International tranquility, or just tea

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ambassador_Kennedy_Participates_in_a_Tea_Ceremony_%2810843528344%29.jpg

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy takes part in a tea ceremony.

In the same way that Sun Tzu’s classic Chinese military treatise, ‘The Art of War’, has come to be widely seen as a useful manual for a surprising range of non-military activities (everything ranging from business strategy to NFL football sports), there are oriental traditions with followers who make similarly bold claims: namely, that their tradition has a usefulness far beyond the cultural niche that it has occupied for centuries. One such Japanese tradition is the Art of the Tea Ceremony, which is purported to be beneficial not just for the well-being of the individuals who participate in it, but also for realizing lasting international peace between nations.

Is this just a quirky claim made by an art which is eager to promote itself to a wider audience? Perhaps. Undeniably, it is difficult to take these pronouncements too literally or too seriously. But this topic can nevertheless be a useful jumping-off point for political analysis. At the very least, the history of the tea ceremony can be examined for clues as to why this art form might aspire to political relevance, and additionally, we can explore how it has fared in political circles in practice.

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Thoughts on Japan’s National Security Council

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Japan’s current National Security Council (kokka anzen hoshō kaigi 国家安全保障会議 ) was established in 2013 by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. The new body, which replaced the old Security Council, was intended to serve as a coordinator between the many different ministries and agencies which are relevant to Japan’s security policies. It is currently headed up by Shōtarō Yachi, who had already served as a foreign policy advisor to Abe during his first run as prime minister (2006-2007), during which Abe had already unsuccessfully attempted to create “his own NSA”, predictably modeled after the United States’ NSA.

While it is not unusual for Japanese policymakers to take their cue from the US or to model themselves on American structures, why was the older Security Council deemed to be inadequate? What may have enabled Abe to go ahead with creating this new body may have been the Algerian hostage crisis of January 2013, which involved 17 Japanese nationals being taken as hostages, 10 of which did not make it out alive. Even though Abe interrupted his South Asian tour and returned to Japan in order to give his full attention to the hostage situation, the general perception at this time was that the government’s response was neither swift nor centralized enough.

So the perceptions surrounding the Algerian hostages crisis, and the perceived need for a swifter and better coordinated response to such crises, created extra pressures that leveled a path towards establishing the new body. But, perhaps more importantly and from Abe’s point of view, it fits into Abe’s longer term goals of attempting to facilitate a revision of the Constitution, and the conversion of the Self-Defense Forces into more conventional and traditional military forces (see Kitaoka, 2013).

Since its establishment, the NSC has not had to deal with any crisis as acute as the Algerian hostage crisis. Its staff of roughly 70 members, considerably smaller than the 300-head staff of its US counterpart, has been dealing with the coordination of responses to lesser crises, such as the December disappearance in Indonesian airspace of the AirAsia jet, the search for which involved Japanese navy ships.

In short, it remains to be seen whether the new National Security Council represents an improvement over its institutional predecessor.

Academic Sources:

Kitaoka, Shinichi. “The Abe Administration: Beyond 100 Days.” Asia-Pacific Review 20, no. 1 (May 1, 2013): 1–12.
Sakaki, Alexandra, and Kerstin Lukner. “Introduction to Special Issue: Japan’s Crisis Management amid Growing Complexity: In Search of New Approaches.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 14, no. Special Issue 02 (June 2013): 155–76.

Japan’s Ongoing Campaign for a Permanent UNSC Seat and What Motivates It (essay, wonkish)

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“Where [is] the giver of treasure? Where are the seats at the feast?”
–from “The Wanderer”, anonymous English poem

In the post-war period, Japan has certainly not been a stranger to multilateral diplomacy, even though its contributions to the United Nations have largely been limited to giving generous financial aid and less on major policy-making contributions. But one major policy proposal it has been pushing and pursuing throughout has been the goal of UN Security Council reform: more precisely, the goal of securing a Permanent Seat on the Security Council for itself.

In pursuit of this goal, Japan has mounted many different campaigns. This essay examines the most recent campaign, looks at previous campaigns, and formulates potential answers (using a constructivist identity framework) to the questions of why Japan always returns to this demand for a Permanent UNSC Seat and what might be motivating it.

