The exchange of fire between the North and South Korean militaries that left two ROK Marines dead and at least a dozen wounded, following closely on the heels of revelations regarding a new North Korean uranium reprocessing facility, strengthens hopes that the US and Japan might be able look past Futenma and strengthen their security relationship. The relationship has, of course, had a bit more wind in its sails since the standoff between Japan and China over the maritime collision near the Senkakus.

Can we really draw a straight line from regional instability to closer security cooperation between the US and Japan? Arguably this logic has worked in the past, with North Korean provocations from 1994 onward stirring Japanese policymakers to bolster Japan’s capabilities and launch new bilateral initiatives with the US, ballistic missile defense being perhaps the most notable example. And there are signs that the DPJ-led government is remarkably more realist in its approach to the region than many expected. I think Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji spoke for many in the DPJ when he told an official Chinese foreign affairs publication that he is ‘by no means a hawk but a realist who values idealism.’ The distinction between ‘hawk’ and ‘realist’ is meaningful and says a lot about the DPJ’s approach to foreign and security policy.

To be a hawk in Japanese politics is not just to support a certain set of policies: it is more a cultural identity than a policy stance. It is a worldview that, in addition to wanting to dismantle political and legal constraints on Japan’s security policy, questions the value of Japan’s post-war regime (that which former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō wanted to ‘leave behind’), supports revising the constitution (not just Article 9), opposes ‘masochistic’ interpretations of history, and promotes traditionalist values. While they cite the threats posed by North Korea and China to justify their policies, the idea of Japan as a great power is valued in its own right — it is not driven by material considerations.

Meanwhile, to be a realist in Japan means much the same as it does in other countries: valuing the sober assessment of national interests, and thinking clearly about how best to secure those interests using the means available. While I think ‘realism’ is often associated with a predisposition towards military capabilities and the use of force, it need not be. As Eric Heginbotham and Richard Samuels argued in a 1998 article in the journal International Security, post-war Japanese leaders have been ‘mercantile realists,’ thinking of Japanese national interests in broader terms that prioritised Japan’s economic position.

The DPJ has thus far been far more realist in its foreign and security policies than has been generally recognised. Like earlier LDP governments it is working to maintain some sort of constructive relationship with China, however difficult, while building closer bilateral ties with other countries in the region that are also concerned about Japan’s rise. The government has signaled that it is willing to invest in Japan’s security, for example announcing last month that the MSDF will increase its purchase of new submarines from 16 to more than 20. As this post at Sigma1 notes there are signs that the government’s new National Defense Program Guidelines, which the DPJ has been considering since it took power, will contain a number of sensible proposals to enhance Japan’s security, including a relaxation of the arms exporting principles and relocation of SDF personnel from the north to the south. Is Japan ‘rearming’? Arguably not. But we are not seeing a passive and pacifist Japan either, despite the idea that the DPJ is ‘left-wing.’

But what about the relationship with the United States? On the face of it, the dispute with the US over Futenma has shown the limits of the DPJ’s realist tendencies, allowing its position on the bases to be driven by domestic political considerations instead of the ‘national interest.’ However, is it really in the interest of either Japan or the US to force bases on an unwilling Okinawan public? The point is not that the DPJ has been particularly sober minded in its approach to the issue, but that it is not altogether clear how the bases in Okinawa serves Japan’s interests, which leads to the larger question of how the US-Japan alliance can best serve the interests of both countries.

This is the big question hanging over the alliance, the question that the two countries may finally be in the process of addressing as they begin consultations in advance of a bilateral summit that is expected to be held sometime in the spring. Will North Korean provocations or Chinese maritime adventurism push the alliance in new directions? If anything, I think regional uncertainty reinforces the trend towards a ‘strong but limited’ security relationship focused deterrence in and around Japan instead of more expansive or grandiose plans for the alliance. And given Okinawan opposition to US bases and the uncertainty regarding the US economy, the countries should be talking about politically and economically sustainable deterrent capabilities.

As such, while developments in the region may lend a certain urgency to bilateral talks about the future of the alliance, it is unlikely that they will push the US-Japan alliance in a drastically different direction than it was already going.

Tobias Harris is a Japanese politics specialist who worked for a DPJ member of the upper house of the Diet 2006-2007. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in political science at MIT.

1. The state of the relationship with Japan
2. The two Koreas: Talking peace, with menace
3. China–DPRK’s special relationship of convenience

The Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer has an op-ed in the IHT in which he argues that despite widespread pessimism among Japanese regarding their country’s future, things may not be so bad. He suggests that the DPJ may well be learning to get along with business elites and bureaucrats, Japan and the US may be rebuilding their relationship after a remarkably bad year for the alliance, and, finally, the Japanese people have not taken to the streets in opposition to their government.

The first two arguments are more or less acceptable, although there is little to praise in how the Kan government prevaricated and ultimately failed to lead on the issue. Further, Japan’s foreign relations do not, however, follow the ‘China down, US up’ pattern Bremmer suggests — the Kan government is no less committed to fixing relations with China than it is committed to maintaining a healthy relationship with the US, consistent with the DPJ’s position that Japan is not in a position to choose between the US and China.

