. Ms. Sato pointed out that Japan will not be involved in TPP discussions for another six months, so it will already be too late to influence the structure of the talks.

But the Japanese government has been doing more than “thinking about” ASEAN + 6, and they’ve been doing it for a few years now:

At the second East Asia Summit (EAS) held on 15 January 2007 in Cebu, the Leaders of ASEAN and six other nations (China, India, Japan, S Korea, Australia and New Zealand, agreed to launch a study on a Comprehensive Economic Partnership in East Asia (CEPEA) among EAS participants. An underlying ambition was the establishment of an ASEAN + 6 FTA.

A free trade zone has already been created in the region:

Starting the first day of 2010, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand can import and export almost all goods across their borders at no tariff.

As of 1 January, for ASEAN-6 an additional 7,881 tariff lines will come down to zero tariffs, bringing the total tariff lines traded under the Common Effective Preferential Tariffs for ASEAN Free Trade Area (CEPT-AFTA) to 54,457 or 99.11%. Additionally, with the reduction, the average tariff rate for these countries is expected to further decrease from 0.79% in 2009 to just 0.05% in 2010. In 2008, intra-ASEAN import value of commodities for these 7,881 tariff lines amounted to US$ 22.66 billion, or 11.84% of ASEAN-6 import value within ASEAN.

Also last year, ACFTA (the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area) came into effect between the 11 countries. It is now the world’ s largest free trade area by population and third-largest by trade volume (behind the EU and NAFTA). Tariffs were eliminated on 90% of all categories. They are near zero for trade between China and the six original ASEAN nations, and are zero among those six countries.

WTF is going on here?

The Mainichi Shimbun explained it succinctly in a Japanese-language op-ed. They think the U.S. is determined to obstruct any trade regime in Asia that it isn’t a part of, for both economic and security reasons. They are using trade and commerce as a weapon to fight the Chinese in the Pacific, and Japan is caught in the middle of the Great Game.

Chinese Ministry of Commerce sources say they prefer the ASEAN + 3 arrangement, but they’re flexible. They also understand that they and the U.S. are involved in a tug-of-war over Japan, and think the Japanese are using TPP to patch over the strains in the relationship with the U.S. that emerged over the Marine air base in Okinawa.

Further, they are concerned about Japanese participation because it would provide a fillip to Japanese growth, reduce their own economic strength, and tend to weaken their position in dealing with the U.S. As far as the TPP goes, the Chinese are biding their time as they watch whether all the nations involved will be able to work out their differences. Finally, they think the TPP is too ambitious and doesn’t take enough consideration of newly emerging countries with growth markets.

The Russians aren’t involved in either arrangement, but they have a similar view. Though the TPP was started by three countries (Chile, New Zealand and Singapore), and joined by Brunei shortly thereafter, they think the Americans took over the process because they perceived it as a useful vehicle for regaining the influence they’ve been losing in Asia and for blocking the Chinese.

Of course the Yanks are also in it for the money, as Japan’s Cabinet Office survey demonstrates. Some in Japan opposed to or doubtful of the TPP suspect it is to allow Americans to conduct trade in the region under their own rules, including their export taxes and tariffs. American agriculture is also heavily protected, and if they can push their own tariffs into the agreement as a base, it could wind up implanting protected trade in a new form.

Meanwhile, in talks with ASEAN, China has brought up the subject of using the yuan as the common regional currency. Indeed, the Chinese claim they already have the common Asian currency. In one of their occasional stabs at cleverness, Britain’s Economist referred to the yuan as the redback.

The pols and the polls

Noda Yoshihiko’s safe driving skills will be tested when he tries to steer any TPP treaty through the Diet, as is required by the Constitution. There are 480 members in the lower house, so 241 is the magic number for passage. A media outlet’s informal survey of lower house members last week found more than 220 members opposed the treaty, including nearly one-third of the ruling DPJ’s delegation. If those numbers hold, the treaty would still squeak through, but it’s not a lock when one considers how Mr. Noda has handled the political automobile so far. According to the Japanese Constitution, the lower house decision will be the final determination if the upper house rejects it.

It’s quite a different story in prefectural assemblies, however. The Asahi Shimbun conducted a survey that found 44 of 47 prefectures opposed to TPP, often by large margins. A recent vote in Chiba, next to Tokyo, was 72-22 opposed.

The results of public polls are fascinating. The industrial media is playing up the results of a recent Yomiuri poll, which showed a public thumbs up by a 51%-35% margin, but that’s the only one with majority approval. A recent Asahi poll had it at 46%-28%.

Other polls are not as positive. The NNN poll (TV) had it 43.7%-35.7%. FNN, another TV network, came in at 46.5%-35.2%, and the numbers from the quasi-public NHK were 34%-21%.

No, it is not beyond the inclination or the abilities of either the Asahi or the Yomiuri to doctor the questions or the composition of those surveyed to get the desired results — particularly if the Foreign Ministry let it be known what results they desired.

More intriguing are the numbers behind the numbers. The Asahi poll found that 84% of the respondents thought the government’s explanation was insufficient, while Yomiuri’s response for the same question was 86%. That means there’s a nation full of people unhappy about what little the government is telling them, which suggests the current poll readings for approval/disapproval are just skin deep.

In addition, the undecideds in the surveys range from a low of roughly 18% to as much as 38% in one poll. There’s a lot of potential for a major swing one way or the other, and we all know in which direction any swing is likely to occur.

Here’s another one— the NNN poll also asked the respondents whether they were uneasy or hopeful about TPP. The results:

Uneasy: 56.1%
Hopeful: 39.3%

Why should anyone take seriously the results of an up or down question in the face of nearly universal dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the issue and a majority in one poll more worried than hopeful about the treaty? Refer once again to Mr. Abe’s quote at the top.

Of course the mass media — particularly the foreign media — is thrilled that the farmers have wiped the dirt and dung off their boots and driven the buckboard to town to protest. Colorful videos of a farmer demonstration are circulating. But FNN had the wit to actually poll by occupational sector (as well as age). Their survey found that people in the agriculture, forestry, or fishing industries were evenly split at 45%-45%. While there is strong opposition in that sector, it is not as strong as the media would want you to believe. (Is that because the indolent louts who write for newspapers can’t be bothered to reexamine their assumptions, or is it that they prefer that narrative and they’re just as unimaginative as Mr. Noda?)

