Maliki Does Have a Point, You Know

Paragraphs (1) through (3) of Article 76 of the Iraqi Constitution say:

First: The President of the Republic shall charge the nominee of the largest Council of Representatives bloc with the formation of the Council of Ministers within fifteen days from the date of the election of the President of the Republic.

Second: The Prime Minister-designate shall undertake the naming of the members of his Council of Ministers within a period not to exceed thirty days from the date of his designation.

Third: If the Prime Minister-designate fails to form the Council of Ministers during the period specified in clause “Second,” the President of the Republic shall charge a new nominee for the post of Prime Minister within fifteen days.

What is so hard to understand, people? If everybody from President Obama to Supreme Leader Khamenei, not to mention all the Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds and many Shi’ites including members of his own Dawa Party wanted him to leave, what harm was there in giving Maliki his 45 days before moving on to the conciliatory alternative?

Constitutional provisions may be a dinar/riyal/rial a dozen business as usual in the Middle East (or not, I have no way of knowing). But I am a little disturbed by the American disregard for the constitutional process when it comes to the consequences of its overseas adventures in the interests of democracy. And I’m also talking about the situation in Ukraine here. (Couldn’t someone make the Maidan protesters wait another year, then vote Yanukovich out?)

Maybe their thinking is that it’s all well if it ends well. But there’s been a lot of grief, including threats to the desired range of outcomes as the result of these “democracy” shortcuts.

The Greatest What Ifs of History: What If Putin…

…had pursued his musical career?

Worth thinking about.

The Telling Detail: Hey, I Don’t Like Maliki or the Islamic State Either

According to a 10 August 2014 Reuters wire “Maliki Defiant as his special forces deploy in Baghdad” Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki, a Shi’ite who leads the largest bloc of parliamentarians, will go through the federal court to force President Fouad Masoum, a Kurd, to nominate him to form a government as prime minister. Sounds reasonable. But the wire, entitled “Maliki Defiant as his special forces deploy in Baghdad” and invoking the name of Saddam Hussein, insinuates that Maliki is using force to secure a third term as prime minister. Perhaps. But isn’t it just as likely that he’s taking precautions to make sure that his opponents won’t use force to push him out, or worse? After all, Sunnis, Kurds, a good number of Shi’ites as well as major stakeholders Iran and the United States—talk about an odd couple!—all want him gone, giving the Saddam Hussein analogy a different twist.

With the forces of the Islamic State formerly named the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria a short drive from Baghdad, I can understand why people want the divisive Maliki gone. But a report that gives no thought to how it would look from his perspective has as good a chance of misleading as informing.

There’s another, less obvious but nevertheless misleading piece of information later in the article.

“The group, which sees Shi'ites as infidels who deserve to be killed, has ruthlessly moved through one town after another, using tanks and heavy weapons it seized from soldiers who fled in the thousands.

“Islamic State militants have killed hundreds of Iraq's minority Yazidis, burying some alive and taking women as slaves, an Iraqi government minister said on Sunday, as U.S. warplanes again bombed the insurgents.

“Human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents –who have ordered the community they regard as ‘devil worshippers’ to convert to Islam or die—of celebrating what he called a ‘a vicious atrocity’.

“No independent confirmation was available of the killings of hundreds of Yazidis, bloodshed that could increase pressure on Western powers to do more to help tens of thousands of people, including many from religious and ethnic minorities, who have fled the Islamic State's offensive.”

Now it may turn out to be true that “Islamic State militants have killed hundreds of Iraq's minority Yazidis, burying some alive and taking women as slaves.” But who saw this happen? And get away? It’s plausible that a few Yazidis escaped a large-scale massacre. But buried alive? Enslaved women? How do you get escape that to live to tell the tale? The Iraqi official’s account sounds more like typical rumors that crop up before and after a swift onslaught of enemy forces. And the success of the Islamic State so far suggests that its forces are too disciplined for that to happen. Soldiers, policemen, militia, yes. Civilians? I think that it would first try to collect taxes before it resorted to the sword. Of course it would be easy for the Iraqi authorities to produce witnesses and other evidence. The Reuters report does say that the claim was uncorroborated. But did the reporters bother to ask the Iraqi official, who had every incentive to use any bit of information regarding the urgency and seriousness of the situation regardless of it veracity?

I deal almost exclusively in publicly available information. Experience tells me that it’s exclusive information that can be wildly misleading. But publicly available information has its own shortcomings. The biases of statistics can often be gleaned from the accompanying notes; for less formally rendered sources, you often have to use common sense. 

The Telling Detail: Ukraine Paramilitary on the Frontlines

This is a crucial week in the wars in Ukraine and Iraq, the two easily most compelling geopolitical stories of the year—but not of the decade, which belongs to the rise of China.

First, Ukraine. The pro-Russia separatists are doing badly, holding on to Donetsk and Luhansk for their dear lives. Pretty soon, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is calling President Putin, who will soon have to bet raise, or fold. Now, I, like everyone with any interest in this matter, have my own set of plausible outcomes in their order of likelihood. I won’t inflict my thoughts about that on you since my understanding of the region is largely derivative. However, I noticed a detail in the news that appears to be a crucial piece of the answer to the question: How did the rag-tag, poorly-equipped Ukraine military grow a spine and then some? I mean, it was just a few months ago that they’d caved in Crimea, and proceeded to yield to the pro-Russia separatists elsewhere in southeast Ukraine without putting up a fight of any kind. Did air cover turn the trick? Maybe replacing local conscripts with soldiers from the west really helped. Is Porochenko actually Tony Stark after a facelift? Perhaps all of these things helped, but there was no way to sure, since the media was not giving me any clues. But then, NYT provided a great hint in “Ukraine Strategy Bets on Restraint by Russia” (9 Aug. 2014), in which Andrew E. Kramer writes:

“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat.”