What is interesting is Bremmer’s argument about the relative stability of Japanese politics as measured by the lack of demonstrations, riots, and rallies with people carrying signs likening the country’s leader to various twentieth-century dictators. In this superficial sense Bremmer is right: over the past two decades Japan has seen none of the upsurge in extra-parliamentary politics that one would expect a country in dire economic straits to experience. It is difficult to see how a deflationary economy would lead people to take to the streets, particularly without the benefits cuts that have produced demonstrations and riots in Western Europe.

Would Japanese continue to abstain from extra-parliamentary politics if, say, the Kan government pursued austerity with the same zeal as the Cameron government? And if they did continue to stay out of the streets, why? What’s so different about Japan that the Japanese people seem content to express their dissatisfaction in public opinion polls and in the voting booth (which they have done regularly for decades, for despite the LDP’s success in general elections there is a history of the LDP being punished in local and upper house elections)?

Is it political culture, for example the lack of an anti-government subculture like in the United States? If so, what has changed since the 1960s? The decline in the kind of organisations that might facilitate collective action (student groups, unions, etc.)? The lack of the kind of welfare benefits that, when cut, can cause to demonstrations in defense of the status quo? The result of a half-century of LDP rule, which habituated citizens and interest groups to a certain approach to politics that left little room for public demonstrations?

If Japan is in fact more stable than other rich democracies, it would be helpful to understand why, not least because if Japan were to pursue benefit cuts in order to shrink the deficit, it might assist in predicting whether Japanese politics will continue to enjoy ‘relative domestic tranquility.’

Tobias Harris is a Japanese politics specialist who worked for a DPJ member of the upper house of the Diet 2006-2007. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in political science at MIT.

1. Hatoyama victory a watershed in Japanese post war history: a view on the Japanese election from China
2. What can the Yakuza explain about Japanese politics anyway?
3. Japanese election – Weekly editorial

Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto and Wen Jiabao, his Chinese counterpart, have met briefly in Brussels on the sideline of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit, marking an end to the bilateral standoff following the collision between a Chinese trawler and Japanese Coast Guard vessels in the vicinity of the disputed Senkakus.

As expected, Japan and China reiterated the importance of the strategic, reciprocal partnership initiative. High-level talks and cultural exchanges will resume. All in all, it is difficult to say what has changed strategically as a result of the dispute. That China will fiercely resist any perceived change to the status quo in its maritime disputes? That China has greater leverage at its disposal? That countries — not just China — don’t like having their nationals held by other countries, particularly when, Sourabh Gupta argues, there may have been little basis for Japan’s holding the Chinese fishermen in the first place?

Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom that the US is the biggest winner from the dispute is probably overstated. The allies will not find it any easier to resolve the Okinawa dispute, which continues to loom over the alliance. More importantly, however, the dispute appears to have merely reinforced the DPJ government’s basic approach to China: having little choice but to forge a working political relationship with its neighbor, Japan will redouble its commitment to building constructive relations with China. In short, the dispute, rather than signaling that Japan must change course entirely, may simply lead the Kan government to try harder.

The basic idea that has animated foreign policy under the DPJ from the day it took office — that Japan, living in a region dominated by a rising China and a declining but still powerful US, needs to find a way to navigate between and live with both power — remains intact.

That being said, the dispute with China has obviously had consequences within Japan, not least for the Kan government’s public approval ratings. Despite having received a remarkable bump in his support after defeating Ozawa — nearly 20 per cent in some polls — Kan’s numbers are back to around 50 per cent thanks to his government’s perceived mishandling of the dispute. Peter Ennis makes a strong case that the Kan government actually handled the issue well, getting the assurances it needed out of the US while resisting Chinese pressure long enough for the government to claim that the captain’s release was the result of a decision by the prosecutor’s office in Naha and not the central government. But the Japanese people apparently do not see it the same way. In Yomiuri’s poll, for example, 83 per cent of respondents were not convinced by the prime minister’s claim that there was not political intervention. The same poll found a 10 per cent increase in the number of respondents who said foreign and security policy should be a top priority for the Kan government; in early August only 4 per cent said it should be a top priority. Whether this change in the public mood is more than temporary remains to be seen, but the drop in the government’s approval ratings give Kan that much less room to manoeuvre as the prime minister tries to coax the opposition parties to cooperate with the government.

Indeed, the LDP has rushed this issue to the top of the agenda as the autumn extraordinary session of the Diet begins. The party has declared that the ‘abrupt’ release of the captain was the worst foreign policy failure in post-war history. The LDP is sure to build its response to the Kan government around this issue, together with the latest Ozawa indictment, meaning that the largest opposition party has two tangential issues with which to attack the government — with the sanction of the public, thanks to the public opinion polls showing that these issues matter — and put off talk of cooperation on an economic agenda. The LDP will of course get an assist from the Japanese media, particularly its more conservative precincts, which appear to have found their voice again after a dismal couple of years during which their issues vanished from the agenda as the global financial crisis unfolded and then the LDP was unseated by the DPJ.

The dispute with China not only has given ammunition to an LDP desperate to obstruct the Kan government and force an early election — it has also provided an opening for dissent within the DPJ, stirrings of which could be found in the petition signed by 43 DPJ members, including Nagashima Akihisa, and submitted to Sengoku. The petition goes out of its way to soften its criticism of the government, but it does suggest that China policy could create some space between the government and the ruling party. However, since Kan’s cabinet has been united on the issue, grumbling within the DPJ can be safely ignored for now.

