21st century Class A war criminals

It’s been one year since the Tohoku earthquake. What we need now is not words, but actions. Not repeated words, but repeated actions — actions in which everyone shares a bit of the burden. There is nothing else.
- Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru

If Australia is to get the government it needs (and deserves) it must first experience the full horror of the government it doesn’t deserve.
- James Delingpole, who could just as well have been speaking of Japan

LAST Sunday was the first anniversary of the Tohoku triple disaster — the fourth-largest recorded earthquake in history, a monster tsunami, and the nuclear accident at Fukushima. The Nishinippon Shimbun presented the numbers in a small box on the front page of its Monday edition:

Dead: 15,854
Missing: 3,155
In shelters or temporarily in other areas: 343,935

Also in the Monday newspapers were the results of a recent poll:

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for recovery efforts in the stricken area?
Good: 25%
Bad: 67%
No answer: 8%

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
Good: 12%
Bad: 80%
No answer: 8%

There are no excuses when four out of five people think you stink. It’s time to reach for the soap.

Fortunately, the public is doing it for them. Among the noise and distortion and useless pallid confetti of media discourse, a low but distinct signal is emerging. Long before 11 March, people understood the crimes of commission and omission of the so-called Iron Triangle: the political establishment in Nagata-cho, the governmental establishment at Kasumigaseki, and the business establishment everywhere else. The voters have persistently expressed the wish to destroy that triangle. But the national disaster seems to have focused their attention and made vivid the futility of relying on the long-running disaster that is the triple establishment. Another poll released this week revealed that pre-existing political trends are accelerating. The question asked was about the contours of the government they’d like to see. The answers:

A government centered on the Democratic Party (the current ruling party): 7%
A government centered on the Liberal-Democratic Party (the largest opposition party, and the ruling party for more than half a century): 10%
A DPJ – LDP coalition government: 26%
A government with a new framework after a political reorganization: 50%
No answer: 7%

Note that the current DPJ government could manage only a rating equal to that of the stragglers in any poll who can’t be bothered to form an opinion. It was lower than the No Answer response to the previous two questions. The LDP is not viewed as an acceptable option.

The people have thus disqualified the major political brands from serious consideration. While their enthusiasm for alternatives was evident before, it’s so strong now that even the Three Disasters in Tokyo have noticed. They see that the tsunami of popular will is surging in their direction. No one knows when it will break, but when it does, there is no levee big enough to stop it.

Kusaka Kimindo, born in 1930, a former director of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, and a commentator on business and governmental affairs, recently released a book called The Collapse of the Japanese Establishment. He welcomes that prospect. The blurb on the front cover reads:

The government-patron academics, the Western-worshipping intellectuals, and Big Mass Media have lost their authority.
A new wind has begun to blow.

The next few posts, and others from time to time in the future, will focus on aspects of the speed and direction of that wind. Perhaps it might blow as strong as a third kamikaze, the divine wind, combining the salvation of the first with the internal origins of the second.

First, however, we must look at what is collapsing, and why.

The Kan Cabinet: Class A War Criminals?

That’s the question asked in the lead article of the 18 March weekly Sunday Mainichi, issued to coincide with the anniversary of the disaster. The tone of Japanese weekly magazines is often wild and woolly, but this time they’re quoting someone else: political commentator Kinoshita Atsushi, a former lower house member from the Democratic Party — the same party as Kan Naoto.

It’s the job of a leader to create a more comfortable working environment, but Mr. Kan did the opposite. You could say he was a Class A war criminal.

Mizote Kensei is the secretary-general for the LDP bloc in the upper house, and a former Minister for Disaster Management. He expressed the same sentiments in a different way:

If this were a backward country, they’d be taken to court, and might even be executed.

The Sunday Mainichi thought that was extreme, but they did spend an entire page discussing the possibility of court action against several former Cabinet members, including whether it would be a criminal or civil proceeding, the precedents for such action, and what might happen. (They conclude it would be possible in theory, but difficult to pursue in practice.)

Lower house LDP member Kajiyama Hiroshi doesn’t have Mr. Kan to kick around any more, but he called for the immediate resignation of Madarame Haruki, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission:

The LDP certainly has responsibility for promoting nuclear power. But beyond that, Tokyo Electric and the government, particularly Prime Minister Kan, bear a heavy responsibility. After the Fukushima accident, Mr. Kan spoke only to Madarame Haruki, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, about technical matters. That’s because no one else capable of expressing a different opinion was there.

That only Mr. Kan would listen to Mr. Madarame’s personal views on technical matters was decisive. Also, there are no records of their discussions. There is no choice but to assume that the information we’ve received has been doctored, and there are even doubts he didn’t want to hear the views of other technicians….The other members of the commission should have met together to create a consensus, and that should have been the advice given to Mr. Kan.

In addition to allowing other people to use the term Cabinet Class A war criminals, the magazine referred to Kan Naoto as a “self-righteous hothead” and said that Mr. Madarame was “unconnected to the real world”.

Then again, it’s not as if Mr. Kan listened to Mr. Madarame even when he was listening to Mr. Madarame. During the prime minister’s universally lambasted helicopter trip to Fukushima on the morning of the 12 March 2011 to view the facility from the air, the NSC chair tried to communicate several of his concerns en route. Mr. Kan issued an order: “Just answer my questions.” (It sounds even worse in Japanese.)

One of his questions was whether there would be a hydrogen explosion. Mr. Madarame thought not. There was an explosion, however, about eight hours later. When the prime minister saw it on television, he exploded himself:

Isn’t that white smoke rising? It’s exploding, isn’t it? Didn’t you say it wouldn’t explode?

See what they mean about “self-righteous hothead”?

The technicians thought a meltdown was possible at Fukushima the night of the accident, and detected evidence that it had started early the next morning. They informed the government, but Kan Naoto lied about it, not only the next day, but for several months thereafter — including on the floor of the Diet.

He also says he failed to receive information from SPEEDI, the system that generates projections on the dispersion of radioactive material. There are even claims that he didn’t know the system existed. Had the information from SPEEDI been employed, it could have limited the region’s exposure to radiation.

Itabashi Isao, a senior analyst for the Council for Public Study, explains that Ibaraki Prefecture publishes a book for high school students to explain nuclear energy, and that the book contains a description of the SPEEDI system.

They say the data reached the crisis management center and stopped there without going to Mr. Kan or the others. When politicians say they didn’t know something that’s being taught to high school students, it should not be the end of the discussion.

To continue the discussion, in October 2010, five months before the earthquake, a disaster prevention drill and simulation were conducted based on the premise of failure in the cooling function of Chubu Electric’s Hamaoka nuclear plant. The drill used data generated by SPEEDI. The government formed a group to oversee and monitor the drill and simulation. The head of the group was Kan Naoto, the man who supposedly didn’t know about SPEEDI.

But of course he did. Hosono Goshi was then an aide to Mr. Kan. He was later appointed as the minister in charge of dealing with the nuclear disaster, and added the Environmental Ministry portfolio with the inauguration of the Noda Cabinet. Last May, two months after the accident, Mr. Hosono said that SPEEDI information was not made public because of worries the people would panic. (There are also suspicions in some quarters that he held on it to it to enhance his career prospects.)

The Sunday Mainichi quoted a journalist:

They hid information because they thought if they told the truth, the ignorant people would panic. It is an indication of their viewpoint based on the premise of stupid people, stupid thinking (gumin guso).

We already know that’s the way they think — it was clear in the fall of 2010 during the incident in the Senkakus with the Chinese “fishing boat” captain. The government wouldn’t release their video of the incident because they thought it would inflame both the Chinese government and the Japanese people, but someone in the Japanese Coast Guard solved that problem by uploading it to YouTube. The government also claimed that the Naha prosecutors were in charge of the disposition of the case. More than 80% of the public thought they were lying.

Now the phenomenon of the circular firing squad is emerging as the Fukushima investigation continues. Mr. Madarame has been testifying to the Diet committee looking into the nuclear accident, and said the following about then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio:

From the perspective of those of us who work with nuclear power, saying (as Mr. Edano did) ‘there will be no immediate effect’, sounds as if he is saying the effect would be late-developing cancer. We would not say anything like that. Therefore, I did not make any suggestion of that sort to the chief cabinet secretary.

Not everyone in the Cabinet was complicit in the war crimes. One of those was Katayama Yoshihiro, then the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. A former governor of Tottori Prefecture, he has an idea about the way government executives are supposed to conduct themselves. He’s on the record about Mr. Kan:

Who was the leader of the operations? It was impossible to understand the intent of too many of the various demands and requests (from the government command center). They were fragmentary and childish. There was no leadership at all.

Mr. Katayama also cited the breakdown in communications between the underground command center for the crisis in the basement of the Kantei, and Mr. Kan’s fifth floor office. He said that the prime minister never took the elevator downstairs, but communicated with the center only by cell phone. Mr. Kan, meanwhile, complained that 90% of the raw data came through Tokyo Electric, and that “the gears of communication did not move”, even when he put Mr. Hosono and then-METI Minister Kaieda Banri on the job. Shifting the blame to someone else is a Kan hallmark.

It will be difficult to find out exactly what happened in the Kantei because no record was kept of governmental discussions immediately after the disaster. It is widely assumed that Kan Naoto didn’t want people to know.

There are no records of the first 18 of the 23 meetings of the main group tasked with dealing with the Fukushima problem. An official with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency took records of the 19th meeting on his own initiative, but there is no organizational record.

One of the unindicted co-conspirators is then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, who as the government spokesman said a meltdown had not occurred, and repeatedly insisted there would be no harmful effects from the nuclear accident. Mr. Edano is now the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, the body overseeing nuclear power operations in Japan. He has reportedly aligned himself with the METI bureaucrats promoting the continued use of nuclear power. He’s interested in becoming prime minister, and thinks this will help him win the support of Big Business. (A former attorney who defended radical labor unionistas, he could use the credibility.)

Mr. Edano is also backing the METI position in the ministry’s dispute with Tokyo Electric Power. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to take political control of the bureaucracy?

Showdown at the hypotenuse

METI and the past two DPJ governments want to temporarily nationalize TEPCO. Their plan is to inject JPY one trillion of public funds into the company to help offset what could be tens of trillions of yen in eventual liabilities. They would receive a two-thirds ownership stake in return, replace all the top executives, and sell off the generating division. (That last one’s a good idea, and should be applied to all the power companies as part of the implementation of a national smart grid, but that’s yet another one beyond the capabilities of this government.)

Tokyo Electric objects. They think the government is incapable of operating a utility — can’t argue with that — and charge the government has no clear plan for divesting itself of ownership in the future.

So in classic Old Japan fashion, Tokyo Electric Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa is getting chummy with the Finance Ministry to head off nationalization. The Finance Ministry is sympathetic to the utility, if only because they don’t want to put the government on the hook for paying off the liabilities. Katsu Eijiro of the ministry, serving as an aide to Prime Minister Noda (and dubbed his puppeteer by the press), told his subordinates they should not permit government control of the utility in negotiations, and to draw the line at 49% ownership, no matter how much they have to compromise before reaching that point. With that capital stake, the government could only reject major proposals, and the Tokyo Electric leadership would stay.

Prime Minister Noda, however, has left the responsibility for negotiations with Mr. Edano, as he is said to be too involved with a consumption tax increase to handle anything else. Mr. Noda wants to unify social welfare programs using the consumption tax as funding. The people backing this idea are calling it a “reform”, a term the Western media echoes. Yet the reform so far consists of allocating just one-fifth of the assumed revenues from the tax increase to social welfare programs (JPY 2.7 trillion) while earmarking JPY four trillion to public works projects. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to shift the emphasis from concrete to people? Nor has the Noda Cabinet come up with a specific proposal for the future form of the social welfare system. They just want the taxes first.

