It Looks Like Japan Lied Its Way Into the Olympics

[Update, November 24, 2014:  Despite dire predictions, TEPCO has successfully removed 1331 spent fuel rods from the cooling pond at Number 4 reactor.  Removal of the 204 fresh fuel rods is underway.  On the other hand, Mainichi reports that the "freeze play" plan to freeze contaminated water to keep it from draining into a trench has failed.  Instead, TEPCO has received permission to place concrete in the bottom of the trench and hopes that will stop the flow.  Per the Guardian, TEPCO is still pursuing plans for a 1.5 kilometer ice wall to keep groundwater from entering the reactor building and becoming contaminated.  Fukushima generates 400 tons of contaminated groundwater per day, and 500,000 tons is now stored on site.  Total cleanup & compensation estimate now about US$85 billion.  CH 11/24/14]

[Correction: in the final round Tokyo was competing against Istanbul and Madrid, not Rio.  Heckuva choice for the IOC this time.]

In order to secure the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for Tokyo, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assured the IOC that the Fukushima situation was “under control”, per AFP:

"Let me assure you the situation is under control," [Abe] said.

"It has never done or will do any damage to Tokyo."

Abe replied decisively when pressed by veteran Norwegian IOC member Gerhard Heiberg over Fukushima.

"You should read past the headlines and look at the facts," he said.

"The contaminated water has been contained in an area of the harbour only 0.3 square kilometres big.

"There have been no health problems and nor will there be. I will be taking responsibility for all the programmes with regard to the plant and the leaks."

It looks like the key point, to paraphrase Bill Clinton is “what your definition of ‘situation’ is”.

If the “situation”  is currently officially stated radiological hazards to Tokyo and Olympic participants thanks to Fukushima, the answer is a qualified “yes”.

That is, if the Japanese government continues to give public credence to rather unfounded Tepco optimism that the Fukushima clusterfuck will simply maintain the current trend of dumping radioactive water into the ocean and the main danger to denizens of Tokyo involves getting radioactive sushi from some tuna caught out in the Pacific.

After Shinzo Abe came home from scoring the Olympics, he announced that the Japanese government would participate more actively in the faltering Tepco effort.  

At the same time, Abe took pains not to stint on the denialist BS that underpinned the Olympics bid, as if the main problem was not hundreds of tons of sizzling fuel rods and thousands of gallons of radioactive water, but “rumours”:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the scrapping of two Fukushima nuclear reactors that survived the 2011 tsunami, a write-off that threatens to complicate a turnaround plan the operator has presented to creditors.

He also said he stood by his commitments to the International Olympic Committee of insuring a safe 2020 Summer Games.

"I will work hard to counter rumours questioning the safety of the Fukushima plant," he said.

Some fact if not rumour-obsessed locals explicitly rebutted Abe’s contention that the situation was “under control”.  Per Mainichi Shimbun:

The town assembly of nuclear disaster-hit Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, passed a protest resolution against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sept. 20 for declaring the situation surrounding the radioactively contaminated water leaks at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant "under control."

The prime minister made the controversial comments during Tokyo's final presentation at the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s general meeting in Buenos Aires on Sept. 7, saying, "Some may have concerns about Fukushima. Let me assure you, the situation is under control." He also said the effect of the water leak has been "completely blocked" within the 0.3 square kilometers of the plant's harbor.

The Namie Town Assembly unanimously passed the Sept. 20 protest resolution stating that there is a "serious problem" with Abe's remarks as they "contradict reality." The protest also calls the situation at the plant, where some 300 metric tons of radioactively contaminated water is leaking into the ocean every day, "serious."

"The situation has never been 'under control,' nor is the contaminated water 'completely blocked,'" the protest read.

There is no guarantee that the current Fukushima clusterfuck will not get an upgrade.  Per anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman:

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

…

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.

The situation at Unit 4 does look pretty dire.  The cooling pond, on top of a damaged structure, contains a reactor load of rods (Unit 4's rods had been moved from the reactor to the pond as part of routine maintenance when the tsunami hit) that are usually gingerly manipulated under precisely controlled conditions by computer-driven cranes.  Conditions at Number 4 cooling pond are considerably less than optimal, as Reuters tells us, and the actual removal operation might play out like a frustrating encounter with one of those claw machines at Denny's.

Botching the removal could lead to a ghastly, if not apocalyptic nuclear accident.  The possibility that Tepco is driven to try to remove the rods, not because it is ready to, but because the whole building is subsiding in water-soaked soil and may come crashing down, also inspires the heebie-jeebies.

Wasserman expressed a vote of no confidence in Tepco and launched a petition drive to strip Japan of its control over the Fukushima clean up and turn the effort over to the international community through the United Nations.

At the time I thought, hmmm, that doesn’t seem particularly practical.

However, a radio report from ABC Australia also indicates that the Japanese government now thinks it may not have the capabilities to handle Fukushima by itself, despite Abe’s personal assurance to the IOC (which should remind us of the lack of legal enforceability of brave statements made by politicians on their own kick).  

Reportedly, Abe talked with French president Hollande at the UN this week and asked for French help to decommission two of the Fukushima units.

The broadcast also made the interesting point that Russia offered help shortly after the disaster, and also advised the Japanese government that Tepco’s strategy of cooling the hot, collapsed cores with water would a) not solve the problem and b) create a huge irradiated water mess.  The Japanese government apparently ignored the Russian approach and, guess what, the problem is not solved and there is a huge irradiated water mess.

