Japan Leaves the War on Terror
- 10.27.2007 - 3:06 PMToday, the vessels of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces are serving proudly in the U.S.-led Maritime Intercept Operations, along with the navies of seven other nations. Tokyo’s role has been maintaining a “free gas station” in the Indian Ocean for American and other vessels involved in the war against terrorists on the high seas and in Afghanistan. “This mission is part of an international effort,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters recently. “What would the other countries think if Japan were to pull out?”
We will soon find out because the legislative authority for Tokyo’s refueling activities expires this coming Thursday. Moreover, the authorization will not be extended until sometime next year, if ever, so this week Japan will end the mission begun in 2001. Fukuda has submitted a watered-down reauthorization bill—which would not permit Japan to refuel vessels involved in military operations, including those in Afghanistan—in the lower house, controlled by his Liberal Democratic Party, of the Japanese legislature, the Diet. Yet this “antiterrorism” legislation will be blocked by the Democratic Party of Japan, which controls the upper house. The DPJ has vowed to stop the refueling mission on the grounds that the United Nations has not fully authorized coalition operations in Afghanistan, the mission violates Japan’s constitution, and oil supplied to the United States Navy has been used in the Iraqi war.
The Japanese public is closely split on the refueling mission, and the opposition DJP appears to be using the issue to unseat Fukuda’s LDP in the next elections for the lower house. Matters have been complicated by the Defense Ministry’s underreporting of the amount of fuel supplied and unrelated allegations of corruption—this time involving a former official accused of going on more than 200 golf junkets arranged by a contractor. The result is that the world’s second-largest economy, which obtains virtually all of its oil from the Middle East and depends on the United States for the safety of tankers bound for Japanese ports, will drop out of multinational efforts to secure the sea lanes.
The refueling mission is largely symbolic, so its ending will also be full of meaning. The one thing we can say with assurance is that Japan in the Fukuda era is about to take a large step backward as a member of the international community.
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October 27th, 2007 at 5:34 PM
It amazes me that a country, so close to danger with China and North Korea, would pull back its commitment to security.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:34 PM
If there is anything to add to your accurate report, it’s the fact that the recently revealed corruption between the Defense Ministry and its contractors is not really a side issue or an unrelated problem.
The Japanese think that this is “the tip of the tip of the iceberg” because by now they have known the modus operandi of the Japanese government is such that they admit to their wrongdoing little by little so that the Japanese will be immunized for the entire story of bigger magnitude.
I agree that Japan’s pullout from the token mission won’t make any difference.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:37 PM
What does it take to get the left wherever rampant to see the peril and set politics aside?
October 27th, 2007 at 6:52 PM
Banjo: Actually all it takes is for America to wake up to the fact that Japan has never been really committed to the anti-terror cause. In other words, the Japanese won’t wake up to the threats being posed by Islamic fundamentalists and the neighboring communists until the Americans become aware there’s no point in treating the Japanese as the Britons in Asia.
If Mr Bush really wants them to become really committed, he should take his nuclear umbrella away from them.
October 28th, 2007 at 3:57 AM
“Dai Nippon” is truly a “great” nation.
The Almighty has truly graced the people of Japan with many, MANY gifts.
And the whole world needs that people to step forward, unabashedly, in support of law, order, civilization.
It’s long past time for the Japanese to trash the nonsense about non-violence within their constitution.
It’s all garbage. It’s all nonsense. And it’s s*#t stupid.
Peaceful proclamations, however solemnly proclaimed, mean nothing.
Ask Holland. Ask Belgium. Ask Luxembourg.
Consult all “the neutrality acts” passed by Congress during the inter-war years.
It’s all a joke. A pathetic, pusillaminousness joke.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:51 AM
Symbolic or not: so much for the 1000-ship navy concept. Commitments are paper. The only ships you can rely on being there when you need them are your own.
October 28th, 2007 at 3:43 PM
Dan,
Your exquisite comments reminded me of the 1949 film classic, The Third Man. In that film Orson Welles, acting as a cynic racketeer profiting from the ongoing WWII, says:
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Guess what - in 62 years under the pacifist Constitution and the nuclear umbrella provided by Uncle Sam, the Japanese have produced the likes of Toyotas, PlayStations and manga for adults. Because these products have nothing to do with values worth defending at the risk of their lives, this archipelago is now filled with 127 million purposeless people caught in the endless chain of means. A Tokyo-based Canadian journalist once likened them to zombies.
Another byproduct is barrels of pus, of course.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:24 AM
I think you’re being hard on the Japanese there, YY.
They make all the coolest horror movies these days.
October 29th, 2007 at 9:59 PM
How many people in the world support US operations in Iraq?
Thousands of innocent peoples were killed in Iraq, and Iraq had nothing to do with September 11 incident in the first place. There was no WMD, either. The more US kills innocent people, the more the fundamentalists get support from worldwide.
YY, what is worth defending from your perspective, if “purposeless people” are not worth it?
Your greed, perhaps.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:54 PM
This author seems to share most of the views of the American neocon hawks. Probably he agreed more with Mr Abe’s confrontational policies and American clientelism than with Mr Fukuda’s conciliatory approach to China and distantiation with Mr Bush’s crusade.
Maybe he is right, and China is just talking about peace and trade, but getting their weapons ready to remake their empire across Asia. But I truly think that’s just the paranoid delusions of neocons, who only seem to feel safe if they’re bullying everybody around.
Think about North Korea. Only after Mr Bush’s animosity was calmed through the Republican catastrophe in the Parliament was it possible to reach progress in the talks with Mr Kim’s freaky regime. Mr Chang probably still feels that is all a trick from those sneaky kimchi-eaters, and that the only solution would be to cut all relations and supplies to the country until starving off the regime, but it seems more to me that only now we are advancing to a peaceful solution thanks to the pragmatic stance of China.
I think Mr Fukuda also realizes about this, and is tired of playing Mr Bush’s games.