The White Peril 白禍

The Japanese government publicized a new defense outline, including a rejiggering of the mission of the SDF, Friday. The Yomiuri's English article is ineptly translated but gives good background; the Asahi's English article gives more information about the outline itself. The new outline stresses that flexibility and resilience (not to mention missiles, which the LDP's coalition partner the New Komeito has not been keen on) will be key elements in the portfolio of possible responses to terrorist and military threats from here on. It also breaks new ground by naming names: China and North Korea are referred to as potential threats, and the Middle East is deemed a key strategic region with respect to Japan's defense. The old assumption that SDF activity would be limited to reactions to threats in or very close to Japanese territory is gone. And a good thing, too. The last time the government updated its SDF mission statement was to deal with the end of the Cold War, nine years ago. The world is a different place--or rather, we now recognize how different it is.

On the other hand, the head of the SDF announced this weekend that if the situation in Iraq becomes too dangerous, the non-combat SDF personnel, whose deployment there has been extended for a year, will be pulled out anyway. That's fair enough. They are not, after all, on a combat mission.

For a stretch there, I was remarking quite a bit on the repatriation of Hitomi Soga and the attempts to get her husband and daughters to Japan to live with her, largely because the developments weren't getting much play at home and it wasn't clear how things would pan out. I haven't lost interest in the story, but I was kind of wary of reading the Time interview with Charles Jenkins, largely because Nancy Gibbs is often the reporter Time gives big-deal human interest stories to, and for some reason, her approach really tends to annoy me. So I know every man, woman, child, and ficus tree in the Western world has read the thing by now, but for the sake of completism, I'll link it anyway.

It doesn't really contain a whole lot of new information about Jenkins's life in the DPRK. It was already known that he lived for years in a house with other American defectors and that they were tortured and assigned to beat each other up as punishment for disobedience. It was also known that the Jenkins-Soga family lived well for North Korea but was no more free than anyone else, and that their daughters were enrolled at the country's most prestigious foreign language institute, where they would probably be trained to do some sort of espionage work.

The part about how he first got into North Korean hands, however, is new. (At least, I haven't seen it narrated before.) While Jenkins is not an innocent party, his is a very sympathetic story, and it makes you glad that, at the very least, he and Soga had the comfort of falling in love with each other--I think I speculated a few months ago that theirs may have been a marriage of convenience, but it's nice to be proved wrong--and starting a family. And that they've now been able to come to Japan and bring their daughters with them.

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BTW, there's a push here in Japan again for sanctions against the DPRK, which has squandered the goodwill it earned by releasing Jenkins and (especially) his daughters by throwing together some bones and purporting that they're the remains of another abductee, Megumi Yokota. The cabinet is not all of one mind on the matter. A nice detail is that the Minister of the Environment (whose name--dead serious, here--means Lily Littlepond!) was one of those who said essentially, "If we cooperate with the US, we can fry their ass!"

This isn't a surprise, but it's official now: Japan will extend the Iraq deployment of SDF personnel beyond the original end date. The extension will be for a full year, to avoid further arguments between Koizumi's LDP and its fractious (as least on issues of war) coalition partner, the Shin-Komeito. Discussion over the proposed new amendment to the Japanese constitution, which would allow the SDF to participate in combat missions with allies for purposes of collective self-defense, will of course continue over the same period.

1 December 10:16 EST

Another on-going issue is Japan's bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council (those who like their kanji compounds long and turgid doubtlessly get off on seeing 国連安全保障理事会の常任理事国入り cropping up in news reports lately). In cooperation with other applicants, including Germany and Brazil, Japan has apparently solidified its actual proposal. Of course, Germany and Japan have more than just their increased prominence as world powers to think about:

Japan's Takashima welcomed the panel's recommendation that the so-called "enemy state" clause be removed from the U.N. Charter.

The clause, dating to World War Two, allows for military action against Japan and Germany, without any endorsement by the Security Council. Japan pays almost as much money as the United States into the United Nations' coffers.

Intriguingly, the Reuters article emphasizes the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs's push for full veto power for potential new permanent members. By contrast, the Nikkei report is focused more on the slight but perceptible softening of its public stance:

これまで求めてきた常任理事国の拒否権の扱いについては、「拒否権つき」に固執せず、柔軟に対応する考えに転じた。

On the subject of how the veto power of permanent members, which Japan had sought until very recently, will be dealt with, [the Japanese government] has shifted to a way of thinking that will respond more flexibly [to the wishes of the governing body] and away from its hard-line demand that veto power be attached to new permanent membership.

1 December 18:46 EST