Who's afraid of the conservatives?

Yamasaki Taku, perhaps the leader of the LDP's remaining doves, spoke at a Genron NPO meeting Thursday afternoon at which he addressed Murata Ryohei's revelations of the secret deal between the US and Japan that permitted the US to "introduce" nuclear weapons to Japan. (Previously discussed in this post.)

"It is appropriate to approve this kind of action for US deterrent power," he said, in light of the nuclear standoff with North Korea, this kind of action being a revision of the non-nuclear principles to permit explicitly the introduction of US nuclear weapons into Japan as in the 1960 secret agreement.

Yamasaki is no pacifist, so this statement is not exactly a bombshell, but it does suggest that there is more to this debate than suggested in Armchair Asia's discussion of Murata's revelations. The anonymous author of Armchair Asia outlines Murata's conservative motives in this post, arguing, "In reality, it is part of a convoluted Rightist strategy to repeal Article 9 and create a military independent of the United States."

I do not disagree that Murata has a number of affiliations that strongly suggest his political leanings. The Shokun! article cited in the initial post — Shokun! obviously triggers various red flags — uses a number of conservative code words, "pride," "independent country," and the like. A subsequent post includes a translation of an op-ed by Okazaki Hisahiko, the notoriously hawkish Foreign Ministry OB who was once known as "Abe's brain," defending Murata's actions. (Available in Japanese here.)

But so what? Why should it matter that Murata is a conservative nationalist? And why should it matter why he decided to reveal the secret agreement (or why Okazaki has defended him)? After watching the Abe government blow up, it is hard to muster up the same concern about the influence of the conservatives. The author writes that of how Murata's remarks will be used by those "who want to use any means to repeal Article 9 and advance Japan's rearmament." Events seem to have taken care of both causes. As I have written previously, the economic crisis has greatly diminished the power of the conservatives even within the LDP, to the point that constitution revision might not even be included in the LDP's manifesto this year (if the LDP ever gets around to writing one).

Is Article 9 really at risk? Even in the best of times, it was unlikely that the conservatives would get what they wanted on Article 9. Oh sure, they could get the article revised, but the need to assemble two-thirds of the members of both houses plus fifty percent plus one of the Japanese public would guarantee that the article would be amended but not abandoned. Revision would likely shift the yardsticks, ratifying changes that have been made that appear to depart from the letter of the law, without removing all limitations on Japanese security policy. And, incidentally, I see no problems with revision of this sort. No document drafted by human hands is beyond revision. My problem is with those obsessed with revision, like Abe Shinzō, not revision itself.

In any case, with the LDP in its death throes, it bears mentioning that constitution revision is even less likely under a DPJ-led government in coalition with the SDPJ. A DPJ government is likely to take its cue from public opinion polls that show the percentage of respondents interested in constitution to be under five percent. Raising constitution revision would only serve to weaken the coalition and sow dissent within the LDP, while strengthening an opposition LDP.

The same goes for "rearmament," the second concern voiced by the author of Armchair Asia. The conservatives have been ascendant for roughly the same period that Japan has let its defense spending stagnate, which suggests, of course, that for all their rhetorical might their reach exceeds their grasp. Their reach will only decline further should the LDP lose power this year. They have allies in the DPJ, but if the DPJ is able to deliver on its plans for a government that unifies cabinet and party, conservatives like Maehara Seiji will find themselves straitjacketed by government service. And there is no chance that a DPJ government elected on a platform of Seikatsu dai-ichi would, upon taking power, proceed to channel significant sums of money into defense spending. Elected on a platform stressing butter, butter, butter and facing skyrocketing pensions costs, it is highly unlikely that the DPJ will decide to invest in guns once in office.

There may be more to rearmament than defense spending, but as with some limited form of constitution revision, what is the problem with Japan doing incrementally more without drastically increasing its spending?

To conclude a discussion that has run longer than I intended, the conservatives should be challenged but their strength and influence should not be exaggerated. And if Ambassador Okazaki wants an open debate, then someone in Japan ought to give him his debate.

Meanwhile, as I wrote in my original post on Murata, I think that whatever his motive, it is good that the Japanese government will be forced to address the role of nuclear weapons in the US-Japan relationship openly. It is entirely possible that the Japanese public — with a nuclear North Korea next door — will recognize a revision of the non-nuclear principles that explicitly permits the US to do what it has been doing all along will strengthen Japan's security. Despite the wishes of the conservatives, the public isn't exactly pressing for Japanese nuclear weapons as a substitute for US nuclear weapons.

It is encouraging that the two governments will hold a working-level meeting this month to discuss the nuclear umbrella, a discussion that is long overdue. One meeting will not resolve the paradox of Japan's trying to be the world's conscience on nuclear weapons while being defended by US nuclear weapons but it will at least help call attention to the paradox and force the Japanese public and their representatives to address it. The US should not be forced into a position where it would have to use nukes to defend Japan (at the behest of its elites) even as the Japanese public condemns the US. Explicitly permitting US nuclear weapons in Japan would certainly help make both countries responsible.

Koike versus the "soft liners"

On Tuesday, Koike Yuriko, former defense minister and aspirant to the LDP presidency, announced her resignation as chair of the LDP's special committee on base countermeasures.

She told the media that her resignation was intended as a protest against the decision to soften the language on preemption in the LDP Policy Research Council's defense division in the recommendations for this year's National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) sent to Prime Minister Asō Tarō this month. She sees the longstanding doctrine of "nonaggressive defense" as injurious to the national defense, unacceptably tying the government's hands in addressing threats to Japanese national security.

Koike has a point: if Japan is to acquire the capabilities to strike at "enemy bases," it might as well be straightforward about the circumstances in which it intends to use said capabilities. What is the deterrent value, after all, of capabilities that Japan may or may not use if faced with an imminent missile launch?

This feud may be indicative of what I thought the response to the remarks (mentioned here) by Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to Japan, would be among LDP members. While it is unclear at what point the language was softened to rule out preemptive strikes even while calling for capabilities to strike enemy bases, Ambassador Cui's remarks surely reinforced concerns by LDP members like Yamasaki Taku that Japan must be careful about sending the wrong signals abroad — while reinforcing the resolve of hawks like Koike who unabashedly want Japan to be ready and able to carry out preemptive strikes.

Naturally there is also the question of Koike hopes to achieve by resigning her post in this fashion. She has reinserted herself into the discussion of a hot-button issue just as the Asō government has entered into what might be its endgame. She has taken a hardline position on an issue of prime importance to Asō's conservative backers, perhaps in hope of prying their support away should the prime minister be forced out before an election. Of course, I am not questioning the sincerity of her beliefs — just the timing and form of her protest.

It's a small step, but it could be an important one. If Asō does not survive long enough to lead the LDP into the general election, the conservatives might reason that backing Koike is a way to ensure that their approach to North Korea and national security generally enjoy top priority in the LDP's election campaign — while allowing Koike to take the fall should the LDP lose disastrously in the general election. (Of course, I remain skeptical that the prime minister's critics will be able to force him out before a general election.)

Meanwhile, I am curious about the political salience of the debate over preemption in the LDP. Curiously, I have yet to see a single poll that asked respondents for their opinion on the idea of preemptive strikes and the acquisition of capabilities in order to carry out attacks on North Korean bases. I suspect that there's little interest in the issue as a priority, especially if respondents were informed that acquiring new capabilities would entail greater defense spending, but I am keen to see some data on this question. If a poll has asked this question and I've missed it, do send it my way. Otherwise, the question remains: why no polling on preemption?

There is another question in the preemption debate that advocates like Koike have not addressed forthrightly. Can Japan actually preempt a possible North Korean attack? Jiji calls attention to a recent report by the International Crisis Group that suggests that North Korea has an estimated 320 Rodong intermediate range ballistic missiles on mobile launchers directed at Japan, exceeding the previous estimate of 200. Would Japan be able to find these missiles, let alone destroy them? Have Koike and other hawks made an honest assessment of what capabilities Japan will realistically need to possess in order to carry out this mission? If Japan is to have a proper debate about preemption versus deterrence, the advocates of preemption ought to be honest about what the JSDF would need to possess — and what such an arms program would cost.

For now, all I see is posturing from politicians like Koike about how Japan lacks a "true national defense."

A reply to Randy Waterhouse on balancing

Randy Waterhouse graciously addressed some points I raised in response to his discussion of Japanese balancing behavior, and I would like to respond in turn.

Although before I do, I must add that I like the Stephensonian moniker.

