Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

US eye on Japan's polls
By Hisane Masaki

Aug 27, 2005

TOKYO - Following in the footsteps of his German counterpart Gerhard Schroeder, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took a make-or-break political gamble - and in an equally unorthodox manner - in a desperate bid to save his reform drive from the jaws of death.

The political fortunes of the leaders of the world's number two and three economies, as well as the fate of their reform programs, are at stake in the elections they called for next month. The elections will be held only a week apart.

Apart from their similarities in political style shown in recent weeks, however, Koizumi and Schroeder have adopted sharply contrasting foreign policies on the two interwoven issues of Iraq and relations with the United States - their countries' most important ally during the Cold War. It can be easily imagined that



President George W Bush has a strong desire to see the staunchly pro-US Koizumi survive the upcoming vote. Not Schroeder - to say the least.

Schroeder can find an ally in Japan over Iraq and the US: Katsuya Okada, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) now challenging Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Like Schroeder, Okada is critical of what is widely perceived as Bush's unilateralism. The DPJ leader condemns Koizumi's foreign policy as just following big brother US and calls for the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq by the end of this year.

The big gamble
Koizumi took a political gamble by dissolving the Lower House of the diet, Japan's parliament, on August 8, only hours after the postal privatization bills, the centerpiece of his reform program, were voted down by the Upper House by a vote of 125 to 108. Although Koizumi's LDP and its coalition partner, New Komeito party, together hold a majority in the Upper House, a larger number of LDP lawmakers than the party leadership had expected voted against the bills. Koizumi cannot dissolve the Upper House, so he uses the election as both a means to cleanse the party of dissidents and to revitalize his reforms.

The Upper House rejection of the bills followed weeks of fierce internal feuding within the LDP between supporters of his reform programs and what he calls "old-guard conservatives" or "resistance forces". The bills had been passed by the Lower House, the more powerful of the two diet chambers, on July 5, on the strength of the LDP-led coalition's majority, but by a narrow margin of only five votes because of a revolt by about three dozen LDP lawmakers.

Koizumi, who had claimed that the killing of the postal bills would be tantamount to a no-confidence vote against him, was quick to carry out his threat to dissolve the Lower House for a snap general election to seek a new mandate for reform programs, especially his pet project to privatize Japan Post, effectively the world's largest financial institution with about US$3 trillion in assets. Koizumi vowed to step down if the LDP-New Komeito coalition failed to secure a majority in the Upper House.

When he dissolved the Lower House, Koizumi came under a barrage of criticisms, even from within his LDP, that dissolving the Lower House on the grounds of government-sponsored bills being voted down in the Upper House was an unconstitutional act. Koizumi brushed away the charge.

In the general election set for September 11, all 480 seats are up for grabs. The LDP has 212 seats going into the vote, excluding the 37 seats held by dissenters, and New Komeito party has 34 seats. The LDP and New Komeito party have a combined 246 seats, only five seats more than the 241 required for a majority. The DPJ has 175 seats going into the election.

Koizumi seems to have wind in his sails. Since he dissolved the Lower House, public support for him has been rising sharply, according to public opinion polls by Japanese newspapers. But there are still three weeks to go before the vote and public opinion is volatile. Autumn winds could suddenly blow in the opposite direction.

Foreign policies issues
In stark contrast with the German leader, Koizumi has been one of the world's staunchest supporters - along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair - of Bush's anti-terrorism campaign, launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, and of his Iraq war.

The Koizumi government enacted two new controversial laws to enable the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to assist US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under the first law, enacted in October 2001, only weeks after September 11, SDF naval vessels were sent to the Indian Ocean to support US-led operations in Afghanistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime had been ousted from power.

Under the second law, enacted in August 2003, the Koizumi government at the end of that year dispatched several hundred ground troops to Samawah, southern Iraq, on a humanitarian and reconstruction mission. In December 2004, the government extended the SDF dispatch to Iraq by another year, until the end of this year. The decision came despite strong objections from opposition parties and amid growing concerns about the safety of the Japanese troops. Opinion polls, conducted by news media when the extension was decided, showed that a majority of Japanese were against the decision.

