Aftermath of the Japanese 2009 General Election

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama

This week, Yukio Hatoyama became Japan’s Prime Minister. The government has changed hands, as was widely predicted, in a landslide. The Democratic Party, Minshuto, received 308 votes to the Liberal Democratic Party’s, Jiminto’s, 119. On the day of the election, I wrote that the election was to be a landmark For democracy in Japan, and sure enough with Jiminto out of power, the election was historic. However, the reasons for Jiminto’s catastrophic defeat demonstrate mundane causes.

Working in a job that allows me to probe other people’s lives for the sake of their studies, I have been able to gauge how and why my students votes. That insight gave me only one solid reason for Jiminto’s defeat: dissatisfaction.

Many of my students voted Minshuto, a few voted Jiminto, but a noticeable number voted for the Communist Party, Kyosanto, or the independent Minnanoto, ‘Your Party’. These are representatives of the urban middle classes, and no one was ‘happy’ with Minshuto’s victory. Only a handful would admit to being ‘satisfied’.

Many voted not for a party, but instead simply voted against Jiminto. After governments derailed by scandals, it is no surprise that many were dissatisfied with their leadership, and for many people punishing this long-ruling party was a top priority. Most students complained that Minshuto did not offer a viable alternative, hence their rather pessimistic unease over the results: they lacked concrete details over the changes they seek, and seemed to be offering unbalanced accounts of how they would supply all the cash handouts they have planned. Indeed, even with the recent important announcement regarding curbing climate change, Hatoyama’s nascent cabinet have few concrete details. Theirs was a hollow victory, but Jiminto’s defeat was total.

As a gauge of how the people voted, it is interesting to look at how some of Jiminto’s recent cabinet ministers fared, particularly those embroiled in scandals. On election night, a few names stood out for me.

The Gaffe-Makers Fumio Kyuma Hakuo Yanagisawa Bunmei Ibuki Shoichi Nakagawa	The Potential Leaders Kaoru Yosano Yuriko Koike Seiko Noda
Komeito’s Leadership Postscript: Jiminto’s Winners

The Gaffe-Makers

Since Jun’ichiro Koizumi‘s exit from the Kantei, Japanese politics has become, more so than ever, a catalogue of people who should think before they speak. Insulting their constituents, whole swathes of the population, or the international community, they stand out for seeming amateurish and incompetent.

Jiminto Candidate		Minshuto Candidate
Name	Number of Votes	Number of Votes	Name
Fumio Kyuma	106,206	120,672	Eriko Fukuda
Hakuo Yanagisawa	109,120	154,035	Nobuhiro Koyama
Bunmei Ibuki	81,913	105,818	Tomoyuki Taira
Shoichi Nakagawa	89,818	118,655	Tomohiro Ishikawa

Fumio Kyuma

Fumio Kyuma

Fumio Kyuma, 68, of Nagasaki Prefecture’s 2nd District, was Director-General and Minister of Defence under Shinzo Abe. He was outspoken with regards to the US-Japan alliance, the bedrock of Japanese security, and that made him prone to ‘Foot-in-Mouth Disease’, as I discussed back in 2007.

• “The United States doesn’t understand [the importance of] spadework.”

• “I think President Bush launched the war in the belief there were nuclear weapons, but I think that decision was wrong.”

• “I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy.”

Eriko Fukuda

While Kyuma may not have been wrong in saying these things, it showed great insensitivity to the victims of Nagasaki (which in many ways could have been avoided), the Japanese people, and Japan’s ally.

However this was aeons ago in political time, while I have no definite idea as to why Nagasaki voters ousted Kyuma in the 2009 election, I would like to think that it had something to do with an ‘assassin’ sent by Ichiro Ozawa’s (Minshuto’s political mastermind): Eriko Fukuda, 28.

Fukuda was the public face of lawsuits by about 170 people against the government in a major health scandal in 2002 and 2003. When she was 20, she discovered she had contracted Hepatitis C through a blood transfusion as a baby. One of the few to publicise her name during the suit, Fukuda wrote a book and blogged about the victims’ struggle for the truth, and when the Health Ministry admitted in October 2007 that it had had a list of victims but had sat on it, ostensibly to protect the companies involved, she was at the forefront of the public response.

She represents the youth of Minshuto’s ranks, and she is by all means a heroine in her role in publicising the scandal. Hand-picked by Ozawa to stand against Kyuma, after proving that she was about more than just her disease through a series of weekly public meetings, Kyuma didn’t stand a chance.　However, the polls bear out a close fight.

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Hakuo Yanagisawa

Hakuo Yanagisawa

Nobuhiro Koyama

Next on the list is another gaffe-maker. Hakuo Yanagisawa, 74, of Shizuoka Prefecture’s 3rd District, famously insulted the women of Japan with this comment in 2007:

“The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can do is ask them to do their best per head … although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”

He was right about that last part. While I believe he was simply trying to explain a complex issue using the language of economics and production, he nevertheless did so in such an insensitive way that he was forced to resign.