So did Kan lose? I cannot agree with Ennis entirely that the government handled the dispute well. The government’s biggest mistake was stressing that it was a matter for the Japanese legal system to handle. This stance may well have contributed to China’s raising the stakes on the issue (because it could not accept this stance without tacitly acknowledging Japanese sovereignty) but it also ensured that the rule of law would be tarnished in the event of a Japanese climb-down. If the Japanese government was indeed prepared to allow the legal process to run its course I suppose this position would have been acceptable, but I doubt that Tokyo really was prepared to wait that long (unless the Kan government was actually caught off guard by Beijing’s response). The Kan government should have treated the issue like the diplomatic dispute it was from the very beginning instead of staking the credibility of Japanese institutions on the outcome. That it did so at least partially explains the public’s opposition to the government’s handling of the issue.

By holding out for as long as it did Japan may well have forced China to think twice about how hard it will push Japan in the future, perhaps won Japan more support from other countries locked in disputes with China, and provided an opportunity for Japan and other countries to take steps to mitigate China’s economic leverage (as in the case of rare earth elements), but these gains may have come at the expense of Kan’s credibility at home. Without public support, the prime minister, already the head of a de facto minority government, will find it that much more difficult to move an agenda centered on fixing Japan’s economy, which in turn is critical to maintaining Japan’s influence in the region (as argued by Maehara Seiji, Kan’s foreign minister, at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan Tuesday). Whatever the medium-term benefits to Japan from the dispute, it may not have been worth the short-term costs for Kan.

Tobias Harris is a Japanese politics specialist who worked for a DPJ member of the upper house of the Diet 2006-2007. He is now a Ph.D. Candidate in political science at MIT.

1. Japan’s leaders must show leadership
2. Chinese hubris boosts Japan-US relations
3. Japan must acknowledge ‘territorial issue’ over islands

Having successfully fended off Ozawa Ichirō’s challenge to his leadership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan — indeed, having defeated Ozawa by an unexpectedly large margin, not only winning the vote among Diet members but also receiving the support of 249 of 300 district-level party chapters and sixty percent of the vote among local representatives — Prime Minister Kan Naoto finally has an opportunity to govern. After all, since succeeding Hatoyama Yukio in June Kan has spent much of his time focused on elections, first with the House of Councillors election in July and then the showdown with Ozawa.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that within days of his victory Kan reshuffled his cabinet and the DPJ leadership. I am generally skeptical of the efficacy of cabinet reshuffles. Doling out cabinet and sub-cabinet posts is, of course, one of the more important tools in a party leader’s toolbox as he tries to induce good behavior on the part of backbenchers. But too much turnover at the head of ministries can stymie policy change. Every change of minister comes with a period of inactivity as the minister learns the job; reshuffle too frequently and by the time the minister is ready to lead, he will be on the way out. This problem was characteristic of LDP rule in particular.

During its first year in power, the DPJ avoided a wholesale reshuffle, despite its declining popularity (the usual time for a reshuffle) — even Kan held off when he took over from Hatoyama. However, having secured his control of the DPJ, giving him a two-year term as party leader during which the government will not have to face the electorate if it doesn’t want to, I suppose it is only natural that Kan would want to appoint a cabinet of his own making. And the DPJ certainly benefits from more party members getting experience in government, giving that virtually none had any experience of power before the DPJ won last year.

The new cabinet is being billed as a ‘non-Ozawa’ cabinet. No member of Ozawa’s group received a cabinet post, although Kaieda Banri, who, while not being a longtime Ozawa associate, supported Ozawa’s challenge, was appointed as economy minister. There will be little turnover in the cabinet’s most important positions. Sengoku Yoshito stays on as chief cabinet secretary and Noda Yoshihiko will continue to serve as finance minister. With Okada Katsuya’s becoming DPJ secretary-general, Maehara Seiji, formerly responsible for transport and Okinawan affairs, will move over to the foreign ministry. Kitazawa Toshimi stays on as defense minister, ensuring a degree of continuity as far as Futenma is concerned. Renhō and Genba Koichirō will stay on the cabinet’s administrative reform posts. The cabinet also includes former Shimane governor (and non-MP) Katayama Yoshiro as minister of internal affairs and communications, with an additional portfolio for regional revitalisation and Kano Michihiko as agriculture minister (a post he held in 1989 in the Kaifu government).

Kan has presented his new cabinet as a cabinet that will ‘make good on its promises.’ That remains to be seen, as the prime minister has a difficult road ahead.

Kan spent his time on the campaign trail talking about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs.’ But talking about employment is one thing — doing something about it is a different matter entirely. The rising yen has triggered more hollowing out in the manufacturing sector, as businesses relocate to cheaper countries within the region. A recent METI survey found, for example, that forty percent of manufacturing sector respondents would move factories overseas were the yen to continue to rise. In the immediate aftermath of the DPJ election the Bank of Japan did intervene in foreign exchange markets, which has at least temporarily halted the yen’s rise (although Felix Salmon suggests that since the BoJ did not sterilise its intervention this time, it could have anti-deflationary effects).

