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Good evening. I'm here to welcome you to this evening's lecture and book launch by Professor Richard Samuels from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I won't reappear on stage to try and field questions from Professor Samuels would allow him to do that afterwards. But I'll be here to help with the sale of books. For those of you who are interested in getting an autograph copy at a considerable discount from Cornell University Press, paperback editions of the book Securing Japan are on sale for £8 cash or cheque. So I'm playing the role of the book salesman for this evening. I'd also like to introduce Professor Samuels, whose work I'm sure many of you know. He's the Ford professor of Politics at Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MIT as well as the director of the center for International Studies. You, I think, should best understand his work. I think in the light of something that it seems to me is sadly missing very often from the London School of Economics, which is an appreciation of the importance of. Of the politics of Japan. I've been here for four years and somehow Japan seems amazingly forgotten in terms of our understanding of international politics. And this seems to me utterly unacceptable. And no one has done more over the past decades to shed light on Japan's domestic and international politics than Dick Samuels. And his work is crucial and widely understood to be really the center of all debates and understandings of Japanese politics. And his new book seems to me is very timely in terms of recent changes in Japanese politics, potential changes in American politics and other developments. When we here at the LSE obsess so much about China, it seems it's well worth turning our. Our focus to Japan at least occasionally. And no one is better qualified to do so and help us doing so than Dick Samuels. So please join me in welcoming here for a very interesting lecture.
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Thanks very much. Is this picking? This picking up? Okay, great. So I'll just stand here. I'll thank the. Thank you, John, for that introduction. And I realize that when I'm being described as someone who's made contributions for decades, it's time to cash in and leave the scene. That's very scary to me. My conceit is not that I've been around for decades. Anyway, the book I'm hoping you'll find of interest, the COVID was originally modeled after Shogun. I don't know if you remember the COVID of Shogun, which had a sword and it said basically this. This sword dripping with blood, much like the Shogun cover by Clavell. And this is not fiction. His was, of course, and his. The original design for this screamed out, buy this book or I will disembowel, probably you and myself. This one simply says, buy this book and this soldier won't be quite so lonely. And that's a plug for this. This is actually a woman. And it's exactly the same cover that's used by Sabina Fustruck on her new book, which is on gender and the military in Japan, which I commend to you and I'll probably get to again in the course of my comments. What I want to do with you this evening in my comments is very quickly start with the past. Nothing I do, as some of you who've read my work know, I always start with the past. Sometimes I dawdle in the past for long, lengthy passages. But I do believe we can't understand where Japan is going to or where anyone is going without understanding the past and how it's used. In particular, how it's used. And I want to sort of walk you through the past as I understand it in Japanese grand strategy. Look at the present, explain how we got here or how Japan got here, and then sort of with you, speculate a bit on where the future might be for Japan in international security affairs and perhaps take a position that some of you will argue with, perhaps some of you will embrace it. Either way, I hope to have a reasonably lively conversation. I know I won't be disappointed. So the past. This is actually not going to be on the exam, but it is a full. It is a snapshot of an entire chapter in the book. I simply want to make a couple of points about this chart. I'm very proud of it because it is basically, it connects the dots across contemporary Japanese, the history of contemporary Japanese grand strategy and by contemporary. I'm thinking about the period from the turn of the last century. Well, the turn of the 20th century, yes. To the present. So you can see the timeline flows, the time flows from top to bottom here, beginning grandly with the Meiji Restoration and the rich nation, strong army ideal for Japan, which soon, around the time of the First World War, broke up into four groups. Discourse, really, that had four positions. I'm not going to go into the details here. I simply want to make a couple of points. First, that Japan's grand national strategy, national security strategy, has had four moments, well, three moments until now, of basic consensus. There were always different strands. There was always great fighting. The portraits that have been painted of Japan as sort of this homogeneous, consensual wa. Oriented. The WA sometimes gets boing, but is otherwise consensual. That stuff is nonsense, has long been nonsense. If it's being fed to you, throw it back up at the feeder. The point is, Japan has always been a nation of folks, both elites and masses, who have had really sharp disagreements about what is best for securing Japan's national interest. Different values have been optimized at different times. The point here is that there were three moments, certainly the rich nation, strong army consensus, this forced march to industrialization and militarization, the military's ascendance under what I'm calling here, Konoe's new order and the cheap ride on US security guarantees. It's not a free ride, but it's a cheap ride. It's close to a free ride. It has some of the same dynamics, some of the same moral hazards and so forth, which I call democratic. Japan's cheap ride is often called the Yoshida Doctrine. I prefer to refer to it in slightly less decorous terms, but there it is. Throughout all of this, and connected across all of this, have been fairly consistent views about whether Japan should be a big nation or a small nation, whether Japan should be a trading nation or a powerful military nation, whether Japan should be a great power or a middle power, and so forth. And that's the kind of debate we see now blossoming again in Japan today. That's where I'm going to go with this. But I just wanted to show you how it connects to the past. We can, if you wish, come back to it. There is one guy among many who I just want to mention. Again, I'm flicking at him, not doing him justice, but it's Yamagata Aritomo, who built the Meiji military, who built the Emperor's military, who made it possible through his manipulations with other elites in the late 19th, early 20th century. In his particular case, to make sure that there would be military at the table of all cabinet meetings and that the military would have a veto of Japanese national security, actually all national policy. It's very important, and I mention him because at the end of the Second World War, Japan came out of the other end of a devastating war, devastating for its neighbors, but of course very devastating for itself. It came out at the other end with four groups of folks who were vying for power, who were vying for control of the national agenda. They were self described pacifist folks who, mostly on the left, who wished Japan to be unarmed and neutral and rejected the idea of an alliance with the United States. Neo militarists who saw the alliance with the United States as a convenience but basically as a convenient way back to a revived military who said, well, we got it a little bit wrong, we'll get it right the second time. And these guys had great friends among the American military occupiers and they never got much traction, fortunately. But we don't want to cast a blind eye to their existence nor to their friendship with the American military in Japan. The American military government SCAP in Japan and then two groups of conservatives who we'll come back to over and over again. Which is the purpose, really the purpose of this slide. The first, what I'm calling the revisionist revisionists is just playing off of the notion of revising the Constitution. Article 9 of the Constitution which says that Japan forever renounces the use of force as a means of settling Internet international disputes and therefore will not maintain land, sea or air forces. I mean, that is basically a paraphrase, maybe even a direct quote from the Constitution Article 9. There are folks who were never really comfortable with that, who were trying from the very beginning to undo that because they thought that this would be crippling to Japan. It would prevent Japan from being all that it can be, as we say in American jargon. And then the pragmatists actually who held sway for most of the first 40 years of the. Most of it, not all of it, but most of the first 40 years under the Yoshida Doctrine. They were Yoshida and his acolytes and his successors, very pragmatic, very conservative, but very pragmatic. And they were the ones who said, well, you know, for Japan to become a great nation again, for Japan to step again upon the world stage as an equal of the great powers. What, what it needed first to do was to rebuild and would be economics first. And they made a tacit deal with the pacifists that they would not support revision of Article 9. They were opposed to the pacifists in the ballot box. They were with the revisionists within the Liberal Democratic Party after 1955. But the real fight within Japan for most of the Cold War was between these two brands of conservatives. I'm telling you this for reason. What won and what prevailed under their under basically the pacifists wing for the most of this period was as I say, a cheap riding realism, very realism, very realistic. This was not. It's ideological in a profound sense, I suppose, but this was a calculated strategy to maximize benefits for Japan. And it had several pieces, it was a way to. Well, let me walk through them. The largest and most important piece of this was that the ghost of Yamagata Aritomo was always hovering somewhere. That's why