Saturday, August 24, 2024

ECONOMIC STRATEGY INSTITUTE (ESI)


Economic STRATEGY  Institute

As of July 2024 the Washington economic policy think tank, Economic Strategy Institute (ESI), will no longer maintain its website, econostrat.org.  The organization's work does continue, albeit quietly and behind the scenes. 


To reach ESI or its president, Clyde Prestowitz 

Please Contact 


        ECONOMIC STRATEGY INSTITUTE

c/o Asia Policy Point

1730 Rhode Island Avenue, NW

Suite 414

Washington, DC 20036

asiapolicyhq@jiaponline.org

Friday, August 23, 2024

Kishida Stands Down

How new will the next Japanese PM be?

By Takuya Nishimura, Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun
The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
August 21, 2024. Special to Asia Policy Point

On August 14, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced at his press conference that he would not run in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election this coming September. His campaign would have been for a second term as president of the LDP. The new party leader elected on September 27 will become the next prime minister of Japan by virtue of the LDP’s voting power in the Diet. 

An extraordinary session of the Diet is expected next month after the LDP election in order to vote on the next prime minister. The date has not yet been selected. When it is, this will mark the end of the current highly unusual political situation in which a wildly unpopular prime minister has overstayed his tenure.

In his press conference, Kishida emphasized the need for change in the LDP. “It is necessary for the LDP to show its change before the nation. The first step for it, which is very easy for the people to understand, is that I am going to stand down. I will not run for coming presidential election,” said Kishida. His diplomatic work had ended the day before after a telephone call with the prime minister of Mongolia.

In aftermath of the LDP slush fund scandal, Kishida lost public confidence when he failed to explain how and why the kickback system of ticket sales for fundraising parties was created and operated. His inability to regain public support led to miserable defeats in the April by-elections of the House of Representatives. These losses generated serious concerns among LDP lawmakers about the coming elections of both houses of the Diet.

Kishida alienated himself from other LDP lawmakers by dissolving his faction, the Kochi-kai, and then by appearing before the Political Ethics Council of the Diet to describe his own involvement in the slush fund scandal while urging other LDP lawmakers to take responsibility. The lawmakers were frustrated with Kishida and demanded his resignation. Under these circumstances, Kishida could not keep his administration going.

Kishida confessed, as the LDP president, he felt responsible when details of the slush fund scandal first began to emerge. This created expectations that he would step down over the summer. And he has.

The race to succeed Kishida will be short and fast. Former LDP Secretary General and former Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishiba announced his candidacy, if he would be able to secure necessary nominators, as soon as Kishida ended his press conference. The current Secretary General, Toshimitsu Motegi, has not hidden his ambition either. Within hours of Kishida’s announcement, Motegi had a one-on-one meeting with LDP Vice President Taro Aso.

The race likely will be between those two men. Two former prime ministers, Aso and Yoshihide Suga, who hope to maintain behind-the-scenes leadership, may influence the race. Aso would prefer Motegi in order to control the next administration. Ishiba would be the better vehicle for Suga. But it is unclear whether Ishiba will want or need Suga’s support.

Other possible contenders include Minister for Economic Security Sanae Takaichi, Digital Minister Taro Kono, and former Minister for Economic Security Takayuki Kobayashi. However, each of them is still struggling to marshal support in the LDP. Kono’s faction boss, Aso, has yet to endorse him. Takaichi has not expanded her wing of the LDP beyond ultra conservatives. And Kobayashi has not built a significant youth movement.

One of the biggest obstacles for the lesser contenders is LDP election law. Article 10 of the Rules for Election of President of the LDP states that “only those members nominated by at least 20 Party Diet members shall be accepted as candidates.” Collecting 20 supporters is not easy, because those supporters will be isolated if their candidate loses in the presidential election. Twenty supporters have to be ready for exclusion from cabinet posts and party leadership positions, if they fail. The 20-person requirement means that four or five candidates would be the maximum number. 

So long as the 20 party-member requirement remains in place, factional politics will be the order of the day. The supporters of the winner become mainstream in the next administration and act as a quasi-faction. To maintain collective power in politics, LDP lawmakers take collective action. The meeting between two leaders of the former Kochi-kai, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi and former Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera, on the same day of Kishida’s announcement demonstrated that they would maintain their factions.