The Ukrainian military didn’t get any stronger, they just called in their own paramilitary.

This may have some immediate consequences, for Kramer goes on to say:

“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.

“In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev. In the video of the attack, no restraint was evident. Gesturing toward a suspected pro-Russian position, one soldier screamed, ‘The bastards are right there!’ Then he opened fire.”

The paramilitary harbors potential for battlefield atrocities depending on the severity of the endgame, assuming there is one. But it could be of more than passing importance regardless of the outcome or the process in getting there, for it will have proven itself to be by far the most powerful group man-for-man of fighters in the land. What ambitious politician would not want it to have his/her back in the post-conflict political landscape—assuming that it cannot be easily disbanded, once the hurly-burly is done? It is likely that a disproportionate number of these fighters owe their loyalty to the more radical elements in the Maidan takeover that wound up with Yanukovich absconding the country, elements who will be making demands for a place in the post-conflict political landscape that Porochenko and the rest of the mainstream politicians will ignore at their peril.

Outlook? Somewhere between the Taliban and the French resistance.

“Yes, the U.S. Really Will Defend Japan”

In English here, in both Japanese and English here.

The Comfort Women Issue after the Asahi Report

There are matters left untouched, and what I have written below does not have the look of a finished product even as a self-indulgent blogger. But I have other matters to tend to, so I shall let it stand for now, perhaps to come back to it if I have something appropriate for a more formal outlet.

The Kono Statement regarding the comfort women was issued to smooth the way to the 1993 Japan-South Korea summit. Since then, the Korean government, citizens, media and expats and their descendants—I will refer to them collectively as Koreans except where it is necessary to be more specific—have assumed ownership of the issue and have demanded restitution and further apologies from the Japanese government and to secure international recognition of their unique suffering, each to varying degrees of success.

The Korean claim in its purest form is that 200,000 or more young Korean women were taken forcibly and detained to provide sexual services against their will for Japanese soldiers. Japanese revisionism at its most extreme holds that the women were highly paid professionals who performed sexual services of their own free will. The Asahi report falls somewhere in between, a more detailed variation of my conjecture some years ago, which I posted on this blog: a Japanese military and government that procured women from Japan, Korea and Taiwan through middlemen to provide sexual services to its soldiers and officers and engaged in the maintenance of the establishments where the females were sequestered or housed₁. As the military pressed forward and secured women locally, the report says that it became more strident and violent for this undertaking, including rape.

The number 200,000 is connected in the Asahi report to a claim that the Korean comfort women were recruited as the Women’s Volunteer Corps. But the Women’s Volunteer Corps of Korea turned out to be the same as their Japanese namesakes, school girls who had been mobilized to work in Japanese factories₂. The assertion that the women were taken forcibly stems from the testimony of a Japanese man who claimed to have been involved in the seizure on the Island of Jeju. His testimony, however, was totally discredited by facts that contradicted it and by his inability/unwillingness to produce any evidence to support it. These matters had become widely known by the late 1990s, but Asahi had remained silent until it conclusively rejected them in its report.

Where does this leave the Kono Statement? I continue to believe that it is within the range of acceptable renditions of what occurred or is likely to have occurred. It is certainly appropriate for some of the things that the Japanese military did in China and Southeast Asia. And if what we see and hear even today of the sexual trade held true then as well, then many of the Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese women, the younger ones in particular, and some of their families, should not have been aware of what was befalling them until it was too late; some of them would have surely have left their stations had the military and/or the police not been there to maintain order₂.

How then, does the rejection of the Women’s Volunteer Corps-as-comfort women and forcible taking of the women from the Island of Jeju change the circumstances? Well, they were both held up as key elements of the Japanese government’s involvement in the recruitment. Take them out, and much of the power of the narrative disappears. Moreover, advocates of the comfort women assert numbers, the bigger the better, with conviction, while detractors prefer smaller numbers, if any, and emphasize uncertainty. Take the Women’s Volunteer Corps off the table, and the largest estimate disappears.

By remaining silent, Asahi allowed the related assertions to maintain a degree of legitimacy that Koreans could use to give the undeniable story of victimhood a power and Korean uniqueness that it otherwise would not have lacked. For Korea as a nation never fought imperial Japan; it never had the chance. It was seized, then subsumed, with minimal resistance. Then WW II came and went, with only tangential consequences until the release at its conclusion, again at the hands of others. The comfort women, embellished by a misunderstanding and a falsehood, became an indispensable symbol for Korea’s alignment with the victims and eventual victors in Japan’s war of aggression in Asia and the Pacific.

Now that the Korean narrative has lost much if not most of its uniqueness, where does the world go from here? In an ideal world, Koreans would adapt to the new narrative, align with the Japanese, most of their elderly and recent forebears, who felt victimized by the misadventures of the Japanese government and military, while the kind of Japanese who experience schadenfreude at the lawsuits recent brought against the South Korean government by “comfort women” for the US troops stationed there wake up to the fact that this was almost surely another case where the South Koreans had learned well from the example of their erstwhile colonial masters in the archipelago to the east and likewise accede to the new narrative when they have exhausted themselves from flogging the Asahi for its belated admission₃. But I am probably grown too old and too cynical to expect that to come to pass or to advocate in the hopes that they will listen.

1. My assertion of “not quite separate, not quite equal” for military service and forced labor held true for the comfort women as well, since only the Japanese women had a minimum age limit of 21.