Cynical observers will perhaps conclude that the Abe administration was aware of these major and currently insoluble issues from the git-go, but declined to involve itself in Tepco’s Fukushima work until after the Olympics bid was safely under its belt, allowing the Japanese government to base its presentation on Tepco’s sunny assurances rather than the somewhat grimmer reality prevailing at the site.

As for the Olympics bid itself, it looks like the Abe administration followed the Karl Rove formula for political jiu jitsu, namely attack your opponent’s strength and turn it into weakness (best typified by the Swift-boating of John Kerry’s war record during his presidential race against the service-dodging party-hearty history of George W. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard’s “champagne squadron” during the Vietnam War).

Refusing to regard the Fukushima situation as a liability, the Abe team turned on the waterworks to make the tsunami disaster the emotional centerpiece of its bid:

The effects of the tsunami and earthquake – killing over 18,000 people – was never far from the lips of the presentation team.

Princess Takamado – daughter-in-law of the Japanese Emperor – spoke in French expressing the gratitude Japan owed to the IOC in the way they had rallied round after the tsunami and how it had had an impact on the young living there.

“The Olympic bid has given the young people in the area affected something to dream for, the motivation to move forward with courage,” said the 60-year-old, who is the first member of Japan’s Royal Family to address the IOC.

“I know one of the IOC’s most important aspects is the legacy a Games leaves. The IOC will certainly remain in the heart of these young people.”

Mami Sato, two time Paralympian in the long jump, spoke movingly about her personal experience of when the disaster struck.

“I was not there at the time and I was really worried because I did not know if my family was still alive but luckily they were,” she said tearfully to the backdrop of a photo of her reunited with her parents.

Abe added: “Today, under the blue sky of Fukushima, there are young boys playing football and looking into the future and not the past.”

The Brazilians are probably kicking themselves for not packaging their massive anti-government demonstrations (and attacks on the economic wisdom of hosting the World Cup, something that undoubtedly gave their Olympics bid a black eye) as a non-stop carnival of Olympic-worthy youthful passion.  Also, no princess--even though there are not one but two family lines claiming the Brazilian imperial throne and there are plenty of princesses, including the quite attractive Paola Maria de Bourbon Orléans e Bragança Sapieha.  C’mon, people!

The Turks are probably kicking themselves for not packaging their sizable anti-government demonstrations as a non stop carnival of Olympic-worthy youthful passion by Istanbul's admittedly Olympics-hating young urban bourgeoisie.  And Erdogan could have flown to Rio to assure the IOC that the Kurdish unrest and Syrian debacle were all "under control".  Also, no princess--even though Europe is generously seeded with heirs to the house of Osman and attractive and articulate princesses like Princess Ayşe Gülnev Sultan

would have been available to lobby the royalty-besotted IOC. (Attaturk  did make a clean break with the imperial aspirations of the Ottomans and exiled the house of Osman; I guess Princess Takamado can say There, but for the grace of General MacArthur, go I!  However, the Erdogan government--while keeping one eye cocked at the disapproving Turkish army--is gingerly pursuing rapprochement with the house of Osman in order to burnish Turkey's claims to regional leadership.)

Madrid, for that matter, was unable to spin its substantial supply of existing Olympic-worthy venues and its desperate need for an economic kickstart into IOC support.  Spain had badly botched its anti-doping image management by short-circuiting a massive investigation into the blood-doping and medication-dispensing activities of one Dr. Eufamiano Fuentes.  A Spanish judge restricted Fuentes' testimony to his activities relating to traditional doping whipping-sport professional cycling, even when he offered in open court to name names in other sports as well.  The rumor is that Spain's massively popular and economically powerful football clubs leaned on the court to keep out of the public eye allegations that Fuentes was doping their athletes.

As for princesses, Spain, with a reigning royal family, is chock-a-block with in-country talent.  However, one of the byproducts of Spain's crushing economic crisis is growing disenchantment with the excesses and incapacities of the local aristocracy; the possible deposition of the royal family is now an item on the national agenda. But maybe Princess Leonor and Princess Sofia could have swayed the IOC with, perhaps, a little less hauteur than they displayed at Easter mass in 2010.

As to what’s really going on under the blue skies of Fukushima, this post-Olympics reportage gives a more honest picture (under the Irish Times’ typical feisty headline, Fukushima clean-up may be doomed):

Across much of Fukushima’s rolling green countryside they descend on homes like antibodies around a virus, men wielding low-tech tools against a very modern enemy: radiation. Power hoses, shovels and mechanical diggers are used to scour toxins that rained down from the sky 30 months ago. The job is exhausting, expensive and, say some, doomed to failure. 

Today, a sweating four-man crew wearing surgical masks and boiler suits clean the home of Hiroshi Saito (71) and his wife Terue (68). Their aim is to bring average radiation at this home down to 1.5 microsieverts an hour, still several times what it was before the incident but safe enough, perhaps, for Saito’s seven grandchildren to visit. “My youngest grandchild has never been here,” he says.

Saito’s house is outside the mandatory evacuation zone, from which 160,000 people decamped by government order and have yet to return.  Another 40,000 or so from Saito’s municipality, Minamisoma, voluntarily evacuated and have yet to return.  According to the article, one estimate for the total cleanup bill for Fukushima may reach $600 billion.

 And that’s only if things don’t get worse.