Both the former Abe and Nikai factions are too fragmented after the slush fund scandal to unite in the presidential election. Some members are no longer affiliated with the LDP. It is possible that the LDP will field new candidates against their former members in the next election. That is what former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did in the postal reform election in 2005 against his political enemies. An old-time kingmaker, Shin Kanemaru, once said that factional breakdown was “dispersed horse manure in a river stream (maguso-no-kawa-nagare).”

Although young LDP lawmakers have expressed concerns about factional politics, the LDP has no choice. The opposition parties criticize the LDP’s routine replacement of a leader in order to escape responsibility for any failure, in this case the slush fund scandal. The opposition also derides the LDP’s factional politics as old-fashioned.

Yet, it is undeniable that the LDP remains the choice of voters in Japan. The opposition parties have not presented a clear alternative to the LDP. They have never agreed on basic policies such as constitutional amendments or nuclear power generation. It is necessary for them to propose which parties will construct a new administration and who will be the prime minister. The leading opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, needs to discuss its idea for a new administration in its September 23 presidential election—four days prior to the LDP’s presidential election.

Thursday, August 22, 2024

The Sado Gold Mine Decision

General Masaharu Homma
"Beast of Bataan"
Sado Island was family fiefdo
m
Is Compromise Over History Possible?

First published on the Korea Economic Institute website, August 14, 2024

BY Daniel Sneider, APP Member, is a Lecturer of International Policy and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

The transformation of relations between South Korea and Japan during the past two-plus years is one of the signal accomplishments of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. However, there remain doubts over the durability of this achievement. A troubling question remains whether the historical past of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea will again roil relations. The ongoing division between the two countries over colonial and wartime history, alongside Korean demands for historical justice, is again on display in recent weeks.

Background and Controversy Surrounding the Sado Gold Mine

On July 27, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formally granted the prized World Heritage Site status to the gold mines located on Japan’s Sado Island. Submitted to UNESCO in 2015, Japan had included the mines on a list of sites that supported its industrial revolution. The Sado gold mines were developed during the Tokugawa era and played an important role in Japan’s modernization. Although the mines are no longer operational, they have been preserved as a historical site for tourists.

The controversy surrounding Japan’s application centers on the wartime history of the mines and the use of Korean workers to carry out dangerous mining operations. The South Korean government and civic activists opposed the granting of World Heritage status to the gold mines. Koreans, along with numerous Western and Japanese historians, insist that many of the workers were brought to the mines against their will, either through coercion or deception. The objections to the granting of World Heritage status rested on compelling Japan to acknowledge the role of Korean forced labor at the site itself and in its official accounts.

The Sado decision reflected a compromise by Japan that was supported by the South Korean government and reached through diplomatic negotiations. It included an agreement by Japan to present the role of Korean workers and their harsh working conditions, as well as hold an annual ceremony to pay respect to them. An exhibit at a museum near the site was created to provide information on the more than 1,500 Korean laborers who worked there, including the fact that they faced more dangerous conditions than their Japanese counterparts and other harsh measures.

However, it avoided using the term “forced labor,” which the Japanese government has always opposed. Within Korea, this compromise has been assailed, particularly by the opposition Democratic Party and Korean media commentary. The Yoon government has been accused of deliberately and misleadingly claiming that Japan had agreed to fully accept this history.

“The Japanese government had never acknowledged the concept of forced labor,” former Korean Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo told this writer in an email exchange. Even in the case of Battleship Island (discussed below), it tried to find language that avoided the term. “This time, it seemed the negotiations did not squarely address this issue.”

Nonetheless, Ambassador Shin believes that the compromise was justified. “My hunch is that the Korean government strove to put more emphasis on the real teaching of history to the visitors to the site than arguments on the wording,” the former diplomat, who remains active on relations with Japan, said. “We need to assess the outcome as a product of diplomatic compromise, given the big gap between the two sides on their historical views.”

Japan Fails to Fill Out the History

At the time of the 2015 application, the Japanese government, then led by the late Abe Shinzo, denied the forced nature of Korean labor and discrimination against Koreans at the sites. But UNESCO insisted that Japan clearly admit that “a large number of Koreans and others…were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.”