2. Bruce Cumings’s Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (2005) had a photo of two or three girls in school uniforms surrounding a middle-aged man in a chair, all looking solemn, even dignified. With no provenance, Cumings states that the girls were comfort women. The photo had no provenance, but an armband indicated that the man was an executive at Nakajima Aircraft, the producer of the Zero Fighter among other things. My deceased mother went to a school not that far away, in Gifu and inevitably wound up as a member of the Women’s Volunteer Corps. It is now too late to ask if their paths might have crossed.

3. Yes, it would be nice if the Asahi accounted for what had transpired during its silence. It would be nice if Asahi set out its position as an editorial. (The other major dailies have spoken on it, from predictably Sankei, Yomiuri and Mainichi perspectives.) But self-reflection is not one of the Japanese media’s strong points, Asahi or otherwise. Let it suffice that Asahi has decided to clear the air on the facts at all.

Where Have Yomiuri’s English-Language Contents Gone?

Seriously, all that I can find is this crapulous loop of an advertisement solicitation. With the following blurb:

The Japan News makes full use of the comprehensive coverage of The Yomiuri Shimbun, while also offer a wide range of information from its feature and other sections.

Looks like English-language copy editor got axed as well.

Hey, if Yomiuri can’t afford it… (And to think it recently published a series of articles warning that China was lapping Japan and then some in the competition for international eyeballs.)

Is the Mutual Defense Treaty Made to Be Broken?

My friend—and I’m using this term in the original, non-John McCain sense—Paul Sracic asks “Will the U.S. Really Defend Japan?”

My response: “Yes, the U.S. Really Will Defend Japan.”

I know that I have not had the last word on this. Stay tuned if you are interested.

Ryukyu and National Identity

A healthy majority of the people of the Ryukyu Islands supported their 1972 reversion to Japan as Okinawa instead of seeking independence. After all, Ryukyu had been an independent state until it was conquered by the Satsuma-han (now Kagoshima Prefecture, not the Tokugawa Dynasty in Edo/Tokyo that was ostensibly the quasi-sovereign of the national government) in 1609. Even then, it was allowed to maintain the façade of an independent state, a pro forma vassal state to both the Satsuma-han and China. Just as important, standard Japanese and the Ryukyu dialect, or the set of Ryukyu dialects, would easily have qualified as separate languages (heck, the Kagoshima dialect would have too, but let’s leave that aside for now), and the Ryukyu culture back then was at least as strongly sand directly influenced by Chinese culture as it was by Japanese culture (which turn was strongly and directly influenced by Chinese culture, but I’m not going to make this narrative no more complicated than I have to).

I used to chalk the 1972 outcome up to the success of three quarter-centuries of education and indoctrination in submerging sentiments of nationhood. There’s certainly that, but an online exchange with a couple of friends about Korea and Taiwan got me to also wondering: What if there hadn’t been much of a sense of national identity to begin with?

The gist of the exchange with Robert Dujarric and Michael Cucek was that imperial Japan gave colonial peerages to high nobles in Korea but did not do so in Taiwan because the latter, as an outlying territory of China largely populated by historically recent immigrants, did not have its own native aristocracy to be coopted or a national identity to be subsumed. Now, the lack of national identity among the Taiwanese also explains the lack of enmity—indeed, nostalgia, even—among the pre-Kuomintang locals towards the Japanese occupation. And here, the point Michael made that the Ryukyu nobility was also inducted into the Japanese peerage has salience. Ryukyu was an independent, if vassal, state until the 19th Century with its own distinct culture. Was less than a century of subjugation enough sufficient to sublimate any sense of Ryukyu as a source of national identity in the majority of the residents there? Or had there not been a widely shared sense of national identity in the first place?

Put yourself in the shoes—or rather the straw sandals, if that—of the medieval serf in one of the Ryukyu Islands. You are certainly aware of your landlord, most likely your landlord’s master and so on and likely whomever rules that island. Heck, you might even be dimly aware of the existence of the House of Sho or whichever holds sway in Shuri on the main island. But most of the last group of people and their immediate retainers have very little presence if any in your life because the modern-era media does not yet exist and the “government” provides few public services. You may take up arms to fight a war to protect your home and hearth, but not out of any sense of duty to a motherland whose seat of ultimate power lies…somewhere. For you and your descendants, for the descendants of perhaps most of the people on the Ryukyu Islands, Japan will be the only source of national identity that they will ever have. It is perhaps not surprising then, that the majority of the people of Ryukyu never sought independence after the American occupation.

This is not to say that the rest of Japan was much different. Indeed, one of the first acts of the new Meiji government was to send proselytizers to the four corners of the archipelago to tell the common folk that they were citizens of a country named Japan presided by a “Son of Heaven” who dwelt in Tokyo.

That must have been the case for the Korean serfs too, as well as the hereditary slaves and anyone else outside the yangban aristocracy there. Why then, do Koreans work so assiduously to align their national myths with China’s, when the experience of their forebears hade far more in common, if in the case of national subjugation with the Ryukyu Islands, if in the case of forced wartime labor or the comfort women with that of the people who called Taiwan or the Japanese archipelago home? I have some thoughts around this question too, but they are not yet gathered sufficiently to put them down in writing, even tentatively in blog-post form.

Cold Feet at MOFA regarding Abe-Putin Summit

A few days ago, I posted that the Abe-Putin summit later in the year would not be happening. According to today’s hardcopy Nikkei, MOFA agrees.  Look, if you think the US reaction to Prime Minister Abe’s December visit to the Yasukuni Shrine was bad, a Putin visit will be kiss-the-TPP-goodbye bad. The only question left is managing the retreat.

Matando o Messageiro?

Sim, e não.

Aqui.

Seriously, I’m now ready to believe that Dilma will be first past the post after all.