Japan stirs Campbell's US 'pivot' soup

[This piece originally appeared on Asia Times Online on April 26, 2013.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

Oscar Wilde wrote, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Perhaps this is how Kurt Campbell feels today.

Campbell, after all, as assistant secretary for East Asia in Hillary Clinton's State Department, was a key architect and proponent of the "pivot to Asia", which was meant to elicit satisfactory behavior from China - and, in the process, demonstrate US leadership and relevance - by confronting the PRC with a phalanx of Pacific democracies (plus Vietnam of course) determined to impose liberal security, economic, and human rights norms on the rogue superpower.

The inevitable result of US backing has been an increased willingness of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan to stand up to China, which has contributed a virtuous cycle of Chinese hostility and a further defensive cleaving of the smaller nations to the United States.

The less-than-desirable by-product has been the tendency of the pivot's designated junior partners to tug at the dragon's whiskers for national and domestic political reasons, secure in the knowledge that the United States must back them up, even if the confrontation runs contrary to long-term US interests and objectives for the region.

In the case of Japan, adventurism has gotten out of hand, and the US is responding with anxiety, a shift in policy, and a sea-change in nomenclature.

History will judge if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the architect of Japan's renaissance, or merely an opportunistic and short-sighted nationalist. In any case, he has already demonstrated a willingness to stir the Pacific pot in ways that excite the anxiety of the United States.

The United States' discomfort at Japan's eagerness to hype the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Island dispute as a useful point of friction with China has become palpable.

Kurt Campbell, now ensconced in the private sector on the board of the Center for a New American Security think tank, chose to reveal to the Kyodo News Agency that the US government had advised Japan against the nationalization of three of the Senkaku Islands, the provocation that sparked this year's Sino-Japanese brouhaha:

The Japanese government consulted with the State Department prior to the purchase, Campbell revealed, and was given "very strong advice not to go in this direction."

The US government, in urging Japan not to follow through with the purchase, stressed the action could "trigger a crisis" with China, which claims the islands for itself.

"Even though we warned Japan, Japan decided to go in a different direction, and they thought they had gained the support of China, or some did, which we were certain that they had not," Campbell said. [1]

Stroking the Senkaku fetish might be excused as an unavoidable political imperative for Abe, given the rise in anti-Chinese feeling in Japan. However, under Abe the Japanese government has unilaterally undertaken a series of other moves to strengthen the hands of Pacific nations seeking to counter China.

In recent months, the Japanese government has agreed to provide 10 patrol boats to the Philippines; enticed Taiwan to abandon its anti-Japanese stance on the Senkakus (which, as a matter of proximity, really belong to Taiwan) by granting Taiwanese fishing vessels the right to fish near the islands (though not within the 12 mile limit); offered its economic good offices as an alternative to China as a destination for Mongolian coal; and scheduled talks with Vietnam on cooperation in "maritime security", also known as the provision of patrol boats along the Philippine model.

The spectacle of the Japanese government cutting all sorts of anti-China deals in Asia on its own kick raises the specter of an independent Japanese security policy and, with it, the kind of destabilization that the US pivot to Asia was meant to pre-empt.

As Peter Ennis reported in Dispatch Japan, the Obama administration was determined to reign in Prime Minister Abe's anti-China shenanigans during his March visit to Washington:

In a brief Oval Office appearance with Abe, Obama spoke not one word about the Senkakus, China, Okinawa, or even a "joint vision" of the sort announced with Noda. Abe tried his best to criticize China, very indirectly, but adhered to US desires to not rile-up Beijing. ...

Neither Obama nor Secretary of State John Kerry took the seemingly easy step of reiterating the January 18 statement by then-Secretary of State Clinton outlining American opposition to any effort at unilateral change of Japan's administrative control of the Senkakus. This was a far-cry from Abe's initial desire for a strong statement from Obama specifically mentioning China. ...

Obama embraced the US-Japan alliance, but did not embrace Abe. [2]

Unfortunately for the United States - and the pivot - it looks like the Japanese military cat is permanently out of the bag, as a result of Japan's growing unwillingness to accept the second-class military status imposed upon it by its defeat in World War II.

The Abe government is determined to revise Japan's "pacifist" constitution and dilute its restrictions on military operations outside Japan's borders once the LDP gains expected dominance of the Diet's upper as well as lower house - and the ability to unilaterally amend the constitution - following elections in July.

Actually, a lot of nibbling has already taken place. Recently, the Japanese cabinet decided that Japanese ground forces could be dispatched overseas "to assist in the evacuation of Japanese nationals" from danger zones. Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera asserted Japan's legal right to engage in preemptive strike to forestall an imminent attack, while stating that Japan had not developed that capability "as yet".

During Prime Minister Abe's visit to the United States, the Japanese team also touted the concept of "collective self-defense", which states that the Japanese self-defense forces could come to the defense of an ally, ie fight a war outside Japan's borders as long as it was "defending an ally". To demonstrate the benefits of the collective self-defense posture, the Japanese team also suggested that Japan's missile defense network would be pleased to knock down a North Korean missile headed for the United States.

The Obama administration, while undoubtedly appreciative of the offer to shelter beneath Japan's missile defense umbrella, was perhaps more worried about Japan knocking down something else and starting World War III, and demurred.

In a relatively unnoticed but equally significant development, the Obama administration also objected strongly to Japan's plans to process its spent fuel rods domestically and enlarge its sizable stockpile of bomb-worthy plutonium metal. [3] Another indication that Japan has slipped the leash is in the area of "Abenomics".