Yanagisawa, in what was described by Tobias Harris of Observing Japan as “the LDP’s most secure seat”, lost to Nobuhiro Koyama, 33, who previously worked for the central bank of agricultural, forestry and fishery cooperatives, Norinchukin. A newcomer and unknown quantity, it is surprising that he secured his victory by 45,000 votes and thus managed to thrash Yanagisawa.

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Bunmei Ibuki

Bunmei Ibuki

The last of the Abe cabinet gaffe-makers to be ousted from his seat, Bunmei Ibuki, 71, served as Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology during the Abe administration, and briefly as Yasuo Fukuda‘s Minister of Finance, and is a previous holder of the prized Secretary-General position within Jiminto. His two most memorable gaffes occurred during his time as Abe’s Education Minister.

• “Japan has been historically governed by the Yamato (Japanese) race. Japan is an extremely homogenous country. In its long, multifaceted history, Japan has been governed by the Japanese all the way.”

• “If you just eat nothing but butter every day, then you will develop metabolic syndrome. Human rights are important, but if you eat too much of it, then Japanese society will develop “human rights metabolic syndrome.”

Tomoyuki Taira

Many inferred that the latter statement’s use of butter as a metaphor for human rights was calculated to highlight their foreign origins. Dairy products did not figure into the Japanese diet prior to Japan’s opening by Commodore Perry. Once, if something was said to ‘reek of butter’, that meant that it had a foreign feel to it, in a derogatory sense.

These statements hint at underlying culturalist values that leech from those studies of Japanese uniqueness – Nihonjinron. This is not particularly strange, many Japanese hold themselves and their country to be unique. In an afternoon class of ladies, I asked what they thought was special about Japan, several mentioned its having four seasons… Such ideas of uniqueness is prevalent not just on the international level, but casting down into prefectural and urban differences too.

While these statements have been long since forgotten, and have very little bearing on the election results, they do highlight the relative lack of media savvy these Jiminto candidates have displayed. In Kyoto, Minshuto recruited minor radio personality, Tomoyuki Taira, 50, a head of a policy think-tank, to face off against Ibuki. He seemed to have done the trick.

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Shoichi Nakagawa

Shoichi Nakagawa

Tomohiro Ishikawa

Shoichi Nakagawa, 56, will forever be remembered as an example of politics at their most embarrassing. Nakagawa was a important thinker among Jiminto’s forward-thinking defence-policy nationalists and he held some important positions within the party, including Chairman of the Policy Research Council. He offered true potential for leadership, but squandered it at a G7 meeting in Rome in February 2009. There, whether under the influence of alcohol or just cold medicine, he slurred and napped his way through a press conference before being the worst possible visitor to the Vatican Museums as he tripped alarms and touched exhibits. This incident led him to be immortalised in a mobile phone game.

At the start of his campaign in Hokkaido’s 11th district, he renounced alcohol, but the image of him drifting off in Rome is just too fresh to save him. After inheriting his district from his father, Ichiro Nakagawa, Shoichi Nakagawa would lose it to Tomohiro Ishikawa, 36, a former aide to Ichiro Ozawa and PR representative.

Ishikawa was questioned during the scandal that erupted over Ozawa’s fundraising which resulted in the arrest of his chief secretary earlier in the year. He had run in the 2003 and 2005 elections, but was beaten by Nakagawa albeit narrowly in 2005. He faced having to prove himself against Nakagawa’s proven pork-barrel projects, but in the end, he was clearly successful.

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The Potential Leaders

Three Jiminto candidates stood out for their potential to rise to the top of the party. They represent some of the best and brightest of the party, and luckily for them, all three have been thrown a lifeline: they will remain in the Diet through the proportional representation system, through which voters vote twice: once for a local candidate and once for a party. However, none have formally entered the race to replace Taro Aso as leader of Jiminto.

Jiminto Candidate		Minshuto Candidate
Name	Number of Votes	Number of Votes	Name
Kaoru Yosano	130,030	141,742	Banri Kaieda
Yuriko Koike	96,739	105,512	Takako Ebata
Seiko Noda	99,500	111,987	Masanao Shibahashi

Kaoru Yosano

Kaoru Yosano

Banri Kaieda

Kaoru Yosano, 71, was Abe’s Chief Cabinet Secretary for one month and Aso’s second Minister of Finance since February 2009. Following Fukuda’s resignation in 2008, Yosano ran in the leadership contest to become President of Jiminto, but lost to Aso who received a staggering 351 of the 527 votes available.

Yosano is a fiscal conservative who has put his expert knowledge of taxes to good use by arguing for the need to increase consumption tax to recover the government debt and the take the strain of Japan’s ageing society.

He is an avid and gifted Go player, and claims to have taught the game to Ichiro Ozawa, the mastermind of Minshuto’s election strategy and its former leader (although some claim he is still pulling the strings). Running in the political heart of Tokyo, its 1st district, Yosano faced Banri Kaieda, 68, and would put his former Go student to the test.