What they don’t want is to remind everyone that the last time the consumption tax was raised, during the Hashimoto administration, it had a negative impact on the economy that further decreased tax revenue.

Edano Yukio, however, says there will be no government support without a two-thirds stake. For negotiations, he has enlisted his political patron, Sengoku Yoshito, who became a Class A war criminal as chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan Cabinet during the Senkakus incident.

The METI bureaucrats are said to like Mr. Sengoku, including those with greater political ambitions, as well as banking industry veterans now in subordinate Cabinet positions. They think he’s a genius at lobbying and working behind the scenes. (Yes, they said “lobbying”; in Japan, the politicians in government are the lobbyists.) Mr. Sengoku is thought to be interested in shifting the power industry’s votes and money from the Liberal Democratic Party to the DPJ.

Another aspect of the stalemate is another Old Japan struggle for the authority over the nuclear power industry itself, with METI, the Ministry of Education (which includes science affairs), Defense, the National Police Agency, and the Cabinet Office duking it out.

While the servants of the people have been attending to what they perceive as national affairs, others have offered many good ideas for recovery programs. These included making the Tohoku region a special economic development zone as a trial for a move to a state/province system, giving tax breaks to donations (there are donation boxes nowadays in most public places and commercial establishments), and issuing long-term bonds bought by the Bank of Japan.

Neither the Kan nor the Noda governments could manage any of that.

Shiva’s second coming

Talk of dinosaurs brings up the subject of Ozawa Ichiro, the former president and secretary-general of several political parties, and now suspended as a member of the ruling DPJ, though he was their secretary-general until May 2010 and president until a year before that.

He’s back in the news because the government he wants to topple this time is the one led by Mr. Noda — ostensibly for failing to uphold the party’s 2009 election manifesto, but really for not paying attention to him.

One of the weekly magazines conducted an interview with him on 14 December 2011 and published it in their 31 January edition.

Ultimately, I look at Japan with doubt, wondering whether it is a democratic state…In Japan, the power of the citizenry is not linked to changing politics.

No one has to doubt who’s ignoring the democratically expressed desire for change. The Japanese say hansei, or reflecting on one’s past conduct, is a national trait, but that’s one mirror Mr. Ozawa passes by without looking in.

The interview contained the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here’s the good (or at least the accurate) part:

If Japan had the ability to negotiate with the US as equals, there would be no worry about TPP. But the present government isn’t capable of doing anything like that. The people are concerned that in the end, it will turn out the way America wants it.

It isn’t just TPP. It’s everything, including the security issue, starting with the Futenma base. It’s the same with economic issues. What has to happen is that the Japanese become independent. But the government has to be able to stand up for the Japanese national interest….I agree in principle with free trade, and we should negotiate based on that. If the government had any ability to negotiate, there’d be nothing to worry about.

Now for the bad:

To prepare for the market opening, the DPJ put in the manifesto a domestic policy of income supplements for agricultural households. If we (upheld) that, agriculture would survive.

The legal vote-buying schemes of power politicians might buy a few votes, but that wouldn’t ensure the survival of agriculture. The romantic vision of the family farm is no longer enough to put food on the nation’s table, especially considering that most farmers in Japan are not exclusively engaged in farming. Policies that promote agribusiness are the means for survival, but few politicians want to campaign on that.

Now for the ugly:

People who criticize my assertions don’t understand anything at all.

He also sat for an interview with the Asahi Shimbun earlier this month, which they thoughtfully translated into English:

Question: It has been two and a half years since the change of government, but the political sector does not appear to be functioning. Why?

Ozawa: That means that democracy has not matured to a point of taking hold in Japan. It is often said that politicians are only as good as the people who elect them.

Remember what the journalist said about stupid people and stupid ideas?

Ozawa: The change in government with the Lower House election of August 2009 was a major decision by the Japanese public, which dislikes change. I believe they held a dream.

The Japanese public likes change a lot in politics. They keep voting for it. They don’t get to realize the dream they hold because Mr. Ozawa and his party keep stepping on it.

Ozawa: However, the DPJ did not have the qualifications necessary to respond to those expectations. It was unable to fulfill its role because the responsibility may have been just too large.

Either that or their capacity to fulfill their role was too small.

Noda Yoshihiko: a chip off the old blocks

Noda Yoshihiko isn’t as appalling as the vaporous Hatoyama Yukio or the repellent Kan Naoto, but the performance of those two has jaundiced the media’s view of anyone who would lead the DPJ government. Here’s the 16 March edition of the Shukan Post:

It is usual for prime ministers to make frantic efforts to get the people on their side when managing the affairs of state becomes difficult, but this man, who has little experience or few accomplishments at the upper levels of government, does not understand the meaning of authority. He increasingly curries favor with the bureaucrats, the Americans, and his powerless supporters, while showing his fat ass (肥えた尻) to the people.

What has been appalling are his Cabinet appointments, despite his trite claim that he was putting the right people in the right places. A career bureaucrat was quoted on his opinion of Finance Minister Azumi Jun, a former NHK broadcaster:

He’s pretty good. Like Kan, he doesn’t pretend that he knows anything. He admits that he doesn’t understand fiscal policy. He stands up for (Finance Ministry policy positions) in the Cabinet. He’s also cute, and has a cute personality.

Yes, he said kawaii.

With public sentiment running against his plan to increase taxes, Mr. Noda is trying to trim expenditures to convince the public that he actually is the fiscal hawk in the portrait the spin doctor present.

He’s announced a plan to reduce public sector hiring 40% from 2009 levels in 2013, to about 5,100 people. The figures are likely to be similar in 2014. Hiring was already down in 2011 and 2012, however.

Another plan to cut civil servant salaries by 7.8% passed the Diet rather quickly. Japan’s industrial media played up the legislation, but one of the jobs of kisha club reporters is to circulate the PR handouts for the Finance Ministry.

The Shukan Post points out that’s officially only JPY 300 billion a year for two years, and probably closer to 270 billion. The politicos said the savings would be spent on Tohoku recovery, but the bill contains no specific mention of that, nor has a framework been created for that expenditure. It hasn’t even been allocated to the special recovery account.

Meanwhile, Mr. Noda not only rescinded the freeze on civil servant salary increases in place since 2006 this spring, he gave them a double bump. That increase will also be reflected in overtime allowances. The bureaucrats still get overtime while attending to Diet members, i.e., sitting and watching the Diet in session or going out drinking with MPs after the session is over. They also get taxi vouchers for the trip home.

He’s also retained the special allowances public employees receive in addition to their salary — JPY 26.4 billion a year in residential allowances, apartments in Tokyo at roughly 20% the rent of commercial properties, and JPY 7.1 billion for cold weather assignments. There’s even a special allowance for those assigned to work at a ministry or agency’s main office, which eats another JPY 10.2 billion a year.

Former bureaucrat and current freelance journalist Wakabayashi Aki asked them why they needed a special allowance to work at headquarters. She was told assignments there had the unique and difficult responsibility of formulating legislation and policies.

In other words, they get a bonus on top of their salaries to do the jobs they were hired to do.

But the generosity of the Japanese public sector doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. They’re also giving the money away overseas.

International exchange

This week the Foreign Ministry released its 2011 white paper on ODA, which offered their explanation of the reasons for foreign aid. They emphasized the importance of international cooperation and pointed out that the feelings of trust and thanks toward Japan from overseas were fostered by lavish ODA. To support their assertion, they cited the assistance received from 163 countries, including developing countries, after the Tohoku disaster.

You might have thought money can’t buy you love, but the Foreign Ministry has other ideas.

Some of it read as if it were a script for the TV commercials of the kind that oil companies produce to convince viewers of their environmental awareness: Students in Sierra Leone sold their meals and collected US$ 500 for donations, and all the national civil servants of Mongolia donated one day’s salary to Tohoku relief. While Japan’s ODA has declined for 13 straight years, the Foreign Ministry touts it as a great success, saying “active donations to the international community are connected to Japan’s own benefit.”

The prime minister thinks so too. Mr. Noda met Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on 7 March in Tokyo and promised to help rebuild her country’s infrastructure, including expressways, railroads, and IT, after last year’s floods.

Said Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osama at a news conference:

A friend in need is a friend indeed. We will never forget the goodwill of the Thai people, who offered us support as a country during the Tohoku disaster. There are many Japanese in Thailand working for companies in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and the expectations toward Japan are great. We want to formulate solid measures that will not betray those expectations.

The folks at the Seetell website are on the case again. They quote this from the Nikkei:

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has decided to provide Japanese companies with subsidies for their 18 infrastructure-related projects in China and other Asian countries, The Nikkei learned Saturday. The subsidy program mainly targets projects for building smart communities in China and Vietnam. It covers not only exports of infrastructure facilities and systems but also smart community projects involving land development in China, Thailand and Vietnam, sources said.

After providing some details about the programs, the paper added:

The ministry will extend subsidies of tens of millions of yen to these projects, sources said.

Seetell asks several excellent questions:

So, the bureaucrats at METI can allocate funds to build cities in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but no one in the government can seem to rally any focused effort to rebuild cities in Japan? What could possibly cause such a mismanagement of resources and priorities? Are not the Japanese people of greater concern than the Vietnamese, Thais, and Chinese?

And how does it fit that Japan is building cities in China when the US occupation of Okinawa continues for its 67th year because China is seen as a threat to Japan?

Here’s one Seetell missed:

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today welcomed a $340 million contribution by Japan, the highest amount that Japan has ever made in 10 years of vigorous support for the Global Fund. Japan is now making its first payment of US$ 216 million for its 2012 contribution.

“Japan has always been a leader in the fight against disease, but this is a great vote of confidence in our commitment to saving lives,” said Gabriel Jaramillo, General Manager of the Global Fund. “We recognize Japan’s determination to see real advances in global health, and we are equally determined to deliver.”

This new contribution represents a significant increase over Japan’s previous highest contribution of US$ 246 million in 2010. In 2011, Japan’s contribution was reduced to US $114 million following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan in March of last year, but this new contribution demonstrates that Japan’s commitment to the Global Fund remains steadfast.

The Boy Finance Minister Azumi the Cute is warning of a Greek-like catastrophe, people in the cold Tohoku region spent the winter in prehabs, but Japan had to almost triple the amount of money it gives to this group? The Global Fund couldn’t get by with just 100 million again this year? Japan was the only country they could tap for cash?

Here’s another from the Shukan Post. The IMF wanted $US 100 billion (about JPY 8 trillion) from Japan to help bail out the Europeans. Japan said it could only contribute about half of that, but the IMF insisted. The Finance Ministry finally told Mr. Azumi to cave again, so now Japan will help bail out the unbailable Greeks. The magazine points out that this amount of money, if kept in Japan, would remove the necessity to raise taxes for the Tohoku recovery, and the necessity to float bonds to cover national pension outlays.

To be fair, returning favors and gifts for favors and gifts received is an important element of Japanese culture. Nonetheless, one has to suspect that part of the motivation is the fear of government ministries and agencies that they’ll lose the budget money they don’t use. Besides, the government has been selectively generous about which favors it returns. Taiwan, which contributed JPY 20 billion to the Tohoku recovery, sent a representative to the memorial service in Tokyo last Sunday. They were left off the list of donor acknowledgments, and the representative was shunted to the general seating area on the second floor while the other foreign delegates sat downstairs in a VIP section.