It is safe to say that no governments outside of Japan are enthusiastic about the keystone of Prime Minister Abe's national economic rebirth strategy: a wild bet on quantitative easing twice the size of the US effort, one that will inject US$1.4 trillion into the economy over two years and double Japan's money supply.

Officially, the objective of the policy is to boost inflation to 2%, thereby baking inflationary expectations into the economy, and stampeding "Mrs Watanabe", the prototypical Japanese saver, into buying a new car or bedpan-emptying robot right away, instead of waiting for another 20 years of continued deflation to bring the price within reach. Nobody knows if that will work.

Unofficially, the objective of the policy seems to be to drive down the yen and boost Japanese exports, which is already working.

To cite Oscar Wilde once again, export promotion is the quantitative easing consequence that dares not speak its name. Nobody who engages in quantitative easing - the United States, the European Union, or, now Japan - admits that the objective is to weaken the currency and keep factories humming with exports. Because once one country weakens its currency, everybody else will, and we're down the slippery slope.

Given the fait accompli Abe delivered to the financial markets, the Group of 20 decided to give Japan the benefit of the doubt with this less than ringing endorsement of its motives at the April 19 meeting of finance ministers in Washington:

Japan's recent policy actions are intended to stop deflation and support domestic demand.

Full stop.

The G-20 had a lot more to say about quantitative easing, as long as it didn't have to talk directly about Japan:

We will refrain from competitive devaluation and will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes, and we will resist all forms of protectionism and keep our markets open. We reiterate that excess volatility of financial flows and disorderly movements in exchange rates have adverse implications for economic and financial stability. Monetary policy should be directed toward domestic price stability and continuing to support economic recovery according to the respective mandates of central banks. We will be mindful of unintended negative side effects stemming from extended periods of monetary easing.

Concerned readers will be shocked, shocked! to learn that Japanese officials and sympathetic media outlets spun the G-20's leeriness about quantitative easing and its one-sentence shirking of criticism of Japanese policy into an endorsement of Abenomics. As in:

G-20 understood Japan's policies to revive economy - BOJ's Kuroda. [4]

The Japan Times headlined with "G-20 finance chiefs back aggressive easing regime" and continued with a strategic use of the passive voice:

Those comments were viewed as giving a green light to Japan's program, which has driven the value of the yen down by more than 20 percent against the dollar since October. [5]

As reported by the Guardian, concern over Japan's Abenomics plans was already widely acknowledged back in February:

Japan will escape censure from the G20 group of nations meeting in Moscow this weekend despite widespread unease at Tokyo's aggressive intervention into currency markets to drive down the value of the yen.

It is understood that pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and several prominent G20 members has kept any reference to Japan's attempts to depress the yen out of a communique due to be released on Saturday.

A draft communique seen by Reuters suggests that Tokyo would not be singled out for criticism, as had been suggested.

An unnamed delegate was quoted as saying: "There wasn't anybody putting Japan on the spot. That's quite frankly a bit of a surprise." [6]

For its part, in order to avoid explicit criticism in the Washington meeting, the Bank of Japan declared it would print money by purchasing Japanese government bonds, not directly purchasing foreign securities and thereby explicitly strengthening foreign currencies. [7]

Nevertheless, in the real world, a lot of that money is going to end up in foreign markets (and strengthening foreign currencies) anyway, simply getting laundered through private securities firms instead of flooding out direct from the BOJ. Bill Gross, the bond guru of Pimco - and Japanese QE skeptic-told the Wall Street Journal:

"This BOJ printing seeps out daily into global markets as Japanese institutions which have sold their Japanese government bonds to the BOJ look for higher yielding replacements," said Mr Gross in an email interview Tuesday afternoon with The Wall Street Journal. "Ten-year Treasurys to us look very low-yielding, but to them they yield 125 basis points more." [8]

It is not out of line to speculate that Japan's announcement of its decision to join negotiations on the Obama administration's cherished Trans Pacific Partnership trade pact was also timed to ensure US forbearance on Japan's massive program of quantitative easing.

Japan may be enjoying some success in its public relations campaign to paper over widespread unease about its quantitative easing program, but massaging the national and financial press is not going to alleviate private US concerns about the immediate and less than beneficial impact of Prime Minister Abe's diplomatic and economic initiatives on another important pivot partner, South Korea.

In the framework of the pivot, Japan's disregard for the sensibilities and interests of the Republic of Korea, a frontline state in any effort to restrain North Korea and counter China, is well-nigh inexplicable.

Why split the anti-China alliance by fussing over the Dokdo Islands, provoking South Korea with unnecessary, symbolic affronts like Abe's offering to the Yasakuni shrine, the visit of almost 200 lawmakers to the shrine, or making statements like this?:

On Tuesday during an Upper House session, Abe was asked to comment on the 1995 statement by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who straightforwardly apologized for Japan's "colonial rule and aggression," which "caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries."

Abe didn't elaborate, but he did claim that the definition of "aggression" in general has yet to be "firmly determined" by academic experts or the international community.

What is described as aggression "can be viewed differently" depending on which side you're on, Abe said. Major South Korean newspapers slammed Abe on their front pages Wednesday. [9]

If Prime Minister Abe is unable to characterize the invasion of Korea and China as "aggression", Japan's neighbors are free to worry about how elastic his definition of "self-defense", collective or otherwise might be, once the constitution is revised.