Japan and the US are now moving to strengthen security and defense ties based on the bilateral security treaty, including the development and deployment of a missile-defense system to counter the threats of missile attacks from North Korea, which has an estimated 200 or so Rodong missiles capable of striking almost all of Japanese territory.

The two countries are expected to reach an agreement later this year on the realignment of US military bases in Japan. The Bush administration is reviewing the role of these bases as part of its military's worldwide "transformation". The role the US expects Japan to play will be that of a "power projection hub" to ensure stability in an "arc of instability", an area stretching from Northeast Asia to the Middle East via Southeast Asia and South Asia.

China, a rapidly ascending military and economic power, is alarmed by the US military transformation now underway. There are suspicions in China that the real US motives for the sweeping overhaul of its military's global posture might be what some call the "soft containment" of China.

The state of Japan-US relations is now one of the best in history, backed by a personal friendship between Koizumi and Bush. Their chemistry seems good. In stark contrast, Japan's relations with Asian neighbors, especially China and South Korea, have been in recent months at their lowest points.

Japan has seen relations with China and South Korea strained seriously by such issues as Koizumi's repeated visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, territorial disputes and Tokyo's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. China and South Korea regard the shrine, where some class-A Japanese war criminals, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, are enshrined with the 2.4 million war dead, as a symbol of Japan's militaristic past. Japan's public opinion is split down the middle over Koizumi's visits to the shrine.

Many experts in Japan take Koizumi to task for the current stalemate in ties with the two Asian neighbors, with some even accusing the US-first prime minister of lacking a clear Asia policy.
DPJ's foreign policies
All Japanese political parties have made public their manifestoes, or policy platforms, for the September 11 general election.

In its manifesto, the LDP puts strengthening Japan-US alliance first. Improving ties with China and South Korea comes next. In a significant difference with the LDP, the DPJ puts Asia policy first and then Japan-US relations. "It is one of Japan's top priority foreign-policy tasks to rebuild relations with China," the DPJ manifesto says. The manifesto also indirectly criticizes Koizumi for lacking a relationship of trust with top Chinese leaders and calls for the construction of a state-run alternative facility to Yasukuni Shrine to honor the war dead, an idea strongly supported by South Korea but balked at by Koizumi.

Regarding ties with the US, the DPJ's policy platform does not use the word "strengthen" as the LDP manifesto does but instead says it wants to see an "evolution" of the bilateral ties and calls for a review of bilateral arrangements, including that of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) within three years.

The SOFA, which sets the legal status of American service members stationed in Japan, has been criticized by many in Japan as an unfair arrangement in recent years, especially since the 1995 gang rape of an elementary school girl by three American soldiers in Okinawa. But the Japanese government has been negative about any review of the arrangement out of political consideration to the US.

Former DPJ leader Naoto Kan once advocated withdrawal of US Marines to US territories such as Guam and Hawaii from the southernmost Japanese island of Okinawa - where the bulk of more than 40,000 American service members deployed in Japan, mostly Marines, are stationed.

On Iraq, the DPJ's manifesto stipulates that the SDF troops should be pulled out by the end of this year, when the current, one-year mandate of their deployment in that country is to expire. Since the Iraq war, the DPJ has claimed that there was no "legitimate reason" for launching the war and that Japanese troops' participation in the US-led multinational forces was in breach of the war-renouncing, post-war Japanese constitution.

But the DPJ is not opposed to other relations with the US. In July last year, DPJ leader Okada visited the US. It was his first overseas trip since taking the helm of the opposition party, apparently reflecting his recognition of the importance of Japan-US relations should the DPJ take power. Okada's apparent favorite in the US presidential election in November was Republican President Bush's challenger John F Kerry, who is a Democrat. Okada participated in the Democratic Party convention in Boston during his US trip for talks with Kerry's staff, although he also held talks with some Bush administration officials later.

Differences between Koizumi and Okada
The political backgrounds of Koizumi and Okada may help explain their foreign-policy differences.

Former prime minister Takeo Fukuda, Koizumi's mentor, effectively inherited the LDP faction founded by Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. The LDP faction Fukuda once led is now chaired by former prime minister Yoshiro Mori and called the Mori faction. Koizumi had belonged to the faction, but left it, albeit nominally, after becoming prime minister.