I showed you his photo to begin with. What I mean by the ghost of Yamagata is that there was this fear deep, deep within the Japanese discourse that any discussion of the military, any discussion of national security, any discussion of the basis these discussions were always overlaid by a fear that Japan would once again become a militarist state. The Japanese. There's a large slice in the Japanese discourse comprising folks who just don't believe Japan can be trusted with having a military. And that that's consistent with Article 9 and that therefore you don't change Article 9. You don't do anything to make it possible for Yamagata and his ilk to return. So the specter of Yamagata Aritomo is very important. And even to this day, as one talks about defense budgets and one talks about doing things with the Americans that are unsavory, many of the things the Americans do are unsavory, of course. And so doing it with the Americans because you have to maintain the alliance again is all you'll see. Conversations, editorials, unrolled, sort of the dust is blown off and reissued. All about being careful not to reinvite a Yamagata like leadership back in. And so this had a number of pieces in it. This is basically the Yoshida doctrine. Non possession, non manufacturing, non introduction of nuclear weapons. The three non nuclear principles limited defense budgets. Less than 1% of GDP would be spent on defense. A ban on defense exports, which was very frustrating to heavy industries. I did a book a few years ago called Rich Nation, Strong army, which looks at the defense industry of Japan and how frustrated, how angry they got that they couldn't nudge the Japanese leadership off of this limitation. They wanted to get in the business. They still do, actually. They are. And I'll get to this in a moment. The ban on the military use of space, which none of these are laws. All of these were sort of norms, more than norms. They were cabinet orders. They were public policies proclaimed by the Yoshida Ites, who followed Yoshida Shigeru. And there would be no Defense Ministry. There would only be a defense agency. And that defense agency would be colonized by senior bureaucrats from other agencies. To keep the Yoshida Ites, keep the people in uniform down. This is very important. Keep the uniforms away from politics. This is a form of civilian control that was quite effective. And so the result was this kind of military. This is from the JDA the Japan Defense agencies. Again, it was a defense agency, not a ministry. From their white paper that Japan would have a reliable and warm hearted military. This is very reassuring, I'm sure to Japan's neighbors this was at least as reassuring. It would also not only be reliable, not only be warm hearted, but it would be damn cute. And so Prince Pickles, this is the mascot. And again, Sabrina Fustrock has done a marvelous job with this. The point is to try to make the contemporary Japanese military look nothing like the Imperial military. Not as ferocious, not as aggressive, not as political, just bloody cute. And so you get this sort of thing. And my favorite, of course, is the one with Donald o' Connor and Gene Kelly dancing on the deck of a helicopter carrier. This is on the web and you can actually see them in motion doing this. This is a recruiting advertisement for, for the Maritime Self Defense Forces. And they sing about seamanship for love and seamanship for peace. I'm being cute about this, but this is a very serious thing. This is an effort to redefine the image of a fundamental institution in industrial democracy. And it's a concerted, protracted, sustained effort that has actually succeeded quite well in part because Article 9 has not been changed yet or reinterpreted. So that's what you, you know, this was the consequence of a past, a reaction to the past, a set of institutions, a set of norms, a set of policies that were designed to reassure not only Japan's neighbors, the Chinese in particular and the Koreans, not that they did a terrific job of reassuring either one, but reassuring Japan's neighbor public, the pacifist public that had suffered itself so much from the excesses of a militarist past. So there's a present now. There's a present that's quite different from the Yoshida Doctrine actually, that I showed you, because it's a present in which Japan actually does have land, sea and air forces. It has not only land, sea and air forces, but considerable land, sea and air forces, land, sea and air forces that reach out, that have the capability of reaching out and touching in very destructive ways. In fact, now there are limits. Japan does not have missiles. It certainly doesn't have yet. At least we'll talk about nuclear weapons. There's some ambiguity in the minds of some, but I've seen those smoking pistols on the nuclear front, but there are no cruise missiles, but they do have capabilities today. I'm listing a few here that were declared unconstitutional as recently as 10 years ago. So the interpreters of the constitutions, those it's called the Naikaku Hosei Kyoku, the Cabinet Legislation Bureau. The people who are interpreting the. It's not the Supreme Court of Japan that does this. These are bureaucrats. Nobody elected. These are just bureaucrats who say what can and can't be legal for Japan to have. And when a Japanese prime minister says he wants it, he's basically gotten it. A digression. In 1957, 1958, a very influential Japanese prime minister who is not a pragmatist, Kishi Nobusuke, who was the guy who ran Manchuria for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and who spent three years in Sugamo prison as an unindicted war criminal, had long since bathed himself in the. In the waters of American democracy, became America's true friend, was elected with what we believe to be COVID support from the Americans. Those, by the way, those archives have not been opened yet. Some of you. There's a great dissertation to be written. Should you get access to those archives. In any event, Kishi was unhappy with the possibility that Japan might not be able to get a nuclear weapon. And so he instructed the Cabinet Legislation Bureau to declare that the possession of nuclear weapons was not unconstitutional. The possession of defense of nuclear weapons, whatever that means. The point is that politicians determined, and in case mostly revisionist politicians determined to make changes, have been able to make changes not in the constitution, but in the interpretation of the Constitution by leaning hard on bureaucrats, which I guess is what you want. If. If you want civilian control, I suppose, let's talk about that. But the point is there's been an accretion over time. And I'll show you the next slide. I'll show you the salami slices that have been taken off of this Yoshida doctrine that have given Japan capabilities that were formerly declared unconstitutional. Aerial refueling is a good one. The Japanese military and defense producers, defense contractors, tried for years to sort of extend Japan's capabilities through the acquisition of aerial refueling capabilities, you know, air tankers. They couldn't have it. They couldn't have it. They couldn't have it. Now they've got it. Assault ships with hardened decks. Now, why do you need a hardened deck if it's a helicopter carrier? Well, maybe someday the suspicion is you'll have a vertical takeoff and landing planes just like, you know, well, just like the British Navy has. The Americans haven't sold any of these to the Japanese. The Japanese haven't built any of these things, but they do have the capability to transport them should they wish to. These assault ships actually look like Carriers, remote island defense is what they practice. This is not the Yoshida Doctrine of Senshuboe. The defensive defense, the hedgehog strategy, which was. I should have had that on the Yoshida doctrine was we will not be able to reach out and touch anyone, but if anyone tries to fool with us, we can defend ourselves. We put up, like a porcupine or a hedgehog, we put up our bristles, and we're very effective defenders of our homeland. Now they're actually reaching out and touching and practicing remote island defense and establishing the Coast Guard. The Japan Coast Guard is a new military power. I will show you a slide about this in a moment. A very important slide, actually. But if you're interested in the longer argument from which it's derived, I did a piece in the journal International Security recently on Japan's new military power, using the coast, talking about the Coast Guard as the paradigm. And they've had doctrinal shifts over time. Participation in peacekeeping operations under the UN auspices and participation, enthusiastic participation in what is thought by many to be quite illegal, which is the Proliferation Security Initiative, the willingness of the United States, this was John Bolton's initiative, to go out and declare the right to board and to interdict any ship on the high seas that it's suspected of transporting weapons of mass destruction. The Japanese signed on. Other countries did as well. Some declined. And of course, now they have been engaged in what are called by some semi permanent patrols to the Persian Gulf. I say more semi than permanent because in the meantime, the upper house of the Japanese Diet has come to be controlled by the opposition. And that matters for reasons I will discuss. So what happened was Japan went from Senshu boe, homeland, exclusively defensive defense, homeland defense, to something a little bit different, which was a regional security. And the first bullet point here is quite important. Arata na senryoku in Japanese, arata na senryoku. This is in quotes. And you'll notice the exclamation point is inside the quote. And the exclamation point is inside the quote because this is the way it was written in the Japan Coast Guard white paper of 2006. And when I saw it, I fell out of my chair. So I dusted myself off, I got back up on my hind legs and I hied myself off to the Japan Coast Guard commandant and got an appointment to see the gentleman and said in my best Japanese, what's up with that? And the reason I asked what's up with that? Is because some of you will recognize the word senryoku. Senryoku is what's in the second paragraph of Article 9 of the Constitution that Japan cannot have. It's forbidden. It's