And here’s one more: All these polls are conducted by random digit dialing (RDD) to fixed-line telephones. That eliminates many younger people who sleep with their cell phones but don’t have any of those old clunkers with wires going into the wall. The FNN poll broken down by age shows that people over 60 supported the treaty by 52.8%, but only 36.3% of those in their 20s backed it. Thus, the numbers might look quite different if the younger demographic’s views were better factored in. (Also, 54.2% of men were in favor but only 39.3% of women.)

You don’t have to be a psephologist to know which way the wind’s blowing for Mr. Noda’s support ratings. The NNN poll had it down to 40%, which is a Kan-like drop from the 60% after he took office in September. The non-support is climbing and is now up to 34.2% in that poll, 8.1 points higher than the previous month. FNN had the Cabinet support down to 42%, while a TV Asahi poll this week pegged it at 39.5%.

What do we know?

Here’s a partial list of the conclusions we can draw from all this.

* Noda Yoshihiko has no business being in a real Cabinet, much less being “prime minister”. When serving as “finance minister”, his position in opposition to BOJ purchases of government bonds was based on his ignorance of the law. As “prime minister”, he was ignorant of a critical aspect of the TPP treaty that would irrevocably change Japan.

Not that he would tell the public even if he did know.

* Custom and courtesy require that everyone refer to Noda Yoshihiko as the “prime minister”, but he seems to have little influence on the decision-making process or control over what the government actually does. He’s what the mob lawyers call a mouthpiece. Indeed, Japan’s position on TPP was determined a year ago. It’s already taxing his abilities just to drive the Miss Daisies of Kasumigaseki and keep the car on the road.

* He fairly lays himself open to the charge that he and his government give precedence to American economic growth in the TPP rather than to Japanese economic growth in ASEAN + 6.

* European MP Daniel Hannan of Great Britain observes that the French have the terms pays légal, which now refers to the group composed of politicians, civil servants, business leaders, and newspaper editors, and pays reel, which refers to everyone else. Since the former are making the decisions everywhere else, why should Japan be the exception? Also, as in the Western world, some people in the Japanese branch of the pays légal detest the concept of nation states. They will support any international treaties that require countries to subordinate domestic law as a necessary step on the royal road to global governance. Why do you think Kan Naoto was so taken with the idea of TPP?

* Mr. Noda has no problem lying about an issue that will have substantial domestic consequences either to the people or to the rest of the political class, in public at any rate. He’s not very good at it, either. During his wind-up-doll line of defense in the Diet, he came off as a talking life-sized cardboard figure of Col. Sanders at a KFC regional sales managers’ convention. But then he knows he dare not give the real explanation. Not that it makes any difference. Everyone in Nagata-cho knows what’s going on anyway.

* Another reason he can’t come clean is because of the strong opposition to the TPP in his own party. Coming out and saying what everyone knows could wind up destroying the DPJ. In fact, that’s the paramount reason the DPJ has no business as a ruling party in the first place. The potential for collapse is why they are incapable of taking a stand on any major issue. They’ve abdicated governance to the bureaucracy as a result. Some people in Japanese media circles outside the industrial core think bureaucratic control is more blatant now than at any time in recent history.

* All the talk about opening or closing the country, the opposition by farmers, the exclusive focus on TPP, blah blah blah woof woof, is so much vaudeville and just as passé. We’ve got bleacher seats for the early 21st Great Game, and it’s all about making Japan choose sides.

Predictions aren’t what I do, but here’s one anyway: Noda Yoshihiko will not handle this very well. Here’s another: If Japan doesn’t join the TPP, or his government falls as a result, watch the foreign media and the pretentious blogs get it all wrong in their commentary.

Regardless of what happens, however, even those supporters of free trade — and I’m one of them — have to admit that all the issues raised here are legitimate and cannot be waved aside with airy-fairy platitudes. Being a neo-liberal is one thing, but being a neo-conservative is another.

Afterwords:

* The bilingual website Seetell makes an excellent and often overlooked point:

(I)n order to join, Japan will have to be “approved” by the current TPP member nations. That poses few problems for Japan from any of the nations except the US. And because the US Congress will have the final say on whether Japan is allowed to join, Japan will be forced to concede most of its negotiating points to the US before the negotiations even begin…

Plainly stated, Japan will have to negotiate first with the US – and without input from other member nations – before it will be approved to join the pact. The bulk of Japan’s negotiations will occur before the official negotiations begin.

The US has totally usurped the TPP from the original nations as a vehicle to gain access and influence into the Asian economy. Now, it sits as the sole judge and determinant as to the terms of the agreement.

* Before becoming “prime minister”, Mr. Noda was best known for delivering political speeches at his local train station every morning for years to the morning rush-hour commuters. One has to wonder: What the deuce did he tell them?

* Only the merest of glimpses of the real issues are being afforded in the mainstream Western press. The New York Times this week ran a lengthy article about United States pressure on China. Here’s all they could find to say about the TPP:

Mr. Obama wants to appear strong in pressing Beijing. He made headway on an ambitious American plan to create a Pacific free trade zone, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that, for now, would not include China.

There was no mention of ASEAN + 6 in the article, but then we should all have seen through the tiresome fiction of full (or even intelligent) coverage from the New York Times by now.

It’s also noteworthy that the Times refers to the TPP as an “ambitious American plan”, when that certainly wasn’t how it started. Even the Times can be jingoists, it seems, as long as their Golden Boy is in the White House, rather than one of the evil, wicked, mean, and nasties of the other party.

* I listened to Yamamoto Ichita’s questioning of Noda Yoshihiko on NHK radio while working on a translation. Mr. Noda did not perform well. On NHK radio news that night, the announcer briefly mentioned one of Mr. Yamamoto’s questions without replaying it, and they ran a single, brief clip of one of the few times Mr. Noda gave a lucid and crisp answer.

Yes, there is media bias in Japan, too.

* It was puzzling to see that the Voice of America article was written by that well-known peddler of Weird Japan stories and FCCJ barfly, Justin McCurry. Justo is a Brit who, the last time I saw a sample from the cloaca that constitutes his body of work, was affiliated with The Guardian.