China and its “Fishermen”

At first, I was mystified when a gaggle of Chinese fishing boats circled and rammed a Vietnamese fishing boat that had come too close to the Chinese oil rig planted near the Paracel Islands. So what in the world were fishing boats doing protecting an oil rig? But then, the hard-copy Yomiuri printed a detailed story last month, complete with interviews, on how Chinese fishing boats and their crew had been recruited as part-time surveillance and patrol forces by the maritime authorities. So that explains that… as well as the Japanese donation of five used fishing boats to Vietnam, who will convert them to coast guard vessels.

I’m not sure which is more alarming, the fact that the Chinese authorities are recruiting those unruly Chinese fishermen into paramilitary duties, or that they are freely letting Yomiuri visit and interview the fishermen.

Postscript to “Stephen Walt on WW I Reminds Me…”

I talked at some length about WW I and the Japanese experience, some of which was taken up in this Le Mondo article. I owe my thoughts to a conversation with Paul Furia, a young thoughtful French diplomat in Tokyo, and his impressions of the historical narrative at Yasukuni Shrine.

Three Thoughts on Argentine’s Latest Default

Caveat: I claim no expertise on restructuring, so the reason that no one seems to be talking about the following may be that I am just dead wrong. Well. IMHO…

1. You have to hand it to those hedge-fund holdouts, they’re going to make a killing in any of the first six scenarios here and, eventually, most likely in the seventh as well. Which means…

2. Restructuring sovereign debt has become much, much harder. You cannot foreclose on sovereigns; that used to limit the leverage that small creditors could bring to bear on the other creditors in the hopes that they would be bought out by the big boys to complete the deal. Now, holdouts will have power over the rest of the creditors for the duration of the deal. Of course in future bailouts, creditors could drop the “Rights Upon Future Offers (RUFO)” clause. But that incentivizes every small creditor and hedge fund to hovering in waiting for windfall profits after the restructuring deal, making it that much harder to convince a sufficient portion of the creditors to take haircuts to make a worthwhile deal.

3. The Argentinian finance minister may not have an exit plan, but he sure rocks sideburns. Straight out of the fifties.

Oh, Canada, US Beef? Just Chill

A bipartisan group of 140 US Congresspersons sent a letter to President Obama urging him “to pursue the TPP negotiations without any country, including Japan, Canada, or others, that proves unwilling to open its market in accordance with these high standards” with regard to agricultural products. This is a pre-election bluff of sorts. At the end of the day, the agricultural interests will accept what will be a significant improvement over the status quo; to do otherwise will put them at a competitive disadvantage against Australia and other agricultural exporters who sign FTAs with Japan. The key sentence here is: “We owe our farmers and ranchers the best deal possible.”

But before I go on, let me take note of the fact that this must the first time in human history that Japan and Canada has been mentioned in the same side of the same sentence in an agricultural conflict. Now back to the story…

Caveat, I only researched beef, but here’s what happened there. US beef had dominated the chilled beef import market, while Australia had to settle largely for the less lucrative frozen beef market. That all changed when the mad cow disease scare closed the Japanese market to US beef. Australian (and to a lesser extent New Zealand) beef quickly filled that vacuum until US beef was allowed back in (if I remember correctly) two stages. Australia quickly lost ground, and has continued to see modest slippage. The EPS deal that PMs Abe and Abbot struck essentially puts a floor under Australian beef (chilled being the more important) trade as the moving average for the three preceding years (if I remember correctly). That tariff quota is going to be used in combination with chilled beef coming in under higher tariffs (there’s a formula) to undercut US and others competitors. Australia essentially has a fallback position if the TPP negotiations collapse (or, unlikely though it seems, conclude in a deal without Japan) where it will be at a significant competitive advantage against the United States. Does that sound like “the best deal possible” for US “farmers and ranchers”? I didn’t think so.

The bottom line? A better deal than the Australians got. Don’t worry, Aussies, there must be an unwritten MFN clause written into that Abe-Abbot deal. And the Kiwis (and Mexicans) will be the collateral beneficiaries.

If anyone wants me to write a real report, you know where to find me.

Stephen Walt on WW I Reminds Me of the Dangers of a Free Lunch

Stephen Walt is one of my favorite—possibly the favorite—political scientists. In “It's Not the Guns of August -- It's the Trenches of October,” he asks why WW I lasted so long, and gives what to me seem to be a well-considered, fully worked out and concise answer. But I take issue with his following claim.

“…the only country that emerged from World War I in a stronger position than in 1914 was the United States of America.”

Wrong. So did Japan. If anything, “it fought [even further] from its own territory, and its losses were extremely light compared to the… major combatants [including the United States].”

This is not trivial, since this experience—or lack thereof—helped Japan willfully ignore the fact that imperialism had passed its consume-by date. 

You Talked the Talk, Mr. Kaieda, Now Talk the Talk

“There’s someone [Akihisa Nagashima, the DPJ defense hawk] who goes the United States and says something about collective self-defense that is completely different from what I’m saying. I want him to desist.”

Well said, Mr. Kaieda. Now, all you have to do is to tell it to his face.

Not That There’s Anything Wrong with Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, Mind You

Go back far enough, and most sovereign states have their roots in genocide and ethnic cleansing. Heck, the whole “New” World would look very different today without them. Not that our “Japanese” hands are clean; the Emishi owned half of Honshu during much of the First Millennium (and I haven’t even mentioned the Ainu yet).

So when, why, and how does “history” become history, so that “history” no longer is “history,” but just history?

The Japanese Sanctions, and Putin’s (Prospective) Tokyo Visit

In case anyone wants to know:

1)      Some individuals and organizations to be named later to be added to the list of asset freezes.

2)      Vote with the Europeans on any future EBRD loans to Russia.

3)      Restrictions on imports from Ukraine.