But as Richard Katz argues in the Financial Times, intervention to weaken the yen is little more than a temporary fix. He notes that a weak yen does nothing to help wean Japan off export-dependent growth, and cannot reverse the long-term trend towards a stronger yen. (And if Japan’s is but the first in a series of competitive devaluations with its trading rivals in the Eurozone, it is hard to see what Japan will gain from intervention.)

The problem for Kan is that the path from short term to long term is perilous. In the short term, economic success will depend on the traditional export-led model, meaning that when a survey reveals that Japan’s manufacturers will accelerate offshoring if the yen continues to strengthen, a government focused on economic recovery has little choice but to pressure the BoJ to intervene. But over the longer term, Japan needs to revitalise the service sector to produce a more balanced growth model (while trying to put the government’s finances on a healthier trajectory).

This objective, easily the overriding purpose of the Kan government and its successors, would be difficult enough in the best of political circumstances. These are not the best of political circumstances.

First, although Kan has a new mandate as DPJ president, he still has work to do consolidating his control of the party. Whether Okada will be able to help him in the post as secretary-general remains to be seen — as Michael Cucek notes, Okada may not be the ideal man for the job, seeing as how his appointment to the post was not uncontested. The main problem within the party may still be Ozawa. While Kan’s margin of victory may silence Ozawa for the moment, it remains to be seen how Ozawa will react to Kan’s decision to exclude Ozawa’s lieutenants from the cabinet and party leadership. I do not expect Ozawa to leave the party, not least because it is far from certain that he would get many to follow him out, especially now that the Kan government has a bit more buoyancy in the polls. Having failed to unseat Kan, Ozawa may recede into the kind of role I thought he might take earlier, that of an elder statesman, periodically declaiming on or critiquing the government’s decisions but not actively organising an intra-party opposition.

But while Ozawa may be less of a problem, Kan will still have to contend with backbenchers unhappy with the direction taken by the government, as Kan implicitly acknowledged by suggesting that he will have a ‘cabinet of 412’ (referring to the number of DPJ legislators). The inclusion of DPJ MPs in policy deliberations is unavoidable as the Kan government tries to revise or scale back the party’s promises in the 2009 manifesto, but it need not be cumbersome if the prime minister is able to take control of the policy agenda.

Whether he is able to will depend on the opposition. Kan still has to find a way to coax the opposition parties to support his proposals, without which they will die in parliamentary proceedings. That the Kan’s approval ratings have shot up to the same level as when he took over should help him — if he does not squander public support through indecision or inaction. Arguably the only way Kan can succeed is by doing what Koizumi did: appealing to the public directly in order to break the resistance of opposition parties and opponents within his own party. But to bring the public along Kan has to offer something in the first place. The challenge for Kan, then, is to develop an economic program that includes macro- and microeconomic policies, that attacks wasteful spending, includes deregulation and tax reform, and promises something better for the public. If the government is incapable of developing this program internally, Kan should take a page from the playbook of prime ministers past and convene a blue-ribbon advisory council headed by Kan and composed of prominent figures from business, labor, academia, the bureaucracy, and the political opposition. The commission would have to be as much a public relations exercise as a policymaking exercise, regularly issuing statements and drafts that reveal the emerging program and allowing the process to dominate public discussion.

The turn to advisory-group policymaking would be at odds with the DPJ’s professed desire for cabinet-led policymaking, but at this point I’m not sure that the Kan government has much choice. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘growth strategies’ the DPJ-led government has issued over the past year, but whatever the number, it’s too many. The public is willing to give Kan and the DPJ another chance, but it is clear that what they have been doing isn’t working.

If Kan is unable to bring the public along with him, the outcome will be easy enough to predict: low public support, opposition obstructionism, and unrest within the DPJ, the same cycle that has brought low every prime minister since Koizumi.

1. Japan’s prime minister and a country in limbo
2. Japan’s lame duck prime minister
3. The next Democratic Party of Japan prime minister

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ — Enoch Powell

Returning to his familiar role as Ozawa Ichirō’s trusty factotum, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio announced Thursday that he will be supporting Ozawa in a bid to unseat Prime Minister Kan Naoto in next month’s DPJ party leadership election. Ozawa himself has yet to make an official announcement, but much like when Hatoyama was DPJ secretary-general under Ozawa, Ozawa conveyed his intentions to Hatoyama, and Hatoyama revealed them to the public. Naturally Hatoyama’s backing Ozawa after earlier indicating his support for Kan is an insult to the prime minister.

I have held off from commenting on the possibility of an Ozawa run at the party leadership and premiership because the idea struck me as patently absurd (for reasons that Michael Cucek captured well here and here).

And yet here we are, with Ozawa on the brink of entering the ring once more. I suppose on the plus side, at least he’s competing for a public post, one that would force Ozawa to assume public responsibility instead of hiding out of sight.

There is no shortage of speculation about Ozawa’s motives for running, having to do with his tenuous legal position, his desire to reinsert himself into the policymaking process by running, losing, and then bargaining for an important post, or his genuine desire to, in Hatoyama’s words, ‘to risk his life on behalf of the country.’ I have long since given up trying to read Ozawa’s mind and am willing to believe that any, or all, or none of these reasons is the real reason for Ozawa’s decision.