If it is the Voice of America, why do they speak through a Brit from an often anti-American newspaper? Do they think no Americans in Japan are capable of producing the same lukewarm dribble of the type at that link? Here’s one of the sentences from his piece on the TPP:

But it could mean stiffer competition for some domestic industries, especially Japan’s farmers who could struggle to compete against cheaper imports.

Yeah, I guess it “could”, couldn’t it? If the idea is to cook the gruel that thin, what’s the bleedin’ point other than filling website space?

* Now Canada wants to join the TPP discussions. They also want a bilateral trade deal with Japan.

* The Australian government says that TPP is an important priority for them, but they also have serious concerns about ISDS:

Some countries have sought to insert investor-state dispute resolution clauses into trade agreements. Typically these clauses empower businesses from one country to take international legal action against the government of another country for alleged breaches of the agreement, such as for policies that allegedly discriminate against those businesses and in favour of the country’s domestic businesses.

The Gillard Government supports the principle of national treatment — that foreign and domestic businesses are treated equally under the law. However, the Government does not support provisions that would confer greater legal rights on foreign businesses than those available to domestic businesses. Nor will the Government support provisions that would constrain the ability of Australian governments to make laws on social, environmental and economic matters in circumstances where those laws do not discriminate between domestic and foreign businesses. The Government has not and will not accept provisions that limit its capacity to put health warnings or plain packaging requirements on tobacco products or its ability to continue the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

In the past, Australian Governments have sought the inclusion of investor-state dispute resolution procedures in trade agreements with developing countries at the behest of Australian businesses. The Gillard Government will discontinue this practice. If Australian businesses are concerned about sovereign risk in Australian trading partner countries, they will need to make their own assessments about whether they want to commit to investing in those countries.

One Australian op-ed opposed to TPP made this point:

In its negotiations over the AUSFTA during 2003-04, the office of the United States Trade Representative focused in particular on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (which provides heavily subsidised access for patients to listed medicines under patent), its process of blood procurement (which for health and security reasons is not open to international competition) and its laws mandating minimum levels of local broadcast content on television. The USTR sees these policies as “protectionist” and wants them abandoned, regardless of Australia’s arguments that they are in our national interest.

The Australians have no trouble standing up for Australia. Does anyone think the Japanese government is capable of doing the same?

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Bare trees and lonelyhearts

ONCE upon a time, they say, university life for the Chinese was a combination of the military and the monastery. Students lived more than 10 to a dorm room and became ghouls, as my university’s slang had it, haunting the libraries and carrels until late at night. Had they the time, most still wouldn’t have had the money to pursue one of the primary extracurricular activities of Western students — pursuing the opposite sex.

Today, however, the partial application of market economics and the single child policy have made more Chinese financially comfortable, if not gloriously rich, and many students have refocused their priorities: Now, everyone’s got a love jones. Though the government still pledges public allegiance to communism, the first thing the students learn is that everyone is not equal in matters of the heart. The monkey on the back that comes with the love jones is that nobody is guaranteed to score.

As in Japan, a side effect of the increasing openness and prosperity in China has been the popularity of American-style celebrations of Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and a secular Christmas. But the lonelyheart Chinese students soon became frustrated when they saw those more equal than others having all the fun on Valentine’s Day (and perhaps Christmas, too; Christmas Eve in Japan has become a heavy date night for young lovers). Instead of moping, their solution was to create a celebration for themselves that has become a national phenomenon.

Most people attribute the origin to Nanjing university students circa 1990, and the festivities began to spread throughout society as they graduated. It gained momentum in the new century and broke out nationwide in 2005. Now the events of the day receive regular coverage in the media and have become a part of social life similar to Valentine’s Day in the United States.

That day is called Guang Gun Jie (光棍節), and it falls on 11 November. The first two characters are the word for stick (with the bark peeled off, by some explanations), and it was chosen to represent a tree trunk with no branches, i.e., someone with no spouse or children. The word has now come to be used as a synonym for single people. They picked the date of 11 November because 11/11 can be visualized as a row of four tree trunks without branches. (This sort of creativity is a trait common throughout Northeast Asia, by the way.)

What do all the lonely people do on 11 November? They try to get dates, of course, and if they can’t get dates they get goofy. Some of the goofiness is a bit more innocent than the baroque time-wasting schemes concocted by American college students. One example is this fight using pillows stuffed with paper scraps instead of feathers. The release of all that intensity is to be expected when people lack other outlets for their energy.

They also get risqué, for China anyway. In Chinese, the character 脱　(second from the right on the sign) also means to remove one’s clothes, as well as to break away from something (the sense in which the Japanese use it). These guys got all barechested to show how ready they are to break away from Mary Palm and her five sisters:

Nowadays, however, it’s not just for students any more. The public at large has gotten behind it, as you can see from the poster in the first photo, one of many of which were hung throughout the city of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. The folks in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, went so far as to hold a mass o-miai (marriage meeting) in a public park.

It’s also no surprise that the Chinese found a way to turn 11/11 into another shopping opportunity, and the event has become a golden goose for merchants. That raises the question of what people would buy to celebrate the day instead of the usual Valentine’s or Christmas presents, other than a fifth of liquor. Reports suggest there’s a lot of traffic in normal merchandise sold at special discounts. The big seller this year was the iPad.

Another question is whether the event has mushroomed into something that’s just as depressing as Valentine’s Day or Christmas for the people stuck with penny stocks in the sexual market. Here’s a message from a young woman on a Net bulletin board:

Everybody else has got someone, but only I am alone. I’m looking for someone to spend the holiday with. We’ll split the costs.

And yes, that facilitates the manifestation of the natural Chinese mercantilism in other ways, too. Here’s some bulletin board advertising:

I’ll spend the holiday with you for 8 yuan an hour. (JPY 96, which is about US$1.25 these days)

The Joseon solution

A more clever response to datelessness comes from those holding a losing hand in South Korea. They have a similar, informal tradition, but their solution contains more humor. The bare trees in that country, referred to as the Solo Squad (솔로부대, which Japanese will recognize as ソロ部隊), celebrate Black Day on 14 April. On that day, the folks who drilled dry holes on Valentine’s Day or White Day (14 March) dress up in their best black clothing and get together to commiserate with each other by eating jajangmyeon, a dish of white Korean noodles with black bean sauce, washed down with black coffee. Jajangmyeon is the Korean version of zajiang mein, a northern Chinese dish of thick wheat noodles with ground pork stir-fried in zajiang (炸酱), a fermented soybean paste.