The two men share a history. Yosano had lost to Kaieda in 2000 and 2003, reclaiming his seat in 2005 during Koizumi’s landslide victory. A survivor of cancer of the pharynx, on the first day of the official campaign, on August 18th, Yosano collapsed at a rally in Shinjuku, which saw him sitting out of a later G7 meeting. Regardless of this, and no doubt wanting to prove himself to be a strong campaigner against the odds, Yosano fought on and became a loud, if not ironic, advocate of a need for Jiminto to survive as a strong opposition party.

Kaieda, for his part, has been the key economic policy-maker within Minshuto despite having no seat in the Lower House. Prior to finding his home in Minshuto, he was a member of Nihon Shinto (New Japan Party) before joining the ultra-local Tokyo Shimin 21 (Tokyo Citizens 21).

They campaigned on similar grounds, but Kaieda had the advantage of a population that was looking to shed Jiminto’s blood.

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Yuriko Koike

Yuriko Koike

Takako Ebata

Yuriko Koike, 57,replaced Fumio Kyuma as Minister of Defence under Abe but remained in the job for only a month before she resigned. She also ran for Jiminto top spot, but came third behind Aso and Yosano.

Koike, originally from Hyogo Prefecture but running in Tokyo’s 10th District, had a successful TV career before entering politics. Somewhat of a free agent, Koike has been a member of several small parties (mostly because they were coalescing into the big parties we seen now, but what is clear is that in 2000 Koike switched from the moderately liberal Jiyuuto (Liberal Party) to the firmly rightist Hoshu Shinto (New Conservative Party). When that party was absorbed by Jiminto, she simply stuck around.

A successful woman who knows how to play up to a feminist audience (coining the term ‘iron ceiling’ in contrast to the ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women from reaching top positions in other countries), she has also addressed environmental issues (she was instrumental in two famous Koizumi campaigns: Cool Biz and Mottainai), as well as a worshipper at the controversial Japanese shrine and a constitutional revisionist. An Arabist by trade, due to the influence of her father who saw potential energy security in good relations with the Arab states, she has something a little different to most Jiminto politicians… so what went wrong?

The Minshuto candidate was also a woman, Takako Ebata. Successful and very well educated, she holds an MBA from MIT, she was an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, considered Japan’s best, and yet she seemed more down-to-earth as ran with the clear support of her family. This is in contrast to the divorced and childless Koike, who seems to epitomise less desirable traits for career women. Couple this with the dissatisfaction of the public with Jiminto, and Ebata’s victory looked promising. Even though Koike brought out her popular former colleague, former Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi to lend some support, she couldn’t hold off the swell for change.

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Seiko Noda

Seiko Noda

Masanao Shibahashi

In 1998, Seiko Noda, then 37, set the record as she became Obuchi’s Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, the youngest post-war cabinet minister. She was the first woman to become Programme Director of Jiminto’s House Steering Committee and served as State Minister for Consumer Affairs under Fukuda and Aso.

Noda, now 49, is an active feminist within the Diet, advocating women’s rights to keep their maiden name after marriage (which is not currently an available option for Japanese women), as well as helping bring about much needed legislation to curb child pornography, and video games that promote sexual violence. She has also been a powerful voice for the creation of equal opportunities for disabled people too.

Noda is also a politician who seems to stand by her convictions, not only on equal rights, but also more generally. After opposing Koizumi’s postal  privatisation bill, she lost recognition from Jiminto in the 2005 election. With no small amount of guts she continued into the election as an independent (albeit with Komeito’s backing), and faced off against Yukari Sato, the ‘assassin’ appointed to stop Noda from winning her seat in Gifu Prefecture’s 1st District. Noda won the seat by about 10,000 votes, a figure quite common in the elections results above too. Sato won a seat through the proportional representation system (the same system that would bring Yosano, Koike and Noda herself back this year). Sato also lost her seat in the 2009 election.

Minshuto’s man in 2005, Masanao Shibahashi, now 30, faced Noda in the 2009 election. A former bank clerk, Shibahashi is young and ultimately benefited from dissatisfaction with Jiminto, just like his colleagues.

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Komeito’s Leadership

While Jiminto were certainly had more seats than any other party after the 2005 election, they did not govern alone. Jiminto had a coalition partner, Komeito, which suffered heavily at the hands of the voters this year. It is a political front for Soka Gakkai, the international Buddhist new religion, and some might say cult.

Komeito Candidate		Minshuto Candidate
Name	Number of Votes	Number of Votes	Name
Akihiro Ota	108,679	118,753	Ai Aoki
Kazuo Kitagawa	84,883	100,548	Hiroyuki Moriyama

Akihiro Ota

Ai Aoki

Akihiro Ota, 63, became Komeito’s Chief Representative in 2006, succeeding Takenori Kanzaki. He has been with Komeito since 1971, starting first as a reporter for the party’s newspaper. A former university sumo wrestler, he has primarily concerned himself with issues of the constitution and structural reform making him the ideal partner for the 2005-2009 string of Jiminto leaders.