Now about those plans for Putin’s December visit to Tokyo…

“‘So far, nothing has been decided on President Putin’s visit. [This issue] will be considered in its entirety, taking into account the whole scope of factors. This is our point of view,’ Suga said at a news conference.”

Interesting. I can’t see the White House letting it happen, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Evidently, in the G-Zero world, you do your best to make sure that the friends of an enemy are also your friends. 

The Prime Minister’s Office, (Almost) Two Week Behind on Its Website

I go to PM Office website to look for English translation of Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga’s July 28 announcement of Japan’s additional sanctions on Russia in the wake of the MH17 shootdown, find that they’ve barely made it to July 18. On the other hand, the July 18 “Message from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the Occasion of ‘Marine Day’” is not available in Japanese (not that I really care about that one, but still).

The person responsible for the website should be shipped out to Kiev, and the person in charge of public communications for the PM Office should have his/her pay docked.

Abe Is No Spendthrift Where Defense Is Concerned (Still) and Other Stuff

Collective self-defense means lashing any overseas projections of Japanese military power even more tightly into the US hub-and-spoke network of security alliances. That understandably makes the regional hegemon aspirant whose only supporter in Japan seems to be an octogenarian expat from Australia—yes, the other modern state founded on genocide and ethnic cleansing, not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that—upset. But South Korea? Those people should be dancing in the streets by now for this yet another constraint on Japanese plans to retake the Korean Peninsula…except they aren’t…OMG DON’T TELL ME THEY’RE PLOTTING TO COAX CHINA (YET AGAIN) TO REPRISE THEIR JOINT 12^TH CENTURY DOUBLE-BARREL (FAILED) INVASION.

…wait till the Sankei Group hears about that…

Kidding. Actually, the South Koreans are afraid that Prime Minister Abe will team up with Kim Jong Un, who is on the outs with Xi Jinping, to overrun South Korea (Jong Un, we provide the robots, you provide the men). Now that explains why the Xi-Park relationship is heating up.

Oh, the Japanese defense budget. The ongoing Medium Term Defense Program, which runs through FY 2014-FY 2018, puts the total at 24.67 trillion yen, which runs to about a 0.8% increase per year, a figure that has been talked up by some analysts. But the budget is already up 2.8% year-on-year in FY 2014 at 4.8848 trillion. Barring an unforeseen turn of events, the annual budget would have to observe a near standstill notwithstanding inflation to bring the five-year budget under the 24.67 trillion threshold. The secret, in case you haven’t guessed it already, is that the target was expressed in real terms, with an implicit Abenomics, baked-in 2% inflation target. Factor in the 2% inflation target phased in over three years, and you should be able to work in a 2% increase per year in real terms.

Trust me, kids, it pays to do your own arithmetic.

Still, a 2% increase in real terms is pretty modest, peaking out at 200 billion yen per year—roughly 0.2% of the general budget—if and when the inflation target is met. And if anyone tells you that things could turn out to be otherwise, then that someone knows something that the rest of planet earth doesn’t know, since it was the Abe cabinet that authorized that Program. And Prime Minister Abe will be gone in the last year of the Program—if not earlier if the economy tanks and the LDP decides to throw him out before that. So much for the claims of the scaremongers.

Protecting the Guilty—on History Issues, What Else?

A post on a public forum included the following amusing proposition, which touched off the subsequent exchange between me and a real live human being, a friend whose name will go unmentioned here. (I’ve always wondered why you have to “protect the innocent.” After all, it is the guilty who need the most protection if they are to remain useful sources, no?)

“It is interesting to compare how Okinawa came to [be] incorporated into Japan with the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, abetted by a company of U.S. marines. On the centennial of this event, the U.S. issued a formal apology, in a joint resolution of Congress that was also signed by Bill Clinton. The apology ‘acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.’”

“Very interesting. So, if you really, really apologize, you don't have to give anything back? (Just let them have a few casinos, if they happen to be genocide/ethnic cleansing survivors?) I'm sure Mr. Abe will be delighted to hear that.”

“Yes you're right, but the key to this is the politics.  Some genocides have zero political cost because all the victims are dead. Other far less serious crimes generate problems due to the circumstances of the deed. I'm afraid that what the PM fails to see. It's not about morality, it's about efficiency.”

“‘...because all the victims are dead...’

Sufficient, but not necessary; you only have to own them. Americans don't have to worry about Native Americans because, hey, they're Americans. Likewise, the Chinese with their Uighurs/Tibetans et al, we Japanese and our Ainu, the Spaniards Basque... The list goes on.

Yes, the Spanish have to worry about the Catalonians and the British about the Scots--but they wouldn't have to if they were willing to kill them all. Israel and the Palestinians fall somewhere in between, like 19th century America.”

“Yes it helps to own the corpse. But generally if you've killed them all you end up owning their land.

As a dying Spanish general reportedly told the priest who asked him, while administering the last rites of the Church, to pardon all his enemies: ‘Father, I have no enemies.  I killed them all.’”

“‘Father, I have no enemies.  I killed them all.’

Kim Jong Un can only dream.”

Oh, Russia...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-17/malaysia-jet-shot-down-in-ukraine-near-russia-ifx-says.html

Postscript to CRI Panel Discussion

Not one of my best performances. Need to do this more often. Practice, practice, practice.

But did that commentator threaten Japan with war at the end? Fascinating note to end on. I remind myself that America’s friends did indeed suffer, but its enemies suffered mch, much more.

ROAD TO A “NORMAL” COUNTRY OR A POWERFUL COUNTRY

My crib sheet for China Radio International panel discussion, later in the day, just in case I fail to get my licks in. (The questions, in italics, are theirs. And yes, they’re having me back.)

What does this historic policy shift mean to Japan? And countries in the region?