In some circles, Japan's quantitative easing is seen as little more than a zero-sum game to juice the economy by benefiting Japanese exporters at the expense of their direct rivals in South Korea, pivot be damned:

[T]he Hyundai Research Institute predicted that if the yen reaches 100 or 110 to the dollar, South Korean exports will fall by 3.4% in the first case and 11.4% in the second.

The problem is the large degree of overlap with Japan in terms of major exports, which account for 60% of South Korea's GDP. An analysis by the Korea International Trade Association showed an overlap of about 50% between South Korea's top 100 export items and Japan's.

Indeed, Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MTIE) figures on the first quarter growth rate for export items where South Korea competes with Japan showed an 11.3% drop from the previous quarter for steel and a 3.5% drop for automobiles. With respective ratings of 0.63 and 0.58, they were the second and third most competitive industries behind shipbuilding (0.75). [10]

South Korea experiences a double whammy at the hands of Japanese quantitative easing thanks to the ROK's status as a growing, emerging economy and, therefore, a hot money magnet, as William Pesek wrote for Bloomberg, while chronicling the ROK's $16 billion stimulus counter to the 20% drop in the value of the yen:

Instead of spurring demand, ultra-low rates are creating a flood of hot money. All that cash has to go somewhere, and it's ending up in Chinese junk bonds, Philippine stocks, Australian real estate and the Korean won.

More bold steps may be coming. Korea is considering ways to insulate itself from capital-flow volatility, possibly by imposing taxes on financial transactions. Fifteen years ago, Malaysia became a pariah state when it limited the flow of money. Today, it is common-sense economics to protect your country from being overwhelmed by central-bank largesse.

Developing Asia once spread financial contagion from New York to London and Tokyo. Now, as the world's richest economies return the favor, Asian policymakers are grappling for ways to cope ? [11]

Ironically, one of the best ways for the US to restrain an increasingly independently minded Japan is by cozying up to China and redefining the pivot away from its China-containment (and provocation and destabilization-enabling) roots.

So Kurt Campbell emphasized the distance between Washington and Tokyo on the Senkakus, and - notably for someone who built a diplomatic strategy on confronting China - made the case in an op-ed for the Financial Times for increased cooperation between the US and China:

[T]he world's most important bilateral relationship is the one between the US and China. For that relationship to succeed, it must be embedded in a larger framework of US diplomacy in Asia, stretching from Japan to India, but certainly the US-China piece will be central for the 21st century. With new leadership in Beijing under President Xi Jinping settling in and President Barack Obama starting his second term, this is a defining period for the future of US-China relations. Both countries have challenging domestic agendas, but Washington and Beijing fully recognise the importance of their international interactions. [12]

The US media also made some ridiculous but significant efforts within the context of the North Korean crisis to shoehorn China into the unlikely role of America's pivot "ally". [13]

As part of the China reset, the Obama administration dispatched the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Michael Dempsey, to Beijing, where he labored to redefine the pivot as "not all about China" and, indeed, not even a pivot at all:

Economic, security, and demographic trends all lead to the Asia-Pacific region, he said.

"Furthermore, I tell them this wasn't about them, meaning China. Of course they're a factor, but this wasn't a strategy that was aimed at them in any way," Dempsey said.

The chairman added that military considerations are only part of the broader US regional strategy. "I pointed out to them that among the first visitors who came here after our ? rebalancing initiative was announced was Jack Lew, the secretary of the treasury," he said. [14]

For connoisseurs of government newspeak, it should be pointed out that apparently the "pivot", with its thrusty, aggressive connotations is "out" and the more gentle, conciliatory "rebalancing" is "in" as the description of what the US is trying to do to or with China in Asia.

Speaking of the finance side of "rebalancing", the Department of Treasury also quietly emphasized the implicit gap between Washington and Tokyo on quantitative easing while giving China some modest praise, as the German news outlet MNI reported:

If there was anything mildly unexpected in Lew's post-G20 comments, it was the highlighted praise aimed at China, increasing the emphasis on the positive beyond that of Lew's two most recent predecessors. ?

Lew's silence about Japan in his statement to his counterparts from around the world seemed to soften somewhat the emphasis placed only hours earlier by a senior Treasury official. The official had reiterated in response to a question from MNI that the US. will be watching closely to see if the expansion of quantitative easing in Japan actually does more to boost demand and inflation than it does to depreciate the yen. [15]

In another indication of US establishment umbrage, New York Times also weighed in with an editorial critical of Japan's Yasakuni Shrine antics titled "Japan's Unnecessary Nationalism".
In a significant bit of reframing that probably irked the Japanese government, the New York Times pointed out that the recent heightening of tensions around the Senkakus was a bilateral effort (China was responding to a flotilla of Japanese nationalists), not merely an exercise in Chinese "assertiveness", as the Western media usually presents the issue:

On Monday, South Korea canceled a visit to Japan by its foreign minister and China publicly chastised Japan. On Tuesday, tensions were further fueled when Chinese and Japanese boats converged on disputed islands in the East China Sea.

Japan and China both need to work on a peaceful solution to their territorial issues. But it seems especially foolhardy for Japan to inflame hostilities with China and South Korea when all countries need to be working cooperatively to resolve the problems with North Korea and its nuclear program. [16]

So, from the US perspective, maybe China is not the only big, bad guy in Asia anymore.

Add Japan, with its unilateral, damn the consequences (to others) security and fiscal aggressiveness to the list.