Early in the run-up to the election, it appeared that Ichiro Ozawa himself would go head to head with Ota in Tokyo’s 12th District, but Ozawa apparently had a change of heart and instead registered in Iwate, where he was born. His proxy was Ai Aoki, 44, a former singer and TV reporter who had won a seat in Chiba in the 2007 Upper House Election by proportional representation. Aoki’s victory decapitated Komeito until they elected Natsuo Yamaguchi to replace him on 8th September.

Ota wasn’t the only Komeito honcho to suffer. Most notably Kazuo Kitagawa, the party’s 56-year old Secretary-General, lost in Osaka’s 16th District. His opponent, Hiroyuki Moriyama, a 38-year old former Osaka assemblyman had a strong victory when viewed in relation to the more closely contested seats in the other sections above.

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Postscript – Jiminto’s Winners

Jiminto suffered a heavy blow at the hands of the electorate, and perhaps as a result of the canny election strategy put forward by Minshuto’s Ichiro Ozawa, who put younger and often female candidates against the stuffy Jiminto politicians of old. This energy added to the calls for change that was the rallying cry of the Minshuto candidates. At the same time, Komeito suffered a massive blow, unable to secure any single seat constituencies. However, it was not all tears and gloom for Jiminto, there were a number of notable successes too.

Jiminto Candidate		Minshuto Candidate
Name	Number of Votes	Number of Votes	Name
Shinjiro Koizumi	150,893	96,631	Katsuhito Yokokume
Kunio Hatoyama	138,327	119,481	Issei Koga
Taro Aso	165,327	96,327	Kousei Yamamoto
Yasuo Fukuda	103,852	91,904	Yukiko Miyake
Shinzo Abe	121,365	58,795	Takako Tokura

Kunio Hatoyama

Shinjiro Koizumi

Shinjiro Koizumi, former Prime Minister Koizumi’s 28-year old son, took over his father’s seat in Kanagawa Prefecture’s 11th District. He scored a stunning victory against Minshuto’s Katsuhito Yokokume, 27. A fourth-generation politician, he seems, like his father, destined to being against the grain of traditional Jiminto. He researched the US-Japan relationship at the renowned Center for Strategic and International Studies in America in 2006-07. Some of his work from his time at CSIS can be accessed [here].

There was good news too for 60-year old Kunio Hatoyama, Jiminto candidate for Fukuoka Prefecture’s 6th District, and brother of the new Prime Minister. He beat his Minshuto opponent, Issei Koga, 62, by a significant margin. Hatoyama was dubbed ‘the Grim Reaper’ for the speed with which he signed off on death penalties as Abe and Fukuda’s Justice Minister. In June 2009, he resigned as Aso’s Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications over a disagreement regarding replacing Japan Post Agency head, Yoshifumi Nishikawa. This incident reflected poorly on Aso’s leadership and only contributed to his rapid decline.

Finally, it should be noted that all three post-Koizumi Prime Ministers kept their seats. Outgoing Prime Minister Taro Aso, 68, kept his seat in Fukuoka’s 8th District against Kousei Yamamoto, 37. Yasuo Fukuda, 73, held his seat in Gunma’s 4th District against Yukiko Miyake, 44. Lastly, Shinzo Abe, 54, held his seat in Yamaguchi’s 4th District against Takako Tokura, 50.

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Priorities – Swine Flu and North Korea

It never fails to surprise me just how short-sighted public attitudes can be. In May, the world fell around our heads on several occasions, but none more notably than when swine flu started to rattle its way through Kansai, or when North Korea pulled out the big guns.

Swine Flu

The WHO reports that as of June 3rd, Japan has had 385 cases of Influenza A (H1N1) – better known as swine flu. For all those cases, just higher than Britain’s 339, Japan has suffered no fatalities. Not one. Given the hysteria that swept the country, you should not be surprised . It is difficult to separate cause from effect, but face masks (a constant feature of Japanese commuting life) and anti-bacterial handwash flew off the shelves. In Golden Week, Keiko received a call from her mother, who was trying to buy face masks for her father’s trip to Tokyo. They were all sold out, in the ass-end of nowhere in Hokkaido, where everyone drives everywhere. It was ridiculous, and there hadn’t been any cases at that time.

People freaked out when the first possible cases came in. Everyone began to worry because they rode the same train lines as these suspected sufferers.  Wear masks, gargle, sterilise you hands… The mantra was behind the panic buying, ignoring WHO advice as to the possibility of harm in using masks (which provide peace of mind more than actual preventative benefit). Eventually, the cases began rolling in exponentially among high school students in Hyogo and Osaka causing schools to be shut down. The world’s press had already been reporting the disease’s low mortality rate (outside Mexico, only the US, Canada, and China have suffered deaths – a total of 20 among the four countries, Mexico had 97), but it took another week for the Japanese government to loosen restrictions. In the meantime, PM Taro Aso urged for calm in a very short TV message shown in commerical breaks, and JR stations and schools continued to urge people to wear masks for a further week.