In passing, it’s interesting that the Koreans have adopted the Japanese creation of White Day, despite the studied Korean ambivalence in some quarters for things Japanese. (There’s more of that going on than outside observers might think.) An important part of Valentine’s Day in Japan involves women giving giri-choko (obligatory chocolate) to their male co-workers on 14 February. The men are supposed to return the favor one month later, often with confections that are white. (Japanese merchants certainly one-upped their American counterparts in creating profit opportunities with that one.)

While Guang Gun Jie or Black Day might not appeal to everyone’s taste, they certainly are a more pleasant, innocent — and tasteful — response than the Western solution.

*****
Maybe the Japanese have the best solution of all. This is Rockappella from Hitotsubashi University in 2009.

Prickly

EARLIER this week, a post from Prof. Shimojo Masao described a lawsuit filed by a South Korean citizen in New Jersey to prevent a school for Japanese students (enrollment: 90) from using a history textbook that states the islets of Takeshima are Japanese territory despite the current Korean occupation.

Those familiar with the conduct of affairs in Northeast Asia already know that behavior of this sort — over-dramatized, malicious pettiness made grandiose — is a not-uncommon attribute of the Joseon mindset. Yet another data point surfaced this week when Korean netizens fulminated over a scene in a Japanese television program. The drama was Boku to Sutaa 99 Hi, which translates to something like The 99 Days of Me and the Star. It was broadcast earlier this month on the Fuji Television network. One of the stars of the show is Korean actress Kim Tae-hee, who occasionally appears on Japan TV.

The scene at issue is brief. A child asks about the location of South Korea, and another actor spins a globe, points to the country, and says, “It’s here.” Those people with the time and the interest to give very extremely close scrutiny to fictional television programming noticed that the writing on the Japanese globe identifies the Sea of Japan as the Sea of Japan and the islets of Takeshima as Takeshima. Everyone else on the globe would consider that unremarkable, but the Koreans insist they’re called the East Sea and Dokdo, respectively.

This caused an uproar in the irritable bowels of the South Korean Internet, and the flatulence generated was sufficient to provide content for that country’s mass media. Someone on the net in South Korea claimed to have read a tweet from a Fuji TV staff member saying the network had used a graphic to erase those two place names to avoid giving offense, but that it wasn’t used in the final editing for the initial broadcast. The tweeter supposedly said it would be used in rebroadcasts and DVDs.

Fuji TV, however, denied they will alter the scene for rebroadcast and said their plans were to do nothing in particular. Fuji also reported that a producer looked into the matter and found there was no such tweet from a staff member. That’s only logical; this was a Japanese TV program broadcast in Japan, and it’s not as if many people off the peninsula are concerned about how to avoid offending the global network of Korean nationalist vigilantes. The first rebroadcast was very early in the morning today, and there’s been no word yet on what that showed.

What did the scene in the drama look like? Here’s a screenshot of how it was presented on a Korean website:

The report on the J-Cast website in Japan doesn’t mention whether or not Kim Tae-hee will be forced to wear the scarlet letter in her homeland for her contribution to this inexcusable affront to the national honor. She might already have some built-in credibility, however, because this isn’t the first time Ms. Kim has been involved in a political incident. In May 2005, the South Korean branch of the Swiss government’s tourism department filmed a video to promote Korean tourism in Switzerland, and she was the spokesman. One month before that, the international website of the Korean Broadcasting System (English-language) put up an apparently bogus page that suggested the Swiss government supported Korea in its territorial disputes. The Swiss denied the assertion. That same month, they confiscated a shipment of t-shirts with similar political messages being brought into the country by an employee of the South Korean branch at the Zurich airport. (See what I mean about over-dramatized, malicious pettiness?) The Swiss government stays clear of international territorial disputes and doesn’t allow proselytizing of that sort in the country. Everyone knows about Swiss neutrality, which is probably what attracted Korean interest to begin with.

During her stay in Switzerland, Ms. Kim is said to have worn one of the propaganda t-shirts. Her career on Japanese TV had already begun by that time, so to prevent any blowback she denied the charge to the Japanese branch of the Swiss tourism department. That’s not what people at the Japanese branch learned when they made inquiries, however.

After she returned to South Korea from Switzerland, her agents told the local media that she thought it was only natural to please the expectations of her Korean fans. Shortly thereafter, she visited Japan to promote a TV show. She told the media there that she had been a science major in school and needed further study in politics and history. She should also check the library for any books on how to concoct plausible excuses.

Those readers inclined to believe the puffenstuff they see elsewhere about the rabid nationalism of the Japanese should note that Ms. Kim has continued to appear on Japanese television since her small contribution to the Korean propaganda campaign. They might also speculate on what it would have meant to Ms. Kim’s career had the situation been reversed and she departed from the Joseon cultural party line while on an overseas trip.

When Japanese Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko visited South Korea last week for a summit with President Lee Myun-bak, one English-language newspaper ran the headline, “Japan seeks to smooth prickly ties with Seoul”. That’s an apt description, but none of the prickliness originates in Japan.

Indeed, we can improve that headline. It’s the job of newspaper headline writers to find short, punchy words that fit into a limited space and attract the reader’s eye. There’s a shorter alternative for “prickly” that would also improve its accuracy.

Just remove the l.

*****
Here’s an another update on the East Asian Ein Volk, Ein Reich front. Last week in a post about Hatoyama Yukio, I wrote:

Without exception, every young Japanese I’ve known with an interest in China who has gone to study or to spend an extended period of time in that country has returned with their illusions shattered following their encounter with kokumin who mainline on ethnocentric nationalism.

To see what causes the shattering, here’s an older article by John Derbyshire describing his experience on a Chinese-language mailing list for software engineers in the United States infected with the Black Plague strain of ethnocentric nationalism:

Bear in mind, please, that the writers of these e-mails are the intellectual cream of Mainland China, now immigrants to the U.S. Few do not have Master’s degrees; many have Ph.D.s. The average age is around thirty, I suppose. Their academic and professional qualifications, and their command of English, are sufficient to have impressed an American consul into awarding them a visa—no easy matter, allegedly. Yet for all this, their notions about national sovereignty were essentially those of the Ming dynasty mandarinate, and their knowledge of history a collection of false and preposterous clichés.

You have to read it to believe it.