1 and 2) I think what we're dealing with here is the difference between balancing as a description of behavior intended to counter or neutralize visible threats to a state's security and balancing as the process by which the structure of international system changes. Japan may be engaged in the former in regard to North Korea and the latter in regard to China. There may be some overlap, but perhaps not as much as meets the eye. (Although any legal or constitutional changes that grow out of the North Korean threat would undoubtedly influence balancing against China.) For example, Japan has little reason to ramp up military spending to neutralize the threat posed by North Korea. The debate is over whether passive or deterrent defense is adequate to meet the threat posed by North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, or whether Japan needs to consider preemptive defense. Arguably meeting the North Korea challenge does not require all-out mobilization, a comprehensive change in how Japan mobilizes national resources in response to external threats. The debate over how to deal with the North Korean threat is obviously connected with the debate over how to deal with a rising China, but the question is how these two debates are connected.

One connection is simply that Japanese hawks are not making clear distinctions between North Korea and China when making their case. I figured that Waterhouse and I agree on the importance of China for Japanese balancing behavior over the long term, but my point was that China may play a more prominent role in Japanese debates about balancing in the near term than I read his post as arguing. After all, Waterhouse wrote of "the lack of bold, provocative military signals from China of late," which may be true in an objective sense, but from the perspective of Japanese elites arguing for balancing behavior of one form or another, China has done plenty to merit more balancing on Japan's part, whether by spending more on its military or by sending the PLA Navy to waters ever further from China (and by acting with greater assertiveness closer to China). Arguments about China may carry less weight than arguments rooted in meeting the North Korean threat, but some elites are making arguments about the China threat. It may not be easy to separate the two: national security hawks are trying to create a climate of uncertainty in order to sell their policies, and they are willing to use any external threat at hand to make their case. North Korea may provide a particular perturbation — but the sensitivity of elites and public to a perturbation may have as much to do with worrying signals from China as with North Korean behavior.

3) Just to build on a point here, there are a number of different ways to think about post-cold war changes to the US-Japan alliance. External balancing against a long-term threat may be the most likely explanation, but there are other plausible explanations, whether domestic politics or a structural explanation rooted less in preparations for a rising China than in the impact of unipolarity of the US alliances that were the legacy of the cold war. It is entirely possible that we may be entering a period in which Japan chafes at a security policy overly centered on the alliance and instead opts for Samuels's "Goldilocks consensus," a grand strategy that features a more even mix of external and internal balancing, maximizing Japan's options in a changing regional security environment. (Of course, if US power declines markedly relative to China's, structural realism would presumably predict greater incentives for external balancing by both the US and Japan and more internal balancing by Japan to compensate for US relative decline.)

Is Japan balancing?

"Randy Waterhouse," the nom de blog of a contributor to the political science group blog Duck of Minerva, looks to Japan in a discussion of when and why states balance against other states.

As I wrote in April, the lack of Japanese balancing behavior is the great puzzle in Japanese security policy since the end of the cold war. Waterhouse considers the possibility that North Korea — as opposed to China — is leading Japan to pursue a balancing strategy. He considers threatening signals from North Korea as a source of "perturbations" (borrowing a concept from Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies) that will trigger Japanese balancing behavior against North Korea.

There are a few problems with this argument. First, while the DPRK is in a sense be "revisionist" in that it wholly rejects the prevailing international order, as a small, impoverished, isolated country dependent on its neighbors to feed its people and having little more than its nuclear weapons, its missiles, and its wits to depend on for survival it hardly constitutes a revisionist power in the sense outlined by Robert Gilpin. North Korea may be revisionist in rhetoric, but do states balance against rhetoric or reach? The idea — implied but not explicitly stated by Waterhouse — is that Japanese conservatives can balance against the state that may one day become a revisionist power if it is not one already (see Alastair Iain Johnston's consideration of this question here) by using the DPRK as a stand-in for China. Policy decisions made to cope with North Korea could serve as a "down payment" on a balancing strategy against China. Or not: as Waterhouse notes, there is a difference between reactionary balancing and long-term balancing. And while Waterhouse argues that elites interested in a more robust security posture are treating North Korea's recent behavior as a catalyst, certain conservatives make no secret of their desire to balance against China. A recent Sankei editorial on the LDP subcommittee's draft NDPG points to China's rise to second place in the SIPRI index of defense spending to make the case for reversing cuts in Japan's defense spending, a call echoed in an op-ed by Sassa Atsuyuki, the first head of the Cabinet's national security office, who calls for an increase in defense spending to 1.5% of GDP (but does not mention China). Japan's desire to purchase the F-22 is explicitly connected to a desire to balance against Chinese airpower. Despite the positive developments in the Sino-Japanese relationship, the China threat thesis is alive and well among the Japanese elites arguing for a more robust security policy. North Korea's actions may help make the case for balancing, but that does not mean that elites using Chinese behavior too.

There is a bigger question in this debate, namely how do we know when a state is balancing? What mix of policies would constitute a Japanese balancing strategy? Waterhouse essentially assumes that any change to the status quo in Japanese security policy would constitute balancing. But there has been plenty of change in Japanese security policy in the past twenty years, but it is debateable whether these changes constitute balancing. Japan may have opted for some balancing: the decision made by Japanese officials in 1994-1995 to keep the US-Japan alliance at the center of Japanese security policy (and to "strengthen" the alliance) was a response to the uncertainty surrounding China's rise, although US and Japanese officials were careful to not mention China when discussing the redefinition of the alliance. In other words, it is possible to argue that Japan has opted for external balancing over internal balancing, which would entail sweeping legal changes and (presumably) an expensive rearmament program that would give Japan greater autonomy from the US to cope with an uncertain regional environment. Nearly a decade of stagnant defense spending in areas aside from missile defense and host nation support — i.e., defense spending directly connected to the alliance — means that autonomy has become increasingly costly for Japan, which may in turn explain why Japanese elites are especially sensitive to recent signals emanating from Washington.

But that being said, there are other explanations for Japan's decision to embrace the alliance that have less to do with balancing and more to do with institutionalist arguments: Japan opted to renew the alliance after the cold war because there was a certain degree of path dependency. While it appeared as if Japan was making a choice between the US-Japan alliance, greater autonomy, and greater independence within the UN and other multilateral organizations, the choice may have been a false one. Japan may have reaffirmed the alliance simply because the balance of power among domestic actors was overwhelmingly in favor of doing so, with little thought to the strategic implications of this choice versus other choices.

Is this about to change? With the defense division of the LDP's Policy Research Council approving its subcommittee's draft NDPG that recommends the acquisition of preemptive strike capabilities — most notably cruise missiles — it is possible that Japan is preparing to shift from external balancing to internal balancing. Prime Minister Aso is favorably disposed to the proposal, although his defense minister, Hamada Yasukazu, is more cautious (triggering two blog posts from Komori Yoshihisa criticizing Hamada for being too soft). But Hamada's caution suggests that there may be skeptics within the LDP who could prevent the government from making a radical break with the status quo. (And there's a strong possibility that the LDP will not be in power long enough to oversee the publication of the new NDPG in December.)

In short, Waterhouse is right to look at domestic politics as a source of Japanese balancing behavior, but he understates the extent to which Japan may have already opted for a particular balancing strategy via the US-Japan alliance, and the extent to which domestic politics constrains political actors who want Japan to embark on a substantial and expensive rearmament program.

Pushback on preemption

Prime Minister Asō Tarō and a group of national security hawks in the LDP may be pushing hard for the inclusion of preemptive capabilities in this year's National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG), but it appears that while there is little opposition from within the LDP, the Aso government may yet have some difficulty getting its way on preemption.

The LDP's campaign for preemptive capabilities is part of a broader national security program compiled by a subcommittee of the national defense division of the party's Policy Research Council. In addition to the acquisition of preemptive defense capabilities — which the subcommittee maintains is critical to strengthening the US-Japan alliance — the draft calls for reversing cuts in defense spending, permitting collective self-defense, creating a "Japanese-style" National Security Council, relaxing the three arms-exporting principles to permit joint development, and altering Japan's policies on the defense of outlying islands.

Not surprisingly, Komeitō's leadership has aired its skepticism about both preemptive defense and a new law in the works on the inspection of North Korean vessels.

Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to Japan, criticized the calls for preemptive defense as being unhelpful for resolving the North Korean crisis.

It is unlikely that Ambassador Cui's criticism will do much to stymie the debate on preemptive self-defense — it is possible that he might convince some risk-averse LDP members to question the wisdom of significant changes to Japan's security posture, although, at the same time, his interjection has undoubtedly stiffened the resolve of the LDP's hawks. Komeitō opposition is more significant, at least in terms of having the power to prevent the government from embracing the proposed national defense program or, should Asō embrace the program, soften it considerably. Does Komeitō need to do anything more than remind the LDP of the importance of its votes in the forthcoming election in order to receive concessions from the LDP on security policy?