forbidden. And yet they were using the same word to describe what they had, which was new. Aratana Senryoku. They'd have new military power, and it would be in the hands of a coast guard. Now, a coast guard is a constabulary force. It's designed to go after bandits and smugglers and people like that, bad guys. Not to fight the militaries of other nations, not to fight other people in uniform. Okay. So they. This is the way it was explained to me, actually, what he said to me. He said to me, I don't know how many of you understand Japanese. He looked at me and he said. He says, you're a little too clever. I said, what do you mean I'm too clever? He says, how about the Red Sox? How they doing this year? And he wanted to change this. I said, no, let's talk about Senryuku. He said, no, let's talk about the Red Sox. I didn't. I didn't get a good quote from him. Other than the Kashikoi Sugurin. The idea was not to engage. And actually this doesn't appear in the 2007 or 2008 white papers, but it's an important statement because this is an alternative to a Yoshida. It's the beginning. It's an accretion of new capabilities and new forms of participation in regional security. What does it include? Modernization of the Coast Guard. Very rapid growth. The Japanese defense budget, the formal defense budget has been flooded flat and kept under 1% of GDP since the early 1980s. But the budget of the Japan Coast Guard has gone up like this in the interim. It's where law enforcement, as I said, meets national security. It's sort of a fourth military branch. I say it's not a second Navy because it doesn't have the kinds of look down and look up capabilities that navies have, you know, hunting for subs and doing, you know, air. Air clearing radars. But they have had a very relaxed set of rules of engagement. This is very, very relevant. One of the things that's most central to the Article 9 of the Constitution is that Japan would not. Would not use force as a means of settling international disputes. That's the Article 9, right? Well, these guys were told you can sort of use. You can use force at your judgment. And that law was changed In October of 2001, at the very moment that Japan passed the patrol to the Indian Ocean law that we were all focused on. They changed the Coast Guard law. And one month later, for the first time since 1940s, Japanese uniformed officials fired guns and sunk a foreign ship. And that was a North Korean ship, the quote, unquote, mystery ship, Fushinsen. I don't know how many of you remembered or even paid attention to it, but it was historic because there they were using force against the. And actually it sank in Chinese waters. And we'll get into that. The interesting and actually counterintuitive thing behind all of this is that this has been welcomed not just at home, by Japanese across the board, in part because the Coast Guard sits inside the old Transportation Ministry. And until this last cabinet reshuffle, the last four or five ministers have been from the Komeito, which is a coalition partner. So there's a way to keep the coalition in. It's a way to reassure the Japanese public. You know, there's nothing bad afoot. But it's been welcomed by the Chinese, it's been welcomed by the Russians, been welcomed by the South Koreans, and certainly by the Americans. This is this bulking up at the Japan Coast Guard. There was a thing called the Northern Pacific Coast Guard Forum, which is actually an extraordinary model of quasi military cooperation in Northeast Asia. In fact, the only model we have. We can talk more about that. But the Coast Guard has been used for overseas development assistance. JICA has used Coast Guard equipment. Now, this is a country that can't. Right. Export arms. Well, they've been exporting Coast Guard ships to Malaysia, to the Philippines, to Indonesia through jica. Those of you who know the Japan Aid Agency. So here we are. Well, here we are. This is Mr. Abe. He's two prime ministers ago. And this is taken at a very important time, actually, in the context of this, this discussion. It was January of 2007 when the Japan Defense Agency became the Ministry of Defense. And so here he is reviewing the troops of the new ministry, the troops within the Japanese Self Defense Forces within the Ministry of Defense. So I've just described some changes. How. How did it all happen? Well, you know, in graduate school, I remember a lecture from Carl Deutsch. I don't know if y' all read. Y' all read Carl Deutsch. Anyone read Carl Deutsch here? Students? I'm asking the students. No. Well, you should go back and have a look. I mean, Carl Deutsch, he was a great man. And Carl Deutsch, you know, among the many memorable things he said, got up on the podium and his head. I won't even begin To. I would try to attach myself to his accent, but he had this wonderful way about him and very tweety, and said, you know, if there was ever a single reason for any political event, I assure you it didn't happen. And so here I am telling you the same thing, which is there's lots of reasons and I'm not going to try to put beta coefficients in front of each. Let me just suggest there's domestic reasons and international reasons and walk through a few. First, that those pragmatists who had dominated the Yoshida Ites, who had dominated Japanese political discourse, really got. They were. They were elbowed out by the heirs of Kishinobusuke. You know, this guy here is the grandson of Kishinabusuke. Actually the current prime Minister is the grandson of Yoshida. So never mind. But there we are. The LDP pragmatists were marginalized. They were shunted aside by, well, Mr. Koizumi in particular, as the revisionists with Koizumi, with Mori, with Abe certainly began to consolidate their power. These were what I call normal nationalists. But the term normal nation, Futsunokuni, comes from actually a guy in the opposition, Ozawa, it said, Japan should be a normal nation. We should be able to say no to the United States. We should be able to use force if our interests are threatened. We should be just like Britain. We should be particularly British, but we should also be like France or Italy or Germany and so forth. These guys with this doctrine in mind consolidated power. And they did it in a vacuum. There was no opposition at the time, really to speak of. There was Ozawa and his first Liberal Party, and then the Nshito, his current party. But they didn't get in the way. The left had put. Long since gone. The left committed suicide, the socialists committed suicide, and the communists became irrelevant long, long ago in ways that are actually very sad for the health of Japanese democracy. In my view, the fight was entirely among the conservatives. The bureaucracy was no longer the dominant force that it was said to have been. And a public support for the Self Defense Forces was growing and is today higher than it's been ever, in part because of very careful use of the Self Defense Force, about which in a moment, of course, it's also in the context of a new world order, one in which everything has changed. No balance of power globally, only the United States basically running around and doing what it wished to do in ways that forced Japan's hand, repeatedly forced Japan's hand. Are you with us? You're against us, you know, and The Japanese came. Well I'm talking to a group in Britain. You understand these things. How governments came to sit with and beside the feet of the United States as it was exploring these options for the new hegemony, a new balance of power regionally certainly that is the rise of China. That's sort of nice way to. Two different ways to say the same thing I should say. And over time I won't get into the details of this because I'm already talking too long, but the sending minesweepers to the Persian Gulf after the first Gulf War signing into law after much debate among these groups that I described before, the right to do UN peacekeeping a shift as I've said from homeland to regional security. In 1996 when it was discovered that the US Japan alliance had no core. This was in the context of the first Korean, the first crisis nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. The alliance managers looked at it and said so you know, we have this crisis and you know, we actually, we Americans, we actually may be doing strikes and so here's what you're going to do. And the Japanese said say what? Where does it say we have to do those? And you know, there was nothing. There was no there there. And when it was discovered there was no there there. The there was a lot of very rapid efforts. There were a lot of very rapid efforts made to try to put some there there into this alliance. And that was the redefinition from strictly homeland security to regional security, which is in the areas surrounding Japan, which the Japanese quickly went to Beijing to reassure their Chinese friends was not a geographical concept. I'll leave you to interpret that. And of course after 911 the basically the violation of a constitution, the de facto collective self defense. The current interpretation of the constitution says Japan has the right under international law but doesn't have the legal ability under its constitution to engage in collective self defense with an ally. That is that means if an American ship is attacked on the high seas, it cannot defend the American ship even if it has the way the means to do so. This would not go well with the Americans. The Japanese understand that and so they have been working for years to try to get a reinterpretation. It hasn't really happened. In the meantime, de facto, by sending their tankers with destroyers out to Diego Garcia, fueling American and British warplanes for sorties in Afghanistan during occupation enduring freedom they've made it happen. They have violated the constitution. And I think the Japanese all understand this. It's a bit of a kabuki and there's an effort to sort of make it right, put it right, make it consistent. And it's a difficult circle to Square. And by 2004, there are Japanese boots on the ground in Iraq. The Japanese claimed it was a non combat zone because that's, you know, important. You can't send troops into combat under the current interpretations of the Japanese constitution. So they sent them to this place called Samawa, which they said was a non combat zone. And when Mr. Koizumi was