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Permanent residents no longer to get public assistance – except when they do

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What is it like to be a foreigner living in Japan on a prolonged basis – i.e., a Permanent Resident of Japan – and you can’t make ends meet? Would the social safety net catch you or leave you to your own devices?

One of my teachers at a university in Tokyo was a Caucasian American who had been married to a Japanese woman for several decades. During the first 15 years of his residency, as he once related to us, every day he was stopped by a police officer at a kōban on his way to work. ( “Kōbans” are small neighbourhood police stations, usually staffed by only one person at a time. There are about 6,000 of them spread out all over Japan, and they deal with such basic tasks as giving directions, low-level crime, lost and found objects, and so on.)

In other words, during the 70’s and 80’s my teacher was stopped almost every day, usually by the very same police officer, and he was asked to produce his visa, which over time became a permanent residency card. The police officer always carried out this document control procedure with a smile, but the Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation was abundantly clear: how could a foreigner whose legal documents were in order, have turned into an illegal alien from one day to the next? If his papers were in order on one day, logically, they would still have been in order on the next day.

In judging the motivation of the Kōban officer who was irrationally eager to check the same residency papers of the same man over and over again, it is tempting to assume racism and xenophobia. Indeed, the objective observer can only interpret this case as a form of harassment. But was this harassment necessarily racism? Is there a distinction to be made between racism and xenophobia, in the context of an island nation such as Japan, with its particular history and cultural configurations? This question is not easy to answer, and I will not go into it here.

I also have to add that, according to my American teacher, after 15 years the practice suddenly came to an end. He could only guess at the reasons for the change, but at long last he was no longer stopped during his commute at the same Kōban over and over again.

The above anecdote is forever at the back of my mind while reading about the experiences and travails of the permanent resident. In July, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that permanent residents of Japan are not eligible to receive public assistance. In doing so, it overturned a High Court decision to grant public assistance to foreigners with legal residence. The Supreme Court overturned that decision because, in its opinion, permanent residents do not meet the legal definition of “a Japanese citizen”. Up to this point, whether or not to grant financial aid to permanent residents had been left to the discretion of local authorities, which could decide for themselves in which cases to extend it, and in which cases to refuse it.

However, despite coming from the Supreme Court and ostensibly being the last word on the matter, it does not mean that every single permanent resident will be denied aid from now on. The ruling is not likely to have much impact on the practice of allowing local authorities sort to things out based on the particulars of each individual request for aid, and based on their own judgment. Mainly, what the Court did was restrict the permanent resident’s right to complain in those cases when assistance is refused.

But the arbitrariness and seeming randomness of the current system is arguably a problem in its own right: permanent residents simply don’t know what to expect, and the decision might appear random to them. There is a Kafkaesque quality to such a situation, that is reminiscent of my American teacher’s experience of having to show the same police officer his legal documents every day for 15 years.

Government Discomfited by Comfort Women issue

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In February of 1996, the United Nations issued a special report (E/CN.4/1996/53), authored by its special rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, that authoritatively confirmed and condemned the Japanese imperial practice during World War Two of having used so-called “comfort women”. At issue was the Japanese military’s practice of forcing thousands of women from the occupied territories (Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, etc.) into sexual slavery during the war. Coomaraswamy’s report called upon Japan to apologize and to pay compensation to the surviving women or their families.Three years earlier, the Japanese government had already issued the Kōno Statement (Yōhei Kōno was the chief cabinet secretary at that time, hence the title of the statement). This statement was broadly interpreted at the time – especially in South Korea – as Japan’s formal apology for the sex slavery network that its military had maintained during the war.

Both the 1993 Kōno Statement and 1996 UN report have since been a source of perpetual anger for some members of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party and for Japanese conservatives more generally. To them, the Kōno Statement and the UN report constitute an unacceptable blemish on Japan’s reputation. In other words, they reject what has become the international consensus on that issue for (what are mainly) reasons of national pride. And in recent years, the governments headed by Shinzō Abe have tried undermine both the Kōno Statement and the UN report.

In order to undermine the claims that were already made, and which were more or less admitted to in the Kōno Statement, the Abe government has seized on the admission by the Asahi Shimbun (which is the main left-of-center newspaper of Japan) that some of the reporting it did on the issue 20 years ago was flawed. Its articles back then contained testimony from a man called Seiji Yoshida who had made claims that he had kidnapped South Korean women and forced them into the sex slavery system, but whose pronouncements had long been questioned by the academic community.

