By Takuya Nishimura, APP 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.
June 16, 2025. Special to Asia Policy Point
On June 11, Japan’s Diet enacted a law to convert the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) from an independent consultative body to a special public corporation with stronger governmental oversight. The new law enables the Japanese government to participate in the selection of the council’s new members.
The Council historically has represented Japan’s scientific community. The new law takes effect in October 2026. The changes to the Council’s membership are controversial: some scholars are adamantly opposed, dubbing the law the “SCJ Control Act.”
The SCJ was established in 1949 as a special organization of the government of Japan to provide a scientific perspective on government actions. “Based on a belief that science constructs the basis of cultural state, SCJ is hereby established with consensus of scientists, upholding mission of peaceful reconstruction of our country, contributing welfare of human society, and supporting academic progress connected with world academy,” as the current SCJ Act states.
The Japan Academy (Nippon Gakushi-in) is another government-authorized academic organization. The Meiji government established Gakushi-in in 1879 to reward scientists who had made outstanding scientific breakthroughs. While the members of Gakushi-in have life-time membership, SCJ is limited to 210 members, who are frequently replaced.
One unusual decision of a prime minister in 2020 prompted proposals to reform the SCJ. Then Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga rejected six scientists as new members of the SCJ. The SCJ Act provides that the prime minister appoints the members of the SCJ based on recommendations from the council. Former prime ministers had previously approved all members recommended by the council as a matter of course. The six scientists rejected in 2020 were known to be critical of some government policies, and they are not the members of the SCJ up until now.
In March 2025, the government of Japan submitted the bill for the new law to replace current SCJ Act. Reflecting the view of the leading parties, mainly conservative ones, that a government organization contribute to the government, the bill stripped from the SCJ its status as a special organization in the Cabinet Office, which makes independent decisions and receives sufficient financial support.
The new law includes provisions to establish new sections in the council. They include a Member Candidate Selection Committee, a Selection Advisory Committee, and a Management Advisory Committee. The law requires the SCJ to abide by various conditions in selection of new members. In addition, the law sets up an SCJ Evaluation Committee in the Cabinet Office. This committee will evaluate SCJ’s annual self-assessment report on its activities, as well as reviewing the mid-term plans of the council.
The SCJ argued that the law should maintain the SCJ as a national academy in its statement in April. The statement proposed five elements necessary for the SCJ to be a true national academy: status as an academic representative of the state, public qualification, a stable financial base in the form of funding in the government’s budget, independence from government regulation of its activities, and autonomy and independence in selecting members.
Six former presidents of the SCJ issued a statement in May that the SCJ Act would not include those five elements and urged that the bill be abandoned.. They recommended maintenance of a cooptation system in the selection of new members, arguing that the new law would erode the SCJ’s academic independence with the government’s intervention in the management of the council.
The government never explained, even in the Diet discussion, why former prime minister Suga rejected the six scientists as new members in 2020. It merely repeated that the new law would guarantee higher independence and autonomy. Although the leading coalition, the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, did not have a majority in the Lower House, the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin-no Kai) joined them in passing the bill in the Lower House on May 13 and the Upper House on June 11.
At a press conference after the bill passed the Diet, one of the six former presidents who opposed the bill, Juichi Yamagiwa, the former President of Kyoto University, labeled the new law the “SCJ Disorganization Law.” “The reason for Suga’s rejection has not made clear and the law entails stricter control on academism,” said Yamagiwa.
The Suga administration was a loyal successor to the Shinzo Abe administration. Abe worked aggressively for constitutional amendment, but in the face of criticism by liberal scholars, his efforts failed. It is likely that the conservative lawmakers and the loyalist bureaucrats close to Abe were frustrated with the academic community in Japan.
Knowing that Suga’s rejection of the six scientists was an arbitrary decision against liberal scholars, they might have thought that they could control the SCJ by reviving the law. They did not choose a course of correcting Suga’s decision. Today’s Japanese government, not unlike the Trump administration in the U.S., appears not to appreciate scholarly advice from experienced scientists on national policies.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Japan's Science Council Politicized
Saturday, April 22, 2023
Rescinding Japan's War Apology
What Will Kishida Say on August 15 at Japan’s National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead?
Kishida has an opportunity to demonstrate his independence now that Abe is gone. Will he return to the legacy of the Murayama statement?
By Mindy Kotler, Asia Policy Point
The Diplomat, August 13, 2022
What Will Kishida Say on August 15 at Japan's National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead?
In the immediate aftermath of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s murder, Japan’s current leader Kishida Fumio promised to honor Abe’s legacy by building upon his accomplishments. The reportedly more liberal Kishida, however, came to power expected to do the opposite and dial back some of his predecessor’s more provocative stances. His room to maneuver was limited, however, by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s right wing and Abe’s own constant public hectoring on hewing to the course.
With Abe’s untimely death, Kishida has an opportunity to demonstrate his independence. The first indication of a new course may come with his August 15 address at the National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead.
A crucial objective of Abe’s two terms was the freeing of Japan from “masochistic” history. This odd expression was a call to arms advocating both amending the U.S.-imposed “mind-control” constitution and ending Japan’s war apology diplomacy. Although constitutional amendment was not accomplished, the latter objective has been achieved.
Abe led an aggressive campaign to reconstruct history and monitor its telling at home and aboard. Diplomats asked the governments of the Philippines and Germany to remove statues memorializing the “comfort women” and other victims of sexual violence. Abe ordered the creation of commissions questioning the legitimacy of Japan’s 1995 official war apology, known as the Murayama statement, and the 1993 provisional apology to the comfort women, known as the Kono statement. (Here it should be noted that this particular statement is no longer prominently noted on the Foreign Ministry’s webpage explaining their position regarding the comfort women. Instead, it is buried in another document and only the knowledgeable and persistent can find it.)