asked, well, how can you know it's a non combat zone? And he said, well, because that's where our troops are. Again, I leave it to you. I mean, there were the lexical somersaults that Japanese politicians and bureaucrats have been. Been going through is really very difficult. And I'm not trying to diminish it. It's very difficult for Japan to be quote, unquote normal and be consistent with the strict interpretations of the Japanese constitution to this point. By 2004, they relaxed the arms export ban. They exempted BMD cooperation with the United States from these things. I've talked about the creative use of the Coast Guard and so forth. Let me skip over these. There are specific catalysts. The end of the Cold War, certainly the humiliation of what they call checkbook diplomacy. That is the fact that after the first Gulf War in 1991, the coalition that was put together by George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush, Bush I, he relied upon a Japanese check of $13 billion. They wrote a check for $13 billion. Japan was the only country in the world to actually tax its citizens to pay for the first Gulf War. And when the thanks went out from the Kuwaitis, bless them, Japan was left out. And so Japanese who would like to see Japan be normal have never failed to use this to talk about the humiliation of checkbook diplomacy. Understanding that unless we put our men and women in harm's way, unless we do more than transfer loot, but actually transfer bodies and put our national treasure beyond our national treasure, our people, we will never achieve the status, the equal status of the other great powers. And so that was a catalyst and a lot of people blame all this on the United States. This is a lot of fun. This is Rich Armitage, Richard Armitage, who at this moment, he's cracking the whip for the lion, Mr. Koizumi, as you might recognize him, the lion is the Ja Tai, the Self Defense Forces. And he's jumping over the wall of Article 9 and he's saying, get over the wall. He says, show the flag, put your boots on the ground, get over the fellow else. And the question mark at the end of this is was it really force majeure or is it simply that it's the Americans forcing the Japanese to sort of get in line or was it the Japanese sort of in particular, Mr. Koizumi saying, you know, if we don't stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, not quite wingtip to wingtip with the Americans, we're going to suffer for it. I think it's the latter, but there it is. Then there's the, the catalyst from central casting. This one is quite a lot of fun. The mother of all catalysts, probably at least notionally, rhetorically, is Kim Jong Il. This is the starting with the 19934 crisis, which, you know, that crisis led to the reinterpretation, as I've already described, of the alliance and really of Japan's security doctrine. In 1998, of course, he sent his hardware, he tossed his hardware over the archipelago and the result within a week was a repeal of the long ban, the long held ban on the non military use of space. You know, Mitsubishi Electric had had a program set to go and it was the Diet passed it and Japan put up a spy satellite with an E year or two. The Coast Guard law revision I've already described again, that was a North Korean ship, again used by those who would have Japan become more muscular as evidence that Japan needed to be more muscular, North Korea. He's been a serial miscalculator all along the way with the Japanese because he's fed. If you're on the right in Japan, if you want Japan to be more muscular, if you want Japan to be stronger, you can't hope for a better foil than Kim Jong Il. I was at a conference recently with a retired Japanese ambassador and he was asked, you know, why are you participating in ballistic missile defense with the Americans? You know, this is a violation of your constitution, blah, blah, blah. And he said, well, you know, the problem is the North Koreans. And at the end of it I asked him, okay, there are two possibilities, Mr. Ambassador, I did this off mic, but there are two possibilities. The Ch before the North Korea was either chosen, which is not a nice way to describe Korea in Japanese, although Cholsen is North Korea or it was China. And he said, you heard that right? And of course we heard it, everyone heard it. And the point is that it is China that folks are worried about, but North Korea is just so much more convenient because it's so much more transparently the villain. And so it's easier for the Japanese, who want to be more muscular to get their tasks adopted. Of course, you don't forget China. We can talk about the security dilemma with the Chinese. We really don't know the full dimensions of it. I will say it's not quite as bad as security dilemma as we might imagine. That is an arms race, a security dilemma. IR101. Yes. Where you do something that's in your defense, you think in your defense, your adversary or potential adversary interprets it as aggressive and so does something to counter it. You interpret that as aggressive and so you're in this security dilemma. It's a long held theorem in international security studies. It's not quite out of control in east and Northeast Asia because the Japanese have maintained that level of formal defense cap, but there it is. And there are lots of triggers, potential triggers. The territorial disputes, particularly the Senkakus, but also the goodies in the East China Sea are non trivial that they're fighting about. So where is it all going? Let me talk to you about. Let me return really in a way to the first slide I showed you, where I connected the dots. These groups still exist. They still exist in Japan. And the way I think about them and the way I do this in the book is to look at the security discourse in Japan across two axes. The horizontal axis is distance from the United States. Basically, it's distance from the United States. It's very straightforward. It's a proxy for the abandonment, entrapment dilemma that's inherent in every alliance. That is, if you get too close to your alliance partner, you risk being drawn into your alliance partners wars. If you get too far away from your alliance partner, you risk becoming irrelevant to your alliance partner. And so your alliance partner doesn't care about defending you. It's very straightforward. It's not rocket science, but it's very important because the rhetoric around the alliance, the rhetoric around doing more is all about this. You know, do we hug the United States? Hug them close. Right? That's the Tony Blair. That's that book about Tony Blair, hug them close. Or do we put some distance with the United States? After all, the United States goes to war a lot and we haven't suffered yet. We've actually profited from most of the American wars. But there's going to come a time when we're not going to be profiting, we're going to be suffering. Let's get away from them. The vertical axis is this axis about whether or not you think it's legitimate to use force as a means of settling international disputes, I.e. should Article 9 be revised or not? And if you think it shouldn't be revised and you believe you should be distant from the United States, you're really consistent with the pacifists, the unarmed neutralists and so forth. On the left, if you believe that Japan should not use force, but you really believe that you would like to continue the cheap ride for as long as you can, you're with the heirs to the Yoshida Doctrine, the middle power internationalists in the lower right box. But if you believe force is legitimate as a means, and you believe Japan should start using, at least be allowed to use force. I'm not arguing that these people believe Japan should be aggressive. What I'm arguing is that these people believe Japan should be better armed and more independent. On the left, those are the neo autonomists. And on the right, continue the alliance with the United States and use that, use that time to buy more capabilities, to buy more experience, to buy more equality along the way. Now, in January of this year, I did a survey, actually I interpreted a survey that was done at Tokyo University by Professor Kabashima. He's now the governor of Kumamoto. He's done well for him for a university professor. He gave us acts. He gave Pat Boyd, Patrick Boyd is a graduate student of mine and I access to data that he had collected for in a Tokyo University study. I don't know if you can see it. Tokyo University study of A questionnaire was sent to all the members of the lower house of Diet. They are the ones who are still, because the lower house has not been dissolved, they are the ones who are still in the lower House of Diet. And the questionnaire covered a lot of issues, from the culture wars questions to, to national security, to how the economy should be organized and so forth. We focused on all three. But for the purposes of this lecture, I just want to show you the results against the chart, you know, sort of the notional chart of the discourse. This is how they came out on the issue of the national security strategy. And what was really striking about this, there were several things really striking about it. One was that the quote, unquote, pacifist. Oh, by the way, the. The response rate was 425, which is huge. It's something like 85ish percent, 90%. And the reason is that it was administered just before an election, the September 2005 election, the Koizumi sweep. And so people really needed to have their positions out there. The pacifists did quite well, not surprisingly, the normal Nationalists did the best as a single group. But what's most interesting and finally, and what's most reassuring, at least to me, is that the neo autonomists, these guys who want nuclear weapons, who want to be completely independent of the United States and so forth, the heirs to the Japanese nativists of the pre war, there are only four guys who sort of position themselves through their answers to the questions in this box. So that was fine and that was interesting and enlightening. But what was most interesting to me was that the cumulative majority, as you can see the cumulative majority are on one line or another, which by my interpretation means that events can shift them. They're not sure, they're a bit ambivalent. And I think you sort of have to watch this space. We don't know which way it'll