Prime Minister Noda later said he was sorry if he offended anyone, but his lack of sincerity was offensive in itself. Chief Cabinet Minister Fujimura admitted the seating arrangements were settled at the Foreign Ministry and the Cabinet Office.

Na Nu Na Nu

Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio enjoys his nickname of The Alien, but one has to wonder if the entire DPJ that he once led is just the Martian Space Party morphed into human form.

Last week, the DPJ announced the appointment of Mr. Hatoyama as their supreme advisor on foreign policy and Kan Naoto as their supremo for new energy policies.

How fitting. One screwed up relations with the U.S., and the other screwed up Fukushima.

Mr. Kan also gave a speech to a DPJ study group on the 5th, attended by mid-tier and younger party members. The topic: Achieving real governance by the political class. “Japan should give serious thought,” he said, “to its approach toward state governance organs.”

Considering his accomplishments in office, that speech was over before his listeners could settle in for a nap.

If this were a backwards country, as the man said, Ozawa Ichiro might wind up being hung. But civilized Japan instead hung his portrait in a room in the Diet chambers last week.

A rule allows those MPs with 25 years of service to put their picture on a wall as long as the governmnent doesn’t pay for it. One of his political protégées did the painting, so he didn’t have to dip into his well-stocked safe at home for the petty cash.

If this were a backwards country, he might also be in the dock along with the other war criminals. But then again, he already is in the dock for political fund problems.

The party that insisted every day from 2007 to 2009 that elections be held immediately is none to excited about holding one themselves now that the executioner is motioning for them to stick their head into the hole of the guillotine. During a TV interview on the morning of the 10th, Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya said:

If we dissolve the lower house now, the anger of the people will be directed at the existing political parties.

It already is, but then Mr. Okada is not known for his insight into popular sentiment.

They would complain that we were only holding elections without accomplishing anything.

Instead, they’re complaining that the DPJ has done little, what little they did was bad, and what they want to do now is what they promised they wouldn’t do.

Anachronisms

It is clear to everyone that these are men whose time has gone. They are living relics of a now irrelevant age. Their approach and viewpoint, while stemming in part from the self-interest endemic to politicians everywhere, is as obsolete as the Cold War. Adding their evident contempt for their own citizens to the list of charges means they’ll have a dread judge to face in the next election.

Disturbed as much by the failure of the Iron Triangle to deal with the triple disaster as they were by the disasters themselves, the people — wiser than their leaders — have moved on. Former Koizumi privatization guru Takenaka Heizo recently published a book-length dialog with former Yokohama Mayor Nakata Hiroshi, who is working as an advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru. Mr. Takenaka observed:

The people now have high hopes for new regional parties, and I think there’s a good reason for that. The era of putting government administration in the hands of the bureaucracy and somehow achieving consistent growth is over. This is now an era for solving our problems. In society’s terms, people are looking for new CEOs. In fact, the best CEOs are the heads of local governments.

The next posts will examine Mr. Hashimoto, the most prominent of those local government heads.

Afterwords:

Try this for a refresher of what democracy means in Ozawa World.

Worried about the potential unpleasantness of Kusaka Kimindo’s comment about “Western-worshipping intellectuals”? Don’t be. Nothing bad will happen, and a renewed appreciation for Japanese values might be salubrious. Besides, even a cursory glance at current social, political, and economic conditions in the United States and Europe is enough to know how well contemporary Western values are working out.

*****
Here’s Takeuchi Mari singing Genki wo Dashite (Cheer Up!).

There’s a good reason this is an evergreen song in Japan, and it’s not just the melody. The premise of the song is that a woman is singing to a friend who’s down in the dumps because she’s been dumped by a man.

But the lyrics have other applications as well:

All you have to do is start again at the beginning…

If you feel like you want to be happy,
Tomorrow will be easy to find.

Life isn’t as bad as you think
So cheer up and show me that smile.

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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Death be not proud

JAPANESE festivals can be more fun that a barrel of monkeys ripped on fermented fruit, but a Taiwanese folk custom, explained by anthropologist Marc Moskowitz, outdoes them all. The website Digital Dying interviewed the professor, and here’s the first question and answer:

What does a Taiwan stripper funeral look like?

Women sing and dance as a truck with blinking neon lights follows a funeral procession through the streets. The trucks are called Electric Flower Cars, or EFCs. Vendors sell things alongside and there is some really fabulous singing and a whole range of performances, taking off clothes is just one part. Often there’s a host, a middle aged man or woman who tells jokes and interviews performers between events. Usually the strippers wear bikinis, or an outfit like you might see at a nightclub.

Usually, but not always, as he explains in the interview.

Now that’s my idea of a going away party!

Of course it’s on You Tube. One caveat — the actual scenes from the documentary were filmed at a temple rather than a funeral. But as one of the commenters notes (Taiwan resident Dan Bloom, who knows what he’s talking about), the performances are the same.

Heck, if that’s what goes on at Taiwanese temples, I think I might have found religion.

There’s a more detailed interview at the io9 site with another trailer from the film. (It’s worth watching for the song’s subtitles alone.) And here’s Prof. Moskowitz’s site.

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The New York Times: As much currency as the Zimbabwe dollar

“Prime Minister Kan has been extremely busy during this unprecedented disaster. He’s screaming at people in the Kantei, he’s barging into Tokyo Electric and screaming at them, and he’s screaming when he comes back. The problem with the prime minister screaming without regard to time or place is that none of it brought about an improvement in the situation.”
- The 2 April issue of the weekly Shukan Gendai

THOSE still interested in smokestack-industry journalism might find it fun to go slumming at the New York Times website and read their article, Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust, about the Japanese government’s initial efforts to deal with the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

A more apt title would be Media Crisis, Crippling Mistrust. That the article contains a substantial amount of distortion, manipulation, and unintentional, spit-out-the-beverage humor will be no surprise — it’s a collaborative effort by two of the Times’ journalistic gimps, Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler. The former is well-known for his hatchet jobs on Japan when he was that paper’s Tokyo correspondent, while the latter’s primary talent seems to be opening his mouth wide and saying Ahhh to receive DPJ government spoonfeedings.

But perhaps that assessment is too harsh. The pair had to work under a greater handicap than usual because the Kan administration, whose party promised greater access to the media when they were in the opposition, excluded overseas reporters as well as freelance and net journalists from the prime minister’s and chief cabinet secretary’s news conferences updating earthquake/tsunami information because “it was an emergency”.

So the Times did the next best thing and faked it by rewriting the government’s handouts.

The following is a comparison of what the Japanese government wanted the Times to tell those people it still thinks are American opinion leaders, and what the Japanese government doesn’t want them to know.

The Times Tale #1:

The Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Terada and other aides said.

What Everyone in Japan Knows #1:

When the earthquake occurred shortly after 2:00 p.m. on 11 March, Mr. Kan and his advisors immediately went to the government’s crisis center. That night, the prime minister himself conducted discussions about ways to deal with the nuclear crisis, drawing up scenarios on a whiteboard. The discussions lasted all night.

At about 5:00 a.m. on the following day, he skipped a meeting of a group organized to deal with the emergency and flew by Self-Defense Force helicopter to view the Fukushima reactors from the air. (The trip itself remains very controversial in Japan. Critics charge it delayed the start of measures to cool the reactors. Others claim the trip had no intrinsic value, and that the prime minister made it only because of his taste for performance politics.)

After he returned, the prime minister told aides:

“The nuclear problem can be handled under Kantei leadership.”

(NB: The term Kantei in Japanese is analogous to the terms White House, the Kremlin, or 10 Downing St. in English.)

At 1:00 p.m., still fewer than 24 hours after the quake, a deputy minister addressed a news conference and said the fuel rods at the Fukushima reactors might already have started to melt. The Kantei was already aware of this possibility. That night, the prime minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio removed him from his job and reassigned him because he had “alarmed the people”.

At roughly 3:00 p.m. on 12 March, slightly more than 24 hours after the quake, Mr. Kan chaired a meeting of all party heads in the Diet and told them:

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The nuclear reactor is fine…Even at the worst, there will be no leakage of radiation.”

TT #2

“…(A) nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.

“Mr. Kawauchi (Hiroshi, an MP from the prime minister’s party) said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.”

WEIJK #2

The Nuclear Safety Technology Center (NSTC), which administers SPEEDI, sends out information in real time during an emergency over dedicated circuits to the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC), all the related agencies in the government, and all prefecture governments. Tokyo Electric informed the government of the power loss at Fukushima on 3:42 p.m. on 11 March, slightly more than one hour after the earthquake. The government immediately instructed the NSTC to operate in emergency mode, which it did at around 5:00 p.m. SPEEDI began sending data hourly, and the amount of data transmitted reached 6,500 pages by 20 April. The government had released only two pages of that data by the end of April. The NSC published the first page on 23 March, 12 days after the earthquake/tsunami, and the second page on 11 April.

An article in the 6 May edition of the weekly Shukan Post claims that Mr. Edano had to have known about the SPEEDI data from the start of the emergency, which means that Mr. Kan had to have known too. The Post interviewed the head of the bureau in the Education Ministry responsible for SPEEDI, who said,

“A senior official at the Kantei ordered that information from SPEEDI was not to be made public (on the 15th). The next day (the 16th) the responsibility for SPEEDI was transferred from the Ministry to the NSC.”

The Post also interviewed the head of the NSC, who denied the story, but the magazine didn’t believe him:

“All the local governments involved told us the (system began functioning immediately). In accordance with the system’s guidelines, maps (showing radiation dispersion) were transmitted to the Fukushima Prefecture government office from the start (of SPEEDI operation). The prefectural government did not issue warnings to municipalities and residents, however. Explained a member of the Fukushima Prefecture group established to deal with the accident, ‘NSC decided whether or not to release the information, and we were prevented from releasing it on our own’.”

Incidentally, the Times found the space for the quote above from Kawauchi Hiroshi, but missed his statement published in the 31 March edition of the weekly Shukan Shincho:

“The prime minister has further stressed political leadership and Kantei leadership, but I do not think that was functioning at all during this crisis.”

TT #3

“(O)n March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No. 3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.

“When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4. ‘This is not a joke,’ the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.

“They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then he gave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit the company.

“At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.

“Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.

“’Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,’ Mr. Kan told them.”

WEIJK #3

That’s not all he told them in the ensuing 15 (not five) minutes. Mr. Kan ordered the press corps accompanying him out of the room. The prime minister grabbed a microphone and started shouting loud enough for the reporters standing outside in the hall to hear. He told Tokyo Electric officials, ‘Kakugo wo kimete kudasai’, (i.e., their workers should be prepared to die) and said that if they withdrew from the plant he would crush the company (100％ 潰れる). He wound up staying for a three-hour conference, but he was still screaming when he returned to the Kantei.

Five-minute impromptu pep talk, eh?

The utility’s workers were exposed to radiation initially reported to be 2.5 times over the acceptable limit. On the 16th (the next day), however, the prime minister ordered Self-Defense Forces dropping water on the reactors from a helicopter to withdraw because of the risk of radiation exposure.

While recognizing there was a lot for which to hold TEPCO accountable, the Japanese media wondered why Prime Minister Kan issued a de facto order to the utility to send its employees into a situation that had the potential of resulting in their death from radiation exposure (which he mentioned himself), though he has no legal authority to tell a private sector company what to do. In contrast, he pulled back the SDF — public sector employees whose job involves receiving orders that might result in their deaths — because of dangerous radiation levels.