When one considers that the Japanese quantitative easing program could blow up the Asian and world economy in a replay of 1997 - or worse - there's even a case to be made that the genuine near-term threat to the world's well-being from Japan is perhaps greater than that from China.

As one finance guru told CNBC:

There are additional risks, the most glaring being that a big round of quantitative easing in Japan may be no better at stoking growth and the good kind of inflation there than it has been in the US. Despite the Fed's all-out efforts, unemployment remains elevated and inflation subdued, though stocks have soared. ...

"Monetary policy is being used as the policy tool to create demand. The question is, is this going to end in tears?" Prudential's Krosby said. "Is this going to end in worse calamity for the markets than what we had in 2008 and 2009?" [17]

Creating and then managing intractable problems through reshuffled nomenclature may be the ticket to full employment for practitioners of international relations, but for promoters of the US national interest, the realization that we are now wrestling with a second assertive, unpopular, and profoundly destabilizing power in the West Pacific is cause for concern, not celebration.

Notes:
1. U.S. warned government against buying Senkaku Islands: Campbell , Japan Times, April 10, 2013.
2. For Abe, talks with Obama came down to 'take what you can get', Dispatch Japan, February 26, 2013.
3. U.S. officials concerned about Japan's plan to reprocess nuclear fuel, R&D, April 22, 2013.
4. G20 understood Japan's policies to revive economy - BOJ's Kuroda, Reuters, April 22, 2013.
5. G-20 finance chiefs back aggressive easing regime, Japan Times, April 20, 2013.
6. G20 meeting: Japan won't be singled out for currency depreciation, The Guardian, February 15, 2013.
7. Finance ministers endorse Japan's easy money, USA Today, April 19, 2013.
8. Pimco's Bill Gross Turns Bullish on 10-Year Treasury Notes, Fox News, April 9, 2013.
9. Abe war comment roils S. Korean media, Japan Times, April 24, 2013.
10. Weak yen could mean trouble ahead for South Korean exporters, The hankyoreh, April 24, 2013.
11. Click here.
12. Steps to improve US-China relations, The Financial Times, April 23, 2013. (Subscription only).
13. AP Thinks China is 'An Unreliable American Ally', China Matters, April 6, 2013.
14. China Visit Sparks Dynamic Engagements, Dempsey Says, US Department of Defense, April 24, 2013.
15. Click here.
16. Japan's Unnecessary Nationalism, The New York Times, April 23, 2013.
17. US, Japan Now Global Allies in Money Printing, CNBC, April 8, 2013.

Setting Sun: Shinzo Abe and the Diverging U.S.-Japan Relationship

One element that continues to amaze is how cavalierly the United States threw Shinzo Abe under the bus while negotiating the North Korea agreement.

The abductee issue—which Abe had ridden to power and which forms the core of his image as Japan’s new generation assertive foreign policy hard case—was dismissively pushed off to the working groups.

While President Bush poured praise on the Chinese for facilitating the deal, Japan was left as the odd man out, refusing to join the energy aid program.

And it’s not as if Abe extracted any political capital by packaging this embarrassing outcome as a piece of principled intransigence.

Unwilling to denounce the deal, he meekly asserted that, despite its absence from the North Korean consensus, Japan was “not isolated”.

As reported in the New York Times:

Critics said Tokyo’s narrow focus on [the abductee] issue, seemingly at the expense of regional stability, would leave it isolated.
...
“We must not be isolated and we are not in fact isolated,” Mr. Abe said in Parliament. “Other countries understood our decision not to provide oil unless progress is made in the abduction issue.”(Norimitsu Onishi, South Korea and Japan Split on North Korea Pact, New York Times, Feb. 15, 2007)

Despite Prime Minister Abe’s protestations, all is not rosy.

Bloomberg reported:

Opposition politicians said Japan was ``out of the loop'' because the agreement failed to address the issue most important to the Japanese public: North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens three decades ago.
...
The agreement signed in Beijing yesterday ``limits Japan's options regarding the abduction issue,'' said C. Kenneth Quinones, former U.S. State Department director of North Korea affairs and a professor at Akita International University in Japan. Abe ``has virtually no leverage with either Pyongyang or other six-party talk participants.''

Now, Abe—whose government was making noises last summer about pre-emptive strikes on North Korean missile facilities in the great American tradition—doesn’t look like our sheriff in North Asia. He looks like Barney Fife.



In a February 15th article entitled With U.S. shift, Abe’s N. Korea Containment Strategy Falls Apart, Asahi drove another nail in the coffin:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's containment policy for North Korea--a stance that helped him vault to power--is quickly crumbling.

The agreement reached Tuesday at the six-party talks in Beijing, in which North Korea would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid, shows that Washington has softened its stance toward Pyongyang.

That is bad news for Abe.

The prime minister continues to assert that Japan will not provide energy assistance to North Korea until the issue of Pyongyang's abductions of Japanese citizens is resolved.

But Abe's words now carry less weight compared to last year, when Japan and the United States were closely consulting on containing North Korea following its missile launches and nuclear test.

"While I would not say Japan has had the ladder taken out from under it, there is no denying that there has been a change in the tide," a senior official in the Cabinet Secretariat said.


An important multi-part article in Yomiuri has explored the rapidly growing divergence between Japan and the United States, as exemplified by the negotiations with North Korea.