North Korea

As the swine flu panic has begun to subside, North Korea has made dozens of severe threats, launched a few missiles and tested a nuclear warhead. The public hasn’t batted an eyelid. No-one discusses it: it’s an abstraction. It’s plastered across the news, but people don’t believe it affects them so they don’t worry. I believe in an underlying anger held by the Japanese public towads North Korea as a result of the abduction issue and missile threats, even if it is not expressed frequently, but I am surprised that people are quite so unfazed by it all.

June 3rd’s International Herald Tribune contained an op-ed piece which, although not taken from the Japanese perspective (instead that of the ASEAN members), addresses the issue quite well:

As for nonproliferation, the Asian attitude is why worry about North Korea when Pakistan’s bomb met no such reaction? Like Israel’s bomb, North Korea’s is seen a means of deterrence and a symbol of isolation. The regime may be appalling, but its only goal is survival.

These views may be a bit naïve, but they are understandable, given so many cries of “wolf” over North Korean arms and so little ability in the West to stop them. Why not ignore the attention-seeking Kim, goes the Asian thinking?

The Japanese government, unlike its people, are fuming, but are also no doubt quietly relieved: North Korea’s growing intransigence is bringing the other four parties to the Six-Party Talks closer to Japan’s hardline stance. They understand the pressing need to address the regime, but they lack the capability to deal with the situation after marginalising their position so thoroughly for the past few years.

A Matter of Perspective

“Why is he ranting?”, you might ask. Swine flu was an unknown variable, if we had been unlucky it could have meant a global plague, but it didn’t. As a Master’s student, I looked at SARS and what it suggested about society’s approach to risk, the similarities are unsurprisingly striking: experts are as clueless as you and I, the risk is transnational, and is entirely reflexive (that is derived from our way of life, i.e. intimate proximity to swine).

One of the main features of sociological risk theory is that the role of experts becomes one of the talking-head, eroding public trust and ultimately adding to the public’s inability to assess the future (the corner stone of the theory). It makes it impossible to judge the severity of a threat: swine flu was quick to spread but relatively harmless if treated early on, yet the people mobilised with the SARS and avian flu scares weighing heavy in their mind. Experts had no good advice, reporting was frenetic, and that led to panic buying and a paranoia which has yet to really subside. In this case, the future was unknowable but increasingly revealing itself with each passing day: we have nothing to fear from H1N1 (yet).

By contrast, no-one can assess the North Korea’s future because no-one has access to the regime’s decision-making. There is very little triangulation in the reporting, and we, the interested reader, are left with rumour and speculation. We cannot know what the nuclear test signals, but I am not happy to know that they have seemingly improved on their feeble first test, nor that they have a missile that is within striking distance of my home. Who cares if it’s a threat to me now or in 10 years, or perhaps never; for a country that likes to talk about peace and disarmament, the experts are still clueless (the good ones can admit it) and the Japanese public are resoundingly mute.

Review: Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, by Gordon G. Chang

North Korea is taking on the world, and we have no choice but to respond.

Nuclear Showdown (2005) is journalist Gordon G. Chang’s conclusion to his contribution to the study of North Korea as a East Asian and global crisis.

It was Chang’s chapter on Japan and the abduction issue that first caught my eye. I found the book as I flicked around the shelves of my local store and immediately I knew I had to buy it. I picked up the 2007 Arrow edition, which includes a new foreword addressing the October 2006 nuclear test.

Chang eases you into the book and takes you along a wandering argument that climaxes with an acknowledgement of the dangerous times in which we live. He is even-handed and incisive throughout, even if his somewhat flowery prose may grate at times. He writes well, although whoever decided to forego conventional footnoting for the bizarre system employed might need rounding up and shooting: finding the relevant comments and references is a pain in the ass.

Chang’s conception of North Korea is of a regime fighting to stay alive as capitalism wells up at the grassroots-level. Chang criticises the US for being to soft on North Korea’s past transgressions, such as the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968, and for not negotiating and controlling North Korea’s nuclear rise in a consistent and firm manner. He also criticises America’s over-generosity to China who should now look to become a responsible world citizen by reining in its client state, or preferably abandoning it altogether. He criticises South Korea, particularly former Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, for sustaining a fragile regime that relying on foreign aid for its survival while snubbing market reform as a result of the brewing bottom-up revolution.

On the issue of Japan, Chang is sympathetic to the country’s more immediate concern of attack: the pressing threat posed by North Korea acts more strongly on Japan than the US. He also notes the overwhelmingly political nature of the abduction issue and its emotional underpinnings. Japan is most at risk from a North Korean nuke, and as a result it is struggling to stay confined to the bounds of the constitution imposed upon it by the American post-War authorities. Despite that, it must: a Japanese bomb would create a whole new arms race and set of global tensions.