That Mr. Kan screams a lot is common knowledge in Japan. One DPJ member — again, a member of the same party — told the media that when the prime minister barged into Tokyo Electric headquarters and started yelling at them it was nichijosahanji. (A daily occurrence; literally, “daily rice and tea”)

“Everyone’s disgusted with him because he calls in officials off the top of his head and starts screaming at them. When an official with a better grasp of the situation tries to point out his errors, he yells, ‘I’m not listening to anything you say!’ When they resign themselves to just conveying the facts, he loses his temper and says, ‘Are you trying to make me decide?’ Everyone knows something serious is bound to happen unless there’s a change, but no one can stop him.”

The cover headline of the subsequent issue of the Bungei Shunju, Japan’s most prestigious monthly, read: Kan Bangs the Table and Yells / Senior Bureaucrat: “I don’t want to look at the prime minister’s face for even a second”

TT #4

“On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.

“‘Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,’ Sakae Muto, Tepco’s executive vice president, explained at a news conference.

“Mr. Sassa (Atsuyuki), the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said: ‘Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?’”

WEIJK #4

When the man with the ultimate authority is psychologically unsound and is emotionally out of control as a matter of nichijosahanji, sends people over whom he has no authority to their possible deaths, and threatens to destroy their company if he is not obeyed, of course the people who must deal with him make decisions based on his mood. They can’t afford to joke around. Here’s another report:

“When a member of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency explained a point to him, he retorted, ‘You haven’t been to the site and seen it (like I have), have you?’ He phoned a bureaucrat he had never met out of the blue and issued instructions. He concluded with, ‘It’ll be your fault if something happens’.” (That English cannot convey the faux tough guy roughness of the original Japanese: 何かあったらお前らのせいだぞ)

TT #5

“Mr. Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, the company still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.”

WEIJK #5

Tokyo Electric told the prime minister at about 10:00 p.m. on the night of the earthquake that they expected a meltdown to occur. Their readings of iodine levels at the plant early the next morning confirmed their expectations. In any event, instead of telling other people in the Diet that he wasn’t sure, Mr. Kan was flatly denying that a meltdown had occurred into mid-May.

TT #6

“(T)he Japanese met an hour beforehand (on 20 March) to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the crisis began.”

WEIJK #6

Onishi and Fackler pulled that last sentence from their backsides; as we’ve seen, the politicians set the agenda from the day the crisis started. That was the problem.

Here’s one freelance journalist:

“The prime minister and his ‘political leadership’ are suspected to be the reason for the confusion of the blackouts, and the disrupted transport, business, schools, medical institutions, which were implemented on the spur of the moment with no input from ministries. He criticized Tokyo Electric for providing information late, but ignored his own inability to gather information.”

And another:

“Mr. Kan’s greatest mistake was that he was supposed to be the commander but acted like a squad leader on the ground. He established a headquarters within the offices of Tokyo Electric. This was just a performance designed to catch the attention of the mass media and promote himself among the people. Meanwhile, he treated the government’s emergency and disaster relief headquarters as a side job, giving it short shrift. That’s because there’s no glory and no media coverage in it.”

Here’s a headline in the Daily Yomiuri on 17 March:

“Distribution channels blocked; Government has done nothing for six days / No specific plans from disaster headquarters”

The problems extended to foreign affairs. The Taiwanese government got in touch with the Japanese government on the day of the earthquake to tell them they could dispatch an emergency rescue team to the area immediately. The prime minister made them — and the people in Tohoku stranded by the earthquake — wait for two days until after the Chinese rescue team arrived.

All of this goes without saying for the people who know Mr. Kan best. Sengoku Yoshito was the chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan cabinet, and returned as the deputy chief after it became apparent that Matsumoto Ryu, nominally the Minister for Disaster Measures, was incapable of doing his job. He reportedly told a close aide:

“Handling affairs from the earthquake to the recovery is beyond Kan’s ability.”

Here’s an example of what that means: The prime minister has been widely quoted in the Japanese media as telling people that he is an expert on nuclear energy. Meanwhile, the Nikkei Shimbun reported that he wanted a “second opinion” from people not associated with the bureaucracy or Tokyo Electric, so he called in outside experts for a discussion. One of the first questions he asked was, “What is this ‘criticality’?”

Loathe to criticize too harshly someone who shares their political beliefs, the New York Times couldn’t find the space for any of the above. They did find the space for this bagatelle, however:

“Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner.”

Who anywhere has the experience in handling the deaths of more than 20,000 people and more than 80,000 people still in shelters as the aftermath of the fourth-largest earthquake in recorded history, the largest recorded tsunami in an area where large tsunami occur roughly every 30 years, and the resultant meltdown of three nuclear reactors?

As for his alleged inability to grasp the severity of the disaster sooner, he understood a meltdown was likely on the day of the disaster and he started ordering evacuations the next day. He was thrashed by the media and the public when it was reported on one occasion soon after the disaster that he said northeast Japan might be rendered uninhabitable, and on another occasion that no one would be able to live there for 10 to 20 years.

Of the many criticisms of the Kan administration, one of the most frequent is that they never accept responsibility and always blame someone else. Either the New York Times fell for it (which means they need new correspondents in Tokyo) or are acting as accomplices.

One reporter assigned to cover the Democratic Party of Japan told the Shukan Shincho that Mr. Kan’s behavior in the first week after the earthquake/tsunami resembled that of Adolph Hitler in the final days of the Third Reich.

Speaking of the Third Reich, anyone who wants to read the Times article and see what an English-language article in the Völkischer Beobachter might have looked like in the heyday of that publication can use the search engine of their choice to find it. No links from me.

Links are for journos on the legit.

*****
Such dubious souls

Shimojo Masao (14): The Senkakus Weren’t Taiwanese Territory Either

THE HEADLINE on the article in the 23 December Sankei Shimbun leapt from the page: “The Senkakus (are) Chinese Territory: Old document sold for JPY 166 Million”. The article reported that it was proclaimed the old document contained conclusive proof identifying the Senkaku Islets (Chinese name: Diaoyutai) as Chinese territory. The document was put up for auction in Beijing, and the winning bid was CNY 13.25 million (about JPY 166 million). The auction attracted attention because the sponsors announced in advance that foreigners would be prohibited from bidding to prevent “the destruction of this conclusive evidence”.

The old document in question was identified as the Zhongshan Jili, Volume #5 of the Fusheng Liuji by Shen Fu, which was thought to be lost. This previously unknown document was said to have been recorded in the Jishizhu, which was abstracted by the Qing Dynasty scholar Qian Yong.

To start with the conclusion, not only does this JPY 166 million document fail to offer conclusive proof that the Senkakus are Chinese territory, the idea that a Japanese would purchase it “to destroy the conclusive proof” is a groundless concern.

Until now, the Chinese have used the records of Chinese emissaries sent to the Ryukyu Kingdom (today’s Okinawa Prefecture) since the Ming Dynasty era to assert that the Senkakus were historically Chinese territory. These records include the directions for a sea route. The name of the island of Uotsuri (Chinese name: Diaoyutai) was variously recorded as Chenkan in the Shiliuqiulu (1534), Guorulin in the Chongbian Shiliuqiulu (1562), Wangji in the Shiliuqiu Zalu (1683), Xubaoguang in the Zhongshan Yunxinlu (1719), Zhouhuang in the Liuqiu Guozhilue (1756), Lidingyuan in the Shiliuqiulu (1800), and Zhaikun in the Xuliuqiu Guozhilue (1808).

Then, in the fall of 2005, a copy of the Jishizhu was discovered in a Nanjing antiques market. Inside was an excerpt about the dispatch of an emissary to the Ryukyus in 1808 titled Celiuqiu Guojilue, that read, “Sighted Diaoyutai on the morning of the 13th.” Chinese and Taiwanese scholars regard the Celiuqiu Guojilue as part of the lost fifth volume (Zhongshan Jili) of the Fusheng Liuji. They claim it is proof the Diaoyutai islets were discovered 76 years before the discovery by the Japanese Koga Tatsushiro.

It is impossible to claim that the records of the Celiuqiu Guojilue immediately prove that Diaoyutai was Chinese, however. To be sure, the text does say there was the intent to establish a vassalage with the Ryukyu king in 1808, and that Zhai Kun was named the principal emissary and Fei Xi-zhang the secondary emissary. Both men did travel to the Ryukyus in 1808. The name Diaoyutai is recorded in the Liuqiu Guozhilue, which both men edited, as being on the route from Fuzhou to the Ryukyus.

To use the appearance of the name Diaoyutai on the sea route as the basis for making the claim that it is conclusive evidence proving the Senkakus are Chinese territory, however, is not possible. Zhai Kun himself did not recognize Diaoyutai as Chinese territory. In his poetry anthology Dongying Baiyong, he includes a poem recounting the trip from the port at Taiping to the port at Naha. The poem states that Mt. Jilong in Taiwan was the limit of Chinese territory at that time.

Zhai Kun set sail from Fuzhou in May 1808 and reached Naha on the night of the 17th, passing Wuhumen, Jilongshan, Diaoyutai, Chiweiyu, Heigouyang, Gumishan, and Machishan on the way. Recounting the trip, he writes that Mt. Jilong is located between Wuhumen and Diaoyutai, and that the mountain marks the outer border of China. He demonstrates the same geographical awareness in another of his poems when he writes that he “passed Mt. Jilong, the outer limit of China”. This enables us to confirm that Zhai Kun was aware that Mt. Jilong delineated the farthest boundary of Qing Dynasty China.

Why did Zhai Kun state that Mt. Jilong, in what was then Taiwan Prefecture, was the edge of China? Because the Qing Dynasty had established Taiwan Prefecture as a Chinese possession in 1684 and designated Mt. Jilong as the northernmost limit to their area of jurisdiction. The Taiwan Fuzhi, compiled every year during the reign of Emperor Kanxi by Jiang Yu-ying, states that the prefecture extends 2,315 li north to Mt. Jilong, That is echoed in the 1696 edition, when the same distance to the mountain is cited and the mountain is called the boundary.

In any event, the Jilong Castle near the present city of Keelung and Mt. Jilong are located that distance from Taiwan Prefecture, and were the outer limits of that prefecture. That’s the reason Zhai Kun writes in Dongying Baiyong that the mountain was the boundary of China, and that when he passed the mountain he passed outside of China. The Senkaku Islets, about 200 kilometers east-northeast of the northern edge of Taiwan at Keelung, were not included in the Qing Dynasty administrative district for which Mt. Jilong marked the border.

This fact can be confirmed in the Qinding Gujin Tushu Jicheng, a collection of maps published in 1728. Before Zhai Kun was sent as an emissary to the Ryukyus in 1808, the maps in that collection showed Mt. Jilong as the northern boundary of Taiwan Prefecture based on the text of the Taiwan Fuzhi. The Daiqing Yitongzhi published in 1744 shows the same thing. This geographical awareness is continued through the era of the Republic of China in the Huangzhao Xuwenxian Tongkao, compiled in 1912, and the Qingshigao of 1927. From the Ming Dynasty, through the Qing Dynasty, to the days of the Republic of China on the mainland, the Senkaku Islets were not part of Taiwan’s territory.

The definitive proof is that on maps showing the sea route when the emissaries were sent to the Ryukyus, the islands of Huapingdao and Pengjiadao were incorporated as part of Taiwan. In the Jilong Shizhi, a report from the city of Jilung in 1951, it is stated that a 1905 reorganization placed Mt. Jilong, Mt. Pengjia, Mt. Mianhua, and Mt. Huaping within the territory of the city of Jilung. The Senkaku Islets are nearly 150 kilometers to the east-northeast of Mt. Huaping, Mt. Pengjia, and Mt. Mianhua. It is self-evident that when the Qing Dynasty took possession of Taiwan in 1684, the governing authority of Taiwan Prefecture extended only to Mt. Jilung.