The coal mine operated on Japan’s Hashima Island, popularly known as Battleship Island, was granted World Heritage status in 2015, but only after Japan agreed to include the “full history” that would “allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.” Even then, a follow-up monitoring team found in 2021 that the information center failed to do this.

In the case of the Sado Mine, historians have documented that at least 1,519 Koreans were forced to work from 1939 until the end of World War II. The initial application filed by the local government, which sought the status to promote tourism to the island, made no mention of the wartime era. It confined itself to the history of the mines during the Tokugawa and Meiji era (until 1912), seeking to avoid this controversy.

The Korean government opposed this application, as did UNESCO experts. UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites requested that the Japanese applicants deal with the wartime period, and a supplemental document was submitted to respond to this issue. The document offers a description of three phases of labor “recruitment” that implies the Korean workers voluntarily agreed to work at the mines until 1944, when labor “requisition” was compulsory. The Japanese official document also asserts that there was no discrimination between Korean and Japanese workers and that the Koreans were paid wages.

The descriptions of the phases of “recruitment” in the document are “misleading,” Dr. Nikolai Johnsen, a British scholar at the University of London who has researched and written extensively on this history, told this writer. The workers were signed up by agents supported by the colonial government “who compelled large groups of men from impoverished Korean villages to take up dangerous work in Japan under false pretenses.” During the second phase, which began in 1942, the colonial regime directly selected the workers, and opposition “often had dire consequences” in the form of “forced mobilization,” the scholar said.

Further, Johnsen explained that “claiming this system was non-discriminatory is simply historical denialism.” Wages and working conditions were far from equal, and much of the wages were never paid, held in accounts by Mitsubishi but never released.

The Japanese account also uses the term “workers from the Korean Peninsula,” a formulation that treats Koreans as subjects of the Japanese Empire and refuses to recognize them as foreign forced laborers. “Recognition of the true character of this history would greatly elevate the universal value of the Sado mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site,” Johnsen wrote in a paper published two years ago. “They cannot be suppressed for the sake of instilling pride in future Japanese generations to the neglect of the victims.”

Lingering Disputes and the Shadow of History

This is not an issue confined to the question of World Heritage status. Suits filed in Korea by Korean workers and their descendants against Japanese companies who used forced labor – and in the case of these mines, Mitsubishi Materials – were a central part of the downturn in Korea-Japan relations in 2018. The successful rulings in favor of the workers, who demanded compensation for unpaid wages, remain an issue despite the Yoon administration’s decision last year to resolve the problem by using a Korean-funded foundation to settle the demands.

That is quite distinct from the way Mitsubishi Materials dealt with a suit filed by Chinese forced laborers that was settled in Chinese courts in 2016 with compensation payments and an apology from the company. The company also offered similar apologies [sic, there was only one apology] to American POWs used as forced labor in their mines during the war. The contrast with Japan’s approach to Korea remains problematic, to say the least.

As noted, the Yoon administration’s drive to improve relations with Tokyo is a signal accomplishment. From the standpoint of geopolitics, the most notable consequence of this improvement has been the deepening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan. However, both trilateral ties and improved bilateral relations with Japan remain vulnerable not only to a change in political leadership but also to the lingering and potentially explosive effects of unaddressed historical grievances.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Japan's Expanding Security Commitments

The 2+2 Solidifies Security Cooperation between Japan and the U.S.


By Takuya Nishimura, Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun
The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
July 29, 2024. Special to Asia Policy Point

On July 28, the secretaries and ministers for foreign affairs and defense of both Japan and the United States issued a joint statement following the meeting of the Security Consultative Committee (2+2) in Tokyo. Their statement focused on enhancing the interoperability of Japan and U.S. forces, including a new command system in each country’s defense organization, procurement of defense equipment and upgrading the countries’ discussion of extended deterrence. This cooperation is intended to counter recent demonstrations of military strength by China, Russia, and North Korea.

With the National Defense Strategy in 2022, Japan decided to establish a permanent Joint Headquarters to unify the commands of the three Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) in order to reinforce its military readiness. The Diet finally passed a bill in May to set up the headquarters in the Ministry of Defense by the end of FY 2024.