These attitudes could be of significance beyond the circulation of a mailing list. Did any of those engineers know Kexue Huang, I wonder?

While he was working for two American chemical companies, a Chinese scientist was stealing trade secrets and sending them to accomplices for further research, assisting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) long-term strategic goals in the science field, according to court documents in a recent case.

There were also reports in Japan yesterday that a committee in the PRC’s National Peoples Congress began discussing a revision of the citizens’ identification law that would require inserting the fingerprints of all the country’s citizens on individual IDs. It would seem that the decision won’t require a lot of discussion, however. The Chinese began issuing new IDs in 2004, and one billion have already been distributed — carrying chips designed for the input of fingerprint information.

Consider what might happen when an entire nation populated by citizens of this sort, who view themselves as the flower in the center of the universe, decide that now is the time to bloom. Some overseas observers are unconcerned because they think a collapse of the Chinese economy and the resultant domestic anger might stop international mischief before it starts. They point to the observation of others that the Chinese real estate bubble is beginning to look as if it’s started to pop.

Then again, a pessimist might wonder if the rest of the world will follow the Chinese economy down the open elevator shaft, or if the Chinese leadership decides international buccaneering is the surest way to deflect internal dissent.

Or further still, if it is not a question of “either/or”, but a question of “both”.

*****
Let’s end with the rousing finale of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinema classic to keep our flagging spirits high.

Shimojo Masao (15): The school for Japanese in New Jersey

LEADERLESS Japan has been devoting its energy to domestic issues since the Tohoku earthquake and has been neglecting foreign affairs. An incident occurred in the state of New Jersey at the end of September that we cannot afford to ignore. I would like to examine a few issues that bear on the future course of events in East Asia.

The 24 September online edition of the Hankook Ilbo in the United States reported that a South Korean in that country brought an administrative suit against a school for Japanese in the state of New Jersey (with 90 students), the New Jersey Department of Education, and the Oakland Board of Education. The suit charged that the school for Japanese was using a civics textbook that, in regard to the Takeshima islets (Liancourt Rocks), which are a subject of dispute between Japan and South Korea, contains the passage, “Takeshima is being illegally occupied by South Korea.” This was a problem because “an American educational institution was educating its students with a Japanese textbook that distorted the facts.” The plaintiff said that unless the matter was resolved by eliminating the offending passage and the Board of Education rescinded its approval of the school’s curriculum, it would bring a civil suit.

But Takeshima, in the Sea of Japan, is Japanese territory both historically and under international law. There is no truth to the assertion in the lawsuit that the textbook’s statement is distorted. The plaintiff objects to the phrase, “South Korea claims it that governs Takeshima, and has control of it, but under international law and historical fact, it is Japanese territory.” This description is in accordance with the facts of history. Why was historical fact ignored to bring suit against a small school for Japanese in New Jersey? In South Korea, students are taught that Takeshima is Korean territory, an outlook that differs from the textbook’s statement that Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea.

But Takeshima was incorporated as Japanese territory in 1905 based on international law and the concept of terra nullius. It was controlled by Japan for nearly a half century thereafter. It became the center of a land dispute in January 1952, when the South Korean government proclaimed the existence of the Syngman Rhee Line in international waters, with Takeshima on the Korean side of the line. When the South Korean government occupied Takeshima by force in September 1954, the Japanese government immediately proposed to the South Korean government that the matter be referred to the International Court of Justice. The South Korean government refused, however, and the matter remains unresolved to this day. That this abnormal state of affairs continues is due to the fact that Japan presents absolutely no threat to the South Korean government.

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits the resolution of international disputes through war or the force of arms. The South Korean government knows that Japan cannot regain control of Takeshima through military action. Japan is therefore precluded from either the use of force or recourse to the International Court of Justice. Explaining the historical background of the illegal South Korean occupation is its only option.

If the administrative lawsuit is successful in prohibiting the use of a textbook that explains Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea, it would thwart Japan’s chances of seeking the return of the islets. A court in Superpower America would have delivered that verdict. Their idea of using a great power to achieve one’s objectives, based on the worship of the powerful, is not limited to this administrative lawsuit. South Korea has already been partially successful with it before.

When Japan claims sovereignty over Takeshima, the South Koreans impute that to Japanese territorial ambitions, and then turn the tables by criticizing Japan as an aggressor nation. They validate that latter assertion by bringing up the name of the Sea of Japan, saying it should be the East Sea instead, or the issue of comfort women (prostitutes) during the Second World War. Using the UN and the international community as a stage, they have plotted to isolate Japan as an aggressor nation.

The South Koreans explain that what is now called the Sea of Japan is known as the East Sea in South Korea, and that name has been used since before the birth of Christ. Later, the explanation goes, the Sea of Japan name spread due to Japanese expansionism and colonial domination. A South Korean group in the U.S. claims that “The Japanese insistence on the (name of the) Sea of Japan is the means for imperialism, which includes the ambition for sovereignty over Dokdo (the South Korean name for Takeshima).” They have begun a campaign to change the name to the East Sea, which they insist is correct. The group has disseminated South Korean public opinion abroad by collecting signatures for a petition and submitting them to the American Congress and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).

There is no historical basis that the Sea of Japan was ever the East Sea, however. In fact, some people in South Korea think the name should be the Sea of Hanguk (韓国海) and not the East Sea. Respect for historical fact should the determining factor for the name of the body of water. Facts should not be determined by petition drives. The method of using a petition drive to stop the use of the name of the Sea of Japan in favor of the East Sea is similar to the idea of employing an administrative suit to prohibit the use of a textbook that says Takeshima is illegally occupied by South Korea.

The issue of the prostitutes referred to as comfort women also originates in the South Korean historical view of Japan as an aggressor state. The existence of women whose vocation is prostitution for military forces during wartime, however, is an issue that humankind has not been able to overcome. There have been comfort women in South Korea for the American forces since the start of the Korean War. The existence of comfort women for the South Korean army during the Vietnam War is also not irrelevant in this regard.

South Korea created the history that the comfort women were forcibly impressed and controlled by the Japanese government, and has used that to repeatedly criticize Japan. But women from the Korean Peninsula were not the only ones that became comfort women — many of them were Japanese. Poverty drove women to sell their bodies.