The Chinese claim that the Senkakus were their territory is vague, lacks a historical basis, and is nothing more than a mistaken impression. The old document that has been declared to present conclusive evidence that the Senkakus are Chinese territory demonstrates, when examined, that the Senkakus were not Chinese territory at all. There are reports an enormous sum was paid for the document to prevent the Japanese from destroying this “conclusive evidence”, but we don’t want to destroy the evidence showing the Senkakus were not Chinese territory.

In recent years China has become emotional about the Senkakus issue, and it has built up its military capabilities, intimidating other countries. That is the height of folly, because neither China nor Taiwan has any historical basis enabling it to claim the islets. Ignoring those historical facts, Japan’s Democratic Party government assigned about 100 members of a coastal surveillance team to Yonaguni Island near the Senkakus on 21 November to use radar for detecting Chinese ships and aircraft, while deliberations were ongoing regarding the National Defense Program Guidelines. To counter this move, the Chinese immediately dispatched two fishing patrol vessels to the area near the Senkakus, sailing for many hours near Japanese territorial waters.

An extreme overreaction of this type is not a wise choice. It is not too late for the Chinese to reexamine their awareness of history and discover the errors before both Japan and China become emotional. As with South Korea, which continues to illegally occupy Takeshima with no historical basis, China does not offer a historical ground for their assertion that the Senkakus belong to them.

Since the Democratic Party took power in Japan, the country’s diplomacy has been thrown into confusion, amplifying the instability of East Asia as a whole. While the lack of ability of the people in leadership positions in the DPJ administration is one factor, the LDP too, which had reigned as the ruling party until then, had a negative approach to resolving territorial issues.

What the people seek from politicians is the assurance of national sovereignty and stability in their daily lives. Part of the territory of postwar Japan has been invaded by neighboring countries, and this situation remains unresolved after more than half a century. Such a situation is tantamount to slavery. While we live contentedly in conditions of slavery, the political dramas of past and present only for the dogged pursuit of the seat of power have been a disgrace. If neither the DPJ nor the LDP has the wisdom to recover our national sovereignty after repeated invasions, they should promptly quit the political stage.

- Shimojo Masao

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War ‘n peace in the East

Tsze-lu asked about government. The Master said, “Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.”
- The Analects of Confucius

FOR THOSE people interested in conducting some peace education with North Korea in a language they’ll understand, Joshua Stanton at One Free Korea presents and expands on a suggestion by Kevin Kim:

(K)nock down one major symbol per NK provocation. Flatten the Ryugyong Hotel, for instance, then start knocking down those Great Leader statues. Shell the stadium where the Arirang Festival takes place, powder the King Il-sung hall of gifts, blast away one leg of the NK Arc de Triomphe and let it topple, etc. If nothing else, such strikes would drive NK nuts. Whether they would demoralize the populace, embolden them to rebel, or solidify their loyalty to the Dear Leader, I have no idea, but if we think purely in terms of symbols, Pyongyang is a target-rich environment.

Mr. Stanton takes the idea and runs with it:

(A)ny attack that strikes at the state’s spiritual legitimacy and its most unpopular aspects would advance our interests in neutralizing North Korea as a threat.

He thinks cities, hotels, stadiums, and even military casualties should be avoided. Instead, he suggests as targets the palaces of the Kim Family Regime and the offices of the security forces:

I’d bet that the North Korean people would actually approve if they learn that KJI or KJU’s fancy palaces were bombed, particularly by the South Koreans. The North Koreans can’t even show video of the damaged palaces without highlighting the gross inequality of North Korean society and suffering an even greater propaganda backlash. Instead, we should use the occasion to show the world, including the North Korean people, how KJI and KJU live in splendor while everyone else lives in squalor.

We could go back and forth on this forever, but there is also anecdotal evidence that some North Koreans think the Kim Family Regime is entitled to its lifestyle. When former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro was in North Korea to discuss the release of the Japanese abductees, the abductees and their families took a break for something to eat and drink with the Japanese delegation. The teenaged son of one of the abductees asked his father in astonishment why other Japanese were allowed to order the same beverage that Mr. Koizumi drank.

While the boy was ethnically Japanese, he was born, reared, and educated in North Korea. His response suggests that some people in that country would think it was natural for the Dear Leader to enjoy Hennessey-stocked palaces and the finer things of life.

That’s a risk I’d take, however.

Meanwhile, further to the south, the Chinese emotional investment in their cultural superiority continues to manifest as a severe case of arrested political development. Believing that it is an obscenity to award Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, they decided to create a peace prize of their own: the Confucius Peace Prize.

That’ll show ‘em!

But they’re still magnanimous:

Organisers suggested that one day the Confucius Peace Prize committee and the Nobel committee could cooperate, even jointly awarding peace prizes to the same nominee.

Until then, we’ll have to wait until the Norwegians have become as sophisticated as the Chinese in these matters. Considering whom they selected to receive last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, that might not be such a long wait.

There were six nominees for the honor of receiving the first Confucius Peace Prize. The winner is former Taiwan Vice President Lien Chan. The Chinese are working fast–their prize will be granted one day before the Nobel.

Both ceremonies might suffer from similar unfortunate circumstances: namely, the absence of the laureates. Mr. Liu will not be in Oslo to receive his award because the Chinese government thinks he should deal with more pressing matters. And if Mr. Lien wants to receive his award in person, the organizers better get on the stick. His office says he’s heard nothing from China about it.

Also nominated were “Nobel Peace Prize winners Mahmoud Abbas and Nelson Mandela, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Chinese poet Qiao Damo and the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second-most important figure.” Here’s the reason the organizers selected Mr. Lien:

“Lien Chan stood out from the six nominees as he built a bridge of peace between Taiwan and the (Chinese) mainland, bringing happiness and good fortune to the people on both sides of the (Taiwan) Strait.”

What that means is that during a 2005 meeting in Beijing, he and Hu Jintao (as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China) agreed that Taiwan is part of China and that they would work together to prevent Taiwan independence.

Yes, that’s much more important than anything Nelson Mandela or Bill Gates ever did.

He and the current Chinese government seem to share other views about the conduct of public affairs. Mr. Lien’s father was also a Taiwanese government official, and the family got gloriously rich by purchasing agricultural land and getting it rezoned. Now isn’t that what Confucius had in mind about “going before the people with your example”?

As Michael Turton of The View from Taiwan points out, the Chinese committee said the new prize was created to “interpret the viewpoints of peace of (the) Chinese (people).”

“How different this idea is from the USSR’s Nobel parody, the Lenin (originally Stalin) Peace Prize, “awarded by a panel appointed by the Soviet government, to notable individuals whom the panel indicated had ‘strengthened peace among peoples’” (Wiki). The prize went to Communists and sympathizers, but even so, the USSR felt that a pretense of universality was necessary.”

They can call it peace if they like, but peace on Chinese terms with the rest of the East Side in vassalage to China more closely resembles the general framework of a protection racket. And isn’t that the same principle underlying North Korea’s foreign policy?

*****
Maybe next year they should give the award to Jackie Chan. Good God, y’all! (If the screen turns black, click the link at the bottom to view the video. It’s worth it.)

Shimojo Masao (13): On the Senkaku islets

PROF. SHIMOJO MASAO has been occupied with other matters lately and has been unable to write for the site, but yesterday he sent this article on the Senkaku Islets.

*****
TENSIONS have recently erupted between Japan, China, and Taiwan over the territorial rights to the Senkaku islets. The eight islets, which include Uotsuri and Kuba, lie about 175 kilometers northwest of the Yaeyama archipelago in Okinawa and about 195 kilometers northeast of Taiwan, and are under the jurisdiction of Tonoshiro, Ishigaki in Okinawa Prefecture. They have been Japanese territory for more than a century, since 14 January 1895.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China claimed the Senkakus on 11 June 1971, while the People’s Republic of China claimed them on 30 December the same year. The reason both Taiwan and the PRC claimed the islets is the content of the report issued by the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) of a survey of the East China Sea seabed in 1969. The report stated it was possible there were deposits of oil resources on the continental shelf of that sea.

The territorial claim of the Chinese government is a special case in that they view the Senkakus as ancillary islands to the province of Taiwan, which they consider to be part of China. The grounds for the Chinese territorial claim is that when the Ryukyu Kingdom (now Okinawa Prefecture) became a vassal state of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Senkakus were used as a landmark on the sea route when the Chinese emissary visited. Therefore, insist the Chinese, they were aware of the islands first. Another basis for their claim that the islets are Chinese territory is that Qing Dynasty emissary Xu Baoguang did not include the Senkakus in the 36 islands of the Ryukyu chain in his Annals of Zhong Shan.

The Japanese incorporation of the Senkaku islets as terra nullius in 1895 was proper under international law. The problem, however, is the wide divergence in historical understanding between the two sides. While Japan asserts that the Senkakus are Japanese under international law, the Chinese say they were historically Chinese territory and that their incorporation into Japan was an imperialist occupation. Chinese fishing boats have nonchalantly continued to carry out fishing operations in Japanese territorial waters near the Senkakus, and this fait accompli informs the Chinese historical awareness that the islets are Chinese territory.

That is the reason China tried to justify the collision when the Chinese fishing vessel rammed the Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats on September 7, and the captain was arrested on suspicion of obstructing public officials in the line of duty. Even when the Japanese took a firm stand and repeatedly insisted that the Senkaku islets were Japanese territory, the Chinese did not agree. Japan’s Democratic Party government deployed a coastal surveillance team of about 100 members to Yonaguni, an island near the Senkakus, on 21 November as part of their evaluation of National Defense Program Guidelines, saying they could detect Chinese military vessels and aircraft in the area with radar. The Chinese countermeasure was the immediate dispatch of two fishery patrol vessels to the area near the Senkakus that passed through the adjoining Japanese waters.

A response of this type, however, is not a wise choice. It is not too late for the Chinese to reexamine their historical awareness before both countries become emotional. In the same way that South Korea continues to illegally occupy Takeshima with no historical justification whatsoever, the Chinese have demonstrated no historical basis for their claim that the Senkakus are Chinese territory.

Of course the Chinese passed near the Senkakus every time their sent their emissary to the Ryukyu Kingdom when the latter was their vassal state. It is true that one part of the Senkaku islets were shown in a map in Zhou Huang’s Treatise on the Ryukyus, and they are not included as one of the 36 Ryukyus as described in Xu Baoguang’s Annals of Zhong Shan. That alone is not grounds for claiming that the Senkaku islets are Chinese territory, however. That’s because Ming Era Taiwan, known as Dongfan, was inhabited by indigenous people and Chinese rule did not extend to the island. The Da Qing Yi Tong Zhi, a 1744 geographical survey of the Qing empire, showed that Taiwan was part of Japan during the reign of the Emperor Tianqi (1621-1628). It was also occupied by the Dutch for a time.

The Qing Dynasty annexed the island in 1684, but their rule did not extend beyond the southwestern part of the island. It did not reach the northern part of the island until 1723, when it established the Zhanghua and Danshui sub-prefectures.