Kishi was a hawkish politician and one of the staunchest US allies. He served as commerce and industry minister in the Tojo government. After Japan's defeat in World War II, Kishi was arrested as a suspected class-A war criminal, although he was indemnified and released later. He stepped down after railroading revisions to the 1952 Japan-US security treaty through the diet in 1960 amid raucous diet debate and tumultuous demonstrations across the country, mainly by leftist students and labor unionists.
In the largest anti-government protests after the war, some protesters stormed the diet building and clashed with riot police. A female University of Tokyo student died in the protest. The revisions were aimed at correcting what was widely perceived as the unequal nature of the treaty in favor of the US, and the protests were more against Kishi himself for his high-handed handling of the revision issue than against the specific contents of the revised treaty.

DPJ leader Okada had belonged to the LDP faction led then by former prime minister Noboru Takeshita before leaving the party along with Ichiro Ozawa, now deputy DPJ leader, and others in 1993 to form a now-defunct new party. Their departure from the LDP led to the party's devastating defeat that year in the general election and its first loss of power since its 1955 founding. The Takeshita faction was a successor to the LDP faction founded by former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, who reopened Japan's diplomatic relations with China in 1972 and is still revered in China as a "benefactor who dug a well for water-thirsty people".

Traditionally, the faction inherited by Kishi, Fukuda and others, including current leader Mori has been the most hawkish of all LDP factions and also pro-US, while the faction inherited by Tanaka, Takeshita and two other former prime ministers - Keizo Obuchi and Ryutaro Hashimoto - has been pro-China.

There is much more to it. Koizumi served as a secretary to Fukuda before being first elected to the diet. Tanaka and Fukuda were implacable political rivals within the LDP. Their power struggle driven by strong personal animosity was so fierce that it is still remembered as "kaku-fuku war".

Concerns among conservatives
Despite its campaign rhetoric, the DPJ will become more realistic if it takes power. It is common sense in Japanese political circles that any prime minister would not survive long without the backing of the US administration.

Former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama's demarche is a good example. When he became the first socialist Japanese prime minister in nearly five decades in the mid-1990s, Murayama made an about-face in his socialist party's security policy and declared that his government would accept the existence of the SDF and maintain the Japan-US security alliance. Before Murayama became prime minister, the socialist party had insisted that the SDF was unconstitutional and that the Japan-US security alliance be scrapped.

The socialist party had been the biggest opposition party for decades after the end of World War II but it is now in danger of extinction due to loss of support. Many former socialist party members now belong to the DPJ.

To be sure, the DPJ may just be engaged in the tactic of playing up policy differences with the LDP in hopes of boosting its prospects in the upcoming general election. But concerns about the DPJ's foreign policy are growing in Japan, especially among conservatives.

The conservative Japanese daily Yomiuri voiced concerns about the DJP's foreign policy. In an editorial on August 20, the paper said: "We wonder if there is no risk of the Japan-US alliance being shaken by the DPJ's stance. The DPJ needs to give a clearer explanation (about its stance)."

The Washington Post has thrown its support behind Koizumi. It said in an editorial on August 15 that Koizumi's defeat would be "awkward" for the US. "Not only is the main opposition party in Japan muddled on economics, but it is critical of the prime minister's pro-US foreign policy and promises to withdraw Japanese troops from Iraq," the paper said.

"An election that endorsed those policies would be troubling, as would one that allowed a weakened LDP to remain in office in exchange for ditching Mr Koizumi. With luck, Mr Koizumi will convince the voters that his stand on reform is worth backing. He has a month to make his case."

In an apparent attempt to dispel domestic concerns about his foreign policy ahead of the September 11 vote by emphasizing the importance he attaches to ties with the US, Okada said on August 16 that he will choose the US as the destination for his first overseas trip if he becomes the next prime minister. But at the same time Okada made it clear that he would convey a message to Bush: his DPJ government has no intention of budging on the issue of pulling SDF personnel out of Iraq at the end of this year.

Hisane Masaki is a Tokyo-based scholar, journalist and commentator on international politics and economy. Masaki's e-mail address is [e-mail]

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