According to the report, it all started with the cataclysm of the U.S. mid-term elections, which forced the Bush administration to turn away from the confrontational policies of the neo-cons to a dovish negotiated track led by the State Department:

According to sources in Washington, shortly after North Korea conducted a nuclear test, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, presidential aide Stephen Hadley and other top government officials held a secret meeting with U.S. experts on North Korea and China on Oct. 25. During the meeting, they did not discuss possible diplomatic solutions to the nuclear crisis, but rather confrontation strategies, including a scenario of toppling the Kim Jong Il regime with China's involvement and cost estimates for military options, the sources said.

However, the Bush administration found itself in a changed environment after the Republican Party suffered a major defeat in midterm elections on Nov. 7.

Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph, as well as Bolton, who was the U.N. ambassador at the time, resigned or were replaced, prompting a drastic review of the Bush administration's diplomatic and security policies.

The U.S. policy on North Korea, which resulted in stalled talks on nuclear disarmament and eventually allowed the country to carry out a nuclear test, was forced to make a major shift from confrontation to dialogue.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator at the six-party talks, has been backed by dovish officials in the administration, mainly those at the State Department.

In a key parting of the ways the U.S. decided to identify non-proliferation—rather than denuclearization—as the focus of the North Korea negotiations.

Differences have become apparent between Japan and the United States over policies toward North Korea since the country's nuclear test on Oct. 9.

In early November, U.S. officials, including Robert Joseph, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, visited Japan.

The very first thing they said was they would seriously address nuclear nonproliferation.

"We were quite disappointed because the Japanese side was planning to discuss how to apply pressure on North Korea toward the country's abandonment of its nuclear programs," a source at the Prime Minister's Office said.

The suddenness of the switch, the obvious flaws in the deal, and the violence it did to the interests of our key ally in the region support my contention that the conciliatory posture of the Bush administration at the North Korean talks was a strategic fire sale: a matter of short-term tactical urgency driven by the mid-term electoral disaster.

Meant to buy the Bush administration time and diplomatic credibility, it resulted in a hastily concluded deal that will either fall apart because of its own flaws or be discarded once the Bush administration feels that its diplomatic options and freedom of action as a unilateral superpower have been restored.

What is most striking is how casually Japanese prestige and interests were sacrificed, at a time when Prime Minister Abe could least afford it.

At this juncture, facing an important July by-election that may determine whether or not he has the political clout needed to effectively rule the LDP and run Japan, the last thing Abe needed was to look superfluous and out of the loop.

An appearance of callowness, a string of scandals, and verbal gaffes by cabinet ministers who Abe is apparently unable to control or openly rebuke have combined to erode his popularity from 70% after his selection as Prime Minister, to the 40s today.

And instead of dancing a minutely choreographed minuet of bad cop and badder cop with the United States in dealings with North Korea and over Taiwan, Japan finds itself like a bum dancing without music as the U.S. strides off in search of a more useful partner--China.

A visit to Japan by Vice President Richard Cheney, keeper of the neo-conservative flame, would normally be expected to result in affirmation of the creed of confrontation not compromise regardless of the political winds blowing in Washington.

But the meetings will be shadowed by the remarks of Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, who had the temerity to criticize the Iraq was as “a mistake”.

Kyuma is an odd choice as Japan’s first Defense Minister. Born in Nagasaki and considered something of a dove, he is obviously ambivalent about the ABM project that is meant to turn Japan into the front line of defense against North Korean missiles:

The government wants to permit the defense forces to shoot down any North Korean missile headed for the U.S. Kyuma demurs, citing the constitutional prohibition against "collective defense" and technical reasons.

Hmmm.

As a result of the Iraq gaffe, Vice President Cheney refused to meet with Kyuma during his visit, effectively painting a bull’s eye on the Defense Minister’s back and begging the question, Why hasn’t Abe fired this guy? or in bureaucratic-speak, Why hasn’t Kyuma accepted responsibility for damaging relations with the United States and tendered his resignation?

Apparently, removing Kyuma from the Cabinet entails a political cost that Abe is unwilling to bear.

Is it because of Kyuma’s loyal service in promoting Koizumi’s agenda and Abe’s elevation to prime minister? The importance of his faction? The weakness of Abe’s administration, which can ill-afford another embarrassing resignation?

Or is there enough ambivalence in Japan concerning the security relationship between the U.S. and Japan that Kyuma’s remarks resonate with the Japanese public and would make his removal another indictment of Abe’s fecklessness in dealing with the United States?

In addition to the divergence on the Iraq and North Korea issues, the United States has shown itself to be less than enthusiastic in backing Japan’s campaign for a permanent Security Council seat.

Another major source of friction in the alliance is Okinawa. Chalmers Johnson describes the massive U.S. infrastructure—which is used for force projection in the region and not for Japanese defense—as follows: “thirty-eight [bases] are located in Okinawa, where they occupy some 23,700 hectares or 19 percent of the choicest territory of the main island. Okinawa is host to some 28,000 American troops plus an equal number of camp followers and Defense Department civilians”.

The Koizumi government cut a deal with the United States for a realignment plan that would send 8,000 Marines to Guam, and relocate an airfield, but leave the massive military footprint on the island group largely unchanged.

Despite efforts to depict Okinawa as a land of U.S.-Japanese amity, the bases are no bonanza for the prefecture, whose unemployment rate is twice the national average. Crime, crowding, crashes, and noise issues are continual sources of resentment. In 2006, local approval of the central government’s plans for the bases polled at 14%. The only thing that separates the various political figures in the prefecture on the issue of the U.S. bases is the relative degree of their disapproval.