go. So let me talk about each one of those. Actually all but the pacifist. Let me talk about three of these boxes and what their national security strategy would be and then tell you why I think none of them will come to be and tell you what I think will come to be and then get out of your way. A normal Japan. This is the normal nationalists. I've already talked to you about what they've accomplished. The answer is if they stay in power much longer, they will do this and more. This plus alpha. It's basically a Japan that won't say no to the United States, but they want a fuller partnership, more equality with the United States. They want to be normal like the Brits are normal. This is very important. They want British style normality, which would mean you hug the Americans. This is Tony Blair version of British style normality. Sorry, hug them close and fight their wars with them. The problem with this view is that this would alienate Japan from their regional partners, from their neighbors certainly, and from a large number of domestic constituents. I don't think they're going to go there. Armed neutrality, this upper left hand quadrant where they are using force and getting away from the Americans, they would have nukes. They've said so it's a good idea. In their view, they would move from, I think defensive to offensive realism, that is take advantage of opportunities in the international order. It would be a Japan that not only can say no, but but does say no. Now, as I've already showed you, they don't get much traction. Support for this at home is quite marginal and of course in the region and among the Americans is non existent. I don't think it's going to happen in that form. Then there's the return to the Yoshida version of the world. A Japan that will not quite say yes. It says yes on, you know, the free ride, but won't say yes when the Americans say fight with us, that they'll say, we'll send you trucks for the rear area. How would you like these clock radios? In fact, Don Atwood, who was the Under Secretary of Defense during the first Gulf War, actually was told that by the Japanese. When he said, what are you prepared to do? He said, we're prepared to send walkmen so your soldiers, when they come back from the front, can have an entertaining time. And at that point, Atwood said, it's going to cost you $13 billion. That's when the number went from 4 billion to 13. He was not a happy under Secretary of Defense. It's a Japan that would be tethered to the constitution and to its evolved norms, as I've described them, that is the cheap riding norms. It would be rolled back from regional. From global security to regional security, probably back to defensive defense and a very comfortable junior partnership with the United States. The Japanese are not. They don't support this now. This is not where Japan is, where the public is, and it is, at the end of the day, a very robust democracy in Japan. Something, I guess, I have to say out loud. I shouldn't have to. So what do I think will happen? What I think will happen is what I call the Goldilocks posture. Not too hard, not too soft, not too far, not too close. I have to explain Goldilocks. I've. I thought everyone read Goldilocks. I was in Germany. I thought it was a German fairy tale. And the termans looked at me completely with blanker faces than the Japanese looked at me when I said it. Okay, so it's a sort of, you know, mini max, okay? It's a Japan that will be able to say no and that sometimes will say no in the same way that some of America's most reliable allies have said the Canadians said no. The Germans will say no from time to time. Certainly the French have long learned how to say no to the Americans. That's not a surprise. And yet we cooperate quite easily with the French in other ways. It's a Japan that would be armed for deterrence, not armed for aggression, armed to counter coercion, particularly in the South China Sea. That's what the Coast Guard buildup itself seems to me is about. And why do I think all of this is happening is because I do believe that Japanese leadership is highly pragmatic not necessarily in the Yoshida sense, but very strategic. There are divisions within each of those quadrants I showed you. It was a very coarse grained analysis. There are divisions within each. That's what I guess people, all those folks being on the lines are about Japan because they're acting strategically. They're hedging like master and they're hedging against the decline of the United States which is out there for all to see, both relative and absolute. They're hedging against the entanglement abandonment dilemma. They're again a robust democratic politics. Their intra party dynamics suggest that they're headed in this way. And they may even, you know, God forbid in this robust democracy have an alternation in power that's more Godot like than it is Goldilocks like. But you know, we've been waiting a long time. I've lost a lot of money voting against the LDP in the office election pools, but here we are. But I'll tell you what. I wrote this book, the preface to the edition that's on sale tonight for a mere eight pounds. The preface talks about how Abe was a Goldilocks right out of the gate. And I say in the preface, and I'll say to you here I was surprised. Abe was. Is Kishi's grandson. Mr. Abe was openly very vigorous in his support for a more muscular Japanese foreign policy. Mr. Abe was a strong advocate of punitive diplomacy with the North Koreans. On the abductees issue, there's a whole range of ways in which, which range of features of his point of view that led folks to. To label him a nationalist. He was going to take Japan down the Koizum, further down the Koizumi path. And the Koizumi path included sticking a long sharp poker in the eye of the Chinese and the Koreans by going to Yasukuni Shrine and doing other things that were not cool. So instead, and to everyone's surprise, really, certainly to the surprise of Japan experts and to others, he went. Instead of going to the United States first, which is something that virtually every Japanese Prime Minister in the past had done, he went to China first. He went then to Korea. Maybe it was the reverse order. No, I think he went to China first. He announced that he would reform the Yushukan Museum. The exhibits in the Yushukan. I don't know how many of you have been to the. The Yushukan Museum, which is on the grounds a fair number. Some. Anyway. The Yushukan Museum is a reliquary of war. It's war relics on display and a celebration of Japanese militarism. And if you're the descendant of a former adversary of the Imperial military, it's a very disturbing place to visit, visit. And he listened really to the protests of some, particularly on the American side, said, look, you know, would you please fix this place. Their account of the Nanjing Massacre, their account of the reasons for World War II, their accounts of many things are really quite, well, quite at odds with, I think, good sense and history. But there it is. He argued for that change. He accepted and this was really quite small, striking. He accepted the Murayama apology of 1995. He was the leader of the group of diet representatives in 1995 who walked out of Diet, who wouldn't listen to the idea that a full dress apology on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war to Japan's neighbors was something the Japanese government should do. He opposed it, became Prime Minister and supported it and went further and argued and acknowledged that his grandfather was partly responsible for the Second World War. So this was a guy who was acting like Goldilocks. This was not a guy who was acting like, well, Koizumi, his predecessor. He supported the appointment of a joint history commission with the Chinese new negotiations for the resources in the East China Sea and so forth. So he was really toning it down. So he was Goldilocks right out of the gate to everyone. So then there were the Goldilocks twins. Mr. Ozawa, again, after being elected after his party won a majority or a near majority in the upper house of the Diet, moved first and foremost to pull Japan away from the United States and forced a suspension in the Japanese cooperation in Operation Enduring Freedom and to the Afghanistan dispatch. Temporary though it was, Ozawa and Fukuda, who was Abe's successor, pushed Tokyo closer to Beijing through visits, port calls, military. The promise of sort of, well, port calls. That's not military cooperation. But it's non trivial that a Chinese missile cruiser shows up in Yokosuka in the naval bases and that Japanese military ships show up in Chinese military ports without mass demonstrations. And then the question is, what about aso? I'm not going to go through all of this except to say that Mr. Aso seems to be following an Abe line rather than a Koizumi line and that the distinctions, the differences between ASO and Ozawa and that's the difference that we have to sort out because we're going to have a dissolution of Diet shortly and Ozawa may be the prime. Mr. Aso may be a very short term prime minister. We don't know. We do know that the LDP is going to fall very hard. We just don't know whether it will fall from power. There are differences on a number of issues. The alliance issue, which for also is the number one priority all the way to the right on that chart I showed you, Mr. Ozawa says, yes, you know, the Americans, we, you know, the alliance, yes, important, but it's really the United nations under which. The auspices of the United nations under which we should organize our security posture on the refueling issue. They are starkly in opposition, one from the other on North Korea. Mr. Aso is, I guess, as all Japanese leaders must be at the beck and call of the. I mean, the effort to make the abductee issue disconnect. The six party talks failed and failed miserably. Unconstitutional revision. Although Mr. Ozawa in the past has argued for it, he hasn't spoken much about it recently. Mr. Aso is all for it, but probably unable to make it happen. So stay tuned and I'd be happy to answer questions and thank you for your attention. And I guess, John, I'll. Okay, I'm happy to, you know, if you want, I'll take a couple and. Let me excuse myself for a moment, get a piece of paper. Otherwise I'm hopeless. Maybe I'm hopeless. There we are. So please, anyone? Yes, sir.