The territory controlled by the provincial authority established during the Qing Dynasty did not extend over all of Taiwan. That can be confirmed by the Taiwan Fuzhi (Annals of Taiwan Prefecture), written by Gao Gongqian and others in 1696, and the maps in the Chongxiu Taiwan Fuzhi (Revised Gazetteer of Taiwan Prefecture) by Fan Xian and others in 1747. The eastern half of the island, which includes the Taiwan mountain range, is left blank, evidence that Qing Dynasty rule did not extend there.

In addition, the map of Taiwan Prefecture in the latter source shows the northern boundary of their control to be the Keelung (Jilong) Castle, while the Fengyuzhi in the Taiwan Fuzhi explains that the territory stretches 2,325 li northward to Mt. Keelung, thus defining the territorial border of Taiwan. The Senkaku islets are 195 kilometers northeast of both the fort and the mountain, so they obviously were not considered part of Taiwan. This can be confirmed with the map compiled at the order of Emperor Qianlong in the Da Qing Yi Tong Zhi. The map of Taiwan Prefecture is the same as that in the Taiwan Fuzhi and shows the Keelung Castle as the northern border of the territory. That map in turn was later used as the model for the Taiwanfu Jianyutu in the Qinding Gujin Tushu Jicheng (Complete Collections of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to the Current Times) of 1728. There was no change in the extent of the territory when the Republic of China was founded in 1912. That is shown in the Danshui Tingzhi (The Danshui Sub-Prefecture Gazetteer) compiled at the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1871, the Huangchao Xu Wenxian Tongkao (Comprehensive investigations based on literary and documentary sources) dating from the Republic of China era in 1912, and the Qingshigao (The Draft History of Qing) completed in 1927.

From these Chinese documents, it can be stated on the basis of historical fact that the Senkaku islets have never been Chinese territory, and that the Japanese government’s possession of them as terra nullius was appropriate under international law. The Chinese, however, say that the Senkakus have historically been Chinese territory, and criticize Japan’s incorporation of them as an imperialist occupation.

That is based on ignorance. One can only say theirs is a historically warped territorial ambition of the same type as South Korea’s occupation of Takeshima and Russia’s occupation of the Northern Territories and the Kurile Islands.

- Shimojo Masao

Map of Taiwan Prefecture, Da Qing Yi Tong Zhi, Vol. 335 (Takushoku University Collection)

Afterwords:

Prof. Shimojo told me that he found the map shown here in the university library. The book in which it was found is about 100 years old, had not been examined for a long time, and the university was not aware of the map’s existence.

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Taiwan election

HERE’S a fascinating look at Taiwan’s election earlier this week written by John Parker, a freelance writer and entrepreneur based in the PRC. In the first part of the article, Mr. Parker examines the attempted assassination of a KMT official who is the son of a prominent Taiwanese politician.

But I recommend sticking around to the end to read Mr. Parker’s comparison of the attitudes of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public in Taiwan with those of their counterparts in the PRC:

Taiwan’s election was fascinating to witness for this writer, who has spent years of his adult life in mainland China but knows Taiwan only from brief visits…

What was most striking, to an observer accustomed to mainland China, was the public mood. Despite the attack on Sean Lien, the people at these rallies — for both parties — were happy. All one had to do was look at their faces to see the profound importance of the political disparity that has arisen between Taiwan and the PRC…

The contrast with the mainland could not be greater. On the mainland, all the feelings associated with politics are overwhelmingly negative: fear, hatred, rage. Overtly, all this negativity tends to be directed against the supposedly malevolent “enemies” (foreign and domestic) that the CCP is constantly warning the Chinese people about; but in reality, it originates with the frustration that political impotence causes the population to feel, and their helplessness in the face of the contemptuous way they are treated by CCP officials almost every day of their lives. It seems impossible that much of this negative energy would not be directed against the CCP, were it not for the fact that ordinary mainland citizens can, and often do, suffer colossal adverse consequences for acting on any rebellious impulse…

The default public mood in the PRC, as I see dozens of times every day, is a kind of sullen, hostile rudeness; hysterical, atavistic ultranationalism lurks just beneath the surface. To be fair, this is more pronounced in older Chinese who lived through the traumatic 50s and 60s, but it’s not totally absent from the younger ones either.

After becoming accustomed to this atmosphere, Taiwan was a complete revelation to me: I saw more genuine smiles my first day in Taiwan than I had seen on the mainland in years.

And all of this during an election campaign in which a gangster almost murdered a politician.

The article should be required reading for Thomas Friedman. He probably wouldn’t get it, but you will.

Link stolen from Michael Turton at The View from Taiwan

The world according to China

The United States-Japan Foundation recently held a seminar in Shanghai. It invited Americans and Japanese specializing in Chinese affairs, and Chinese specializing in international affairs, for discussions. Kono Taro of the LDP attended, and he offered a summary of the opinions presented by the Chinese seminar participants on his website in Japanese with the English title, The World According to China. Here it is in English. Remember that Mr. Kono is only reporting what he heard others say.

1. The turnover in Japanese prime ministers is too extreme. We don’t know how much longer the Kan Cabinet will survive, so what value is there in working to build communication channels with the Cabinet?

2. We thought that after the Democratic Party of Japan took power, relations would improve in several ways, starting with historical issues. But it seems as if Prime Minister Kan will not take any action against the hawkish statements of Foreign Minister Maehara.

3. People often say that tension in Asia was created by the rise of China and the decline of the United States, but that’s not correct. The tension in Asia was created by the rise of China and the decline of Japan.

4. It should not have been necessary to suspend interaction between the citizens of both countries after the Senkakus Incident. The Chinese government was hounded domestically for that alone.

5. China now has some leeway in its relations with the United States because its power and status have risen.

6. In regard to Taiwan and territorial issues, the Chinese government is being pressured by the people, who insist that it should respond authoritatively to the United States government.

7. The current American-Sino relationship was formed when China was in a weak position, such as during the Tiananmen Square “incident”. China should act more assertively to create a relationship of equality with the United States.

8. From the Chinese perspective, the United States is saying that China should act more cooperatively, but the U.S. has not changed its position at all on Taiwan and Tibet. They are trying to use India, Japan, and Vietnam to maintain a balance in the region.

9. In its relations with the United States, China will take a strong position in regard to the core issues of Taiwan and Tibet. Realistic cooperation is possible in the economic sphere. For example, in exchange for China giving some ground on currency issues, the U.S. should eliminate its restrictions on providing technology to China. More cooperation is needed between the U.S. and Chine for international issues. China’s international role will increase in the future, so it will not follow America’s lead.

10. In regard to the issue of voting rights at the World Bank, the United States convinced a backwards-looking Europe, and China’s status rose. More of this will probably occur in the future.

11. Heretofore, when the United States engaged with growing powers, they were either complete enemies, such as the Soviet Union, or complete satellites, such as Germany or Japan. This is the first time that the United States has had to deal with the rise of a country that is neither, such as China, and they have no experience with it.

12. The United States is becoming frantic because it thinks it can defeat China with both its power and its values. It feels threatened by China’s rise, however. They seem to want to blame China for everything.

13. China must clearly signal its intentions, learn to communicate forthrightly with the United States, and take seriously its role and responsibilities in Asia and the world.

14. The U.S.-China relationship is not a mere bilateral relationship, but a relationship for creating international relations.

15. A new regional framework is required in Asia to handle new, non-traditional security issues while dealing singly with the traditional security issues of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea. (The statement was made that Taiwan is no longer an issue.)

16. In Asia, Japan, South Korea, and India have very strong economic ties with China. Nevertheless, their bonds with the United States remain as those with a strong nation. This paradox will present an interesting topic for strategic thinkers in the future.

17. In China too the state strongly intervenes in the economy. Other problems include the central government’s excessive pressure on local governments for the resource economy, and the large income gaps.

18. On two occasions the argument was made that a certain amount of political reform was required. The first time, however, (the leadership) made the decision that it would be dangerous after watching the democracy movement in Poland. The second became linked to the Tiananmen “incident”. It is possible that the current corruption and economic gaps will lead to the necessity for political reform. But that will only involve democratic procedures within the party.

19. There is no question that the party controls the military. There are various problems within the government, however, regarding the relationship between the military and other institutions. For example, the status of the Foreign Ministry in the government is extremely low. It has no Politburo members, nor is there anyone at the deputy prime minister level.

20. Whenever there is a difference of opinion between the military and the Foreign Ministry, the military does not give a second thought to challenging them.

21. The party uses personnel moves and the budget to control senior military officers. The military operated its own business enterprises, but permitting that led to corruption and the loss of the budget as a means of controlling the military. Therefore, controls are being put on the military’s involvement in business.

22. Taiwan has ceased to become a problem, so the military requires a new rationale for budget requests.

Afterwords:

Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Did you notice how often the word status came up in the conversation? Joshua Blanton at One Free Korea is even more blunt about China than I:

(F)eeding China’s ego also feeds its arrogance and its predatory nature…China’s leaders are the product of a zero-sum world view where preying on the weak is just what the strong do, where the ideology of class equality masks a cultural obsession with status, place, and power so deep that not even Mao could exterminate it…China must have its share of intra-governmental gridlock and negotiations, but those are negotiations conducted within that unaccountable fraction of a percent of the total population that hasn’t been subjugated. The rest of the world is made of lessers you subjugate, and rivals you can’t…(I)n Beijing…there is a long institutional memory of foreign kings bringing tribute.

Be sure to read all of it for the context, though it also stands alone very easily.

******
I much prefer La Femme Chinoise to Die chinesische weltanschauung.

Calling Taiwan

IN THE Taipei Times, Dan Bloom writes:

…Taiwan has a country code number — 886 — that is so close to China’s code of 86. How did this come to be?

Is it just a coincidence, or is this another example of how China tries to control Taiwan’s position in the international community? What I found out might even be worth calling home about.

Here’s the short version from the LincMad International Country Code list:

The Republic of China (TW Taiwan) is officially recognized by the ITU as a part of CN the People’s Republic of China. The country code +886 is designated merely as “reserved,” without reference to location. However, most calls to Taiwan originating outside of the People’s Republic of China are routed using country code +886, as shown in the table above. (The +86 6 numbering space in China’s numbering plan is reserved for Taiwan.)

The italics are in the original. And yes, what Dan Bloom found out is worth calling home about.

Lee Teng-hui on Japan’s foreign policy

FORMER PRESIDENT of the Republic of China, Lee Teng-hui has always had an affinity for Japan. He enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, helped clean up Tokyo after the March 1945 firebombing, and graduated from Kyoto University in 1946.

Mr. Lee was the first native Taiwanese to hold the office of president. A democratic reformer, he was reelected in that country’s first direct presidential election.

He was in Japan for a week last fall during which he visited several cities and delivered an address at a symposium. In one part of that speech, he offered the Japanese some advice for their conduct of foreign affairs.

The Japanese should take it to heart. Here it is in English.

*****

It seems to me that Japanese foreign policy has yet to break free from the spirit of self-flagellation and self-denial caused by the trauma that resulted from its defeat in the war. Self-reflection is very important, but when taken to extremes, it turns to self-flagellation and abjection. It is impossible to conduct a sound foreign policy in the spirit of self-flagellation and abjection. That sort of thinking will only be mocked by the rest of the world. In fact, I have yet to hear anyone utter the phrase, “A Japan that can be respected”.

Unconditional submission to the United States and an abject, kowtowing policy for the People’s Republic of China—in other words, a foreign policy of pressing one’s forehead to the earth in veneration–is inappropriate for a Japan that has built the second-ranked country in the world.

In particular, the relationship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in the future must be one in which a clear line is drawn, as expressed by the words of (the novelist) Mushakoji Saneatsu: “You are you, and I am I, so let us get on well with each other.”