(Okumura) For many listeners who are not familiar with the Japan issue, Japan has always been a “normal country”, actually a success story of being the second and then the third largest economy in the world. Why is there the pursuit of more room for military buildup?

I sometimes wonder if Mr. Abe hasn’t done too good a job of selling his national security program, raising expectations or fears depending on the beholder. After years of flat or declining military spending, it is going to go up 2% each year in real terms for five years—then Mr. Abe will be gone, and Japanese military spending will still remain at 1% of GDP, give or take a very small fraction, as it has been doing for ages. No, the real change is coming in Mr. Abe’s outreach to allies and other countries with whom he thinks Japan can engage in productive activities security-wise. That is most evident in the increasingly close ties with Australia. His determination to reinterpret Article 9 of the Japanese constitution to include collective self-defense can be seen in that light: Allowing the Japanese military to play a larger role in joint efforts with its allies—first and foremost the United States—where vital Japanese interests are at stake.

And what’s driving all this? Let’s be honest, it’s China. Let’s say that there are conflicting territorial and other sovereignty-related claims, and none of the parties are willing to yield. In that case, if a state wishes to change the status quo, it has two choices: take the matter to the International Court of Justice, or use force. China already had nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles; now it has an aircraft carrier. It has a massive maritime surveillance fleet. Budgets continue to grow by leaps and bounds. And it is aggressively pushing its claims. Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines are feeling the pressure. And Australia worries about its backyard.

(Chinese guest) If you take a look at the Germany and Italy, both defeated like Japan during the WWII, they realized the transformation to become a “normal country” long time ago. Isn’t it natural for Japan to become a normal country? From the point of view of Japan’s neighboring countries, like China and S. Korea, why is that hard to accept?

I’ll leave the conventional arguments to others, and offer a different perspective. There cannot be a starker difference between the reasons for China and South Korea in refusing to accept Japan as a “normal country.”

Take China. Japan is by far the most important security ally of the United States in the Asia-Pacific. Japan is the greatest military asset the United States has there. And it has been positioning itself closer and closer to the United States. If I were Mr. Xi Jinping, I would be very annoyed, and positively alarmed if Japan ever decided to play at the Australian level.

I don’t think that the South Koreans have ever gotten over the fact that it passed from being a subsidiary state of China to a subsidiary state, then territory, of Japan, then a sovereign state, all without putting up any kind of a fight. They would feel much more at ease with a normal Japan if they had been able to beat us to a pulp first.

So China has a real national interest in keeping Japan from becoming “normal” while South Korea has what is essentially a psychological issue that keeps it from accepting something that would actually be in their national interest.

According to Japan’s pacifist constitution, Japan is not allowed to have a national army. But the Self-defense forces are actually the army of the nation. So the normalization process has been started decades ago, right? It seems the normalization has always been about lifting the restraint on the military force? Is that the right impression?

Within reasonable limits, yes, that’s the right impression. Now nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, I think they would be beyond the pale of any reasonable definition of normalcy.

What is a fully normal country, in this case, Japan, like, as currently the US, with a military presence of some 50, 000 troops, enjoys the final say on military matters? When can we call Japan a normal country? When will Japan be accepted as a normal country by China and South Korea?

Actually, one definition of a “normal” country is a country that does its best to convince a more powerful country to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. People in Japan call that the “Yoshida Doctrine,” but it’s what the Europeans have been doing under the NATO umbrella all these years. In that sense, a “normal country,” at least where the developed countries are concerned these days, is one relying on a US military presence and therefore, as a practical matter, does not have the final say on military matters in its own territory. In that sense, Japan is a normal country. Collective self-defense is part of that normalcy. That should not be a concern for U.S. allies; for U.S. competitors, it should be.

REINTERPRETATION OF PACIFIST CONSTITUTION

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe took a detour to change the pacifist constitution by “re-interpreting” the war-renouncing articles. Why didn't he amend the constitution directly? Is there enough public support for the re-interpretation?

It’s very simple. He didn’t have the votes in the Diet to put it to the national referendum. As for public support, yes and no. Recent polls show strong majority support for the actual measures that Mr. Abe proposes under the banner of collective self-defense, but there are strong pluralities or majorities against the notion of collective self-defense itself.

When it comes to the opposition to the reinterpretation inside Japan, what’s their major concern?

The unreconstructed pacifist opposition is not the real concern for Mr. Abe. It’s the source of the collective self-dissonance in the people who support the specific and oppose the principle. Win them over completely, and Mr. Abe will have a popular majority. To make a generalization, I think that these people do not see where all this is leading to and are concerned with the fact that there could be more to this story than they’ve been told. And Mr. Abe and the LDP have given people some reason to harbor these concerns. Mr. Abe has his case cut out for him, between now and the 2015 regular Diet session, when he introduces legislation to implement the change. Personally, I believe that institutional constraints, not least the need to keep junior coalition partner Komeito onside, will keep any Japanese prime minister within very strict boundaries, but I only count for one vote.

What does the move mean exactly? Sending troops overseas to the help of US, an ally, and countries with close relationship with Japan, like the Philippines and Vietnam?

In short, no. Protecting foreign ships carrying Japanese citizens from war zones, clearing mines along vital sea lanes while allies do the real fighting, and anything else concrete that the Abe regime can convince Komeito to accept. My advice to people on all sides of this issue? Don’t make Komeito angry.

THE FEAR OF THE RISE OF MILITARISM

One of the concern people have is, in the wake of the reinterpretation, what’ll be next steps? Will there be gradual steps toward a final abandonment of the pacifist constitution? 

Everything depends on external factors. The greater the threat, the greater the momentum to relax the interpretation and, eventually, to amend the Constitution.