Whatever his reasoning, the consequences could be dramatic. The best case scenario would be that Ozawa is simply unable to muster enough support and goes down to an embarrassing defeat that is a prelude to his departure from politics. It is unclear just how much support from the party’s parliamentary caucus Ozawa can count on — for my part, I have always thought that the media has exaggerated the extent to which Ozawa can rely on an ‘army’ of young MPs indebted to him for his assistance. Even more unknowable is the extent of Ozawa’s support among the party’s rank-and-file members, who will also be voting in the party election. Given the near-universal public disapproval (including DPJ supporters) of Ozawa, it is worth asking whether there are still enough pockets of support for the former party leader to make his candidacy viable.

And if he were, somehow, to defeat Kan and take the premiership? Many seem to think that Ozawa’s becoming DPJ leader would be the catalyst for the long-awaited political realignment (although Your Party’s Watanabe Yoshimi insists that the DPJ will break regardless of what Ozawa does). It is easy enough to see how Ozawa could trigger the realignment. Remember the ‘purge’ of Ozawa loyalists that marked the transition from Hatoyama to Kan? Presumably the ‘magistrates’ who opposed Ozawa and have occupied important positions under Kan would have little to look forward to under Ozawa, and would have two options outside of the cabinet: build anti-mainstream ‘factions’ within the DPJ to challenge Ozawa, thereby completing the LDP-isation of the DPJ, or leave the party altogether to join with Watanabe or form yet another new political party.

The reality is that while at another point in his career Ozawa might have been able to deliver a miracle, untwisting the Diet by encouraging members of other parties to defect or hammering out a new governing coalition, there is good reason to believe that Ozawa is out of miracles. As Kan has found as he has tried to coax the opposition parties to cooperate, with the DPJ reeling the opposition parties have the upper hand. The DPJ will pay a steeper price than the opposition parties for inaction, particularly as the economy worsens. Add Ozawa’s unpopularity and his notoriety as a living symbol of the bad, old politics and the opposition’s advantage grows. And if a Prime Minister Ozawa were the head of a nominally united but fractured DPJ his bargaining power would be undermined even further. Whoever wins the party election will still face a miserable political situation. Having Ozawa as prime minister would only make the DPJ’s situation even more difficult.

It is ultimately for that reason that I suspect that Ozawa will provide another demonstration of Enoch Powell’s maxim, adding a final defeat to a lengthy political career that has seen its share of defeats along with extraordinary victories, arguably none more extraordinary the DPJ’s victory a year ago next Monday. Ozawa simply does not have a compelling case for why he should take charge of the government at this juncture — and I think that the party’s voters know it.

1. The Ozawa saga continues in Japanese politics
2. Ozawa: The Shiva of Japanese politics, creator and destroyer
3. A new dawn in Japanese politics?

‘I would like to face history with sincerity,’ said Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto in a statement issued on 10 August, the 100th anniversary of Japan’s annexation of Korea. ‘I would like to have courage to squarely confront the facts of history and humility to accept them, as well as to be honest to reflect upon the errors of our own.’

In what is now being referred to as the Kan Statement, the prime minister acknowledged the suffering caused by Japan’s ‘colonial rule’ and apologised to the Republic of Korea, and also pledged to return the remains of Koreans as well as cultural artefacts removed to Japan during the annexation.

Cynics will undoubtedly be quick to note that this is only the latest in a lengthy list of apologies issued by Japanese leaders for Imperial Japan’s behaviour — and one need not be a cynic to ask what value one more apology will have for Japan’s relationship with South Korea or its standing in the region more generally. Japan’s conservative ideologues, never shy in their opposition to what they see as ‘masochistic’ behaviour on the part of Japan’s leaders, have vociferously opposed the statement. In a lengthy editorial published the day after the statement, the Sankei Shimbun, a revisionist right-wing daily, criticised the government for ‘imposing’ a ‘one-sided view of history,’ denigrating the achievements of Meiji Japan in the process. The paper stressed that it is necessary to balance the ‘shadow’ of Japanese rule with the ‘light,’ which came in the form of education and railroads.

In its coverage, Sankei also raised questions about the procedure by which Kan secured cabinet approval for his statement, claiming that Kan foisted the statement on his cabinet and the ruling DPJ, over the objections of party members.

Two days after the statement an ‘emergency citizens’ meeting’ met in central Tokyo to demand the withdrawal of the apology. Headed by Odamura Shirō, a leading conservative figure who was involved in opposition to the infamous ‘comfort women’ resolution passed by the US House of Representatives in 2007, the meeting passed a resolution calling for a bilateral relationship based not on feelings of moral superiority for one party and guilt for the other and questioning the legitimacy of prime ministerial apologies. (Of course, the resolution also called attention to the role played by Japan in triggering Korea’s economic development.)