It is to this tension that Chang so skilfully leads the reader. For him, the North Korean problem highlights the challenge posed to the global hegemon, the US. Chang finds WWII to be apogee of US power, and from then on it has been relatively weakened as the destroyed nations around it have rebuilt. He is not implying that the US is by any means facing the end of its history, but rather that it has a chance to solidify its position.

Chang believes that the US should reinvigorate the non-proliferation norms and regime by carrying out what it committed to in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: the destruction of its nuclear stockpile. Chang suggests that even a wholesale, yet incomplete, dismantling of the US arsenal would show the state’s good intentions to the currently less-than-impressed non-nuclear powers. “The American president can give the order to eliminate all life on this planet several times over. If he decides to reduce his arsenal so that he can kill everybody only once, are his constituents any less safe?”

Chang is encouraging the US to take the bold step to make an example of North Korea. By unilaterally reducing its nuclear stockpile it will show its commitment to a non-nuclear future. He also encourages the US to be tough on North Korea in the Six-Party Talks and place all the issues on the table: from human rights to counterfeiting. By doing so, the Chinese and South Koreans will be forced to take sides (all the while under pressure from the international community to take the most reasonable side, that of the US). Ultimately, however, Chang believes that the US should be prepared to make an example of North Korea by committing itself to a possible use of force. “But if there ever were a reason to go to war, it is to save the nonproliferation treat and the global arms control regime. No other justification for conflict comes close.”

Chang’s argument is bold in and of itself. He is pessimistic for our future, and quite rightly so. At the moment, his work is still relevant. In the three years since Nuclear Showdown was first published, little progress has been made. Whether one accepts his conclusions is down to the individual, but the claims presented are well-linked and researched and show a broad understanding of the North Korean crisis in the context of global security.

Maybe our struggle with [Kim] is not the clash of good and evil, as some would have it, but it is at the very least a fight to preserve the liberal international system that has been responsible for so much global progress.

Logos vs Pathos: Emotion and Reason in Japan’s Abduction Issue

I really enjoyed a (not so) recent post by Ampontan: Logos, pathos, and Japanese politics. I would really like to get my hands on a copy of Koizumi Seiken—Patosu no Shusho wa Nani wo Kaeta no ka? (the subject of the book review which sparked Ampontan’s post), although at this stage it would be little more than extra weight on my shelf.

My research area came from my understanding of the abduction issue as emotion overcoming reason, and thus it was with a happy sigh that I managed to read something addressing these two aspects of politics in the context of Japan… a sigh because I wish I had been able to read something like this sooner.

He quotes from the review:

(Professor Uchiyama) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a strong prime minister who frequently resorted to pathos (passions, sentiment) and top-down methods of governing. [...] But the author points out the dangers of Koizumi’s incorporation of pathos into politics, which was symbolic of his approach of stripping logos (reason and language) from politics, thereby weakening the logic of responsibility.

Ampontan then suggests that logos has been the preferred political mode in postwar Japan. It is also my preferred mode of politics and the very reason I wanted to take the Japanese government to task for its handling of the abduction issue in light of the very real nuclear threat posed by North Korea. He writes:

After their defeat in the war, perhaps the Japanese developed an antipathy to the use of emotional political appeals as they applied themselves to studying and incorporating the principles of liberal democracy.

This didn’t sit very well with my gut feelings about the abduction issue, although Ampontan’s later comments settle that impression somewhat:

That is not to say that Japanese are not susceptible to pathos; the public were enthusiastic patrons of the Koizumi Theater. It’s just that pathos does not always mix well with politics here.

I had held the view that Koizumi’s conduct regarding the abduction issue was calculated, controlled, and ultimately correct. If he pandered to the Kazokukai and Suukukai, it was in a fashion that kept the politicians largely in control. Certainly when contrasted with the handling by Abe Shinzo which was an absolute barrage on the public sensibilities, arguably stretching their energy in the issue past its point of elasticity. We all know of ‘aid fatigue’, the public’s over-exposure to aid campaigns (particularly in the age of LiveAid); well, I would argue that the Japanese public has suffered ‘abduction fatigue’.

Ampontan sums up my feelings quite well:

Mr. Koizumi used emotional appeals to sway the electorate, but he was an adroit, skillful politician with an engaging personality. In contrast, Mr. Abe lacked political skills, and his personality, while not unpleasant, tended toward the bland businesslike demeanor Japanese expect from men at work.

Every society suffers from hot-button issues, the kind of issues that are used to rally the electorate and identify opponents. The abduction issue, perhaps similarly with its public anti-nuclear principles, are one of Japan’s.

Koizumi used the abduction issue to bring the electorate behind him in 2002 and 2004 (in the latter case so successfully that even the victims’ families could not stand against him). He showed a calculation that Abe just couldn’t wield as a result of being the issue’s champion. Whereas Koizumi could reel the abduction issue’s advocates, Abe simply allowed them to run rampant. It is my feeling that Abe did more for the abduction issue as Koizumi’s Chief Cabinet Secretary than he could have ever had done as Prime Minister.