The question is whether public attitudes towards North Korea have shifted markedly since 2007. In 2007, then-Prime Minister Abe Shinzō sought to implement a national security agenda similarly to the agenda now under consideration. Much like today, Abe could appeal to "evidence" of a North Korean threat in the form of North Korea's missile and nuclear tests, at that time the July 2006 missile launches and the October 2006 nuclear test. He had control of both houses and was largely indifferent to Komeitō's interests. And yet he was unable to do anything more than convene an advisory group on collective self-defense, failed to pass legislation that would create a Japanese-style NSC, failed to reverse the decline in defense spending, and did nothing about preemptive self-defense capabilities. If Abe could not succeed in implementing this program, it seems highly unlikely that Asō will succeed where Abe failed, certainly not without an extraordinary and unexpected victory in this year's election.

The question is whether North Korea's latest actions have produced a tipping point in the Japanese public's approach to North Korea. Have North Korea's second launch over Japan and second nuclear test — combined with unease about the US-Japan alliance following the Bush administration's about-face on North Korea — made the Japanese public more favorably disposed to the conservative national security agenda?

Amazingly, I have yet to see a public opinion poll that has asked respondents about preemptive self-defense capabilities and an accompanying increase in defense spending, but I suspect that elite opinion is more favorably predisposed to preemptive self-defense and the other planks of the LDP subcommittee's program than the public at large. The latest public opinion polls on the alliance — mentioned in this post — recorded growing public unease about the alliance, but it is unlikely that public unease matches that found among elites. Is the public so much more afraid of North Korea and abandonment by the US in the face of North Korean threats today than in October 2006 that it is willing to sign off on the conservative agenda? Not, I suspect, if the public sees the price tag.

Could the Asō government tie the hands of a potential DPJ government on this question? I suspect not. If the government takes steps in the waning weeks of its tenure to include subcommittee's program into the NDPG, the DPJ may be inclined to delay the NDPG in order to start from scratch, so to leave its own stamp on the program.

Of course, the DPJ may in fact be open to preemption, if not to greater military spending in the near term. Autonomous defense capabilities geared to preemptive self-defense flow logically from the DPJ's rhetoric on defense and the US-Japan alliance.

But ultimately the DPJ will be bound by the public — and the public may not be willing to commit to drastic changes in Japan's defense posture, North Korea's saber rattling and doubts about the US commitment notwithstanding. A DPJ-led government, desperate to consolidate its power and likely dependent on the SDPJ, will hardly be more able to implement far-reaching changes to Japanese security policy than Asō and the LDP, hobbled by intra-party divisions, its dependence on Komeitō, and dismal public approval figures.

It is far from inevitable that Asō and the hawks will get their way.

Separated by a common enemy

Already under consideration before North Korea's nuclear test last week, the LDP's push to include plans for an indigenous capability to strike North Korea to preempt an attack on Japan has picked up speed over the past week. On May 26th, Prime Minister Aso Taro reminded reporters that since 1955 preemptive self-defense has been considered legal. The same day a subcommittee of the defense division of the LDP's Policy Research Council approved a draft of proposals to include in this year's National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) that calls for preemptive strike capabilities, especially sea-launched cruise missiles. On the 28th, the prime minister once again asserted the legality of preemptive strikes, this time in proceedings in the Upper House Budget Committee.

In the midst of this debate, Mainichi called for a less passionate debate that acknowledges the risks associated with this step, including the feasibility of preemptive strikes against North Korea, the consequences for the US-Japan alliance, and the dangers of arms racing and security dilemmas in East Asia. I second Mainichi's concerns: there are a number of questions that advocates of preemptive strike capabilities have yet to answer, most notably the question of what independent Japanese strike capabilities add to US capabilities.

It now appears that the US government may be contributing to the debate over Japanese preemptive strike capabilities.

Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered a message to Japanese and South Korean elites worried about the sturdiness of the US commitment to its East Asian allies:

The Republic of Korea and Japan have since become economic powerhouses with modern, well-trained and equipped armed forces. They are more willing and able to take responsibility for their own defense and assume responsibility for collective security beyond their shores. As a result, we are making adjustments in each country to maintain a posture that is more appropriate to that of a partner, as opposed to a patron. Still, though, a partner fully prepared and able to carry out all – I repeat, all – of our alliance obligations.

This message is ambiguous, welcoming greater allied contributions while reaffirming the US role in defending its allies, especially via extended nuclear deterrence, but Sankei's Komori Yoshisa believes that there is more to the story. The Obama administration, he writes in an ecstatic post at his blog (if two exclamation points are any indication), has signed off on preemptive strike capabilities. His evidence is derived from interviews of Gates and Wallace Gregson, assistant secretary of defense for Asian-Pacific affairs by Asahi's Washington correspondent Kato Yoichi in which both officials appear to accept Japan's having the ability to strike at threats outside its borders. Gates's statement is vague, premised on the notion of "If Japan decides" to acquire more offensive capabilities, i.e. practicing what he has preached about the US being a partner instead of a patron. Gregson, while also reluctant to comment on what is a domestic matter for Japan, was open to a new division of labor between the US and Japan.

I appreciate that the US officials are refraining from overt interference in Japan's internal political discussions, but I think that the US has reasons to be concerned about this shift. (I also think that Komori is fishing for US support for his position. But a pair of quotes in an Asahi article do not a new policy make.)

Apart from the aforementioned reasons for skepticism about Japan's acquiring autonomous strike capabilities, there is another reason why the US should be concerned about this debate in Japan.

Arguably one reason for the difference in US and Japanese approaches to North Korea — apart from geography, the abductees, and domestic politics — is the US alliance with South Korea. Japan's North Korea policy can be conceived solely in terms of Japanese national interests, defending Japanese lives and property from the rogue state next door. The US approach to North Korea is broader. Not only is the US concerned about the threat posed to the US by the possibility of the transfer of nuclear materials, but it is worried to a lesser extent about the durability of the global non-proliferation regime. And it is not only concerned about the threat to Japanese security, but South Korean security as well.

The conflicting demands of the US-South Korea and US-Japan alliances are a source of turbulence in the US-Japan alliance. The US, legally committed to the defense of South Korea, has to think carefully about its words and actions vis-à-vis North Korea — indeed, the US is deterred from launching a preventive and perhaps a preemptive war against North Korea due to the threat posed by North Korean conventional capabilities to Seoul. This lends an air of restraint to US pronouncements on North Korea. As Sam Roggeveen writes, it is possible to read Gates's speech in Singapore as outlining a containment policy in recognition of the considerable obstacles in the way of denuclearization. It also bears recalling the decision by the US government ruling out in advance an attempt to shoot down North Korea's test rocket. That decision has been interpreted by Japanese elites as evidence of the shakiness of the US defense commitment. Maybe so, but it may be more appropriate to view the US not as lacking commitment to Japan's defense but having concerns greater than Japan's defense.

Which is why the US (and South Korea) should be concerned about Japan's acquiring independent preemptive strike capabilities. Japan, not having any alliance relationship with South Korea, will have no reason to take South Korea's security into consideration in confronting North Korea. If the Japanese government detects an imminent launch — with the autonomous surveillance capabilities that conservatives also wanted included in the NDPG — it will be able to act solely on the basis of the direct threat posed by North Korea's missiles to the Japanese homeland. It will not have to consider whether launching a preemptive strike will lead North Korea, fearing a mortal threat to the DPRK regime or perhaps not being able to identify the source of an attack, to lash out against South Korea. Unconstrained by broader regional commitments, Japan could use its new capabilities for "offensive defense" and in the process trigger a broader regional crisis — not out of a lust for conquest, but simply out of a desire to defend itself from an external threat.

This may be an unlikely scenario: after all, it is not clear that the NDPG will include plans for preemptive capabilities, and even if strike capabilities make their way into Japan's defense plans, they may amount to nothing more than a token force. And Japan may not be able to gather the necessary intelligence for attacks against North Korea's mobile launchers.

However unlikely, South Korea ought to reach out to Japan in order to close the gap, in effect forcing Japan to think about broader regional security when it considers the threat posed by North Korea. In other words, it is necessary for South Korea (and the US) to undo the damage done when the Japanese government decided to make recovering the abductees the central goal of Japan's North Korea policy. That decision produced a Japan solipsistic in its approach to North Korea, inclined to view North Korea through its distinct lens, barely considering the perspectives from which other countries have struggled to manage North Korea.

It is encouraging that the US, Japan, and South Korea had their first ever defense ministerial meeting in Singapore Friday. If Japan is to acquire its own strike capabilities, it has to be prepared to wield them responsibly, considering the consequences that saber rattling, to say nothing of preemptive strikes could have for other countries in the region. Regional security and stability is a Japanese national interest, even without formal alliance commitments in East Asia. Realizing that, perhaps Japan's leaders will become more appreciative of US efforts to uphold regional security — especially the defense of South Korea —and less unnerved by US restraint, in turn lessening the need for independent capabilities.