The revisionist right’s reaction to Kan’s statement has less to do with South Korea, however, and more to do with the right’s program for Japan. Its reaction is, above all, narcissistic: what does Japan lose by apologising to those harmed by Japanese imperialism? As Kan himself noted, there is nothing cowardly about frankly acknowledging one’s transgressions without hedging or equivocating. And while the list of apologies to Japan’s neighbours is lengthy, it is precisely because conservatives question the legitimacy of those apologies — most notably the Murayama statement — that prime ministers are compelled to keep issuing new ones. The revisionist right believes that a ‘proper’ and ‘truthful’ historical perspective are critical for national pride, which it believes to have been corroded by the left-wing academics and media personalities and pusillanimous politicians. While they claim to be interested only in historical fact, their selective reading of history belies a blatantly opportunistic approach to Japan’s imperial past that belittles the claims of Japan’s victims and presents a blatantly self-serving (and at least in this telling contradictory) narrative in which Japan was not a coloniser, and even if it was, it was a benevolent one that hastened the demise of those wicked European empires.

Japan’s revisionist right, of course, is not the only political group that propagates a self-serving account of its past that explains away inconvenient enormities (cf. the United States and Hiroshima, among other examples). But the revisionist right’s attitude has persistently placed a stumbling block in the path of better relations with South Korea and China. As Kan makes clear in his statement, a good relationship with South Korea is critical in the years to come. While I do not doubt that Kan’s apology is sincere, it also comes with strategic benefits, as President Lee Myung-bak appears no less interested in building a close relationship with Japan. Since taking power last year, the DPJ has steadfastly worked to build closer bilateral relationships throughout the region. This latest apology is but another step in that program.

And so the battle over Kan’s apology pits two very different world views against each other. For Kan and members of his cabinet, Japan’s future is in Asia, which means maintaining partnerships with important countries in the region. If apologising to South Korea again strengthens Japan’s position and clears the way to closer and deeper exchanges not just with Koreans but other Asian peoples, it is an exceedingly small price to pay. For Japan’s revisionists, any unambiguous admission of Japan’s guilt is evidence of ‘masochism’ and an indication that Japan’s leaders are simply not up to the challenge of competing with China for predominance in Asia. If Kan’s view is strategic (although, again, not only strategic), the revisionist right is absolutist, and were it embraced by those in power it would result in an ignoble and ultimately self-defeating isolation for Japan in the region.

Of course, there is actually little risk of the revisionist agenda being implemented. Even Abe Shinzō, the most unabashedly revisionist conservative prime minister Japan has had in recent years, recognised the value of strong relationships with both South Korea and China and was willing to make concessions on the history issue, whatever his personal beliefs. Since Abe’s downfall in 2007 the revisionists have been increasingly marginalised in Japanese politics, their influence virtually non-existent under the DPJ despite having sympathisers within the party. Indeed, their influence may be inversely proportional to the amount of noise they are capable of generating through various media outlets.

As Jun Okumura suggests, it is now up to South Korea to accept Kan’s apology in good faith. That, of course, points to the central problem with apologies between nations: no matter how sincere the apology (and the acceptance of the apology), it is difficult for one leader to bind the hands of his successors. Nevertheless, by building a closer bilateral relationship, Kan and Lee can do their part to minimise the harm that can be done by political actors in both countries who wish to exploit history for political gain.

1. In the shadow of an apology: Reconciling Japan-South Korea relations
2. The Prime Ministers Fukuda and Sino-Japan relations
3. Okada acknowledges past wrongs in Seoul

Having read and enjoyed Jacob Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice, it was with considerable interest that I read his article, ‘The Last Yakuza‘ in the World Policy Journal.

Like Corey Wallace, I have no particular expertise with which to assess the role played by the Yakuza in Japanese society. But also like him, I am skeptical about what political outcomes we can actually attribute to organised crime.

In brief, Adelstein argues that after decades of deep ties to the LDP — which organizations didn’t have deep ties to the LDP when it was Japan’s hegemonic ruling party? — leading Yakuza organisations have shifted their allegiances to the DPJ as it took control of the upper house in 2007 and then the lower house and with it the cabinet in 2009.

The main consequence of this shift, Adelstein suggests, is that the Hatoyama cabinet included Kamei Shizuka, head of the People’s New Party, who is known to have links to organised crime. Without questioning those links, I think there is a far simpler explanation for Kamei’s presence in the Hatoyama government, an explanation that does not require any reference to the Yakuza. Wanting to streamline decision making in the new coalition government, the DPJ included both Kamei and his SDPJ counterpart Fukushima Mizuho in the cabinet and created a special cabinet committee to coordinate policy among the ruling parties. Kamei, I think, was there so as to concentrate coalition negotiations within the government. The ease with which Kan Naoto cut Kamei loose once he challenged the new prime minister suggests that repaying the Yakuza was low on the DPJ’s list of priorities when it came to Kamei.

But this case raises the larger question asked in the title of this post: what does the Yakuza explain anyway? What political outcome over the past half-century or so of Japanese politics is different because of the influence of the Yakuza in Japanese politics?

The most obvious answer is that the pervasive influence of the Yakuza explains the impunity with which gangsters have been able to act since the end of the war (which makes the 1992 anti-organised crime law mentioned by Adelstein a puzzle worth explaining).

But what about bigger questions? The durability of LDP rule? The rise and fall of prime ministers? Foreign policy and relations with the U.S.? What is different because of the Yakuza’s power? What can the Yakuza explain that other theories cannot? I suspect not much. It’s possible that gangsters may have influenced the outcome of LDP leadership elections during the former ruling party’s heyday, given the shady pasts of some leading LDP politicians and the wholly opaque manner in which the LDP selected its leaders for much of its history. If it were possible to identify prime ministers who came to power only because of Yakuza support, it would perhaps be possible to identify indirect consequences of Yakuza influence, but as Adelstein’s own career shows, becoming a Yakuza expert requires time, energy, and no small risk to one’s person — all for exploring what may be nothing more than an auxiliary explanation.