Finally, the media were a crucial part of the abduction issue’s growth and strength. They helped popularise the issue through the broadcasting of a ‘vicarious trauma’, as Hyung-gu Lynn wrote in ‘Vicarious traumas: television and public opinion in Japan’s North Korea policy’. Ampontan’s comments on the role of pathos in the media are spot on:

Ideals as these, however, must confront the reality that people consume politics through television, and that the demands of television are intrinsically pathos-based and seek the dramatic rather than the sober and the serious.

From this he concludes that pathos is with Japanese politics until the end. I quite agree, although Fukuda’s stance on the issue appears to have brought back some much needed logos. Time will tell how much of that sticks.

A Brewing Storm…

The United States’ lack of real regard for the Japanese conduct of the abduction issue, or perhaps Japan’s hyper-sensitivity on the issue, is causing fractures in the US-Japan alliance.

The US has been linked to the abduction issue since it exploded into the Japanese public consciousness in 1997. The issue supposedly caught Clinton off-guard in an April 1997 summit; as Clinton asked the Japanese to provide food aid to the North Koreans, Prime Minister Hashimoto stated the new Japanese concern regarding North Korea’s abductions. The 1998 ‘Taepodong Shock’ showed the Clinton administration, and the rest of the world, that diplomacy with North Korea had to concentrate on North Korea’s destabilising missile and nuclear projects.

President Clinton argued in May 1999 that the best way to deal with the kidnapping issue was to settle the nuclear and missile issues and end the threat of war on the Korean peninsula. He asserted that once these issues were resolved, “it is more likely that other matters will also be resolved.” Unlike 1997, however, the Clinton administration recognized the credibility of the kidnapping issue. President Clinton and other administration officials acknowledged that Japan considered the issue important and that the United States would support Japan’s attempts to negotiate with North Korea on it. Clinton asserted again in May 1999 that: “If you believe that there are Japanese people who were abducted and taken to North Korea, I think you should keep working on it and looking until you find them alive or you know where they’re buried. And I will support that very, very strongly.”

Niksch, L. A. (2002). North Korea and Terrorism: The Yokota Megumi Factor. Korean Journal of Defense Analysis , 14 (1), 7-23: pp. 12-13

The position expressed by Clinton has stuck to this day. As a staff member of the US Embassy in London once told me in early 2007, Japan is America’s chief ally in the Asia-Pacific and the US supports its position on the abduction issue, however the issue is Japan’s not America’s, the US has its own interests to pursue. It’s a diplomatic stance, but in practice the US has sought to minimise the effect of Japanese stubbornness on the abduction issue.

Following the 1999 Perry Initiative, which “outlined a US strategy to negotiate a series of agreements with North Korea to reduce its missile and nuclear programs and eventually eliminate them” (Niksch, 2002, p. 13), the US attempted to secure a Japanese financial agreement to compensation (compared to money transferred during the South Korea-Japan normalisation of relations) without allowing them a negotiating role, presumably because of fears of derailment.

North Korea, at this point, presumably saw a diplomatic opening and entered into direct negotiations with the Japanese. North Korea has never been shy of playing powers off one another and with a possible agreement arising out of the Perry Initiative, North Korea possibly saw a chance to boost their ‘compensation’. However, this was not to be: “Kim Yong-sun’s offer created a situation in which Japan’s role in the Perry Initiative became dependent on direct Japan–North Korean negotiations in which Japan was determined to give priority to the kidnapping issue.” (Niksch, 2002, p. 16)

As the Japanese found their opening to directly negotiate on the abduction issue, the North Korean’s attempted to convince the US to remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, an action that the Clinton administration seemed to seriously consider. As part of the diplomacy, the North Koreans would have to ‘address issues of past support of terrorism’ which, despite the abduction issue not being the reason for North Korea’s inclusion on the list, would have to include consultations with Japan regarding North Korea’s support for the Japanese Red Army. (Niksch, 2002, p. 17)

All the while, the Japanese campaigned to have the US include the abductions in North Korea’s listing, and threatened to undermine US attempts to separate the rational efforts to resolve the missile and nuclear issues from the emotive abduction issue.

Prime Minister Mori reportedly secured President Clinton’s agreement at the G-8 meeting on Okinawa in July 2000 for US diplomats to raise the kidnapping issue with North Korea. Japanese diplomats urged the Clinton administration to raise the issue directly with the visiting North Korean envoy, who arrived in Washington in October 2000. The Japanese renewed pressure for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to place the issue on her agenda with North Korean officials when she visited Pyongyang in late October. The Japanese apparently used strong words with US officials, indicating that the Japan-US alliance would be damaged if the Clinton administration refused to raise the kidnapping issue. The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun reported on October 8, 2000, that “Japan views that if the United States removes the DPRK from the [terrorism] list without paying attention to the abduction issue, it would mean the United States is taking Japan lightly.”

