Answers lie in a complex web of international and domestic imperatives that are geostrategic, political and economic; Japan itself is in the midst of profound transition at home and within the region.
Under the geostrategic climate of the Cold War, with Japan and India on opposite sides of the divide, Tokyo was generally uninterested in India. But in recent years Japan–India relations have taken an upward trajectory in many fields, from trade, investment and finance to aid and security. Of the many factors pushing the two countries closer, concerns about China’s economic and military resurgence are central. From the mid-2000s, we have seen a flurry of security and defence activities, most concretely through exchanges between high-level defence authorities, and joint statements including the security declaration signed in October 2008.
But the real propeller for Japan to consider nuclear cooperation with India is the US–India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement concluded in late 2008. This agreement allows the US to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India. Japan is a member of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that regulates the transfer of nuclear technology and lifted a three-decade global ban on nuclear trade with India just after the US–India agreement was signed. Yet Tokyo refrained from making any bilateral commitment to India.
American and French companies, along with Russian and South Korean companies, are now seeking to win contracts to build nuclear power plants in India. For it parts, India plans to build up to two dozen nuclear power plants to deal with its chronic shortage in electric power. But since Japanese firms are deeply entangled in the US and French nuclear industry, Japan is also an essential player.
Leading US suppliers such as GE (in consortium with Hitachi), Westinghouse (owned by Toshiba), and French company Areva (a joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) are eager for Japan to abolish existing nuclear and high-tech export controls that forbid Japanese companies from engaging in such transactions with India. Not surprisingly, both the US and France are pressing Japan to sign a deal with India.
Pressure also comes from inside Japan, as Japanese companies aim to expand their business into India’s multi-billion dollar nuclear energy markets. If they miss out, South Korean and Russian companies may secure most of the contracts – a situation unpalatable to a recessed Japan which has already lost the Indian market to South Korean companies in auto and white goods.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and its Atomic Energy Agency, have favoured a nuclear deal with India despite caution from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The scales appear to have now shifted towards the MET–JAEA position.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government also faces two mutually irreconcilable domestic constituencies: the influential business sector pushing for nuclear cooperation with India, and the strong anti-nuclear and pacifist lobby that opposes this concession to a country that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
External pressure and domestic demand from powerful business groups have moved the Kan government towards the deal with India. At the same time, Tokyo will seek assurance from New Delhi that it will refrain from conducting nuclear tests. India is likely to accept the same terms of agreement it accepted with the US, that is, India will not conduct any nuclear tests and will return all material and equipment if it reneges.
Timing depends upon the DPJ presidential election in mid-September, which will determine whether Kan continues as Prime Minister. If Ichiro Ozawa replaces him, concluding the agreement may take longer, according to sources in Japan.
Australia will inevitably be drawn into this ballgame, since it will be pressured to reconsider its ban on uranium sales to India. If even the highly sensitive and nuclear-allergic Japan, which itself has suffered the consequences of nuclear bombings, makes an exception for India, what is to stop Canberra following its US and Japanese security partners and making this deal.
Purnendra Jain is Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide.
Drivers of change in Japan’s position are well laid out.
Not so the case though about a no-test clause in the Japan-India agreement. India did NOT agree to a binding legal restriction on testing in the U.S-India agreement … and the Indian polity considered this to be a deal-breaker.
And so U.S. and Indian negotiators intelligently went about making any and all eventualities (which would ostensibly include conducting a nuclear test) a basis for suspending/canceling the bilateral arrangement in the future – without even so much as a bare mention of the word ‘test’.
Its wholly unlikely that Tokyo will be able to obtain stronger language in the Japan-India bilateral negotiations on testing. And it doesn’t possess sufficiently compelling negotiating chips to force the Indians to concede this point. Meantime Areva, GE and Westinghouse wait. This IS the hardest and most controversial point of the curent negotiations.
Apart from obtaining a written reiteration by New Delhi in the chapeau/text of the Japan-India agreement of the latter’s “voluntary” commitments on disarmamanent and non-proliferation that it made at the time of NSG ratification in Septemeber 2008, its hard to see how this particular issue can be finessed any further to satisfy the diametrically opposed positions of the two parties.
Best, Sourabh
The issue involving Australia has just become a little more complicated following effective alliance of the Labor and the Greens with the support of three independents to form the federal government early this week. The Greens is likely to oppose any escalation of uranium in the parliament with its balance of power in the senate, especially from first July 2011.
It is clear from the article that two main factors played the decisive role in Japan’s decision, namely commercial and security out of concerns of the rising power of China.
The commercial reason just makes a mockery of any moral standard by members of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. If issues as serious as nuclear can be compromised, is there any moral ground for any involved to criticise China or any other countries such as Russia to develop conventional resources in Africa countries or in Iran for that matter?
For security, what do any of such agreements in obvious violation of the NNPT mean really? Does promote peace and stability or does it facilitate regional and possibly global arms race?
The real question is whether the current super power accept the inevitable trend that there will be power shift around the world and some of the existing interests are unlikely to be maintained forever and will change accordingly.
Bad decisions by some may only act as distractions to some inevitable and big world trends. That is unlikely to produce the results wished by them probably.