Today, the Northeast Asia History Foundation, which the South Korean government established as an instrument of national policy to deal with the Takeshima issue, is the driving force behind the comfort woman issue. It has a division that works to link the comfort women, the name of the Sea of Japan, and Japanese history textbooks with the Takeshima issue to use them for political propaganda. It works with the South Korean organization in the United States and a group of juveniles acting as cyber-terrorists to promote anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States and the rest of the world in regard to these three issues.

It is a fact, however, that the territorial issue of Takeshima is entirely unrelated to the issue of the comfort women and the name of the Sea of Japan. South Korea occupied Takeshima using military force in 1954, but the other two issues predate that. The South Korean government has shouted to the international community about comfort women and the Sea of Japan, and plotted to seal off the Takeshima issue by declaring Japan to be an aggressor nation. At the 2007 UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names — whose work is overseen by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and who has also played a central role in the Takeshima dispute — the South Korean representative called for the joint use of the historically groundless East Sea name. South Korean efforts have also resulted in the U.S. House of Representatives and the national legislatures of Canada and The Netherlands passing motions condemning Japan over the comfort women issue.

That these efforts now extend to an administrative lawsuit prohibiting the use of a textbook in a small school for Japanese in New Jersey is likely the result of their past successes. But the claim that the textbook used by the students “is in violation of the U.S. Constitution, and betrays the universal expectations of humankind for education” in a lawsuit that uses superficially democratic procedures is merely an attempt to justify the aggressive act of South Korea. This cannot be overlooked.

My role is to disclose the circumstances surrounding this issue for the school for Japanese in New Jersey and the New Jersey Department of Education, which have been dragged into this false accusation. I trust that the court will clarify the facts of history based on law and justice.

- Shimojo Masao

*******
Ampontan P.S.:

1. Japanese sources say that at least 40% of the WWII comfort women were Japanese, and I’ve never seen an attempt to rebut that.

2. It is worth noting in regard to the South Korean claim for the East Sea name that the body of water lying to the west of the Korean Peninsula is known in Korea (and even by an English-language blogger there who should know better) as the West Sea. The rest of the world knows it as the Yellow Sea. There seems to be no South Korean effort to have international bodies recognize that particular name, from which we can draw our own conclusions.

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Compensation

READERS might assume from some of the posts on this site that I’m opposed to all things governmental, but that assumption would be mistaken. In fact, here’s a story about a South Korean government decision that is of such exquisite and perfect wisdom, I would be happy to buy a drink for the man responsible for it.

Over the years, the veterans affairs ministry of the South Korean government has paid compensation to families of victims of the 1950-1953 Korean War. Recently, the government has come under civilian fire for first refusing compensation to a woman whose brother was killed in that war, and then offering her KRW 5,000. That’s the same amount paid to families 50 years ago, but today it’s worth just $US 4.20.

Here’s the first paragraph from ABC News Australia:

The South Korean government has been slammed by a civil rights commission for offering a woman a little over $4 in compensation for the death of her brother in the Korean War.

Followed by the inevitable wailing and pants-wetting:

The presidential Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission has called the decision “incomprehensible”, saying the government failed to take into account six decades of inflation.

“We hope that this case will lead to forming a system of adequately compensating the families of Korean War veterans who continue to live with deep pain,” the commission said.

Now that we’ve gotten the bathetic fru-fru out of the way, here’s the important stuff:

The South Korean woman, 63, only discovered a few years ago that her brother had been killed during the war…she never knew of his existence until told of his death by a neighbour, local media reported, adding the children’s mother suffered from dementia.

In a 1964 obscenity case, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurrence to the majority opinion that hard-core pornography was hard to define, but added, “I know it when I see it.”

It is also difficult to define which demands for compensation are legitimate and which are just a racket, but, like Justice Stewart, we know them when we see them.

I wish I knew that anti-racketeering G-man in Seoul. His bar tab would be on me.

Fantasies

No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang’s shelling of a South Korean island Tuesday are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future.
- former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
- T.S. Eliot.

THERE’S no better example of the fear and loathing that American politicians feel for the people they serve than the aptitude they exhibit when timing the release of unflattering information to negate or mute media mega-amplification. That practice alchemized into full-blown media manipulation during the Clinton administration. Clinton attorney Mark Fabiani’s preference for document dumps of embarrassing material on Friday evening even led the media to coin the term Fabiani Fridays. President Clinton himself, that staunch champion of the institution of holy matrimony, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, in which the federal government defined wedlock as a legal union between one man and one woman, during the midnight hour on a weekend. How better in the era just before the dawn of the 24/7 news cycle to blunt the anger of one of his party’s constituent interest groups and those people who think elected officials should be straight shooters with the electorate?

The new Japanese Democratic Party government of Noda Yoshihiko seems to have picked up the same playbook. They chose Saturday 17 September — the first day of a three-day weekend — to issue their first definitive statement on foreign policy. The content of that statement is enough to understand their reasons for avoiding public attention.

The Kan government had in April extended sanctions on North Korea and added a ban on all North Korean port calls. Previous Japanese governments had prohibited imports from North Korea, exports of military goods, expensive cars, and the better grades of meat and fish. They also sharply limited financial remittances from Japan to North Korea. Those steps were taken as a result of Pyeongyang’s recalcitrance over working for a final settlement of the abduction issue and that nation’s nuclear weapons program, including nuclear weapons testing and its dissemination abroad.

Here’s how the Kyodo news agency reported Mr. Noda’s decision in English:

The government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided Saturday not to impose additional sanctions on North Korea in light of improving prospects for dialogue between Pyongyang and other governments involved in denuclearizing the hermit country, government sources said…Noda’s administration concluded that adding more sanctions could put Japan in danger of being held responsible for throwing cold water on the diplomatic situation as efforts continue to resume six-way talks on halting Pyongyang’s nuclear development, the sources said.

Questions also remain about the effectiveness of additional measures in seeking progress on such issues as North Korea’s nuclear program, ballistic missile development and past abductions of Japanese nationals, they said.

As usual, Japanese-language sources provided more information than the English-language sources.

First, some Japanese were calling for a complete ban on financial transactions between the two countries. A “government spokesman” countered that the effect of such a ban would be very limited. Remittances from Japan to North Korea have been slashed from an estimated $US 300 million to $US five million in the past six years, he said, yet the North Koreans have not improved their behavior.