- [55:52]
C
Do you think it's likely that the empire will be go through now. Now that Ozawa seems to have.
- [55:59]
B
I'm sorry, that what will go through? Sorry?
- [56:01]
C
The Marine Maritime interdiction.
- [56:03]
B
Oh, maritime interdiction, yeah.
- [56:04]
C
Will it go through now that Ozawa seems to be tactically accepting in order to get the general election?
- [56:11]
B
You're talking about Operation Enduring Participation in Operation Enduring Freedom. Yeah, well, that's not maritime interdiction. That's why I'm confused. Maritime interdiction is something. That's the psi, that's the Proliferation Security Initiative. What they're arguing about is whether or not Japan should continue to send its tankers with fuel for the warships and warplanes of the coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan. That means going out to the. So there's no interdiction involved in that. Do I think it'll go through? Yeah, I do. I think it will go through. But that's, you know, based on a reading of yesterday's newspaper and tomorrow it may say something else. He's not a big fan of it. Mr. Ozawa is, if anything, very clever in selecting issues on which to fight. And if he thinks that's not. I mean, that was an issue to fight in the summer of 2007. And he fights. Fought it quite successfully. The problem for Mr. Ozawa is not a strategic one, except within the context of his party. There are those within his party, Maihara in particular, who are very eager to see this thing happen, and it could split the party. In fact, as we look out over the possibilities for this next election and the consequences of this next election, we may end up seeing the splitting both of these, the LDP and of the dpj, into sort of new formations. You know, there's been speculation about that this would be one issue on which it could come apart. The DPJ, Mr. Ozawa's party, I think. I'm guessing, but I think the majority of the members of the DPJ are not happy with his position on using the UN as the arbiter of what is legal and illegal in Japanese security policy. Going to see this. We're going to see it play out. Yes, sir. Yeah. Yes.
- [58:00]
C
And the reasons for the Japanese opposition to the removal of North Korea from the list. Is it because it comes before the. Any further concession concerning the abductees from Japan or the water issue?
- [58:17]
B
Yeah, this is. You know, I come from the. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the other Cambridge, and it's the 8th congressional district. Well, you know, you spent a lot of time there. And the 8th congressional district was Tip O' Neill's district. And Tip O' Neill was a very famous American populist and popular politician in Boston. And he had a very famous statement saying, which was, all politics is local. Right. And the case of the abductees is. Is exactly that. The people familiar. Are there folks, a quick primer on the abductees? Yes. Does everyone know who the abductees are? Is there anyone who doesn't? Okay, well, then that's fine. Everyone knows the abduct. I'm shocked. The abductees is a domestic political issue in Japan. Civil society, to the extent civil society is active in Japan on this issue, it's been captured by the right. It's been captured by a group. One group has been captured called the Kazokukai, the Families Association. The other is the. The Family, the Abductee Rescue Association. The number of these groups, when I say captured, it means simply that these groups have been championed. Their cause, which is the. The return of the kidnapped from North Korea to Japan or their remains, has been championed by the most. The revisionists within the LDP. The most conservative part of the LDP, that's Mr. Abe in particular, who engineered a huge electoral victory in November of 2003 for the LDP at a time when Mr. Koizumi was wobbly on his pins, he used the abductee issue. He got it done. So abductees is a very important. It's a heartfelt, a heart rending, horrible story of families being divided and so forth. The Americans are aware of it, the Americans are sympathetic to it. I think the Chinese are sympathetic to it. The problem, and it's a profound problem is that in the world of international politics, the fate of 20 or 30 young and somewhere as young as 13 who were at, who were abducted, the fate of their fate and the fate of the families pales in comparison to the problem of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. So the Americans are trying to do actually with the Chinese is to make sure that WMD gets taken care of. And then they told, paying lip service to the Japanese. The Japanese are not happy with that because they are playing to a domestic constituency. This is why the politics is local. Playing to a domestic constituency that they have to, they have to, they have to win the hearts and minds of to get reelected. There's an election coming up. So the real battle is not between. Well, the real battle is making sure that they look like the champions of the abductees. So. And they're not being that their issue is not being sold down some American river. And that's why you saw an announcement yesterday when the North Koreans agreed to allow reinspections again. The first person to get up and protested and issue sort of a statement of concern was the Japanese minister, Nakagawa Shoichi. He got up and he said, look, this is a real problem where we really are concerned about this. It's about to matter and we'll see how it, we'll see how it goes. Yes, sir.
- [61:50]
D
Thank you very much. Very interesting talk. I read one of your pieces, Richard, recently, jointly author about hedging. Japan's hedging.
- [62:00]
B
Oh yes, right.
- [62:01]
D
And I just wondered if your talk wasn't doing the same thing or was it? And I don't mean that by the way, in any insulting sense, but I.
- [62:08]
B
Got thick skin in the end.
- [62:10]
D
I'm not sure where you come down. I've read your work and. But I'm still not sure where you come down really. I mean, is the fundamental consensus which comes under the notion of a Yoshida doctrine, has that fundamentally been abandoned? Are we in a qualitatively new era? Have we moved beyond that? And it seems to me, and I've read the debates around the book which Chris Hughes and others participated in. It seems to me that the fundamentals of that biological market between the United States and Japan, domestic consensus and all the rest of it, the fundamentals of that remain that Japan will buy into a US led security Pacific order, although the Chinese don't seem to understand. They will buy into this because it's the best deal they've got. There is talk of course in Japan of American decline, but they're hedging on that because they're not sure, because nobody is sure. And of course there is the whole question of China, but even the question of rising China itself may reinforce the doctrine, not undermined. So I thought you were hedging a bit at the end. I mean, I see the accumulation of material and you know, obviously these are facts on the ground, but the question is, does this accumulation of the material you presented in the last 2:30 lectures really add up to, in the end, a great fundamental chance? The fundamental fundamentals of that bargain struck in the 1950s and I'm still not convinced that it is.
- [63:39]
B
No, if you've.
- [63:40]
D
As a non specialist, by the way.
- [63:41]
B
No, no, no, no, no. It's a non specialist unit.
- [63:45]
D
It doesn't seem to me the basics of that g. Of that bargain, whatever you want to call it, are really being challenged either within Japan or there's.
- [63:54]
B
A little bit of.