Party A vs. Party B

Maehara Seiji, the former DPJ president who has been viewed as a possible defector from the DPJ, said in a TV appearance Thursday evening that "even if the DPJ loses the election, it will absolutely not break apart." I have long been skeptical of the willingness of Maehara and his fellow conservatives to defect from the DPJ, particularly when the DPJ has been ahead in public opinion polls. Maehara's remarks are yet another reminder that the DPJ — often criticized as being as divided as the LDP — is more unified than the party's critics acknowledge. Moreover, it suggests that a political realignment after the general election is far from inevitable.

Rather what we are witnessing is simply part of the evolution of a mostly two-party system. A post at The Economist's Democracy in America blog is useful on this point.

Questioning the importance of a coherent governing philosophy for either the Republican or the Democratic Party, the anonymous blogger notes:

The American political system all but guarantees dominance by two stable parties over time, but there's no sound reason to think that two basic ideological frameworks adequately represent the diversity of citizens' political views, even in a very rough sense. And, of course, the actual platforms of the two 'modern' parties—which is to say, the parties boasting the names 'Republican' and 'Democratic'—have fluctuated wildly over time. What if we dispensed with any pretense of ideological content and simply branded them 'Party A' and 'Party B'?

Party A and Party B? That actually sounds like a fairly good description of the Japanese political system. Indeed, given the ideological polarization within American politics it is a better account of Japanese politics than American politics.

The DPJ is often criticized for being "LDP-lite," but that implies the LDP has a stable identity to which the DPJ can be compared. The LDP may be the world's most successful big-tent party, having succeeded in preserving an ideologically diverse coalition for more than a half century. Perhaps the key to its success has been that the ratio of pragmatic moderates (i.e., pork-barrellers) to ideologues has long been skewed in favor of the former. Whether this is still the case is an open question, but the LDP has succeeded by being less ideological than its rivals. The DPJ, like the LDP, has its share of ideologues — of the left and the right — but like the LDP it will enjoy more success the more it is "Party B" to the LDP's "Party A." Of course, the more success the DPJ has had at selling itself as "Party B" the more imperative it has been for the LDP to sell itself as "Party A." Thus past elections saw both parties trumpeting "reform" on their campaign posters. (Indeed, back when I was doing campaign work I remember seeing posters for LDP and DPJ candidates side by side, each poster proclaiming the candidate's commitment to 改革. Alas, no picture.) And this election will see the two parties committing over which is more sensitive to the concerns of the average citizen, which is more opposed to the consequences of the Koizumi reforms, which party offers the kinder, gentler reform package. Both parties promise to punish the bureaucracy. Both parties have punted on tax reform.

Party A The LDP will no doubt respond to this situation by borrowing from Karl Rove's 2004 strategy for the re-election of George W. Bush, using swine flu and North Korea's missile and nuclear weapons tests to appeal to voters' fears of an uncertain world — and suggest that now is no time to trust an untested, immature party like the DPJ with power. The LDP flirted with this approach in the 2007 upper house election, but as that election was not a general election, the fear card did not have the same salience. Hatoyama Kunio, minister of internal affairs and communication and brother of DPJ leader Yukio (and possibly friend of a friend of terrorists), said after North Korea's nuclear test this week that under the DPJ "the country cannot be protected." To make this argument he continued to cite Ozawa Ichiro's February remarks about one day reducing the US presence in Japan to the Seventh Fleet. No doubt we'll be hearing those remarks cited out of context up until the general election.

The fact that LDP officials keep referencing Ozawa's remarks may be evidence of how little the LDP has to gone on in trying to argue that electing the DPJ would be risky in these dangerous times. In reality, the DPJ has given remarkably little ammunition to the LDP: it is no less enthusiastic about recovering the abductees than the LDP, it has balanced criticism of China with outreach to Beijing, especially under Ozawa, and it is open to autonomous defense capabilities and, as mentioned in this post, preemptive strikes against North Korea. Nevertheless, the LDP will try to paint the DPJ as irresponsible, irresolute, and pacifistic when it comes to the defense of Japan.

If fear is not enough to win the election for the LDP, it will ultimately come down to intangibles, with the DPJ's benefiting from being just different enough from the LDP to unseat it from power. (Party B! The choice of a new generation?)

A perfect storm for security policy change?

The great puzzle in Japanese security policy is why despite the consensus within the LDP in favor of a more robust, independent security and persistent worries about North Korea and China among the public at large Japan has failed to spend more — or the same — on defense and made legal and doctrinal changes that would enable Japan to meet threats originating from its neighbors.

Will 2009 be a turning point at which Japan opts for a new security policy?

The response to North Korea's rocket launch has been revealing. As I have already discussed, LDP conservatives have responded to the launch by dusting off old proposals and pushing for them with renewed vigor. Abe Shinzo is back in the spotlight. The conservatives, marginalized when public discussion focused solely on the dismal state of the Japanese economy, have been experiencing a bit of a surge going into the Golden Week holiday.

Prime Minister Aso Taro is revisiting plans from the Abe administration to revise the constitutional interpretation prohibiting the exercise of the right of collective self-defense. On Thursday, Aso met with Yanai Shunji, who headed a private advisory group under Abe to consider the question of collective self-defense, to revisit the question in light of recent events. Aso has previously expressed his desire to tackle collective self-defense, but it appears that North Korea may have given him the opportunity to move forward with it.

He will have plenty of help from his conservative allies. On Saturday, Abe spoke in Aichi prefecture, where he stressed the importance of collective self-defense and called for including reinterpretation of the prohibition in the LDP's election manifesto this year. As is the standard line when talking about collective self-defense, Abe stressed that if Japan is unable to engage in collective self-defense, the alliance will be finished the moment North Korea fires a missile in the direction of the United States.

Of course, it is still an open question whether Japan would be able to shoot down a missile. And in the Obama administration's defense budget proposal, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will push for cuts in research into boost-phase intercept technology, in part because, as Nathan Hodge notes at Danger Room, Gates believes that midcourse and terminal phase missile defense systems are sound. In other words, at the same time that Gates has shrugged off the North Korean missile threat, Japanese conservatives are using the supposed threat to the US and the US-Japan alliance posed by North Korean missiles to move their agenda.

Meanwhile, other conservatives are using the US response to argue that instead of collective self-defense, Japan should be more focused on acquiring the capabilities necessary to defend itself. A recent Sakurai Yoshiko article from Shukan Daiyamondo, reprinted at her website, is a classic of the genre. Sakurai looks at Gates's nonchalance towards the North Korean launch as a signal to Japan that it is on its own. Therefore, "For defense procurement, Japan has until now consistently cut its defense budget by two percent a year. This must stop. We should quickly change course and increase the defense budget." This is a been a consistent theme in her writing, especially of late. Another article, this one in Shukan Shincho, covers much of the same ground but focuses more on how the US is moving closer to China and, by shifting its defense priorities (i.e., by cutting orders of the F-22), will leave Japan vulnerable to China's new model fighter jets. Japan, she argues, is in a tough spot as it picks a new fighter for the ASDF, this despite Japan's having no option to buy the F-22 in the first place — Japan would be in a tough spot regardless of US budgetary decisions. (Sakurai actually backs away from the argument that the US is somehow weaker militarily and focuses on the dangers of Obama's naivete.) Yet another article by Sakurai, this one in the current Shukan Daiyamondo, picks up where her Shincho article left off, castigating the Obama administration for its "unrealistic" China policy and complaining about nuclear disarmament and the F-22 cuts.

(Yes, the conservatives are obsessed with the F-22. This article by Noguchi Hiroyuki, a defense reporter for the Sankei Shimbun, lavishes praise on the F-22 in a manner surely unmatched by all but the US Air Force and Lockheed Martin. Noguchi's article contains many of the same complaints as Sakurai's articles, in particular complaints about the threat posed to Japan by the US government's love for China. Noguchi's article is also of note because he chides Gates for talking about the F-22 as a cold war program; the cold war in Asia, he says, never ended. Which is precisely how Japan's conservatives see Asia, despite economic interdependence with China that dwarfs anything seen during the cold war.)

This is all fairly typical coming from these sources. The difference is that now these calls for a more robust, autonomous Japanese security posture dovetail nicely with the push within the LDP, which in turn has benefited from the emergency drill conducted courtesy of North Korea earlier this month. We are seeing a concerted push by Japan's conservatives to make the case for bigger defense budgets, and, in the case of some of them, greater autonomy from the US. Surely China's fleet review this week will provide more grist for their mill, not unlike the current debate over defense policy in Australia.

The DPJ, it seems, does not want to be left behind in this discussion, and so Asao Keiichiro, the defense minister in the DPJ's next cabinet, on Saturday called for conventional capabilities that would enable Japan to strike North Korean launchers preemptively. (Full disclosure: I previously worked in Asao's office.)