Some Japanese also called for expanding the prohibitions on reentry to Japan of people who travel to North Korea beyond the six members of the Pyeongyang-affiliated Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) who are officials of the North Korean government.

Said the government spokesman:

“Restricting the passage of Koreans who weren’t involved with the actual crime of abductions is in violation of the clause in the constitution protecting the free movement of people.”

And:

“If we adopt harsher measures, it is possible the ‘related countries’ will see the step as lacking in composure.”

And let’s not overlook this gem from someone in the Foreign Ministry: “Now is not the best time.” He explained that Pyeongyang is likely to take a harder line in negotiations next year, which will be the 100th anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s birth.

In short, the Noda government’s decision might have some merit — for those whose intellectual calendar is stuck on 1960 and who think that Japanese foreign policy works best when it is based on the theory of speak softly and carry a big pocketbook. After the relatively brief period of bad behavior by their great-grandfathers, some still believe the nation must atone by going through an even longer period of diplomatic castration rather than uphold the national interest.

The people of the reality-based community who aren’t playing Rip Van Winkle, however, understand that the bad old days are gone and ain’t coming back. They also understand there are several serious problems with the Noda government’s decision. Here are a few of them:

1. Anyone who entertains the fantasy that North Korea will voluntarily relinquish its nuclear weapons has no business offering opinions in public on foreign policy, much less formulating foreign policy. Try this:

North Korean expert Andrei Lankov tells CNN, “It is positive that negotiations have begun again. However, there is zero chance that these negotiations will ever bring the officially intended result, that is, democratization of North Korea. North Korea is not going to surrender its nuclear weapons.”

If achieving the denuclearization of North Korea were possible through international negotiations, North Korea would have been nuke-free long ago.

2. The idea that Japan could throw cold water on the talks by expanding sanctions is short-circuited logic: Is North Korea behaving badly? Well, let’s encourage them to behave better by failing to hold them accountable for their bad behavior. Pyeongyang’s been sharping that angle since Bill Clinton began playing with cigars in the Oval Office. Encouraging them to behave better through formal diplomatic channels has only encouraged them to behave worse.

3. Which of the other five “related countries” would see the extension of sanctions as “lacking in composure” (other than the hallucinators in Pyeongyang)? The Bush Administration removed North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism in 2008, a decision that still makes people wonder if W was having an acid flashback. The Northerners have reciprocated that goodwill gesture by building a nuclear reactor for Syria, selling weapons to terrorists, and repeatedly threatening to destroy South Korea while attacking it twice.

Everyone knows the Chinese could end this fantasy in matter of weeks if they were so disposed, but they choose instead to serve as a conduit for North Korea’s export of nuclear weapons parts and the import of luxury goods. Meanwhile, the Russians have obtained the rights to a port on the Sea of Japan from North Korea and recently announced the conduct of joint military maneuvers.

Such are the partners in the six-party talks that Japan musn’t upset with rash behavior in defense of its interests because of the fantasy prospects for a fantasy settlement.

4. Japanese Foreign Ministry officials say the cutoff of financial transactions has had a limited effect. Yes, they do have a point — despite the drastic reduction in the influx of yen, the Kim Family Regime still has enough non-counterfeit scratch to pay for luxury cars, liquor, and pets for itself and the ruling elite while the rest of the country is again forced to pick corn kernels out of pig feces to fend off starvation. Indeed, recent reports say they’ve stopped bothering to pick out the kernels.

If that’s the logic, why bother restricting financial transactions at all?

5. Danged if I can find any passage in the Japanese Constitution that prevents the government from restricting the passage of the people. Article 22 does say that people can choose and change their residences and occupations — as long as it doesn’t harm the public welfare. The argument that allowing free passage of people to North Korea and back doesn’t harm the public welfare would be entertaining if the government official hadn’t provided a deliberately incorrect interpretation. That same article also allows people to move freely to foreign countries. It doesn’t say anything about the government preventing undesirables from moving back. How could it? One of the legitimate functions of government is to prevent the admission of undesirables.

6. If now is not the best time, when will be the best time? The Foreign Ministry doesn’t want to upset the North Koreans as they stage their year-long recreation of the Nuremburg Party Rally to commemorate the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth? That sounds more like an excuse than a reason. There is no “best time” to deal with the people such as the North Korean leadership. Whack them on the head with a stick now, and when they scream, whack them again.

The underlying problem with this decision by the Noda administration is that it wasn’t a decision by the Noda administration. It soon became obvious to Japanese observers that for any matter of importance, the Noda administration is likely to act as the puppets of the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy, particularly the Finance Ministry. (The weekly Shukan Gendai has already fingered Finance Ministry vet Katsu Eijiro as the “real prime minister” but more on that another time.)

Just as some American presidents have had to remind the State Department which country’s interests they’re supposed to uphold, Japan’s Foreign Ministry, as well as some politicians, have sometimes taken incomprehensible positions on relations with North Korea. During the Koizumi administration, five Japanese citizens forcibly abducted by the North were allowed to return temporarily after two decades spent as de facto prisoners of that regime. The abductees themselves had other plans for the rest of their lives, however. After having been kidnapped while minding their own business in their own country and held captive in another, it was natural that they would be repulsed by the idea of going back.

Yet that decision annoyed the Foreign Ministry bureaucrats, some of whom publicly criticized it and tried to shame them into doing just that. Their justification for insisting that Japan kick its innocent citizens back into the hellhole was that the country had to uphold its end of the bargain with a country that’s welshed on every important international agreement it’s signed during its existence.

Part two: New York

Mr. Noda followed up that first foreign policy misstep with another head-smacker:

Despite Japan’s soaring debts, Prime Miniters Noda’s administration has boldly offered additional loans amounting to $1 billion to “Arab Spring” in North Africa and Middle East for infrastructure projects, which will ensure to yield employment opportunities and emerging industries.

On Friday in an Annual General Assembly of the United Nations, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda thanked the countries for the support extended to Japan during the March 11 disaster and vowed to contribute for the development and peaceful stability in the international community.

The three specific contributions Mr. Noda offered for the development and peaceful stability in the international “community” were:

1. Provide humanitarian assistance toward relief of the famine in Somalia.

2. Contribute to the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS);

3. Offer $1 billion worth of yen loans to assist the democratization process in the Middle East and North African region.