There’s fear in China at least that militarism in Japan may rise again. How likely is that scenario? Is that an overestimate of the current situation in Japan?

Japan has one tenth the population of China, spends 1% of an economic output that is smaller than China’s, and does not have nuclear weapons or effective means of their delivery. What the Chinese have to fear is a weak, isolated Japan, abandoned by the United States and feeling threatened, that decides to become North Korea on steroids. Now that’s a very low-probability outcome. But you asked for a scenario where militarism rises again in Japan.

Japan has been in close contact with the Philippines and Vietnam, both of which have territorial disputes with China. Is it likely that, following the reinterpretation, Japan may be able to build a loose military alliance with the two countries against China? 

It depends on what you mean by “loose military alliance,” and what China chooses to do. Would Japan selling coast guard patrol boats to Vietnam and the Philippines qualify as a “loose military alliance”? Most likely not. Would Japan and Australia selling jointly-developed submarines to those two nations qualify? Now the story begins to pick up. But that’s a good number of years in the future, and much depends on how China decides to deploy its military and quasi-military powers over the long-run. In the meantime, Russia is the one selling submarines to Vietnam.

REGIONAL IMPACT: CHINA & S. KOREA

Will there be an arms race in East Asia as a result of the new Japanese move? Will the still strong trade ties among countries be affected by their dispute? (China-Japan and that between S.Korea and Japan?) 

No. Will China’s military expenditures go up even more rapidly? I doubt it. Will South Korea’s? I doubt it. South Korea will buy anything from the United States that Japan does, but that’s the case regardless of the reinterpretation. And no, the trade ties will not be affected. Tourism is already down significantly, consumer purchases may be slightly affected, and Japanese firms may have a harder time securing government business in China, but I suspect that that’ll be it, at most.

Chinese President Xi Jinping paid it a visit to South Korea and the visit has been partly read as an effort by Beijing and Seoul in response to the Japanese move. What’s your take on that?

There are political benefits. And commercial ones too, for South Korea, I’ll wager. But remember, the greater geopolitical bone of contention in East Asia remains the future of North Korea. On that, China and South Korea can only share short-to-medium-term, tactical interests, if that.

The United States has been one of the countries that have welcomed the Japanese defense policy change. What’s their justification?

And everybody else in East and Southeast Asia except China and South Korea. And the bread crumbs leads right back to Beijing. Whether you agree with the legitimacy of the concerns or not, it’s the reality that China has to deal with.

The Strategic and Economic Dialogue between China and the US has just concluded in Beijing. How much a factor is Japan in Sino-US ties?

Japan is the most important ally of the United States in the Asia-Pacific. China cannot push Japan too far without incurring serious US resistance. To put it another way, how much of a factor is the Unites States in Japan-China ties? Very much, is what.

STABILITY OF ASIA 

Japanese PM Abe has said his door is open to dialogue. But with the latest move, the hope for a summit meeting between Chinese and Japanese leaders can’t be even further. Do you have expectation of the upcoming APEC meeting later this year in Beijing?

There are actually two factors that still pull in favor of an informal summit, a chat on the sidelines. China is the host. To refuse to see Mr. Abe would make Mr. Xi look small and defensive. Second, China appears to be concentrating its guns on Vietnam, which, unlike Japan and the Philippines, does not have the United States as an ally. Yet. An implicit offer of a truce from Mr. Xi to Mr. Abe might be in the works.

Both Japan and Germany were defeated in Second World War. But Germany has managed to win the trust and respect from its neighbors, while Japan remains embroiled in constant denial of history. Is there anything Japan may learn from Germany?

That it helps to be the biggest fish in the pond when all is said and done? The histories are so different that the comparison favored by so many conventional commentators merely clouds the picture. But I’ll say this. We Japanese see modern history through the lens of the Black ships rolling in, making demands, and Japan’s response to that. But for the Chinese, the Opium War is the seminal event, which I think is also a perfectly legitimate perspective. This means that the Japan-China War in 1894-95 has very different meanings for the two sides. But World War I changed the rules of the game for all the Great Powers except two: Japan and Germany. If the two nations could accept that the other side will have different narratives with regard to the Japan-China War and Japan reiterates its acceptance of responsibility for its post-WW I actions on that premise, then we will have gone a long way to solving the problem. I don’t think that Mr. Abe is there yet, much less Mr. Xi.

As it is said, we can’t change our neighbors, like it or not. At the end of the day, we need to come to terms with each other. Where to start if we still have hope to mend the fences and fix the problems between countries?

I already gave my views about modern history. Look a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that we Japanese always revered China. Japan is now the only country outside of China and Taiwan that actively uses Chinese characters, teaches Chinese literature as part of our compulsory classic education, and uses Chinese motifs in much of our historical and fantasy anime. And we adore Jackie Chan. Don’t let that affinity borne out of deep history go to waste

More from the Mines

The old man was reminiscing about his experiences immediately after the war. Discharged from the Imperial Army as a suicide-bomber trainee, he returned to school, graduated, very briefly went through a couple of jobs, then settled on a mining company “because the pay was good,” where he wound up spending the rest of his working life, mostly in accounting until he moved up in the ranks to become a senior executive. The conversation turned to forced wartime labor in the mines—I cannot remember why; perhaps the TV was on and there was something in the news—and you might be interested in a couple of things that he said, which I am paraphrasing from memory.

1. When the war ended, the Koreans left the mine immediately without collecting their wages and took the first ship back home. For years, the company kept the ledgers that recorded the wages outstanding, but it disposed of them when it moved offices.

2. I feel sorry for the Chinese prisoners who were brought to work the mine. Many fared poorly, and some died. A company employee (employees?) was executed as a war criminal as a result. He (they?) did what he (they?) could, but some prisoners had arrived already in terrible condition because they had been shipped over under terrible circumstances.