Along with these internal actions in Japan, the 2+2 joint statement notes the U.S. intention to reconstitute the U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) as a joint force headquarters. The statement thus implemented the joint statement of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the U.S. President Joe Biden from April of this year, which announced that both countries would upgrade their command and control frameworks for greater interoperability.

Both countries are consolidating their commands in order to address the evolving security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, and to plan for contingencies regarding Taiwan. The USFJ has been under jurisdiction of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. To better integrate operations and strengthen interoperability and planning between Japan and the U.S., the U.S. will give the USFJ greater autonomy.

While the principle of interoperability assumes the equivalence of both forces, there is a concern in Japan that the JSDF will be a junior partner to the USFJ given the JSDF dependence on the USFJ for information, capabilities, and decision making. Some hope that the commander of the USJF will have the rank of General to balance the titles of both commanders.

The 2+2 also agreed to cooperate more in manufacturing defense equipment. Quoting the joint statement, “the Ministers welcomed high-priority efforts to pursue beneficial co-production opportunities to expand production capacity of Advanced Medium-range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and Patriot PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE).”

At their summit meeting in April, Prime Minister Kishida and President Biden agreed to convene a forum on Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition and Sustainment (DICAS). The 2+2 confirmed this decision and encouraged efforts in both the public and private sectors to improve missile technology, as well as supply chain resilience and repair of ships and aircrafts.

In 2023, the Japanese government eased restrictions on exports of defense equipment to the U.S. by revising the Three Principles of Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology. Because Japanese manufacturers have been producing defense equipment under a U.S. license, exports of this equipment to the U.S. would be allowed. The 2+2 agreed that Japanese manufacturers would export to the U.S. about 3 billion yen’s worth of Patriot missiles.

A highlight of the 2+2 meetings was an upgrading of the bilateral Extended Deterrence Dialogue (EDD) to the minister level. Both governments have conducted EDD at a senior official level since 2010. Both countries now recognize a need to enhance cooperation on deterrence, given the current military environment.

The first minister-level EDD was held at the 2+2. The joint statement described concerns with “North Korea’s continued destabilizing behavior and sustained pursuit of its unlawful nuclear and ballistic missile programs, China’s accelerating and opaque expansion of its nuclear arsenal, and Russia’s undermining of arms control and the global nonproliferation regime.” Their concerns grew out of a 2023 DOD report on China’s military capability. That report indicated that China could acquire over 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.

However, EDD means that Japan will rely further on U.S. nuclear deterrence. Some Japanese newspapers noted that the Kishida administration has sent contradictory signals. As the chairman of the G7 Hiroshima Summit 2023, Kishida promoted a world without nuclear weapons. Yet the elevation of EDD might, according to a nuclear disarmament expert quoted in the Tokyo Shimbun, give North Korea a justification for its nuclear weapons arsenal.

The biggest reason for Japan and the U.S. to enhance their security cooperation is the growing power of China in the Indo-Pacific region. “The Ministers concurred that the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy seeks to reshape that international order for its own benefit at the expense of others,” said the 2+2 joint statement. China’s behavior is regarded as a serious concern to the alliance and the international community. The two governments reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the defense of the Senkaku Islands under the Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.

Japan, meanwhile, keeps on trying to maintain a diplomatic channel with China. Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wan Yi in Laos behind the backdrop of ASEAN foreign ministers meeting. The two countries intend to strengthen their “strategically reciprocal relationship.” However, the meeting yielded no concrete results.

The 2+2 meeting reflected the fact that both Japan and the U.S. must solidify their security cooperation given the volatility of leadership in both countries. President Joe Biden has announced his withdrawal from the presidential election in November. If Republican Donald Trump is reelected it is uncertain if he would maintain the bilateral relationship. He has argued that U.S. allies, including Japan, have not paid their fair share of defense costs, relying instead on U.S. support.

As for Japan, Kishida’s unpopularity augurs poorly for his continuation as prime minister after the Liberal Democratic Party elections in September. Recent secrets and corruption scandals in the Defense Ministry and JSDF combine with Yasukuni Shrine visits by JSDF officers and the undisclosed sexual violence by U.S. servicemen undermine trust between the two militaries as well as the Japanese public. Officials in both countries, thus, hope the 2+2 statement will institutionalize existing bilateral agreements and encourage greater accountability.