[Reader-list] Japan considers nuclear armament

[Rana Dasgupta]

any late 19th century echoes here?

R


July 22, 2003
Japan Faces Burden: Its Own Defense
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/22/international/asia/22JAPA.html?hp=&pagewan
ted=print&position=

TOKYO, July 21 — Not long ago, Nisohachi Hyodo, the author of a four-year
plan for nuclear armament of Japan, was part of the lunatic fringe, his
ideas so far from the pacifist mainstream that he was published only in
obscure journals.

These days, though, he has his own program on a major Tokyo radio station
and is a popular speaker on college campuses. With everyone from the
academic establishment to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi advocating that
Japan become more assertive militarily, Mr. Hyodo scarcely stands out.

More than a half-century after two atomic blasts forced Japan's surrender in
World War II, talk of acquiring nuclear weapons — long one of the country's
most sacred taboos — is but one illustration of how Japan is grappling
openly with the challenge of becoming what is known here as a "normal
nation," one armed and able to fight wars.

By no means do all Japanese support nuclear armament. But the world has
changed since Japan accepted a Constitution, written by the United States
during its postwar occupation, that renounces war as a tool of diplomacy.
The question now is, can Japan change too?

The country's 13-year economic slump is pushing forward a host of issues —
immigration, the role of women, a steep decline in population — that are
testing whether this tradition-bound society will adapt or face inevitable
decline.

No issue is likely to have a greater impact on the region than how Japan
takes up the burden of its defense after a 20th-century past that
traumatized it and its neighbors.

During its long postwar boom, Japan's security rested on two pillars: the
protection of the United States, which still bases 47,000 troops here, and
pockets so deep that it could buy its way out of almost any unpleasant
situation. Today both elements are subject to nagging doubts.

"We are becoming much more realistic about defense matters, and the reason
for this is our economic stagnation," said Koji Murata, an expert in
international relations at Doshisha University. "In the past we could depend
on our overwhelming economic strength as a sort of cushion. Generally
speaking, Japanese are beginning to feel that this margin is getting smaller
and smaller."

For the first time in three generations a shift in public opinion has
rendered ordinary the discussion of a more assertive Japan and left
defenders of the "peace Constitution" on the defensive.

While China's expanding power is a growing concern, the most immediate spur
for this change has been a year of starkly increased tensions with North
Korea, which already possesses ballistic missiles and is pursuing nuclear
weapons.

In March, Mr. Koizumi's defense minister, Shigeru Ishiba, told a
parliamentary committee that if North Korea started fueling its missiles,
"then it is time to strike."

But even if Japanese are more comfortable with such assertiveness, their
neighbors may not be. Many continue to harbor suspicion of a country that
they feel has yet fully to acknowledge the damage done by its militarization
last century, or to atone for its colonial past. Relations with China have
been strained for two years by Mr. Koizumi's repeated visits to a
controversial shrine to Japan's war veterans, including 14 people judged as
Class A war criminals.

When Mr. Koizumi reasserted last month that he would continue his visits, in
what has become a summer ritual, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kong
Quan, warned, "Without a correct view on history, there is no guarantee to
healthy and stable ties between China and Japan."

During the same time, there have been no visits between leaders of the
countries, and China has watched the move toward a more muscular Japan with
concern. While it is unclear precisely how much China spends on defense,
Japan spent $47 billion on defense in 2002, according to the Center for
Defense Information.

By almost any ranking China and Japan are among the world's top five
military budgets, and some analysts warn of the dangers of an unmediated
military competition in the region, which could include the unpredictable
North Korea.

For a long time the United States served as a buffer in the region by
providing for Japan's defense. But many say that this relationship cannot
last forever and that Japan's neighbors, like the Japanese themselves, may
have little choice but to accept the inevitability of a bulkier Japanese
military presence.

In an era of weapons that can project power over vast distances, and with
pressing security commitments elsewhere after Sept. 11, 2001, America may
simply tire of shouldering the defense burden here, many Japanese analysts
fear.

Indeed, some are already drawing that conclusion from a recent decision to
reduce the presence and profile of the 37,000 United States troops in
neighboring South Korea.