That’s not to say that the Yakuza are of no interest to political scientists who study Japan. One question worth addressing is why the Yakuza are so pervasive in the first place, at which point attention naturally turns to Italy, that other Axis power occupied by and then allied with the United States (which failed to purge and in fact developed links with far-right elements) and governed by a hegemonic conservative party for the duration of the cold war. Additionally, it may be fruitful to study the Yakuza in comparison with other interest groups that had long supported the LDP only to watch their fortunes wane during the lost decade(s). After all, Yakuza groups are interest groups, of a sort: interested in the regulation of organised crime. Like other interest groups, they had to adjust their political strategies in response to uncertain political and economic environments.

As such, while the Yakuza are an unlikely explanation for major political outcomes in Japan, they are a part of the landscape and observers should be cognisant of their role. For that we are lucky that Adelstein is working so hard to expose the inner workings of Japanese organised crime.

1. A new dawn in Japanese politics?
2. Ozawa: The Shiva of Japanese politics, creator and destroyer
3. The first day of the new era in Japanese politics

In the wake of its defeat the Kan government has made it patently clear that the Hatoyama government’s ‘ratification’ of the 2006 realignment plan was nothing of the sort — it is now saying that it will be impossible to complete negotiations before Okinawan gubernatorial election in November. The government once again is considering alternatives to the V-shaped runways to be built at Henoko bay, and is reluctant to impose a solution on the Okinawan people.

But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, American domestic politics is emerging as a new constraint on implementing the 2006 agreement. Both houses of Congress have voted to cut funding for the construction on Guam that is necessary to prepare the island to receive the 8,000 Marines and their dependants that according to the plan will move from Okinawa to Guam in 2014.

Congressional staff members said the problems in building new facilities for the Marines in Guam loomed even larger than the politics in Japan in their decision to cut funding.

The Senate appropriations committee said they remained concerned about Guam’s inadequate water, electrical, road and sewer infrastructure — and said inadequate planning had gone in to preparing for the nonmilitary aspects of the move.

The House Appropriation Committee report echoed the Senate findings about Guam, and said it had made the cuts because of the Defense Department’s ‘inability to address numerous concerns about the sustainability of the buildup as currently planned.’

These budget cuts come more than two years after the US government’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticised the Defense Department the the US military for dragging its feet on the Guam end of the realignment plan and suggested that it was unlikely that the 2014 target would be met — and not because of Japanese politics. In late 2008 Admiral Timothy Keating, then the commander of US Pacific Command, acknowledged that the plan would most likely not be executed on schedule, citing budgetary concerns.

Corey Wallace is right to point to Washington’s hypocrisy — for all of Washington’s hand-wringing about political instability in Japan, the reality of the 2006 agreement was that the domestic political conditions concerning the agreement in both countries were at best complicated, and at worse impassable. For the realignment to go forward on schedule, the US government would have to secure the support of the people of Guam and Congress would have to budget a tremendous amount of money to improve the island’s infrastructure, while Tokyo secured the support of communities in Okinawa and budget for the Futenma replacement facility and the construction underway on Guam.

In the rush to get something committed to paper, the Bush administration and the LDP have left the alliance with a festering sore, an agreement that looks all but unimplementable, has eroded trust between Washington and Tokyo, and mortally wounded the DPJ in its ten months in office. Considering these costs, it is remarkable that the Obama administration has clung so tenaciously to this Bush administration legacy. Is there anything in American foreign policy making to rival the much-vaunted bipartisan consensus on Japan?

This article was originally posted on Observing Japan here.

1. Guam recedes into the distance
2. Japan: The Hatoyama government tackles the alliance early
3. Gates rules out renegotiation of Okinawa deal with Japan

During Japan’s 2009 general election campaign, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ran on a platform calling for a more ‘equal’ relationship with the United States. While the party’s leaders left the meaning of the phrase vague, the general idea was that a DPJ government would be more assertive in defending Japan’s national interests in its dealings with the US, arguing that under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Japan was too submissive when the US came asking for help in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The first test of the DPJ’s new approach to US-Japan relations was the dispute over the US Marine air station at Futenma in Okinawa. According to a 2006 bilateral agreement that was reaffirmed in early 2009 by an outbound LDP government, the US would relocate some 8,000 US Marines plus their dependents to Guam, while vacating Futenma for a replacement facility built at Henoko Bay near Camp Schwab, another Marine base. While in opposition, the DPJ drafted an ‘Okinawa vision’ paper that called for a process of moving the air base out of Okinawa, and then out of the country. While the DPJ backed away from this program in its electoral manifesto—where, in addition to calling for an equal relationship with the US, it promised only that it would ‘review’ the agreement on the realignment of US forces in Japan—the new Hatoyama government, pressed by the Obama administration to accept the agreement or provide a viable alternative, struggled for months to find an alternative as the Okinawan people demonstrated against the Marines staying in their prefecture and as Washington worried about former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s ‘dithering.’