The other day, I used those words in a speech in which I said that relations between Taiwan and China must be based on drawing the same clear line. Considering the uncertainty that clouds China’s future, neither Japan nor Taiwan should be dazzled by the carrot that the Chinese are holding in front of our eyes. I think it is necessary to build good relations while maintaining a resolute attitude of independence that asserts, “I am I”.

It seems to me that in the past, Japan’s approach to foreign relations has been to submissively accept the assertions of the other party and to be careful so as to make as few waves as possible.

Unfortunately, however, no matter how much you humble yourselves, that will not be understood by foreigners. On the contrary, all of you must clearly recognize that stance will be scorned and despised.

Indeed, it is now time for Japan to have a proactive and bold foreign policy based on self-driven vigor and self-reliance.

Shimojo Masao (6): The countries of the Confucian cultural sphere

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF JAPAN, the names of the countries that were once part of the Confucian cultural sphere are now entirely different. Qing of the Manchu Dynasty has been divided and become the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), while Joseon has been divided and become the Republic of Korea and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Their social systems have also diverged, with some becoming socialist states and some becoming capitalist states.

Of these, Taiwan and South Korea adopted the market economy and advanced economically. At the end of the 19th century, they were part of highly centralized states. The one on the Korean Peninsula was then called the world’s poorest country, and Taiwan was a remote region on the outskirts of Qing. What lies behind their achievement of economic growth on the level of that of developed nations?

The one factor both have in common is that they were under the administration of Japan until the latter’s defeat in 1945. Taiwan was ceded to Japan after the Japan-China War of 1894, and Joseon merged with Japan in 1910. During that period, the ground was prepared that enabled the economic structures of a centralized government to take on the characteristics of a market economy.

There are examples to corroborate this. Today, with its rapid economic growth, China cannot halt the expanding gap between the cities and agricultural villages. In 2006, the government decided to launch the semaul (new village) movement, an effort to strengthen agricultural villages that was first implemented in South Korea in the 1970s.

The roots of the semaul movement are found in the period of Japan’s colonization and administration. It began in 1907 with the activities of the Regional Financing Association (the forerunner of the South Korean agricultural cooperatives), which converted tenant farms into independent farms. Its slogan was “Diligence, Self-Help, Cooperation”, and it encouraged the autonomous activities of the farmers. The semaul movement had the identical slogan, and it closely resembled the agricultural promotion policies during the period of Japanese administration.

Grappling with the severity of the so-called Three Agricultural Problems (farming villages, agriculture, farmers), the Chinese government launched the “New Farm Village Construction” program modeled on the success of the semaul movement. That is difficult to achieve in the single-party dictatorship of China, however. It is the same sort of difficulty encountered after the centralized Soviet Union collapsed and a market economy was introduced into a national structure based on a planned economy. It is impossible to create a market economy without recognizing the private ownership of land and creating the foundation of a democratic society.

In this regard, the South Korean view of the Japanese colonial administration as nothing but an invasion is an incorrect historical understanding. That’s because the foundation that promised the economic growth of today had already been laid during the period of Japanese administration. That is the backdrop for the economic development of South Korea and Taiwan. This fact should provide some hints for the advancement of developing countries and considerations of an East Asian entity.

- Shimojo Masao

The tower of logo-babel

THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN are two countries separated by a common language, observed George Bernard Shaw, but at least the written matter in one country can be read by the people in the other. Those two countries, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, use the same writing system.

Imagine how much greater the separation must be in the Sinosphere, where there’s more than one way to write Chinese. Many languages are spoken throughout the region that might be called Greater China, but different approaches to the lexicographic system for the written Chinese language are one manifestation of the perennial battle royale in Taiwan over the question of how closely they should associate with the Mainland. On one side are those who want to adopt the PRC’s standard writing system (now that they’ve already adopted the PRC’s Romanization system). Arrayed against them are those who think that’s just a ploy to promote unification on PRC terms. The latter group is using an argument based on the unusual combination of preserving tradition and maintaining ethnic diversity to support their claim.

First, here’s some historical background to get everyone on the same page. The Chinese have been using ideographic characters since at least the 11th century BC. They’ve developed several writing systems throughout their history, but the characters they use today became roughly standardized about 2,000 years ago. Other people throughout East Asia adopted (or adapted) them to write their own language. They were used in the earliest documents written on the Korean Peninsula, and the Koreans used them until they developed their own alphabet. The Korean writing system was formally adopted in 1446, but did not come into common use until the late 19th century. Thus, literacy in Korea until fairly recently required the ability to read Chinese characters.

The Japanese used Chinese characters to write their own language at first, but only as phonetic symbols to express Japanese pronunciation and not necessarily for their meaning. While those early texts appear to be superficially Chinese, no Chinese reader would understand them because it’s still the Japanese language. Japan later developed two phonetic alphabets to use in conjunction with the characters to express vernacular grammatical elements, and these alphabets came into general use from the 8th to the 12th centuries.

The Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese (which is now also an accepted English word), hanja in Korean, and hanzi in Chinese, but they all mean the same thing: Chinese (Han) letters.

Some of the traditional Chinese characters are quite complicated and require many individual strokes to write. In 1946, the Japanese started modifying their written language by reducing the number of kanji they required students to learn and simplifying their written forms. For example, the character gaku, which appears in such words as daigaku, or college, and gakko, or school, once had 18 strokes, but now has only eight. Some of the modifications were so extensive it would be impossible for contemporary readers to identify the connection. (Here’s a chart comparing the old and the new, for Japanese readers.)

The Chinese started simplifying the same characters in the 1950s, but their modifications were different than those the Japanese adopted, making the divergence between written Chinese and Japanese that much greater. The Koreans still use the traditional form of the characters for hanja when they do use them, but that is seldom. The Taiwanese are the only people to have retained the traditional form of the characters in everyday applications.

But now some people want to change that.

The current president of the Republic of China/Taiwan is Ma Ying-jeou of the reconstituted Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT). That was Chiang Kai-shek’s party of the Chinese who fled China when Mao and the Communists took over to set up a government in Taiwan.

Earlier this month, the president proposed that Taiwan adopt the Beijing government’s simplified character set for writing only and retain the traditional characters for reading. The skeleton of the story is in this AFP article.

Said Mr. Ma:

“We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones…It is also our hope that the standard characters can be listed as World Heritage by the United Nations one day,” he said in a statement.

AFP is perhaps the least-bad of the major media outlets reporting on Northeast Asia, and this article gets the basic facts right. Yet they still manage to tilt perceptions in the direction they want all right-thinking people to support.

Relations with China have improved dramatically since Ma’s Beijing-friendly government was inaugurated in May 2008, vowing to promote reconciliation and trade ties.

Note that the Taiwanese president also wants the standard characters to become a “World Heritage”. He does not explain why any Chinese should think a UN imprimatur would enhance the prestige of a written language several millennia old and still in daily use by more than a billion people.

Though it’s not mentioned here, Mr. Ma also hopes that the PRC will implement two United Nations human rights covenants (the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in Tibet in the future.

Add his Harvard Law degree to his wishful thinking about Chinese behavior and it’s easy to see why Time Magazine chose him as one of their top 100 “Leaders and Revolutionaries” for 2008.

Meanwhile, AFP chose an over-the-top yardbird to provide the only dissenting quote in the article.

“Ma is seeing China as his master. He is even trying to change our writing habits to please China, which is absolutely unnecessary,” said Cheng Wen-tsang, spokesman for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP.)

It’s not as if they didn’t have other people from whom to choose. Take this editorial from the Taipei Times:

Since taking office, Ma has been leaning toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as can be seen in many things, from his statement on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to his plans to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement with China.

This may be the trend of the times and Ma may not have a choice, but this does not mean that Taiwanese should learn only to recognize traditional Chinese while writing with simplified characters, because there is a thin line between this and unification — or, rather, being unified.

In ancient China, the standard for unification included standardized wheel width for carts and a standardized script. Today, Ma is promoting simplified Chinese without receiving any goodwill from Beijing.

This is not far from unification as seen by ancient Chinese — how can we not be worried?

And:

Ma may see an acceptance of simplified Chinese characters as part of cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges, but it constitutes a form of political recognition.

Mr. Ma’s statement on Tiananmen, incidentally, praised the Chinese for the progress they’ve made on human rights. (One of these days, perhaps we’ll understand why the people for whom Harvard Law degrees, Time Magazine lists, and the UN are so important think it’s commendable to be friendly with the maleficent Chinese regime, yet were so outraged by the existence of the South African apartheid government, or even the comparatively benign Chile of Augustin Pinochet.)

But the KMT wanted to quickly ameliorate any concerns. They explained:

President Ma Ying-jeou yesterday proposed a concept of “reading in traditional characters, writing in simplified characters…The Office of the President today explained that the suggestion was aimed at 1.3 billion simplified character users in China, not Taiwan. (emphasis mine)

The concept aims to make Chinese people get to know the traditional character symbolizing authentic Chinese culture, said the Office. Traditional characters should be used in publications, but simplified ones are allowed in writing. It is not necessary to promote the concept in Taiwan as Taiwanese are familiar with traditional characters, the Office noted.

The Presidential Office explained that some media misunderstood that Ma intended to push forward the use of simplified characters in Taiwan, and thus clarified that the use of traditional character in Taiwan, a token of preservation of Chinese culture, will not be altered.

Most Taiwanese people are accustomed to using traditional characters in writing. But, for the sake of convenience, it is difficult to ban the use of simplified ones in writing. However, schools, government agencies, and military units should still use traditional characters at all time, according to the Office.

Do we have that right? The KMT wants people to believe the president suggested adopting the simplified PRC writing system in Taiwan so that the people on mainland China will reconstitute its entire educational system for 1.3 billion people and have them turn back the clock and recognize traditional characters?

Did they really think anyone would believe that, or, as seems to becoming common for politicians these days, did they just say it because they had to say something and didn’t care if anyone believed it or not?

But that still leaves another question: if all the books and documents in Taiwan are going to be in traditional characters; the schools, government, and military will use all trad/all the time; and since most people today usually communicate in writing by using the Internet and text messages…

What’s the point?

The Taiwan News has some other objections:

Despite hasty denials by a presidential spokesman, such an interpretation (promotion of unification) is by no means far-fetched given the apish decision by the restored KMT administration to officially adopt China’s Hanyu Pinyin romanization system and exile to the margins Taiwan’s home-developed Tongyong system on the grounds that Hanyun Pinyin was the “international standard,” presumably because of the PRC’s rising global clout. This conclusion was based less on Hanyu Pinyin’s questionable advantages than on an ideological drive to “link” the PRC’s “putonghua” with “Mandarin,” which the KMT defines as the unitary “national language” of the “Republic of China,” and ignored Taiwan’s multilingual environment, in which Tongyong could well be more suitable.

Their concerns are not unfounded. While the advocates of Tongyong pulled off some backdoor maneuvering of their own to get it adopted a few years ago, the Ma administration quickly rolled that back, ditched Tongyong, and adopted the PRC Romanization standard after taking office.

One of Tongyong’s advantages, by the way, is that it allows foreigners who don’t know Chinese to better pronounce family and place names. For example, non-Chinese speakers are at a loss how to deal with the Q in Qingdao (青島) and the X in Xian (西安). Tongyong used other spellings.

