Abe charges in

Less than a week after the Fukuda government announced a new approach to the North Korea problem, Abe Shinzo, self-appointed defender of the abductees, has charged into the fray to criticize Yamasaki Taku, head of a Diet members' group advocating a normalized relations with North Korea. Mr. Abe claimed that Mr. Yamasaki's comments have diluted the government's bargaining power in the midst of negotiations.

Responding to Mr. Yamasaki's dismissing his thinking as "infantile," Mr. Abe admonished Mr. Yamasaki to "think and act in the national interest."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Abe also admonished the government (and the US) not to act unless North Korea moves substantially first.

Mr. Abe and his conservative colleagues are undoubtedly displeased with a foreign ministry announcement Wednesday. The foreign ministry declared that the Japanese government would view the launch of a reinvestigation into the abductions issue by North Korea as "progress," a far lower bar for lifting sanctions than the conservatives want. I will be curious to see who stands up to question Machimura Nobutaka and Saiki Akataka (head of MOFA's Asia-Pacific bureau) in the lower house's ad hoc committee on the abductions problem at a hearing being held today. Will LDP conservatives rake the government over the coals?

It will also be curious to see what Christopher Hill, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, will say when he arrives in Japan today for talks — especially in light of Secretary of State Rice's statement Wednesday that she expects North Korea to declare its nuclear weapons program "soon."

By lowering the bar on what constitutes progress, is MOFA clearing the way to assist the US on the nuclear question? And will Prime Minister Fukuda survive the storm of criticism that will greet such a move?

Forging a Fukuda consensus

Following his first salvo in the creation of a new Fukuda Doctrine, Sankei reports that Prime Minister Fukuda is preparing to launch the next salvo, which will be aimed at remaking Japan's foreign and defense policymaking process, namely by intensifying the Kantei's leadership in foreign policy.

Mr. Fukuda's approach is markedly different from Abe Shinzo's, the former prime minister who wanted to create a US-style National Security Council, an independent national security staff at the Kantei that would presumably be independent from the ministries of foreign affairs and defense. Undoubtedly Mr. Abe and other conservatives saw this as a way to bring their hawkish allies into government and further diminish the power of the hated Foreign Ministry.

Prime Minister Fukuda, however, appears to want to bolster existing arrangements and enhance coordination within and between ministries. He intends to preserve the existing Security Council of Japan that brings together the prime minister, chief cabinet secretary, the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, finance, transport, economy and industry, internal affairs, and the chairman of the national public safety commission. Under the security council, the prime minister intends to create a committee — headed by the assistant chief cabinet secretary responsible for national security and crisis management — on the maintenance of defense capabilities that will facilitate cooperation between the JSDF ground, air, and maritime staff, especially on medium- and long-term planning. The prime minister also envisions a new committee at the cabinet secretariat, chaired by the prime minister's aide responsible for foreign and defense policy and composed of the director of cabinet intelligence, the directors of MOFA's foreign policy bureau and MOD's defense policy bureau, and the aforementioned assistant chief cabinet secretary. This committee would be responsible for synthesizing foreign and defense policies.

Conservatives in both the US and Japan love to hate their countries' foreign ministries (and foreign policy establishments more broadly) as being effete and inclined to "sell out" the country to the enemies of the nation. But this loathing is not without consequences — look at how the OSD policy shop, led by Douglas Feith, effectively diminished the role played by both the State Department and the CIA in planning for the Iraq war and its aftermath. (The sad fate of the State Department's Future of Iraq project is telling, although it bears mentioning that, as noted by Charles Patterson, a participant in the project, "More planning was needed than the Future of Iraq Project, even had the plans been heeded.")

As such, rather than creating new organizations to do end runs around ministries responsible for foreign policy, Japan will be better served by better coordination among existing agencies. But more important than institutional arrangements, what Japan needs is a vision for its foreign and defense policy that has been lacking since the end of the cold war. If MOFA and MOD have been working at cross purposes, it has not simply been a matter of broken institutional arrangements: the responsibility lies with the prime minister (and the ruling LDP) for failing to articulate a coherent foreign policy for Japan. As I noted yesterday, Mr. Fukuda's new doctrine has considerable value, but if it is not institutionalized — whether in the form of international agreements or government planning documents — and instilled in the minds of Japanese citizens, then it can easily be ignored by future governments.