The Opposition Have Hook for Tokyo Assembly Election (2)

What happened after the event is well-chronicled in the Japanese media (Yomiuri providing the most extensive online coverage, followed by Sankei. No one came forth to admit to the heckling. On the 19^th, the day after, the Tokyo assemblywomen, all 25 of them, lodged a nonpartisan joint protest with the assembly chairman (Toshaki Yoshino, by custom on leave from the LDP while chair) to no avail. The next day, on the 20^th, the third day after the incident as required by law, Shiomura filed a formal grievance with the assembly chairman seeking the identification of the hecklers and their punishment. The chairman rejected the complaint, giving as the reason for his decision the fact that the assemblymen against whom the complaint was being lodged had not been identified. Meanwhile, the media was having a field day, among other things taking the question to the governor (who had been caught snickering along with a number of assemblymen)—and the LDP’s national leaders, who by then must have realized that they had a serious problem on their hands, not only because of the national media’s attention but more specifically because enhancing the socio-economic role of women had become Prime Minister Abe’s signature plank in the Abenomics’ third arrow.

By Monday, on the 23^rd, the fix—patch, really—was in. The secretary-general (Shigeru Uchida) of the Tokyo metropolitan LDP announced that Akihiro Suzuki, the assemblymen most widely accused on the internet, came forth to admit that he had been the one who had told Shiomura “Get married ASAP!” but denied that he had made the other comment. The same day, the assemblyman visited Shiomura, apologized to her in a media event, and resigned from the LDP (but not the assembly).

Two days later, on the 25^th, the last day of the assembly session, the plenary:

a) adopted a resolution put forth mainly by the LDP and Komeito expressing determination to “work to regain trust and prevent recurrence”;

b) rejected a motion from the Communist Party seeking the culprit’s resignation from the  assembly;

c) rejected a motion from the Your Party (Shiomura’s affiliation) and DPJ (strange bedfellows at the national level, but not that surprising locally) beseeching the other heckler to come forth; and

d) rejected a final motion from the Communist Party seeking an apology from the culprit.

And the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly went into recess.

There’s an interesting damage control story here, which I will take a look at. For the whole sequence would be trivial—just another one of those weird-Japan stories that has graced the pages of WaPo and NYT over the years—if it were not for the potential ramifications for national politics, which I think that there is a good chance of becoming evident next year. There’s also a sidebar around the deep background behind the heckling, which I might take a stab at.

…to be continued.

The Opposition Have Hook for Tokyo Assembly Election (1)

As John Campbell reminded me, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up, and I guess that was why I just knew this story was going to blow up. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

June 18, the Budget Committee of the Metropolitan Tokyo Assembly is in session. Your Party Assemblywoman Ayaka Shiomura (35) is directing questions toward the prefectural administration concerning its support on pregnancy and maternity when multiple voices from the LDP wing are heard yelling “Get married ASAP!” and “You can’t have children?” Now, heckling is one of the several parliamentarian traditions that we inherited from the Anglos, but this went beyond the pale. And this is the one point in the story arc where contingency played a part. For if Ms. Shiomura had stopped right there, glared at the LDP section and called out the hecklers, announcing that she would not continue with the questions until the culprits had come forth—I’m casting Margaret Thatcher in this role—the committee would have come to a halt, party leaders would have conferred, and the hecklers would have been forced to come forth and apologize and be appropriately censured, and the whole incident would have blown over, with maybe a report on the mostly neglected reports on the local scene pages of the national papers. But she didn’t. Instead, she grimly soldiered on even as tears welled up in her eyes. It was only after the Q&A session that she sought recourse against the LDP. And that was when human nature took over, and the Tokyo metropolitan LDP crapped its pants and threw it up against the fan.

The Japan Times-SHIMBUN?!?!?

I looked for the English version of a Sankei editorial and came across the masthead/nameplate The Japan Times-SHIMBUN. I’ve heard that opposites attract, but this is ridiculous.

Not Quite Separate, Not Quite Equal: The Other “Japanese” during WW II

Able-bodied Korean men were shipped out to the Japanese archipelago to work in the mines and factories there during WW II. Read these first-person accounts by others who was there, a Japanese high school student who were also dispatched, together with his entire class, to work alongside the Korean men in iron mines. The two groups did work together in the open pit mine, and did engage in some fraternizing. However, at the underground mine, it was the Koreans who unhappily worked in the shafts, while the students worked aboveground transporting the ore.

The Koreans differed from the students in two other ways. First, they received wages. Koreans acknowledged this in the lawsuits, where the plaintiffs demanded unpaid back wages, among other things. Second, they had an out. They could volunteer to serve in the Imperial Army; after all, they were Japanese citizens. Not many did, of course, as the small number of ethnic Koreans enshrined in Yasukuni attests. This also meant, though, that they were better off than the typical able-bodied Japanese-Japanese male, who, if given the choice, would surely have elected to serve the war effort from behind.

How were working conditions like for the Koreans? If the open-pit and underground narratives are any indication, they varied significantly with the circumstances—just like the experiences of the soldiers in the Imperial Army. In one example chronicled by the dreaded Special Police of all people, 292 of the 383 Koreans who had been conscripted to work in a nickel mine had run away. The officer making the report complained that the Koreans were being taken in by Japanese businesses, who apparently were offering better working conditions than the mine.

And where there are war efforts and able-bodied males, there are bound to be “comfort women”; the Japanese mines and factories were no exception. Perhaps the high school students were too naïve to notice, but a pro-Korean advocacy web site takes note of their existence on two occasions, 40 Korean women and three Japanese women respectively, both apparently servicing Korean laborers.

I’ll leave it at that for now.