Relocation of Marine air operations from an urban base in Ginowan to a new field to be built at Nago in northern Okinawa was agreed in 1996 and scheduled to be completed within 5 to 7 years, but the Okinawans have unenthusiastically dragged their feet on the issue and nothing has happened, to the undisguised anger of the U.S Department of Defense. Eric Johnston of the Japan Times provides an excellent overview of the contentious and miserable process.

When Tokyo’s chosen candidate for governor of Okinawa, Nakaima Hirokazu, won his election on November 19, 2006, the project was finally supposed to get on track. But Hirokazu immediately came down with a case of cold feet, announcing he wanted the Ginowan base closed within three years—long before any replacement base would be available at Nago. Kyuma, instead of trying to shove the deal down his throat as the central government was expected to do by Washington, criticized the Americans for being “bossy”.

In a sign that disappointment and suspicion are flowering into paranoia, the Japanese press aired a rumor that the United States dealyed the deployment of twelve F-22A Raptors—the state-of-the-art warbird that Abe hopes will serve as the symbol of U.S.-Japan military cooperation—into Okinawa in response to North Korean pressure.

In these unpromising circumstances, the Diet will begin debating legislation, sure to be unpopular, that would obligate Japan to pay up to $6 billion on relocation costs for the 8,000 U.S. troops who are to move from Okinawa to Guam as part of the realignment.

If that wasn’t enough, Japan was forced to back out of a key Iranian energy project, Azadegan—which by itself was expected to account for 6% of Japan’s total oil imports-- out of loyalty to the Bush administration’s policy of intransigence and no economic ties with the Tehran regime.

The loss of this project was followed by the dismaying news that a major Exxon Mobil gas project on Sakhalin had signed a preliminary agreement to sell its output to China instead of Japan. At the same time Russia began threatening a restructuring of another Royal Dutch Shell natural gas project in Sakhalin that was supposed to be a joint venture with Mitsubishi and Mitsui Trading.

In another looming problem, the aggressive U.S. push on sanctions against Iran that Tokyo is loyally supporting, if implemented, would endanger Japan’s access to Iranian oil, which currently accounts for over 10% of its imports.

The Japanese are supposed to be compensated with preferential access to Iraq opportunities but—in an ironic development considering that the Iraq war was intended to exclude competing powers and turn Iraq’s oilfields into a bonanza for the West—another energy-hungry power is muscling in:

Japan is clearly interested in increasing its profile in Iraq's energy sector, but the main obstacle to ramping up investment remains the endemic violence that persists in that country. Despite Tokyo’s calls for domestic firms to pump more money into overseas oil and gas projects, investment in Iraq will be difficult as violence is unlikely to cease anytime soon.

Japanese officials and analysts also worry that countries such as China might have an edge over Japan in gaining access to Iraq's energy resources, since it has more experience operating in inhospitable environments such as Sudan and Angola.

In fact, the new Iraqi government has courted Beijing because Chinese producers have been willing to invest in countries that are considered dangerous or politically isolated. Beijing had previously been thought to be out of the running for major contracts in postwar Iraq, with the best deals going to the U.S. and its allies. But the upsurge in violence there has made the country less attractive to Western producers.


Perhaps as a result of these revelations of the downside of acting as America’s sheriff in North Asia, support for Abe’s signature initiative—revision of the pacifist constitution to permit Japan to participate in hairy-chested overseas military adventures with its freedom and democracy loving brethren in the West—has evaporated.

According to Bloomberg on February 13:

Shinzo Abe's aim of revising Japan's pacifist constitution to allow the nation to assert itself militarily for the first time in 62 years may be petering out, a casualty of the prime minister's falling popularity.

``He's set himself up for failure,'' said Gerald Curtis, author of ``The Japanese Way of Politics'' and a professor of political science at New York's Columbia University. ``There's no enthusiasm for constitutional revision from society as a whole. For it to happen he has to be pretty popular, and he's not.''


An op-ed published in the Daily Yomiuru on Feb. 17 by Weston Konishi of the Mansfield Center stated:

[A]ccording to a Cabinet Office poll conducted last October, only 25 percent of Japanese respondents want their country to take a more active role in peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance and other "contributions to international society." Sixty-five percent of those polled believe Japan's contributions should either be kept at the current level or held at a "minimal level."

What about public support for a "proactive diplomacy" promoting fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law (principles that were also invoked recently by Foreign Minister Taro Aso in his call for Japan to lead an "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" among like-minded nations)? According to the same Cabinet Office poll, just 20 percent of Japanese believe that protecting universal values such as freedom, democracy and human rights should be a role for Japan in the international arena.

The prime minister's claim that "Japanese will no longer shy away" from enhanced international security responsibilities rings hollow considering statistics like these. Indeed, the very items that Abe now promises to the international community--readily deploying SDF missions abroad; actively promoting universal values; and championing the creation of "arcs," "spheres" or other geopolitical formations--are ideas that the Japanese public has not yet signed onto.

Without question, the U.S.-Japan alliance will survive America’s betrayal at the negotiating table in Beijing.

But Shinzo Abe may not.

And the hope that Tokyo and Washington would find an identity of interests that would create an impregnable united front against North Korea, China, and Russia in Northeast Asia is dead, a victim of fundamentally diverging interests and ruthless political opportunism by the Bush administration.