In short, Mr. Fukuda needs to find a way to make his doctrine the successor for the crumbling Yoshida Doctrine, a Fukuda consensus to guide Japan in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As the endurance of the Yoshida consensus illustrates, institutions are secondary to the ideas of a foreign policy consensus.

Japan just as invisible as always

MOFA has released its latest Gallup-conducted poll of American public and elite attitudes concerning Japan. (English summary here; more detailed Japanese documents available for download here.)

Gallup conducted a telephone poll of 1500 Americans over age 18 in February and March of 2008, and telephone interviews with 250 "opinion leaders" in "the fields of government, business, academia, mass media, religion and labor unions."

The results are more or less unchanged. Both the public and elites view Japan as the most important US partner in Asia, with China trailing by roughly ten points among the public and twenty points among elites. Japan is still seen as a dependable ally, although the number among the public dropped seven points from 74% to 67%, even as the elite figure remained strong, improving one point to a record-high of 92%. Both public and elite see Japan as more of an economic power, and believe that the US-Japan relationship is sound, and will either improve in the future or remain just as sound as they think it is today. Elites are well disposed to Japan playing a more assertive role internationally, and have a stronger sense of shared values between the US and Japan than the public at large has.

Of interest to me, however, is that in every question that gave general public respondents the option of "don't understand/no opinion," that response gained. In the "dependable ally" question, the percentage of the general public answering "no opinion" rose from 5% to 15%. Asked whether Japan is playing an appropriate international role given its economic power, the percentage of the general public answering "don't understand" rose from 6% to 14%. Asked about the importance of US bases in Japan, the number of general public respondents with no opinion rose from 3% to 11%. The number who responded "don't understand" when asked whether the US should support the current US-Japan mutual security treaty more than doubled, from 7% to 15%. And I suspect that these numbers probably only measure those who are willing to admit that they either don't understand or have no opinion. How many American citizens have opinions about these questions before being asked by a pollster?

In short, Japan became that much less familiar to the American public from February-March 2007 to February-March 2008. Interestingly, when general public respondents were asked where they get information about Japan, every category but education (improved one point from 51% to 52%), friends and neighbors (improved one point from 29% to 30%), Japanese friends (held steady at 29%), and experience of visiting Japan (held steady at 12%) fell. The big four — TV, magazines, newspapers, and Internet — all fall. TV fell from 80% to 74%, magazines from 72% to 64%, newspapers from 71% to 63%, and Internet 43% to 39%. The impact of these drops are magnified by the paucity of Japan coverage (i.e., not only are the news media providing less Japan coverage, but fewer people are seeing what little they cover). The drops were less significant or non-existent in terms of the elite, but elite awareness of Japan still suffers from the spareness of Japan coverage.

The survey ought to include a question along the lines of "did you have any opinions about the US-Japan relationship before being asked these questions." It might also have been helpful to ask about public awareness of events that transpired in the relationship over the past year (political changes in Japan, the abductee problem, the comfort women resolution, etc.). Without asking these questions, there is no context for these responses. This doesn't say much about what the American people think about the US-Japan relationship in comparison to a host of other foreign policy issues and bilateral relationships.

Violence at the Gaimusho

A twenty-two-year-old suspect, reportedly the member of a right-wing organization, has been arrested after hurling a Molotov cocktail at the front entrance to the Foreign Ministry. No one was harmed but the suspect, who stabbed himself with a kitchen knife after hurling the explosive.

He was reportedly demonstrating against the Foreign Ministry's failure to complain to Beijing after a violent incident between a Chinese national and a Japanese citizen at Yasukuni Shrine last month.

The only reason I'm mentioning this incident is that I find the suspect's age interesting. It seems that the perpetrators of past incidents tend to be older men in at least their 50s; contrary to what I would expect, the right-wing organizations do not seem to have much appeal to the "lost generation," despite their obvious grievances with the system.

This may be an isolated incident — I certainly think it would be a mistake to read too much into this and other instances of right-wing violence. I leave it to others to tell whether this incident has greater significance as far as the demographics of the extreme right are concerned.