I have no problem with Japan's having this discussion — at this point any discussion about security policy is meaningful. But there are a number of questions that none of Japan's jingoes have answered. For example, to Asao, Abe, Yamamoto Ichita, and the others who have used North Korea's launch to call for preemptive strike capabilities, what specifically do you envision for this role? And, as Jun Okumura asks, can Japan actually find and hit North Korea's mobile launchers? Have you at least considered the consequences of an independent preemptive strike capability for the alliance? By how much should the defense budget be increased? The Japanese people deserve to hear their answers to these questions. It's an election year, after all. It's also the year of the drafting of the latest National Defense Program Outline, which this debate will surely impact.

But I wish the debate wasn't so one-sided. I do wish there was someone willing to argue against the idea that East Asia is in the midst of a new cold war with China, with North Korea's being a sideshow to the main event. I wish there was someone of sufficient stature willing to flood the Japanese media space like Sakurai, except with nuanced arguments about the nature of the East Asian security environment and the "co-opetive" relationship most countries in the region have with China.

Nevertheless, I hope Japan has this discussion, and I hope that public pays attention to it. I'm skeptical that it will produce dramatic changes — there is that whole economic crisis after all — but the conservatives now enjoy the most favorable conditions in which to advance their arguments that they've enjoyed in years.

The LDP's loose lips

When Ozawa Ichiro suggested that at some unspecified point in the future the US forward-deployed forces in Japan might be reduced to the Seventh Fleet with Japan's taking greater responsibility for its own defense, he was greeted with opprobrium from LDP and government officials, who called him naive, unrealistic, and ignorant. Even Kevin Maher, the US consul general in Okinawa, weighed in, echoing LDP comments about Ozawa's ignorance of the complexities of the East Asia regional security environment. Judging by the response, it appeared as if Ozawa was a dangerous radical who, if elected, would single-handedly undermine the alliance and leave Japan defenseless in a dangerous neighborhood.

After watching the response from certain corners of the Japanese establishment to North Korea's rocket launch, when will Mr. Maher issue another warning to Japanese politicians for their dangerous rhetoric?

Over the past week, Japanese conservatives have used the fear roused by the North Korean launch to put one radical idea after another before the public, all of which amount to a giant vote of no-confidence in the US-Japan alliance. The same politicians who last month were condemning Ozawa for his naivete were rattling the saber at North Korea and in the process questioning whether the US is capable of defending Japan from its neighbors.

Some examples:

• Yamamoto Ichita and six other LDP members formed a study group for "thinking about strengthening deterrent capabilities against North Korea." The group wants the new National Defense Program Outline due at year's end to include some mention of possessing the capability to strike at bases in North Korea. The group also calls for lifting the restriction on collective self-defense, but the focus appears to be more on acquiring new capabilities than on bolstering the alliance. The other six members are Shimomura Hakubun (54), a four-term lower house member from Tokyo; Onodera Itsunori (48), a three-term member from Miyagi; Mizuno Kenichi (42), a four-term member from Chiba; Tsukada Ichiro (45), a first-term upper house member from Niigata; Suzuki Keisuke (32), a first-term PR member from Fukuoka; and Matsumoto Yohei (35), a first-term lower house member from Tokyo. There are certain points of commonality among these seven. Their study group memberships lie at the nexus of the Koizumian reformists and the Abe-Aso-Nakagawa (Shoichi) conservatives. Three belong to the "True Conservative Policy Research Group." The first-termers belong to the club of 83 or the conservative Tradition and Creation club. They occupy the younger half of the age spectrum, meaning they can look forward to inheriting the LDP. In Shimomura the group has a politician identified by Richard Samuels and Patrick Boyd as a future leader of the LDP. It may be a small group, but it is a significant group in terms of its membership, representative less of the views of the LDP at large than of the views of a group that is likely to lead the LDP in years to come. Their membership in this group is wholly consistent with what Samuels and Boyd found in their study of next-generation political leaders: "The twelve [future LDP leaders they identify]...are significantly more supportive of Japan’s right to preemptive attack in the face of imminent threat than the LDP overall or the larger midcareer generational cohort."
  

• I have already noted that prominent conservatives used the occasion of the launch to call for a debate on the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Hosoda Hiroyuki dismissed these remarks by saying that "I don't think that anyone is seriously saying this," while Kawamura Takeo, the chief cabinet secretary, reaffirmed the three non-nuclear principles. (These remarks were in response to LDP official Sakamoto Goji's remarks about acquiring nuclear weapons and withdrawing from the UN.)
  

• Koike Yuriko, whose quest to unseat Aso Taro ended just as soon as it began, stressed the need for a Japanese-style National Security Council — an idea that died with the Abe government — at a meeting of a subcommittee of the LDP Policy Research Council's defense policy division.

• Nakagawa Hidenao stated his concern that since the US ruled out intercepting the North Korean launch beforehand, it exposed a gap in the alliance.

Komori Yoshihisa, Sankei's man in Washington, more or less summed up the line of argument that encapsulates the views of these politicians in a front-page article in Sankei — more op-ed than reportage — in which he speaks of the present moment as a "moment of truth" for the alliance.

Komori argues that the US (and the effete and ineffectual Obama administration) failed to live up to the letter of the alliance by ruling out an intercept, that the Obama administration's emphasis on multilateral diplomacy did nothing to prevent the launch, and that Japan is learning the true face of the new administration when it comes to the alliance. The upshot is that Japan is coming to realize that in the face of the North Korean missile threat, it cannot necessarily depend on the United States.

This reasoning is considerably more threatening to the alliance than anything Ozawa said. In material terms the US security guarantee is no weaker today than it was before North Korea's rocket launch. Does a slightly less unsuccessful rocket launch make Japan so much more vulnerable to North Korea's missiles that the alliance as it exists is rendered irrelevant? Has enough changed in the past week to merit this discussion?

And yet by talking as if North Korea has struck a blow against the alliance, these leaders risk eroding public confidence in the alliance without offering anything in its place. After all, Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu said "it is highly doubtful" that deterrent capabilities will be included in this year's NDPO or the mid-term defense program. Japan is still not prepared to even discuss nuclear weapons. (Yamasaki Taku offered the novel argument against a nuclear debate by saying that even by talking about nuclear weapons Japan would be voicing its acceptance of North Korea's nuclear weapons.) But the LDP is taking a hard line — Hosoda took the opportunity to criticize Condoleeza Rice and Christopher Hill by name for being "weak" on North Korea — without any indication that its rhetoric will accomplish anything but frightening the public and undermining the alliance. (Of course, if Japan actually acquired its own conventional deterrent capability, it would likely lead to conclusions similar to Ozawa's: if Japan had its own capabilities to strike at North Korea, presumably Japanese citizens would wonder why they were continuing to pay to base US airpower on Japanese soil.)

As Sam Roggeveen wrote in response to equally outrageous rhetoric from Newt Gingrich in the US, "There is no military solution to this dilemma — not missile defence, and certainly not air strikes or special forces. The reason lies in the geography of the Korean peninsula. The proximity of Seoul (and several other South Korean cities) to the border with the North means Pyongyang essentially holds that city hostage." Japan is in no more position to start a war with North Korea than the US is. Japan may be more insecure on account of geography, but geography makes Japan no more capable of "solving" the North Korean problem than any other country.

The US is, of course, paying the price for having swung from unremitting hostility towards North Korea to cooperation in the hope of containing the threat without ensuring that Japan shifted too. The US government, first under Bush and now under Obama, has only acknowledged the reality that the US has little power to change the unpleasant status quo and must therefore find a way to limit the threat posed by North Korea beyond mere deterrence. The Japanese government, by contrast, is locked in by past decisions to pursue a hard line on North Korea that put the abductees first and roused the public's fears so that the government lacks the ability to change course, even if it wanted to do so. And Japan's conservatives are using the situation to push an agenda that they would be advocating anyway — Kim Jong-il has simply made it easier for them to do so.

Conservative rhetoric is unlikely to change Japan's security policy in the near term, not with a 15 trillion yen stimulus package on the agenda. For the moment the public continues to prefer tough talk on North Korea to backing up talk with expensive weaponry. But too much tough talk will undermine the US-Japan relationship and make the US more eager to work with countries that will help it contain or solve the North Korea problem, not make it worse.

Perhaps it is time to send an ambassador to Tokyo.

For the western press, Japan is always rising

Forbes and AP have run nearly simultaneous articles reviving the "Japan rising" meme that I thought had died with Abe Shinzo's government.

Tim Kelly of Forbes uses the occasion of the commissioning of the Hyuga — previously mentioned in this post — to argue that the launch of Japan's "first aircraft carrier since America dismantled the Imperial Navy a half century ago" is a landmark in Japan's "[creeping] away" from pacifism.

Eric Talmadge, meanwhile, uses the trick of reporting on a US-Japan joint military drill to argue that Japan's military is assuming a "more global role."