- [63:55]
D
The Americans have allowed a little bit of, you know, move. There's a little bit of movement within this debate going on. I agree with that, but I'm not sure that it really adds up in the end to something which has been a challenge.
- [64:07]
B
It's a very good question. And if you've read the debates on the book, particularly with Chris, then you understand where we really, where we disagree and where we disagree on this issue is on the question of whether or not the Japanese are creating options for themselves, which is what I believe they're doing, I believe well. Or whether or not. I'll come back to that. Or whether or not the Japanese are insinuating themselves through all of these changes, insinuating themselves so deeply into an American grand strategy that they are reducing their degrees of freedom and making it impossible for them to. I believe the former, Chris believes the latter, I think, and it sort of, it does come down to this. Now let's go back to the issue of the Yoshida doctrine. Parts of it have been. That's why it sounds like a hedge. Parts of it have been deeply embraced in Japan. The fact that Article 9, you know, they crept up to trying to make a change and failed, that there wasn't there isn't popular support for a revision of Article 9 that they've had trouble even putting a bill through to change the interpretation that, that even the revisionists have embraced certain restrictions on national power. Some of them suggest the Oshida Doctrine is still there and to be acknowledged, to be dealt with. On the other hand, so many parts of the Yoshida Doctrine are no more sort of like the old Monty Python routine with the parrot is dead. You know, it's really quite dead. Quite. I can't even do Monty. I wouldn't try to do Monty Python in London anyway. It's. So much has changed. The Japanese have created for themselves, in my view, so many degrees of freedom, not the least of which is through entirely new institutional forms like these, these Coast Guard capabilities. I mean, this Coast Guard has gone down to the Malacca Straits. Best I can tell, last time I looked at a map, nowhere near the Japanese coast, nor is New Delhi anywhere near the Japanese coast. But the Coast Guard folks have been talking with the Indians. You know, I mean, this is. They're playing with new forms of security cooperation on a new scale that was not only unimaginable but certainly illegal under earlier interpretation. So I think there's been a lot of change. It comes down at the end of the day to not just the commitment of the United States, but to the conviction that the Japanese have, the level of conviction the Japanese have that the United States is in fact a committed ally of the Japanese. And there are going to be many who say that the United States may want, even if the United States may want to help it, they won't, they can't. The Gaullists will have their day. And I think the Gaullists arsenal, not to put too fine a point on it, their gun belt, their quiver, let's use quiver, is fuller today than it has ever been. And therefore I think there were more possibilities than existed under the Yoshida Doctrine in its pure form. Despite the fact that as you acknowledge some of the changes of the. On the margins of Yoshida, I think there's lots of opportunity for those who would like to do more that didn't exist. Yeah, two questions.
- [67:33]
E
One is about Taiwan and the. What is the state of consensus implicit perhaps in Japan, about the defense of Taiwan? And secondly, the Arctic China is.
- [67:52]
B
Building.
- [67:52]
E
A long term strategy for sending ships through the Arctic as the ice melts and as just one example, is building very close relations with Iceland of all places, because Chinese giant container ships have to be transshipped to get into Western European and North America ports. And Iceland is a very good place to build a megatranshipment port. And so. And the Chinese are playing this in a long game. I'm wondering what the Japanese are doing about the Arctic.
- [68:30]
B
Thank you, Robert. Robert and I were former colleagues at mit. Good to see him again. Thank you. Those two excellent questions, and you'll see why I think so in just a moment. Let me take them. Turn first is the Taiwan case. The Japanese have committed nothing that we know of to the defense of Taiwan. The Americans, of course, have, but the Americans have in the context of an unprovoked attack on Taiwan. So we would be sailing from Japanese ports. The U.S. navy. U.S. navy would be sailing from Japanese ports. The U.S. air Force would be operating out of Japanese airfields and so forth. What the Americans expect is very little from the Japanese. In fact, what the Americans expect is nothing in a military sense from the Japanese, as I understand it. Indeed, I think Japan had been, has been planned out of most contingencies in that area. What the Americans want is one thing and only one thing, which is that the rear area made those bases back in Japan would continue to operate and not be shut down by protests and anti, you know, anti war movements, that sort of thing. The Americans want to make sure that the Japanese will do at least that much. And if there's anything else in there, and I've not been in government and I don't know the documents, I haven't been told what they say. Certainly my guess is they probably have some agreements on fuel and supplies, but it's very rare area. So I don't think the Japanese have committed too much on the Arctic. I just come back and this is why I'm smiling. I've just come back from a conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and that was at the invitation of the Canadian Coast Guard. It was wonderful meeting in part because I had a chance to see exactly what you described, which is the sense that the Canadians have about what the security consequences are of the melting of the polar ice cap and particularly the opening of the Northwest Passage. Now, there was an article in the May issue of Foreign affairs by a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations whose named Scott. Scott something. I apologize, but you should have a look if you haven't seen it. And it's very stunning. What he demonstrates is, take the Asian example, is if that Northwest Passage is open to commercial transport, the route from Yokohama to Rotterdam is reduced from 12,000 nautical miles to 6,000 nautical miles, cut roughly in half. This hasn't escaped the Japanese notice. It hasn't Escaped. The Chinese notice hasn't escaped anyone's notice. Most of all it hasn't escaped the notice of the Canadian Coast Guard which is non militarized and very concerned about how to strike a balance with its the Canadian Navy and how to find so they I was there because I had just written this piece on the Japan Coast Guard then. So I was the they had asked the Japanese coast, Japan coast guard said no. So I was the Japan coast guard guy but there was a Norwegian coast guard guy and a Danish coast guard guy and there were Russians there, the American coast guard was there and everyone was talking about exactly this issue. And it's not just the militarization of the Northwest Passage, but it's also the things coast guards do which is, you know, search and rescue. God forbid a cruise ship goes down with thousands of small city, you know, they've got to be able to get out there and save lives and so forth. They're talking about how to, how to manage and so forth. They're very aware of it. The Japanese have used the buildup of the Coast Guard not for this purpose and don't talk about China. Trying to think now for a moment. Robert I don't think I, I don't recall whether or not there's a chapter or a section on China in the Coast Guard white paper. This certainly is on North Korea, this certainly is on the Arctic, this certainly is on aid to Southeast Asia and there is on interdiction and so forth through the But China is again sort of not part of this. On the other hand, without regard to whether it's in the document or not, it's certainly on the front of people's foreheads. This is there's going to be competition for these kinds of commercial routes and the ability to maintain freedom from coercion on these routes as well. Now the Americans, you know, God bless us, we never signed the international law of the sea and so we're sort of the odd man out. Everyone else is up there trying to figure it out through an international accord. We have, you know, you have the script, you have the document and the Americans can't play yes sir. States has been pushing. China.
- [73:32]
E
Hasn't China's rise to power created a.
- [73:35]
D
Significant problem for alliance management of the United States?