The opposition might also have a point that the PRC will see this as a concession without making any of their own:

Ma’s proposal received immediate applause Wednesday morning from PRC Taiwan Affairs Office Spokesman Fan Liqing, who gushed that “both simplified and complex characters were rooted in Chinese culture” and proposed that “experts on both sides can actively discuss how to make mutual interchanges in writing more convenient.”

Notice that Mr. Fan said nothing about restoring the use of traditional characters for reading in the PRC. He knows that isn’t going to happen.

“(A) most objectionable facet of Ma’s remarks concerned his implicit privileging of Mandarin, “the” national language in Taiwan, and his complete lack of mention of the fact that Taiwan has at least three Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Hoklo and Hakka), which do not entirely use the same Han characters, and over a dozen Austronesian languages which have no relationship whatsoever to Han characters but are equally or even more entitled to be considered as “Taiwan languages.”

The anachronistic attachment of Ma and KMT ideologues to Mandarin and Han characters as an unitary “national language” reflects their continued colonialist imposition of a racial and patriarchal conception of “Chinese” culture on Taiwan’s multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual democratic society, as reflected by the arrogant and false declaration of his inaugural address last May 20 that “all the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race nation (zhonghua minzu).”

How refreshing to see the bogus concept of multiculturalism put to a positive use for a change. And then they drive the point home:

Instead of compromising Taiwan’s cultural sovereignty and democratic pluralism, the KMT government should demand that the PRC should fulfill its own international commitments and “converge” with the world community by implementing full freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of thought.

Writing in the August 2008 issue of Voice, Omae Ken’ichi suggested that the ties between the constituent elements of Greater China will loosen, and that the Sinosphere will eventually become a confederation rather than a single nation. The article itself was poorly written and poorly argued (and a disappointment, because that’s why I bought the issue), but this lexicographical dispute presents some of the reasons that confederation might come into being.

Kangolian?

Meanwhile, as the Chinese argue about how to best write their own language, a native of Inner Mongolia—also part of Greater China—studying in Japan is creating art by combining two different languages.

A graduate student at Shikoku University conducting research into calligraphy is presenting an exhibit of his creations in Naruto, Tokushima.

Usually I include names with these stories, but in the article this man’s name was written in katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for foreign names (other than Chinese and Korean names, for which kanji is used). It’s not possible to track back the katakana and come up with an accurate Romanization of the man’s name–and doesn’t that dovetail perfectly with the theme of this post?

His calligraphic art is the combination of the 800-year-old Mongol script with kanji. Mongolian also has a calligraphic tradition, and he is studying ways to fuse kanji with that script. Written Mongolian is one of the few vertical scripts in the world read from left to right. (You can read more about it at this website.) The student has also created some works with the two scripts side by side that show identical words and phrases.

To create a bit of Mongolian atmosphere for the exhibit, the museum is serving chai, or milk tea, and playing tapes of horsehead lute in the background.

He came to Japan five years ago and began attending a calligraphy class to improve his Japanese. He was fascinated by the strength of the brushes and the beauty of the work, so he enrolled in college to focus on those studies. He’s now in his first year of grad school.

So to sum it all up, two countries with the same basic language want to impose their own lexicographical views on each other because they can’t read what the other has written, while in Japan a man can combine two entirely different writing systems, call it art, and hang it in a museum to be viewed while drinking tea and listening to music.

And some people wonder why I don’t read fiction any more!

An American view of a nuclear-armed Japan

RICHARDSON OF DPRK STUDIES does us all a favor in this post by bringing our attention to the Congressional Research Service report, Japan’s Nuclear Future: Policy Debate, Prospects, and U.S. Interests, (PDF, 16 pages), dated 19 February 2009.

Richardson has a different perspective than ours because he uses his site to follow North Korean affairs, which means that he also closely follows South Korea. Still, he offers these two quotes:

The previous taboo within the Japanese political community of discussing a nuclear weapons capability appears to have been broken, as several officials and opinion leaders have urged an open debate on the topic. Despite these factors, a strong consensus—both in Japan and among Japan watchers—remains that Japan will not pursue the nuclear option in the short-to medium term.

And:

Any eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula could further induce Japan to reconsider its nuclear stance. If the two Koreas unify while North Korea still holds nuclear weapons and the new state opts to keep a nuclear arsenal, Japan may face a different calculation.

The report was written specifically to provide background information to members of the U.S. House and Senate. There are two authors; the first is Emma Chanlett-Avery, identified as a Specialist in Asian Affairs, and the second is Mary Beth Nikitin, cited as an “Analyst in Nonproliferation”. Ms. Chanlett-Avery has written several Congressional reports on Asian issues, though it’s not clear what territory is covered by Asia. (One of her reports was on Southeast Asia.) Ms. Nikitin also has written Congressional reports on non-proliferation.

Despite turgid prose, poor organization, and one serious flaw, the report is worth reading because it provides a basic overview of the many aspects involved, including:

• Japan’s civilian nuclear power program

• The historical background of Japan’s non-nuclear stance and governmental studies for creating a nuclear deterrent.

• What Japan would need (and not need) to develop a nuclear arsenal

• The difficulties in dealing with the substantial bloc of domestic public opinion opposed to nuclear weapons

• The legal restrictions and obstacles to a nuclear program

• The growing sense of nationhood among younger people

• The possible effect on the U.S-Japan alliance, regional security, and Japan’s standing in the world

While most of the report is straightforward, here are some passages that raised my eyebrows:

Regionally, Japan “going nuclear” could set off an arms race with China, South Korea, and Taiwan.

I doubt that Taiwan would think it necessary to bulk up its military capabilities because Japan had nuclear weapons. China, yes; Japan, no.

Bilaterally, assuming that Japan made the decision without U.S. support, the move could indicate a lack of trust in the U.S. commitment to defend Japan.

The Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons would almost certainly be due to a lack of trust in the U.S. committment to defend Japan.

An ascendant hawkish, conservative movement—some of whom openly advocate for Japan to develop an independent nuclear arsenal—has gained more traction in Japanese politics, moving from the margins to a more influential position.

Japan is as likely to start an aggressive war as shrimp are to learn how to whistle, regardless of the definition the authors choose for the word “conservative”. Therefore, the acquisition of the atomic bomb would be strictly as a deterrent, or in only the most dire threat to national security.

The description of this approach as “hawkish” in this context is curious.

…(F)ew dispute that Japan could make nuclear weapons if Tokyo were to invest the necessary financial and other resources.

“Few”? Does anyone dispute it at all?

…(I)f Japan manufactured nuclear warheads, then it would need to at the minimum perform one nuclear test—but where this could be carried out on the island nation is far from clear.

If there was a consensus on pursuing a nuclear program–a very big if–testing might–and that’s a very big might–be performed at an underground location at one of the remote islands to the south. Hatoma, for example, has a population of only 60 people that a determined government could relocate with the approval of an alarmed citizenry. There are other uninhabited islands scattered throughout the archipelago. This is very speculative, of course.

Japan’s nuclear materials and facilities are under IAEA safeguards, making a clandestine nuclear weapons program difficult to conceal.

If Japan felt threatened enough by North Korea or China to build a bomb, why would they want to conceal the program? And in the face of what such a threat would entail, why would they feel constrained by either the IAEA or the need for secrecy? I think the report would have been improved had the authors considered in greater depth the environment required to produce the events they suggest might occur.

Many observers have recognized a trend of growing nationalism in Japan, particularly among the younger generation. Some Japanese commentators have suggested that this increasing patriotism could jeopardize closer cooperation with the United States…

Subtract points for credibility due to the false equivalence of “nationalism” and “patriotism”.

Realist-minded security observers cite the danger of threatening China…

A nuclear deterrent is not a threat to China. Japanese actions in this regard would depend on Chinese behavior, and the leaders of China know it. The leaders of China also think it’s in their best interests to feed their public a different story, however. (Let’s not bring up the North Korean threat; if the Chinese were serious about stopping North Korean nuclear ambitions, Pyeongyang’s program would have ended long ago.)

Perhaps the “realist-minded security observers” might give greater consideration to the more realistic threat of Chinese nuclear weapons and ever-growing armed forces to Japanese security.

If Japan withdrew from the NPT, it would likely be subject to UN Security Council-imposed sanctions and economic and diplomatic isolation.

The only reason Japan would withdraw from the NPT would be due to a serious external threat that it was convinced the UN and the U.S., among others, were incapable of dealing with. Under that scenario, if the UN were to impose sanctions and economic and diplomatic isolation–which haven’t worked so well with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–global security conditions would have become so perilous that Japan would probably need nuclear weapons.

Acquiring nuclear weapons could also hurt Japan’s long-term goal of permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.

Japan isn’t going to become a permanent member until the South Korean state reaches diplomatic adulthood, which means not in the foreseeable future.

Some in Japan are nervous that if the United States develops a closer relationship with China, the gap between Tokyo’s and Washington’s security perspectives will grow and further weaken the U.S. commitment.

As well they should be.

To many security experts, the most alarming possible consequence of a Japanese decision to develop nuclear weapons would be the development of a regional arms race. The fear is based on the belief that a nuclear-armed Japan could compel South Korea to develop its own program.

It wouldn’t “compel” South Korea to develop its own program, but the current state of South Korean nationalism–not patriotism–would demand it. Just because Japan did it.

The counter-argument, made by some security experts, is that nuclear deterrence was stabilizing during the Cold War, and a similar nuclear balance could be achieved in Asia. However, most observers maintain that the risks outweigh potential stabilizing factors.

“Most observers”? Did they count the observers? Whom do they consider to be “observers”, and why? The authors tend to be vague throughout with their use of expressions such as these, despite what appears to be some lightness in the footnoted material.

Japan’s development of its own nuclear arsenal could also have (a) damaging impact on U.S. nonproliferation policy. It would be more difficult for the United States to convince non-nuclear weapon states to keep their non-nuclear status or to persuade countries such as North Korea to give up their weapons programs.

The United States and its European allies haven’t been very successful in convincing states with malevolent intent to remain non-nuclear. If it isn’t clear to the authors by now that nothing the Americans do (short of total warfare) will convince North Korea to give up its weapons programs, it never will be.

The first justification, by the way, is one cited by the Obama Administration for its sophomoric efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons. As George Jonas points out here, that is potentially more dangerous than anything a hawkish, conservative nationalist would do: “The genie is out of the bottle; good luck to anyone trying to stuff it back.”

The serious flaw of this report is that it assumes the existence of a marvelous policy control panel with hundreds of switches, and the operation in question is to turn only that switch marked “Japanese nuclear weapons” to the ON position. But that switch will not be turned on unless the current position of many other switches in the imaginary control panel also change; that much should be obvious. What, therefore, is the point of examining a single switch in isolation? One would have hoped the authors of Congressional reports were more imaginative when examining hypothetical scenarios.

The full report is here.

Taiwan’s pig bile shampoo

‘Twas a brave man that first ate an oyster.
- Jonathan Swift

WHILE LOOKING FOR something else, I stumbled across this article explaining that Taiwanese merchants have created a shampoo out of pig bile.

“Using pig bile as a shampoo is not a new invention. It had just been forgotten about for a while. In fact, it is an ingredient that the older generation is quite aware of,” said Chen Chih-hao, the manager of the meat market in Nantou.

Mr. Chen says that his grandmother would visit the home of people in the neighborhood who slaughtered a pig and ask specifically for the gall bladder.

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of women when it comes to discovering and using without hesitation new beauty aids or cosmetics, regardless of the source.

It’s not surprising that people would use something once it was shown to be safe and effective, but think about this: Who was the brave woman who had the idea to put that stuff on her head to begin with? And why did she do it?