The funny thing about Talmadge's article is that it has all the pieces for a very different story, which might be headlined, "Japan remains reluctant to commit military to global role." The story mentions the Somalia dispatch occurring "after much haggling in parliament," "opposition from many Japanese who recall the disaster of the previous century's militarist misadventures" should the government send troops to Afghanistan, a quote from an expert (Eric Heginbotham of RAND) noting that "Japan is still extremely casualty sensitive," and a quote from another expert (Watanabe Tsuneo of the Tokyo Foundation) noting that "there is no consensus among ordinary citizens and politicians." One could take the same quotes and the same facts and write a completely different article talking about Japan's reluctance to play a greater role abroad, while alluding to the possibility of change.

The mistake that both Talmadge and Kelly make is to equate military capabilities with a change in intentions or policy. Kelly's article blithely dismisses the very idea that the Hyuga is anything but an aircraft carrier — and if Japan has an aircraft carrier, it must be interested in expanding its global reach. If Kelly acknowledged that the Hyuga might be something other than an aircraft carrier, as Japanese officials maintain, Kelly would not have a story, because what story is there in "Japan acquires another destroyer?" Talmadge, meanwhile, recognizes that far from enhancing its military capabilities, "Unlike China's double-digit defense spending growth, Japan's has remained flat for years." (In fact, Japan's defense budget has fallen for seven consecutive years, as discussed here.) But he then concludes that Japan has "one of the best-funded and highly regarded militaries in the world." But that is not a new development: Japan has had a high-tech and well-funded military for years. What has changed to merit having this discussion now? Not the Hyuga apparently — Talmadge actually doesn't mention it. (The only mention Kelly makes of Japan's defense spending is that Japan has "a defense budget on par with the more militarily active U.K." and that "if America ever lets Japan buy its latest state-of-the-art warplanes, Asia's pacifist nation has the cash to pay for them.")

Oddly enough, Talmadge's case seems to rest largely on the US-Japan joint missile defense program. But why does he equate a global role with the acquisition of military technology? Missile defense technology is, for Japan, explicitly local, intended "to protect the country — and the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed here — from a potential attack by its unpredictable and often belligerent neighbor, North Korea." Missile defense spending may show that Japan is taking its own defense more seriously, but I would not equate it with Japan's taking a more active global role.

I cannot help but think of everything these articles miss. No mention of the domestic political confusion that has shelved discussions of collective self-defense and constitution revision, which would be far more significant than the acquisition of a helicopter carrier. No mention of the lack of interest among many Japanese in seeing the JSDF used for missions not directly tied to Japan's security, as found in the cabinet's latest defense affairs survey (discussed here). No mention of the Asahi survey finding that many Japanese would like to see the government spend even less on defense than it is spending now. No mention of the smoldering debate between the LDP and the DPJ over Ozawa Ichiro's suggestion that perhaps Japan should consider taking greater responsibility for its own defense, while insisting that he literally meant own defense — a more robust JSDF would not be used abroad.

The puzzling thing about Japanese security policy is not that Japan has become so much more active but that it is still doing so little, despite the best efforts of some US and Japanese policymakers (and journalists like Talmadge and Kelly) to paint a picture of East Asia as unremittingly bleak and threatening for a "pacifist" country like Japan. It seems that the Japanese people will not be scared into becoming "normal." The public would still rather cheap ride on the US security guarantee, with greater role in self-defense a second-best option. But even in doing more to defend itself Japan might still not become the active global power of Talmadge's article. It is easy to imagine a Japan bristling with high-tech weapons for its maritime and air self-defense forces, intended to ensure that no intruders enter Japanese waters or airspace, perhaps while still sending unarmed contributions to UN missions abroad.

For once it would be nice to read an article about Japanese security policy from a mainstream media outlet that acknowledges that Japan is not on a linear trajectory to becoming a "normal" nation, that the lack of a public consensus on security policy is not simply something that will disappear with time; it is a fixture of the landscape that Japanese and US policymakers must acknowledge when considering the future of Japanese security policy.

The LDP finds something to agree on

While the Nishimatsu scandal continues to ripple through both the LDP and the DPJ and while all wonder whether next week will see Ozawa Ichiro's resignation as DPJ president, LDP members of all stripes continue to criticize Ozawa for remarks made prior to when the scandal broke regarding the future of the US military presence in Japan.

Prime Minister Aso Taro, speaking to the LDP's Hiroshima prefectural chapter last Saturday, singled out Ozawa for criticism, arguing that his perspective is unrealistic — without a sizeable increase in the defense budget Japan cannot meet threats from abroad alone — and therefore irresponsible.

Foreign Minister Nakasone Hirofumi, speaking in Kanazawa on Sunday, echoed the prime minister's remarks, describing Ozawa's remarks as "irresponsible" for questioning the US presence in Japan, which he described as essential for stability in the area surrounding Japan.

But criticism of Ozawa is not limited to members of the government. Koike Yuriko, stepping up her quixotic campaign against the prime minister, has decided that the key to elevating her profile is in attacking Ozawa and the DPJ, especially on security policy. In an appearance in Nara prefecture, she suggested that security policy ought to be the central issue of the general election, because the DPJ is all over the place on security policy and would prefer that discussing security policy were taboo. (Ozawa's remarks by their very nature belie the idea of the DPJ's making security policy a taboo — as far as I can tell, the LDP is the party trying to make a taboo of a foreign policy issue in asserting the sacrosanctity of the US military presence. But I digress.)

It is the rare issue that can get Aso and Koike to agree, but Koike is being a bit too clever if she thinks that the key to LDP victory lies in a debate with the DPJ over security policy.

Is the public concerned enough to be unsettled by Ozawa's questioning the long-term future of the US military presence in Japan? The cabinet's latest defense affairs survey — mentioned in this post — says relatively little about public attentiveness to defense issues. Yes, the first question found that 64.7% of respondents are interested in the JSDF and defense issues (50.6% interested to some extent, compared to 14.1% extremely interested), but this survey provides no sense of where defense issues rank in comparison with other issues of concern to the public. The most interesting data points concern the value of the alliance. 76.4% of respondents (31.3% see it as useful, 45% agree that if they had to say, they would say it's useful). 77.3% of respondents support the status quo in US-Japan defense arrangements, with USFJ working with the JSDF to defend Japan. Only 9.9% support the proposition that Japan should defend itself by abrogating the US-Japan security treaty and having the JSDF alone defend the country, while a mere 4.2% support the "pacifism in one country" idea of abrogating the security treaty and shrinking or elimanating the JSDF. But this question does not provide the Ozawa option of a minimized US presence (under the treaty, of course) and a bolstered role for the JSDF in defending Japan.

The survey does find that respondents are insecure: 69.2% feared that Japan could be dragged into a war, with the leading reason being "international tension and conflict" (cited by 75.4% of those who feared war). It also suggests that Japanese are minimally afraid of being entrapped by the alliance, with 16.7% of respondents fearing war believing that the security treaty would be the reason, compared with 45% of the respondents who felt that, thanks to the US-Japan security treaty, Japan will not be swept up in war. At the same time, however, the survey did find some evidence of fears of abandonment by the US, as "the relationship between China and the US" ranked fourth among matters of interest to Japan's peace and security following the Korean peninsula, international terrorism, and the Middle East, and slightly above China's military modernization and maritime activites. (Korea I understand, but international terrorism and the Middle East ranking above concerns about China? It seems hard to believe.)

But does all of this add up to condemnation for Ozawa and the DPJ and support for the LDP? This is a picture of a Japanese public increasingly alarmed by the world beyond Japan's shores. The public does not want to abandon the alliance, which at this juncture would mean that Japan would be friendless as far as security goes, but that does not mean that the public has any great love for the alliance either. This survey suggests that Japanese citizens see the alliance as necessary — what alternative is there? — but they do not see it as a vehicle for either assisting the US internationally or contributing to global peace and security. There is a substantial drop from respondents who view the defense of Japan as the JSDF's primary mission (70%, following the 78.4% who see disaster relief as its primary mission) to the 43.6% who see "peace cooperation activities" as the JSDF's raison d'etre. The breakdown is largely the same when respondents were asked about what role the JSDF should play in the future.

There is little desire to rock the boat, which translates into support of the status quo in which US forces are based in Japan, play an important role in defending Japan alongside the JSDF, and to a lesser extent ensuring peace and stability in East Asia as per Article VI of the treaty. I wish this survey had included a few other questions pertaining to the appropriate level of US forces in Japan, the role they ought to play, the precise nature of "international tension and conflict," and amount of support for the current level of defense spending, but the picture that emerges is of a Japanese people with comparatively little interest in an expeditionary role for the JSDF and more interest in how Japan is to defend itself in an uncertain international environment. For the moment the public is content that the US is an important part of the defense of Japan, but does the public think and accept the alliance as an indefinite arrangement, and does it accept that it is best not to talk about the possibility of an alternative to the current arrangement?