- [73:47]
B
And no. Can you just repeat, have there been any significant policy discord has there been significant policy discord between the United States and Japan over a risen China? And the answer is yes and no. And I'm not trying to be cute, so let me try to unbundle the answer on the no part, I'm referring to the alliance managers themselves, most of whom want to see, see a more muscular Japan. So the rise of China has, if anything, helped the alliance because it's enabled the alliance managers to make successful pleas for the pleas of the alliance managers and particularly the revisionists in Japan to make successful arguments for new kinds of deployments, new kinds of cooperations. Remote island defense. Remote island defense is all about China's rise. It's about going out and defending, patrolling and defending the Senkakus in particular and the resource basin in the East China Sea. So in that regard, no, it hasn't created problems. It's actually driven the Americans and the Japanese into each other's arms more tightly. On the other hand, there were a lot of, there was a lot of concern in Washington in 2005 ish when Mr. Koizumi went that extra, you know, cross that extra bridge by continuing, as I said before, you know, sticking a sharp poker in the Chinese eyes by going to the Yaskini shrine. That began to wear out the goodwill of many American alliance because contrary to what I think many believe, which is that bad relations between Japan and China is in US interest, I think the Americans, many Americans even in the Bush administration at that time, were concerned that it had gotten to gone out of hand. Because you began Then, remember 2004, 2005, there were demonstrations, anti Japanese demonstrations in China. There was a pelting of the, you know, they overturned the Consul General's car. There was a riot in the Asian football matches and so forth, anti Japanese riots in China. And the Chinese, Japanese relationship got very, very cold. And the Americans, I think many Americans, not maybe in the Defense Department, but certainly in the State Department, were not happy. And there was, there was friction there. And it's possible that that force majeure that I showed you that said that Mr. Armitage was forcing the Japanese to do more. It may have been the Americans were squeezing the Japanese to do less and to try to just make it up, get it right with the Chinese, for God's sakes. They're your major trading partner. We're not, you know, Japanese China is the major trading, trading dyad out in the world really anyway, in East Asia. So the, the. I think it's a mixed picture. That's why the yes and the no. Can I go to someone else? Just because. I'm sorry. Yes, sir. Let me come back to you at the end. Yes, sir.
- [76:55]
D
What's the nature of Japan's relationship to.
- [76:58]
A
Russia and how is the changing state.
- [77:01]
B
Of Russian foreign policy affecting Japan. Yeah, that's another good question. That's the one about which I know least. Russia plays a very small part in the book. And I think if I were writing the book over again, I'd be doing, doing much more. I'd learn much more and then be able to say much more. I was able to say so little in part because Russia was of so little importance in the course of this period. With the exception of the early run up in the Japanese defense budget in the 1980s, in the early 1990s, there was a time when this move at the end of the Cold War of four forces to the Russian Far east was used by Japanese defense managers to bulk up the Japanese defense budget. And the Japanese defense budget was the fastest growing part of the Japanese national budget with the exception back and forth with aid during this period. And that was the Russians who were scaring the Japanese into this quote, unquote. Then Russia went away in the, in the security planning for the most part. And I mean this again in sort of a gross sense it went away, but it's back. And it's back in part because the Russians have proclaimed that they're back. They've demonstrated that they're back in the North Atlantic, that they're even in the Mediterranean again and in the Far east will return that new intercontinental ballistic missiles are being around the. On the drawing boards and so forth. And so I think that the answer to your question, if I knew more, would be very different today or should be very different today than it was when I was doing the research and writing for this book, even two years ago and a year and a half ago. If there's someone here who knows more about the Russian case, I'd love to maybe you. Do you have a sense? Yes, sir. Can I just ask.
- [79:01]
D
You that on the basis of your last graph chart, if we do see Asso turns after the election, not too devastating, but weakened.
- [79:12]
B
Slightly, do you think he'll have a greater mandate to have enough of a.
- [79:18]
D
Mandate to return to Afghanistan in support of the Americans return to Iraq. The flip side is if we see.
- [79:26]
B
Asawa coming into power, do you think.
- [79:28]
C
We'Ll move to a position where we'll.
- [79:30]
A
Have a.
- [79:33]
B
Law pass? Well, we have a permanent peacekeeping law. Peacekeeping operations law is permanent. That was from 1993. And along the way the Japanese have interpreted their law to allow for participation in peacekeeping forces. So it's in place. The question is where do the peacekeeping forces get deployed and what are they allowed to do when I was discussing this with a former vice minister in the Defense Agency. He said that the Sudan was the first place they thought of had there been a UN peacekeeping force and so forth. They were prepared, they were talking about doing that. And then they decided it simply couldn't be sold to the Japanese people. It wasn't in Japan's national interest and they backed away from it. Since then, we've had a couple of times when the peacekeeping pkf, not PKO PKF has been debated inside those corridors. And my guess is we'll see that and I think we'll see that before we see anything, certainly from Mr. Alzawa, because he's all for this sort of thing. He's absolutely all for this sort of thing. And I don't think there's a big distinction with Mr. Oslo now on this point, on the first point point on whether or not you weren't asking if Mr. Aso would win, but whether or not we'd see a permanent deployment to Afghanistan. No, I mean, I think the last time he needed, Mr. Fukuda needed to invoke the 2/3 veto of the upper house. I mean it's reverse veto that he needed to invoke the special powers given to the lower house that exist only when you have 2/3 majority. He won't have anything near the 2/3 majority as you've acknowledged. So I don't think, I don't think you'll see that. What you may see. Well, I don't think you'll see it. In fact, what we saw as recently as about two months ago, three months ago, was a discussion as Japan is extricating itself from Iraq. Everyone knows that the soldiers with their boots on the ground left Iraq, it left Samala, but they left behind a couple or three C130 transports and they were ferrying materiel between Baghdad and Kuwait City. And you know, thank goodness none ever went down. They didn't fall victim to hostile fire and so forth. So this commitment hasn't been tested and no one's died on the Japanese side. All good things. But that's the last piece to come out of Iraq. The discussion was as that as we extricate, we Japanese extricate from Iraq, oughtn't we be talking about participating in a Multinational Force under UN auspices in Afghanistan? And that was a abandoned when Mr. Fukuda's support really went below anything remotely a level remotely affording him the power to get things done. Last question. It's eight o', clock, so. Last question. I apologize for making Your way just.
- [82:57]
C
Some paradoxical aspect of the economic rise of China that is an economic front giant relations have become closer and in fact, China is already has been for some years the largest trading partner in Japan. Also, the relationship between China, Japan and Korea is a very special kind. That is China has functioned as the launching pad for many of the intermediate and capital goods made in Japan and Korea. But the political aspect is that as China grows more important economically, Japanese are more and more terrified of China. They want to move closer to the United States. So in some sense there is a tension between these ever closer economic relations and how to react to it politically.
- [83:51]
B
Right? No, that's exactly right. The one solution to that, the way it was described to me, and it was actually kind of a compelling explanation, was this issue of the Asian Economic Caucus or East Asian Economic Caucus, a sort of an EU or an EC anyway in the region. And the way it was presented to me was, well, look to the Americans. Americans were none too happy about it because it excluded the United States. And the way the Japanese, very thoughtful Japanese presented it to me me was, look, you know, you've lived with this division in Europe for years. You're in NATO and you're out of the eu and you know, you stopped whining about, well, you still whine, but you know, you haven't tried to undo these things and get used to the idea because that's the future of Asia. The way they square that circle is say, well, on the economic front, we are going to have ever increasing interdependence and cooperation. On the military side, we hedge our bets and we continue to play with the Americans and we build this arc of freedom and democracy that stretches down through Australia and across to India. You know, that's the model. The Indians will have nothing of it to their credit. But you know, it's a very thinly veiled containment strategy toward China. Having it both ways and wanting to have it both ways installed in institutional form is something that I think many, I think what we call middle power internationalists in Japan would like to see hanged. You know, it's, you know, in the United states in the 1930s, they're all end with this. But there was this, we had these, these carnival shows in the Midwest, in Kansas and I you have these state fairs and airplanes, dual winged, probably have them here in Britain as well. You have these bi winged planes and the guys walking on the wings and doing acrobatics while the planes were flying, right. So you have these biplanes. And the first rule, the very first rule about doing wing walking, it's called, is you never let go with one hand unless you're sure you have the other hand. Right. And that's the way I see this. It's not quite a hydraulic relationship. It's more like a wing walking thing where you're making sure that you've got that. Okay, then we'll take that. Okay, then we get that one. And they're going to want to have it both ways. That's part of the Goldilocks model. Anyway, thank you all very much.