The admission by the Asahi that one of its sources had been untrustworthy did not impact the UN report in any signficant way, as it had relied mainly on the testimony from the surviving women who broke their silence in the 90’s. Nevertheless, it created a rhetorical opening for powerful conservative figures to start a campaign against the legitimacy of the UN report, with the Japanese government officially asking Coomaraswamy for a partial retraction of her report – which she refused to do.

Prior to asking for the report to be partially retracted, in June of 2014 the Abe government had already issued a review of the Kono Statement, which questioned the involvement of Korean diplomats in the draft process of the statement, while pointing out that it had relied on the unverified testimonies of 16 Korean former comfort women and that there had been no documents available at the time to verify those claims.

What is really behind the conservative drive for revision of the “comfort women” issue? It actually ties in the political Right’s long history of appropriating some of the Japanese pacifist movement’s most succesful and popular narratives that revolve around Japanese victimhood. The scholar James Joseph Orr argues persuasively in his book ‘The Victim As Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan‘:

“Like any other ideological structure, the image of the Japanese people as war victims served multiple agendas, and this utility helps to explain its longevity in Japanese public discourse on war. … Conservative politicians appropriated the rhetoric of Japanese war victimhood in recognition of electoral pacifist sentiment, with the added benefit that in doing so they could position themselves apart from the militarist period and perhaps evade discussion of Japanese war responsibility.” (p.7)

In this particular case, the twist given to this sense of victimhood by Abe and his side is that the Japanese people are the victims of an international campaign to impugn Japan’s honour. This seems to me to be the most convincing reading of what motivates conservative Japanese opinion on this issue.

Pacifism’s Flame Flickers

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“We offer up … our pain, as fire seeks to burn and consume us.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, in ‘Human, All Too Human’

In November of 2014, a man set himself on fire in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park as an apparent protest against recent changes made to Japan’s self-defense policies. He did not survive. This was similar to an incident near Shinjuku station in June, when a man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire before the eyes of the horrified passers-by which he had been addressing at length on the subject of Japan’s self-defense policies.

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the explicit promise to “give up war” was written into the Japanese constitution, permanently enshrined as Article 9 of that document. Ever since, there has been a constant tension between that limitation and the de facto rebuilding of the Japanese Defense Forces into one of the largest militaries of Asia. There has also been a constant tension between the political forces who want to amend the constitution and those which want to preserve the official, stated policy of pacifist self-defense. For the past six decades, the Japanese public has generally been on the side of the latter.

There are times, such as the present, when the public is more emphatically on the side of those who would preserve the pacifist Article 9 both in letter and in spirit. And while two self-immolating individuals can certainly not be equated with the Japanese public as a whole, the acts of these two men can perhaps be seen as an exaggerated expression of this long-held public conviction on this issue. Their deed is grounded in a deep wellspring of collective pacifist sentiment, and in the remembrance and traditions of past protests.

These men felt they could not tolerate the latest accelerated shift in Japan’s policies towards what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken to describing as “collective self-defense”. Most crucially, this label is attached to new policies which include the possibility of preemptive measures: the ability to strike at a perceived threat to the nation before it has fully materialized. Equally controversial has been the government’s effort to expand the military budget. The political opposition hears in this the rumblings of past imperial adventures, whereas Abe points out the need to adapt to growing hostilities in a changing regional context. Thus Abe points defends the “pre-emptive strike” measure as a new interpretation of the Constitution.

Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of the public oppose these changes. The renewed activism that has recently sprung up around the constitutional issue is remarkable, when you consider that Japanese civil society has been disengaging from politics for several decades.

Welcome

Posted by Res Japonica

Welcome to Res Japonica, a blog dedicated to Japanese international politics, with forays into culture, society, philosophy and literature. While pursuing Master’s degrees in Japanese studies and international politics, I have been writing down my thoughts, theories and observations for some time. Now I am transferring these writings to this blog.

This means that initially this blog will be dealing with the most immediate and current events only sporadically, because many writings date from the recent or even distant past. As time goes on, the writing will gradually become more closely tied to current events.