All of which goes to say that LDP leaders are mistaken to conclude that they will be able to score political points by hammering Ozawa for his remarks. The public is worried, but I would wager that whatever worry is captured in this poll is outweighed by worries about matters closer to home. Should the LDP decide that defense policy ought to be the basis, it may discover for the second time in as many elections that there is a price to be paid for ignoring the priorities of the public.

Meanwhile it is worth mentioning that the Nakasone and Aso critiques of Ozawa, at least as reported in the media, do not disagree with Ozawa in principle, but criticize him on pragmatic grounds, for being irresponsible in proposing an alternative to the status quo that might anger the ally upon which Japan is dependent for its security. I think any conservative arguing in good faith has no choice but to take this line of attack; there is too much history of conservatives, including the august progenitors of the prime minister and the foreign minister, railing about independence and autonomy for them to attack the principle of more independent Japanese defense capabilities. Indeed, one does not need to go back in time to find conservatives making this argument: Sakurai Yoshiko, in an article in the March 12 issue of Shukan Shincho, takes the benign out of benign neglect from the Obama administration, and argues that the new administration is slighting Japan to treat with China — and that China would prefer a Japan restrained by its dependence on the US military. There is a gap between Sakurai and the conservatives in power in the LDP, but just how great a divide is unclear. What is clear is that for now it is politically expendient for LDP officials to defend the status quo on security policy, and, moreover, Ozawa's off-the-cuff remarks notwithstanding, the DPJ is hardly offering a radical departure from the status quo.

Despite Koike's desire for a national security election, the forthcoming general election will resemble the last general election, focusing on pensions, health, jobs, and overall confidence in the ruling party.

Sailing to Somalia

Two Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) destroyers, the Sazanami, last mentioned on this blog when she paid a visit to China last year, and the Samidare, have departed from Kure naval base in Hiroshima prefecture for a four-month tour patrolling for pirates off the horn of Africa. The destroyers are expected to arrive in theater April 5.

The destroyers were dispatched on the basis of an emergency order by the cabinet, which, as I have mentioned previously, the government can do according to Article 82 of the SDF law. At the same time, however, the cabinet has approved an anti-piracy bill to the Diet to put the mission on surer footing. According to the cabinet resolution on the mission and the accompanying bill, the dispatch is to protect Japanese lives and property and ensure public security and order on the high seas.

In short, the Sazanami and the Samidare leave behind a delicate political situation.

The bill that will go before the Diet explicitly permits the MSDF to defend non-Japanese ships at sea and clarifies measures that can be taken by the MSDF to combat piracy. As of now, the MSDF will be permitted to use force in cases of legitimate self-defense, permitting the destroyers to fire warning shots and shots at the hull of pirate ships encountered.

How will the DPJ respond to the government's bill? Nakagawa Hidenao thinks that DPJ members like Nagashima Akihisa, who strongly approved the mission, will lose out to the DPJ left wing (and the SDPJ and PNP, possible DPJ coalition partners). I think there is reason to doubt Nakagawa's assessment.

First, public opinion is strongly in favor of the dispatch. A recently conducted Cabinet survey on the JSDF and defense affairs found that 63.2% of respondents thought that the JSDF should deal with the piracy problem. (The survey concerns more than just the Somalia mission, but I will comment on it at length in a separate post, once I've read it in its entirety.) Sankei suggests that the defense ministry has concluded that the public is favorable to the mission because they recognize the importance of maritime security for Japan. As Prime Minister Aso said in his statement on the cabinet resolution, "Japan is surrounded by ocean, and, moreover, the importance of foreign trade is high because it is dependent on imports for most major resources. The security of ships at sea is extremely important for the Japanese economic system and way-of-life."

Aso's statement mentions a number of other reasons why Japan is contributing ships to the multinational coalition — Japan's responsibilities as a member of the international community, the fact that the multinational coalition is acting under a UN Security Council resolution, and the participation of other major powers, including China, in the coalition — but the thread that runs through it all is the importance of this mission for Japan's national security.

It is for this reason that Ozawa Ichiro and the DPJ will not stand in the way of the cabinet bill. The DPJ will gain little from opposing a mission that the public recognizes is in the national interest, and may even suffer if it is seen as obstructing the government's plans for political reasons. Moreover, if the DPJ opposes the government's legislation, it will show itself to be indifferent to its own principles, which may cost the party public support. As I argued recently, there is a lowest-common-denominator position on foreign and security policy within the DPJ, the product of an agreement between Ozawa and former Socialist Yokomichi Takahiro. One plank of the agreement recognizes the legitimacy of JSDF dispatch provided there is a UN mandate. As Aso noted, Japan is acting in accordance with Resolution 1816. If Ozawa means what he says, he should support this mission.

I suspect the party will question the government, making a show of demanding accountability from the government, and then concede.

What does this dispatch tell us about the state of Japan's national security posture?

Far from being an example of rising Japan, the amount of time Japan took to undertake this mission shows the degree of deliberation with which the government treats every security issue that occurs. Instead of leaping at an opportunity for dispatching forces to participate in a highly visible mission abroad, the government proceeded gingerly.

Indeed, this mission was an easy test for Japan. Participation was overdetermined — participation enables Japan to secure its national interests, and demonstrate its willingness to be an upstanding global citizen and active participant in UN-mandated security missions. It is a high-profile mission in terms of the global media coverage of piracy, meaning that Japan would bear reputational costs for not participating. China was quick to participate, putting pressure on Japan to act lest it appear to be yielding a leadership position to its Asian rival. And the mission is wholly unrelated to the US-Japan alliance, which otherwise complicates Japan's security decisionmaking.

If anything, the fact that it took so long for Japan to commit despite these factors militating in favor of dispatch suggests that Japan is still a long way from being "normal." And I wonder whether it will ever get there. Despite considerable public support for the mission, the Japanese public is still, according to the defense ministry, more moved by the "national interest" dimension than any other component. Given that Japan's national interest in many cases justifies inaction, missions like this one may continue to be the exception rather than the norm for Japanese security policy.

The Japanese people is clearly more open to such missions than before, but the question is no longer about the distance from where Japan used to be, but the destination where Japanese security policy is heading. Regarding this question, this mission tells us little other than that the Japanese people are sensitive to Japan's national security, even as far afield as Africa, but we don't know exactly how sensitive they are, especially closer to Japanese shores, in thornier cases than fighting pirates.

Unpacking the DPJ's divisions

Curzon at Coming Anarchy looks at a couple recent statements by DPJ officials and concludes that the DPJ suffers from cognitive dissonance.

He also suggests that I believe that the Obama administration plans to create an alliance "focused solely on joint security declarations." If he read my post on the subject more carefully, he'd notice I believe in precisely the opposite, that the 1996 alliance has been characterized more by joint declarations and symbolic gestures than by substantive transformation of the alliance and that the Obama administration, insofar as it has a Japan policy, will try to move away from token security contributions and flighty rhetoric about shared values and shared interests to substantive cooperation, even if it doesn't involve Japan's self-defense forces.

But let me turn to the point of his post. Does the DPJ suffer from cognitive dissonance?

First, I think it is best not to anthropomorphize a political party. In other words, individuals suffer cognitive dissonance; parties, as collections of individual politicians, have contested interests or policies. This difference is essential. Curzon seems to imply that parties should have more or less coherent policy approaches, that the party's statement of principles or policy platform, once enunciated, binds its members and creates, in a sense, a corporate identity for the party. In theory there should be no problem with this: this party the hawks, that one the doves, this party the capitalists, that party the socialists, and so on.

But does it ever work this way in practice, especially since socialism lost its authority, muddling the distinctions between left and right? Looking solely at the Japanese party system, the ambiguities of the DPJ's policy positions — such as they exist (more on this momentarily) — are a product of Japan's messy party system, not a cause of it.

Why is this the case?

First, arguably in a political system in which one party has dominated as long as the LDP has, valence issues — defined by Donald Stokes as "[issues] that merely involve the linking of the parties with some condition that is positively or negatively valued by the electorate," in contrast with position issues, which concern policy alternatives — will most likely take precedence over position issues in the competition for power between the governing party and the opposition. Simply by having been in government for more than fifty years, the LDP's performance in government is the issue. Its ability to formulate and implement policy, its relationship with the public, its relationship with the bureaucracy: these issues are all connected to the LDP's fitness for government but have little to do with policy per se. Debate over administrative reform, for example, has less to do with the content of reform (although one can easily find LDP members who oppose it) than with the LDP's ability to deliver on its promises. Similarly, both parties claim to want to formulate policy on the basis of the concerns of the people. Who can be opposed to that? The question is which party is best able to follow through on the pledge. On the one hand the DPJ may be an unknown quantity, but on the other hand the LDP is known all too well.