At the end of May, Hatoyama ultimately decided to accept a modified version of the original agreement, with the exact details about the replacement facility to be hammered out in negotiations with the US.

It is a matter of opinion whether that decision marks the failure of the DPJ’s promise of a more equal relationship or a step in the right direction as the government was able, despite US pressure, to conduct a review of a controversial policy on its own timeline. However, there were worrying signs for Japan’s future in the DPJ government’s approach to the Futenma dispute. Even as the government debated a policy matter with implications for US deterrent power in the region, and therefore Japan’s security, it rarely couched its arguments in these terms, despite an audience in Washington that thinks almost entirely in these terms. It was only late in the review process, when it appeared that the government was preparing to accept the existing agreement, that the prime minister began talking about the deterrent capabilities of the Marines—at which point few were convinced by the argument.

The vast distance separating the US military from all other militaries, including those of its allies, means that there really is no such thing as an equal security relationship with the US. However, if Japan is going to disagree with the US constructively—a Japan that can say ‘No, but…’—its leaders must be able to speak the language of realpolitik convincingly. By being unable to articulate Japan’s security policy independent on the US, its leaders remain dependent on the US.

The DPJ government is not the first Japanese government to struggle with this problem. Ishiba Shigeru, a leading LDP politician who has twice served as minister for defence, writes in his book of politicians uninterested in national defence, criticising fellow LDP members for focusing only on the size of the defence budget and not on why Japan has a defence budget in the first place. Japanese leaders, to say nothing of the public, have long been insulated from the Self-Defence forces of which they were nominally in charge.

Accordingly, any discussion of Japan’s taking greater responsibility for its own defence—especially spending more on the SDF—must begin with changing Japanese security discourse. The Japanese public and its representatives have to first understand the value of the SDF before they will comfortably support more defence spending or new roles for the SDF.

It is questionable, however, whether the rising generation of Japanese politicians is any more capable of articulating Japanese security policy before the Japanese public and in dialogue with the US. Although a number of taboos surrounding discussions of security policy appear to have fallen, what Ishiba points to as the obsession with the cost of national defence may prove to be more resilient, particularly as Japan faces its mounting debt and its aging population. It may take more than mere sabre-rattling by China or North Korea to change this underlying brake on the development of a Japanese ‘security consciousness’.

This is an article from the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly: ‘Next generation on Asia’.

1. Japan: the DPJ preparing to retreat?
2. Political games have no place in security policy
3. Gates rules out renegotiation of Okinawa deal with Japan

If there is one lesson that this upper house campaign has taught us, it is a lesson that we all should have already learned: there is no stopping Ozawa Ichirō. Despite what looked like a marvellous coup by Hatoyama Yukio in getting Ozawa to step down as DPJ secretary-general, Ozawa has been a public critic of the Kan government throughout the campaign.

However, is Ozawa’s criticism of the government — he’s been particularly harsh about the Kan government’s comments about raising the consumption tax to 10 per cent, which he argues with plenty of justification that the government has made life more difficult for DPJ candidates — the prelude to Ozawa’s being a thorn in Kan’s side after the election (as Yuka Hayashi suggests in this post at the Wall Street Journal’s Japan Realtime)? 

It is tempting to see Ozawa’s remarks as the beginning of an Ozawa-led anti-mainstream within the DPJ that will force the Kan government to make further concessions to party backbenchers when it comes to policymaking, particular if the DPJ falls short of a majority on Sunday.

Working in Kan’s favour, however, is that he has government and party leadership united behind him. United in their opposition to Ozawa’s influence, Kan’s leadership team already looks more effective than the Hatoyama-Ozawa team, missteps regarding the consumption tax notwithstanding. More importantly, Kan has already made concessions to the party’s backbenchers, giving them a vehicle for having their voices heard by the cabinet. Ozawa’s concerns about the government’s abandoning last year’s manifesto would carry more weight if the Kan government had not already begun working on a mechanism for incorporating the concerns of backbenchers into government decision making. Furthermore, there are few signs that Ozawa is any less unpopular now than he was before resigning as secretary-general — or that MPs are keen on preserving every piece of the 2009 manifesto. While there are still concerns that Ozawa stands at the head of a proto-faction that could number more than 100 members, I wonder how many members Ozawa can actually count on to back him. How many backbenchers would be willing to buck the new party regime to stand with Ozawa? It is worth noting that few senior party members have echoed Ozawa’s critique of the Kan government.

That’s not to say that party members are happy with how the government has handled the consumption tax issue over the past month. The understandable desire to give the voters a chance to render judgement on the Kan government’s new approach to the consumption tax likely forced the government to roll out the proposal before properly vetting it with party members, which in turn led the government to back away from its initial position, ironically damaging the position of the government and the DPJ even further.

But backbencher dissatisfaction does not automatically translate into support for Ozawa. Far from signalling the beginning of an Ozawa-led anti-mainstream, Ozawa’s behaviour during the campaign could signal a new role for Ozawa as an internal critic, concerned less with vying for control of the party than with keeping the party on what he sees as the right path. It seems to me that the Kan government could live with Ozawa’s moving into this role.

1. Japan: Ozawa will be secretary-general
2. Japan: Ozawa whips the DPJ and the Diet into shape
3. Now the Ozawa era is over