Niksch, 2002, p. 20

Albright did bring up the issue in her visit and in doing so helped solidify Japanese expectations that the US would support its position in the future. This perception was undoubtedly strengthened under the Bush administration. In February 2001, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard met with the Kazokukai and pledged continuing US support for their cause. This meeting sidestepped the Japanese Mori government, whom the Kazokukai felt had betrayed by after a 500,000 tonnes rice aid deal despite Mori Yoshiro’s personal promise that progress towards normalisation would not occur without progress on the abduction issue. Nakayama Masaaki, leader of Nitcho giren (Dietmen’s League for the Promotion of Japan-North Korea Friendship) and of a parliamentary group on the abduction issue, was furious at the Kazokukai’s independent move. (Johnson, E. (June 2004). The North Korea Abduction Issue and Its Effect on Japanese Domestic Politics. Japan Policy Research Institute) However, it was the start of a strong relationship between the Bush administration and the actors in the abduction issue, benefiting strongly from the close interpersonal relationship between Bush and Koizumi Jun’ichiro.

Japan’s involvement in post-war Iraq was inherently tied to both the strength of this personal relationship and Japan’s concerns over North Korea. ‘In February 2004, [Koizumi] declared that it was of overwhelming importance for Japan to show that it was a “trustworthy ally,” because (as he put it) if ever Japan were to come under attack it would be the US, not the UN or any other country, that would come to its aid’. (McCormack, G. (November 8 2004). Koizumi’s Japan in Bush’s World: After 9/11. Japan Focus) If any state was about to attack North Korea, it was North Korea. One Cabinet Office survey showed that 80% felt war with North Korea was likely. Japan was clearly frightened of abandonment by the US over North Korea. (Yakushiji, K. (April 5 2003). Japanese Foreign Policy in Light of the Iraq War. Japan Focus) However, Koizumi’s gamble appeared to pay off: “Bush declared his own “unconditional” support for the Japanese position on the families of the North Korean abductees. […] It was, as a senior [LDP] official admitted, a deal: Japanese forces to Iraq in exchange for US support for Japan’s position on North Korean issues. (McCormack, 2004)

For the US, the abduction issue offered yet more ammunition to pressure North Korea on its human rights issue. In 2006, Abe Shinzo helped tighten the US interest in the abduction issue (beneficially coinciding with a major documentary into the human drama of the issue: Abduction – The Megumi Yokota Story). (Hughes, C. W. (2006). The Political Economy of Japanese Sanctions towards North Korea: Domestic Coalitions and International Systemic Pressures. Pacific Affairs , 79 (3), 455-481: p. 473) In March, Ambassador Schieffer visited Niigata to be given a tour of Yokota Megumi’s final walk home. In a press conference after the tour, he stated ‘the United States would always raise the abduction issue whenever it talked to North Korea about anything’, and ‘that there can be no comprehensive resolution with North Korea without a solution to the abduction issue’. In April , Yokota Sakie (mother of Yokota Megumi and representative of the Kazokukai) and Shimada Yoichi (representative of the Sukuukai) travelled to the US to testify to Congress ahead of the North Korean Human Rights Act. Yokota also met with President Bush who called it ‘one of the most moving meetings’ of his presidency, an impression that has lasted.

Following North Korea’s July Taepodong-2 test, Abe’s rise to office, and the October nuclear test, the US appeared prepared to reaffirm its priorities: missiles and nukes first, everything else later. However, the US were still willing to allow Japan to pressure North Korea on the issue, as Japan was adopting an increasingly hardline under Abe. The human rights issue was a legitimate concern for the world and any pressure was good pressure. With this in mind, the EU submitted a draft resolution on North Korea’s human rights record to the UN General Assembly, co-sponsored by Japan and the US, the latter of whom had received some pressure to work to push the bill through by the Kazokukai in the form of a personal visit to Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Yet with the release of the 13 February 2007 Joint Statement, which offered a great deal of optimism in the Six-Party Talks, the US sought to pressure Abe to be more specific about just what progress entailed.

Japan’s stubbornness on the abduction issue threatens the worth of its role in the Six-Party Talks. After the negotiations on the release of funds from the Banco Delta Asia finally came to fruition, the US clearly didn’t want to squander this new found energy. Japan’s refusal to allow for bargaining room in the SPT has meant that it is inflexible. To their minds, the North Koreans have been rewarded enough for their bad behaviour. However, now “under the terms of the six-party deal on North Korea’s nuclear programs, the U.S. is committed to beginning the process of delisting the country [from the list of state sponsors of terrorism] as Pyongyang moves ahead with its denuclearization obligations“.

What does this mean? It means that Japan is facing the possibility of being abandoned and essentially betrayed by the US due to a disconnect in their national interests. It means that when push comes to shove, the US cannot be trusted to support Japan. While Bush deals with the question of his legacy, he seems willing to burn his bridges with those that he had seemed so supportive of before. A storm is brewing, and how much damage will occur is anybody’s guess. It may be the clearest test of the popular and political importance of the abduction issue in Japan we can ever see.