This bold offer to spend public funds comes as his government is revealing plans to squeeze the country with higher consumption taxes, income taxes, inheritance taxes, and (probably) corporate taxes to pay for the Tohoku recovery and reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Japanese media outside of the national dailies and non-DPJ/LDP politicos are presenting serious alternatives to taxing the general public for raising the money.

While helping with famine relief in Somalia is praiseworthy, the other two proposals are an abdication of fiduciary responsibility. Supporting UN peacekeeping forces anywhere means that it’s close to a cinch two things will happen:

1. More people will die

2. Young women and underage girls will be paid next to nothing to work as hookers with the Blue Helmets as the pimps:

The management of Ban Ki-moon has also been characterized by one of the worst chapters in the history of the United Nations, that of sexual violence. Three years ago, one hundred Sri Lankan “peacekeepers” were accused of abusing Haitian children. Abuses were committed by Moroccan troops in the Ivory Coast and by Indian troops in Congo.

Sex scandals involving UN peacekeepers took place in Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor, Burundi and Western Africa. In Africa the locals now speak of the “peacekeeper babies”, the illegitimate children of UN soldiers.

The mission in Congo was the second largest UN peacekeeping mission. Rape, pedophilia and prostitution are the accusations against the UN. The minors were lured by a dollar. These girls are known as “one dollar baby”.

And just whose pipe dream are they paying for with the loans for the “democratization process” in the Middle East and North Africa? In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was replaced by a military government that promises to hold elections. Yes, that’s always been a reliable path to liberal democracy for Third World countries in the past, hasn’t it? In fact:

The regime, which took over from Mubarak as he stepped down in February, promised it would transfer power to civilian rule within six months, but no date has been announced for presidential elections that would bring an end to military rule.

(Here’s a quick update: How’s this for synchronicity?)

There are two possibilities for what is likely to happen in the Middle East over the near or intermediate term. The first is that there actually will be democratization in the region, which is about as likely as the North Koreans denuclearizing as a result of the six-party talks. But let’s play Pollyanna for a bit and assume that the purple roses of democracy will suddenly bloom in the desert sands. How long will those elected governments last before the military loses its patience and steps in again? More important, how likely is it that those elections will put in power anyone other than a well-manicured thug whose objectives would be inimical to his country’s immediate neighbors and infidels the world over?

The second possibility is that the situation will remain the same as it has over the past several centuries. Another favorite fantasy of the striped pants and commentator crowd is the pursuit of something they call Middle East peace. What they fail to see is that we’ve already got Middle East peace — this is as good as it’s ever going to get.

While it is understandable that the Japanese government wishes to make a gesture of appreciation for the assistance it received after the March earthquake/tsunami, the means and the timing for showing that appreciation are not. First, the assistance Japan received was a partial return on the help they’ve already provided throughout the postwar period. Second, people normally do not expect financial contributions from someone who is putting his own budgetary house in order after an expensive and unforeseen tragedy.

Thus, the Noda government and the Foreign Ministry mandarins have revealed their ignorance of the basics of politics and government. They have forgotten — if they ever knew — that it is the primary business of the Japanese government to facilitate the improvement of conditions in Japan, not to divert the money squeezed out of its citizens to line the world’s unimprovable ordure pits.

One small step forward

Yet despite all this dreary stupidity, the Noda government has taken one positive foreign policy step. That was:

…(the) agreement of Japan and ASEAN, at a meeting of defense officials in Tokyo, to intensify cooperation and consultation on the South China Sea. Japanese Vice Minister of Defense Kimito Nakae said the relationship between Tokyo and ASEAN has “matured from dialogues to one where Japan plays a more specific cooperative role” on a range of regional security issues.”

Nakae also suggested that the recent tensions over oil exploration and military posts in the South China Sea would require more cooperation with the United States and other countries, including India.

Immediately before the defense officials met, Japan and the Philippines affirmed their security links into a “strategic partnership” in a joint statement signed by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and Philippine President Benigno Aquino in Tokyo.

Somewhere in Tokyo, someone seems to have turned off the Lava Lamp and opened the curtains.

In the opinion of UPI Editor Emeritus Martin Walker, this agreement was “the third trigger” for:

(A)n official Chinese newspaper call(ing)…for war against Vietnam and the Philippines to uphold China’s assertion of sovereignty over the mineral-rich seabed, estimated to hold 7 billion barrels of oil and 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Specifically:

The lead article in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times Tuesday carried the headline “The time to use force has arrived in the South China Sea; Let’s wage wars on the Philippines and Vietnam to prevent more wars.”

“The South China Sea is the best place for China to wage wars,” the article said. “Of the more than 1,000 oil rigs there, none belongs to China; of the four airfields in the Spratly Islands, none belongs to China; once a war is declared, the South China Sea will be a sea of fire [with burning oil rigs]. Who will suffer the most from a war? Once a war starts there, the Western oil companies will flee the area, who will suffer the most?”

The article went on to argue that “the wars should be focused on striking the Philippines and Vietnam, the two noisiest troublemakers, to achieve the effect of killing one chicken to scare the monkeys.”

So to sum up, the Japanese Foreign Ministry thinks that if Japan were to take rational steps and further isolate North Korea, other “related countries” — among them presumably the Chinese, whose official newspapers sound remarkably like those from the DPRK, would think it had lost its composure.

Unlike those cool and calm Chinese.

To observe contemporary conditions worldwide and declare that the days of pleasant-sounding fantasies are over would be easy, but it would also be pointless. Those fantasies are the opiate of the political and governmental elites, and they have no interest in getting that monkey off their backs. The rest of us never had to deal with those monkeys to begin with.

The North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Russians have no intention of behaving in any way other than that designed to maximize their power and leverage. It is regrettable that Japan chooses not to do the same. The first three countries contribute nothing positive in a geopolitical sense. Only the fourth country has that potential.

Afterwords:
Note that the author of the article about the North Korean famine blames it again on a natural disaster and “the tangled web of international politics”, another one of the recurring fantasies of third-tier jouros. It seems to have escaped their notice that no one in Japan has starved after an ephocal earthquake and tsunami, followed by an industrial strength typhoon a few months later. Nor is there any understanding that the rest of us have no obligation to feed an armed and dangerous gangster state incapable of feeding itself because it is inebriate on fantasies of its own.

*****
Here’s a nice background tune to play while they pass the the hookah in Tokyo.