But arguably valence issues also take precedence over position issues for reasons having to do with the LDP's own ambiguities. Curzon describes the DPJ as a "motley crew of socialists, right-wingers, and free market liberals," but that could just as easily describe the LDP. Of course the LDP doesn't literally have socialists in the sense of former Socialist Party members, but is the LDP's old guard all that different from the old left? The LDP is no less motley than the DPJ, and may even be more motley. We can ascertain the confusion within the LDP by the complaints its ideologues make about the party. Nakagawa Hidenao, a leading Koizumian reformist, ceaselessly calls for a new LDP that will break from the LDP's tradition of governing hand in hand with the hated bureaucracy. Meanwhile, further to the right there have been no shortage of complaints from conservative LDP members and intellectuals about the LDP's not being a truly conservative party. Hence the Hiranuma-Abe-Nakagawa (Shoichi)-Aso study group in pursuit of a "true" conservatism. Hence Hiranuma Takeo's ongoing talk about creating a new conservative party as a third force in Japanese politics. Some of this talk was linked to Fukuda Yasuo's premiership, of course, which only goes to show that the conservatives love the LDP only when one of their own is in charge, i.e. someone like Abe Shinzo or Aso Taro. LDP members who belong to these two ideological tendencies are woefully unhappy with the LDP as it exists today, but both groups appear to prefer staying in the party and battling for control to building new parties.

In addition to the LDP's internal divisions, there is also the matter of LDP governments' being adept at lifting policies from the opposition, making it more difficult for opposition parties to compete with the LDP on policy terms.

The same dynamic is at work today. There is arguably a national agenda, with little disagreement that the government, regardless of which party is in power, has to shrink the national debt, fix the health, pensions, and welfare system, revitalize stagnant regions, and now, above all else, get the economy growing again. While there are different proposals for addressing each of these problems, the disagreements are more in degree than in kind, and are as often within parties as between parties. The disagreements between the LDP and the DPJ are by and large not ideological, now that even the Koizumian reformists are doing their best to not look like Thatcherite neo-liberals. (It bears mentioning that behind the aforementioned issues lurk cultural issues like immigration, and women's and minorities' rights, about which there is little consensus in either party and surely neither the LDP nor the DPJ would like to make central issues in an election campaign.)

As such, the concerns about a lack of policy differentiation between the LDP and the DPJ are overblown. Parties do not need to fit the model of two large political parties sharply differentiated on ideological terms to have fruitful and intense competition.

Turning now to the question of the DPJ's divisions, analysts like Curzon often assert that the DPJ is divided, because its members come from different parties, but provide little evidence of how the DPJ is divided. I don't deny the party's divisions, but it seems to me that analysts often assert these divisions and move on to other matters instead of providing proper elaboration of what they mean.

In some ways the DPJ's divisions are similar to the LDP's: the party's young reformists fret about Ozawa Ichiro, who they see as emblematic of the old LDP way of politics that they believe must be destroyed. But oftentimes this has less to do with policy and more to do with political style. This was my argument in a post regarding Maehara Seiji's mini-rebellion against Ozawa in June 2008, which I described as more a matter of Maehara's idealism in opposition to Ozawa's realism. Ozawa is the consummate fixer, as we've all been reminded in recent weeks, which means questionable fundraising ties, shadowy ties across party lines, leadership veiled in secrecy, and some creative accounting in policy proposals. By contrast, Maehara and his compatriots are idealistic almost to a fault. But I do not doubt that they share the goal of bringing down the LDP and uprooting the LDP-bureaucratic system of governance.

Meanwhile, analysts — myself included — often have little to say about the role of the DPJ's left wing. It is obligatory to mention that the party includes former socialists, but few seem to have much to say about the left's role within the DPJ. That may be in part because the DPJ's left wingers are simply less visible than the party's neo-conservatives, who are regulars on Japanese TV and frequently quoted by the domestic and foreign press. It may also be because the DPJ's left has made its peace with Ozawa. On economic policy, there is surely little for the left to be disappointed about: the DPJ is now, for better or worse, mildly anti-capitalist (cf. Ozawa's speech at this year's DPJ convention). As far as I can tell even the neo-conservatives are following along. I can't imagine Maehara would have as much praise for the Koizumi-Takenaka reforms today as he did last year. The party is running on a hybrid platform of old-style protection at home for workers and small- and medium-sized businesses, the creation of a new-style welfare state for the twenty-first century, and a relentless campaign to remake the bureaucracy.

Obviously foreign policy is a different matter entirely, as Curzon argues. Curzon is concerned above all with the vagueness of statements by Hatoyama and Ozawa. He's right to a certain extent, in that it is hard to tell just how these statements about a more equal alliance will translate into policy under a DPJ government. As he says, we will only learn if and when there is a DPJ government. At the same time, however, Ozawa's remarks — clearly more important to discerning a DPJ government's plans as long as Ozawa is still head of the party — are finely tuned to balance between the DPJ's left and the DPJ's right.

It is worth looking back to when Ozawa's Liberal Party merged with the DPJ in 2003. Recognizing that foreign policy had the potential to splinter the party, Ozawa and Yokomichi Takahiro, a onetime Socialist, agreed in 2004 to a list of foreign policy principles that included support for a UN standing army, Japanese participation in multinational UN-mandated coalitions (with some fudging on the precise details of Japan's participation), opposition to the dispatch of the JSDF abroad without UN approval, and the maintenance of Article 9. Arguably this agreement has survived intact. Ozawa has clearly strained against the boundaries of this agreement with some of his remarks on foreign policy (his call for armed Japanese intervention in Afghanistan were there to be a "proper" UN mandate, for example), exploiting some of the ambiguities in his non-binding agreement with Yokomichi, but even his "controversial" remarks about reducing the US presence in Japan to the Seventh Fleet with the JSDF picking up the slack for the defense of Japan are consistent with the terms of the agreement. Naturally the neo-conservatives would prefer to do whatever possible, but even they seem to be able to live within the terms of this agreement, even as DPJ members like Nagashima Akihisa argue for vigorous Japanese involvement in the multinational anti-pirate campaign off the horn of Africa.

It is fair to ask whether this entente would survive in Ozawa's absence. I doubt it would — hence my concerns about the Ozawa scandal — but in the meantime Ozawa has managed to strike a balance between the left and the right in the DPJ. Standing up to the US is something that everyone seems to be able to agree on, and doing so conveniently enables them to distinguish the DPJ from the LDP, which has to wear a crimson "B" for having worked alongside the Bush administration for eight years, for "showing the flag" and "putting boots on the ground" when the Bush administration went to war. Is this an uneasy balance? Without question. Is it largely symbolic? Absolutely. Should the DPJ win the general election and form a government, it will be in no position to act on what was not even a proper policy proposal from Ozawa, in part because of budgetary constraints, in part because of the long list of domestic problems that will demand the new government's attention. And facing the Obama administration instead of the Bush administration, a DPJ government will have a harder time saying no for the sake of saying no, especially if the Obama administration is smart and limits its requests to non-military requests, as Obama did when discussing Afghanistan with Aso last month.

For the time being, divisions within the DPJ are less of a concern than it would seem, provided that Ozawa survives this scandal. Even if Ozawa falls but is replaced by someone like Okada Katsuya, the DPJ's policy bargain could survive relatively untouched. While Okada inspires no particular adoration from the party's ranks, he would also not be the object of loathing that Ozawa is in certain corners of the party. Indeed, Sankei reports that the LDP and Komeito are afraid that Ozawa might pass the torch to Okada, who is younger and would deprive the LDP of its efforts to paint Ozawa as the ghost of the bad, old LDP (no small amount of irony there). Much as the DPJ would prefer to contest an election against Aso than anyone the LDP might find to replace him, so the LDP might rather have Ozawa as the face of the other side than any of the DPJ's younger politicians waiting in the wings.

The point is that the DPJ not perfect, but it is by no means as shambolic as the conventional wisdom suggests — or as shambolic as the LDP, for that matter. There is a fragile unity in the party, most likely a product of Ozawa's authority, the decline of constitution revision as a central issue in Japanese politics, the emergence of a broad national consensus on the most important issues facing the government, and, most importantly, the prospect of unseating the LDP, which has undoubtedly worked wonders for party unity. If the DPJ takes power, there will be missteps, mistakes, and u-turns, all of which are to be expected from an opposition party taking power for the first time. But that is no reason to dread a change of ruling party. If the DPJ manages to maintain this uneasy balance within the party and govern effectively, great. And if it doesn't, and it is unable to govern, leading to an electoral defeat, that would be good for Japan too. The very worst thing, however, would be the replace one deeply divided, unmanageable perpetual ruling party with another.