At the same time, Japan's economic problems have begun to reveal the limits
of an approach to foreign policy that critics here call "happo bijin," or
the "eight-faced beauty," strategy, under which the country showers its
wealth around the globe, hoping to win the good will of all.

In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, instead of sending troops, which it said
its Constitution barred, this oil-dependent country spent $13 billion to
placate the United States, Kuwait and the other victorious allies.

But diplomats and foreign policy experts say that heyday as a donor and
practitioner of checkbook diplomacy is past. In the past year, Japan has
quietly relinquished to the United States its place as the world's top
international aid donor. Its aid budget has been slashed by 10 percent.
Public debt has soared to 140 percent of gross domestic product. Opposition
to handouts is growing.

"For years I have been saying that nuclear armament is an inexpensive
solution," said Mr. Hyodo, a former member of the country's armed forces,
officially called the Self-Defense Forces. "We should take the example of
France, which has a minimal nuclear deterrent force. This allows them to
spend far less on defense than Japan, while remaining safe from attack."

That may not necessarily be so. For Japan, building up a military may
ultimately prove more costly than handing out money, supporting the United
Nations lavishly and underwriting American military moves.

But arguments like Mr. Hyodo's may prove persuasive nonetheless. The
difference, analysts say, is that the extra spending will leave Japan with
something tangible — military hardware — and that this may at least create a
feeling of greater security, which in politics is everything. Such a shift
would also buy jobs as Japan expands the large quasi-defense industry that
already exists here.

Groups within the governing Liberal Democratic Party have yearned for
Japan's return to a "normal," militarized status since the 1950's. Today the
signs of the change in thinking abound.

Prime Minister Koizumi has urged the abandonment of the peaceful-sounding
name, the Self-Defense Forces, which allows Japanese to pretend, as their
Constitution demands, that that they have no army, though they have 240,000
forces engaged in national defense, according to Armed Forces of the World.

Mr. Koizumi would prefer for them to be known simply as armed forces, and
for two years he has been pushing aggressively to expand their role. That
began with support in the Indian Ocean for United States operations in
Afghanistan, the first time Japan's naval forces have deployed so far away.
In recent weeks Mr. Koizumi's government has upped the ante, offering to
send troops to Iraq and arguing for a relaxation of restraints on how they
could be armed.

Throughout the postwar period, the joke about Japan's foreign policy was
that it did not have one, instead following ritually in the wake of the
United States.

Now Mr. Koizumi is pushing for the creation of a national security council,
to be drawn up along American lines, bolstering the country's diplomacy and
giving the defense and security bureaucracies far more access to the prime
minister's ear.

Those legal and statutory changes are being matched in the country's armory.
Although Japan's richly financed military forces boast some of the world's
most sophisticated hardware — weapons systems like the Aegis destroyer and
F-15 fighter jets — their actual configuration, as well as training for
their use, has been overwhelmingly defensive.

That, too, is changing abruptly. The country is acquiring in-air refueling
capacity for its fighter force, as well as developing a sophisticated air
support ship — part destroyer, part helicopter carrier — that news reports
say is intended to allow operations near the Korean Peninsula.

Such changes have increasing political and popular support. During a vote
this spring on a series of national emergency laws, which greatly expand the
government's ability to deploy the Self-Defense Forces, even the main
opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, lined up in support of the
bill.

Advocates of continued pacifism complain that the government has carefully
exploited the tensions with North Korea to heighten fear among voters.

The Japanese public, some of them warn, is being dragged unawares into a
revival of militarism.

"I cannot conceive of a war in which North Korea, a far smaller, far poorer
country, attacks Japan first," said Ryuichi Ozawa, a professor of
constitutional studies at Shizuoka University.

"The point here is that there is no confidence that the people of Japan and
their government can control a military," he said. "This is a contemporary
concern, and not just an issue of our past history."

But public opinion is turning against such sentiments. "Whenever there is
any talk about the security needs of Japan, people say we are reverting to
militarism," said Tetsu Takahashi, 20, a university student. "I don't
necessarily support nuclear weapons, even if we can't rule them out.
Whatever the case, our policies have been too meek."