The White Peril 白禍

Ooh. This I hadn't heard about the reunion of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins:

Jenkins told them that he had been set to take Soga to North Korea if they had met in Beijing, according to Japanese sources.

North Korea authorities had promised a car with a driver and increased food rations if he managed to take Soga to Pyongyang, the sources said.

But Jenkins didn't reveal how he planned to take Soga to Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoya said on Tuesday that Jenkins had agreed to meet with a U.S. defense counsel to discuss a possible court martial to settle changes against him.

That Jenkins was prepared for court martial, as conveyed to a relative who visited Japan last week, was on the news yesterday. What hadn't been confirmed that was Soga's instincts had been right about the meeting in Beijing. Good call. (And remind me again why a country that has to ration food is superior to anything?)

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And speaking of betrayals, yesterday, the Tokyo district court ordered a suspension of merger talks between Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group (Japanese, English). The merger would involve reneging on an agreement between UFJ and Sumitomo Trust and Banking (why not get all the behemoth financial institutions to join in the fun while we're at it, huh?) for Sumitomo to buy UFJ's trust bank. Sumitomo, justifiably unhappy, is suing.

This is a few days old, and I didn't know what to make of it because I couldn't find any quotation of what Armitage had actually said to Nakagawa. The English versions of the Japanese papers are now writing about it, but they still don't say what his words were:

Officials in the ruling coalition as well as the opposition camp clearly were caught off-guard by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's remark last week that war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution is becoming an obstacle to strengthening the Japan-U.S. alliance.

Since it was uttered by a senior Bush administration official known for his deep understanding of Japan, they fear it may negatively affect Japan-U.S. relations and ongoing debate in Japan on revisions to the Constitution.

Opposition members also were critical of Armitage for pressing Japan to revise the Constitution.

Hidenao Nakagawa, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's Diet Affairs Committee, shook up lawmakers after he relayed the gist of a meeting with Armitage in Washington last Wednesday.

Armitage also told Nakagawa that while Washington supported Tokyo's moves to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, any nation with that status must be ready to deploy military force in the interests of the international community. Unless it is prepared to do that, Armitage said it would be difficult for Japan to become a permanent member.

The revision being discussed would appear to be a rather modest one; it just makes it possible for the SDF to provide combat assistance in defense of an ally. As written, the constitution doesn't allow Japan to go into combat for anything but defense of Japan itself. Here's what Article 9 says:

1. 日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希求し、国権の発動たる戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこれを放棄する。
2. 前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持しない。国の交戦権は、これを認めない。

1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceeding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

The "means of settling international disputes" is the part that's interpreted conservatively right now. I haven't seen anything to indicate what verbal formulation would be used for the amendment, so it may not have been put together yet, but everything the Koizumi administration (which is proposing it) says indicates that it would apply only to common defense agreements with allies. In the course of arguing for such an amendment, he has, naturally, pointed out that US armed forces personnel already defend Japan.

The PRC has been little mentioned in the most recent discussions on this point--at least, that I've seen--but as you may surmise, Beijing isn't exactly champing at the bit for an opportunity to welcome a Japan with the constitutional permission to project force as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

So yet again, the War on Terrorism is putting predictable stress on all kinds of tensely-balanced relationships in the Asia-Pacific region. If the push to amend the Japanese constitution remains front and center, we'll have long-time animosities surfacing in a snaky line from Australia and the Philippines northward through Japan and Russia. It ain't just vulcanism and plate tectonics making the Pacific Rim hot and frictive anymore.

Not that it ever was.

Those following the five-way diplomatic tug-of-war over the family of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins probably know already that they're...well, I was going to say "back in Japan, " but only Soga herself had been to Japan before. What Jenkins feared, and the Japanese government tried to avoid, has happened: the US government has at least preliminarily made moves to have him extradited so he can be charged as an armed forces deserter. The initial family reunion took place in Indonesia--Soga flew from here, and Jenkins and their two daughters from the DPRK--because Washington and Jakarta don't have a mutual extradition treaty (if that's what it's called).

But Jenkins has serious health problems and needs surgery that he had to come to Japan for, so he, Soga, and their two daughters flew in yesterday. NNN (the Japanese equivalent of CNN, sort of) followed their bus from the airport to one of Tokyo's research hospitals as if it were OJ's van. Atsushi, who's home for the bank holiday weekend, glanced up at a close-up of the family's caravan and deadpanned, "The government put them on a Mitsubishi Fuso bus? Great. At least they're headed for the hospital already."

The two daughters are 18 and 21, and much of the news coverage has focused on speculating what life will be like for them here. Me, I speculate that whatever happened to them would scramble their circuits. They grew up, after all, half-Japanese and half-American in an affluent family in North Korea. So both their parents were of intensely hated enemy peoples; their mother had been snatched from her home country when she was their age now. They were among the select families well-positioned enough to live relatively affluent lives in Pyongyang, and who knows whether they know what's been going on in the countryside for the last decade or so. The people they meet in Japan may know more about the famines than they do. At least for now, the whole family is here. Now we just need to find out what happened to the half-dozen abductees the DPRK has coolly failed to account for.