Cabinet level officials squired applications for UNESCO World Heritage recognition of culturally dubious and politically fraught sites. One was an island shrine inaccessible to women. Another glorified Japan’s industrialization while disregarding the troubled use and abuse of convicts, the underclasses, children, Koreans, Chinese, and prisoners of war. Government promises to UNESCO to include this missing history have not been kept.
The Foreign Ministry was pressed into defending false history in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, scrubbing its website of historical documents containing embarrassing details, and asking the public to report historical narratives contradicting the new official positions. The Abe government used budget allocations to hire public relations firms and amateur historians to cast doubt on widely respected historians.
In talks with the Park Geun-hye administration in South Korea seeking to resolve the disagreements over the proper means of recognizing the dignity of the comfort women, the Abe government resorted to an unprecedented diplomatic diversion. Despite announcing an “agreement,” the 2015 comfort women talks resulted in two competing unsigned memoranda distributed at a “Joint Press Occasion.” The Japanese memorandum, in particular, contains an impossible demand that “this issue is resolved finally and irreversibly.” The “Press Occasion” document was furthermore not Cabinet approved, unlike every other diplomatic agreement the government of Japan has ever announced.
The crowning moment of Abe’s revisionism was his 2020 August 15th address at the National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead. His remarks were the culmination of a seven-year effort to completely revise, if not indeed rescind, the 1995 Murayama statement, the cabinet-approved apology for World War II released by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi. Until Abe, the Murayama statement was the template for all Japanese apologies. The 2020 statement, however, had many of Murayama’s key phrases removed. The new statement was not an apology to Japan’s victims. Instead, it paid tribute to the Japanese people for their resilience.
As early as 2013, on August 15, Abe stopped expressing his “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology.” He replaced “colonial rule and aggression” in the Murayama statement with the milder “Japan took the wrong course and advanced along the road to war” causing “immeasurable damage and suffering.” The main focus shifted away from Japan’s victims to turning the war into a positive transformation where “the peace and prosperity that we now enjoy have been built upon the sacrifices of you who gave up your precious lives.” And the four mentions of unfortunate history in the Murayama statement were reduced to just one promising blandly to “face history with humility and engrave deeply into our hearts the lessons that we should learn.”
Abe tried to codify these changes with a Cabinet-approved statement issued the day before the 2015 August 15th memorial. He explained that his Advisory Panel on the History of the 20th Century and on Japan’s Role and the World Order in the 21st Century had reevaluated Japan’s post-war period. The conclusion was that today’s Japanese are not “predestined to apologize.” Instead, “Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past” only because the peace enjoyed today “exists only upon such precious sacrifices” that are “the origin of postwar Japan.”
Abe’s last memorial statement was in 2020 for the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender ending World War II. It made no reference to history or remorse at all. The pledge to take “the lessons of history deeply into our hearts” vanished. In its place, Abe introduced a new, “forward-looking” phrase – that Japan was ready to make a “proactive contribution to peace.”
In 2021, Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide substantially repeated Abe’s 2020 reconstruction of Japan’s war apology. History remained now only with the Japanese. Like his predecessor, Suga insisted that the lesson learned from WWII was “We will not forget, even for a moment, that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today was built atop the precious lives and the history of suffering of the war dead. I express my deepest respect and gratitude once more.”
Come August 15, Kishida has a decision to make. He can choose to accept Abe’s unrepentant, nationalistic war remembrance. This would of course please the Abe faction and revisionist pressure organization Nippon Kaigi, whose legislative wing includes Kishida and most of the members of his new Cabinet.
Or Kishida, a legislator from Hiroshima, can reassert the centrality of the Murayama statement and the honest, forthright contrition it represents. If he does so, he would send a powerful signal to South Korea and Imperial Japan’s other victims that Japan is willing to confront its dark history.
UPDATE: August 15, 2022
On August 15th, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida repeated Abe's unrepentant statement remembering, but not apologizing for WWII. With his statement, Kishida completed the undoing of the Murayama Statement of apology and remorse.
Kishida largely focused on the damage Japan suffered on its Home Islands — the U.S. atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massive fire-bombings across Japan, and the bloody ground battle on Okinawa. He said the peace and prosperity that the country enjoys today is built on the suffering and sacrifices of those who died in the war. The Japanese, he like Abe implied, were the victims. There was no mention of the harm Imperial Japan inflicted upon others. He repeated Abe's pledge for Japan to make "Proactive Contribution to Peace," which implies military involvement in upcoming world conflicts.
Kishida did, however, return to the August 15th statement a mention of history, however stopping short of actually learning from it: "Taking the lessons of history deeply into our hearts."
Friday, April 30, 2021
The Japan-Korea History Wars
By Daniel Sneider, Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP Member
Toyo Keizai, April 30, 2021
Inside the Biden administration, there is a deepening frustration over what is described as a “painful” breakdown of relations between Japan and South Korea. In meeting after meeting, American officials from the President on down are preaching the importance of trilateral cooperation between the United States and its two key allies in Northeast Asia.
That cooperation is a key piece of the Biden administration’s broader strategy to confront China. The administration’s North Korea policy, nearing the end of its review, depends in part on the three countries lining up together.
Publicly, the U.S. extracts ritual statements of support for trilateral coordination, and holds meetings of senior officials, focused on forging a joint response to North Korea, and hopefully China. Privately, senior U.S. officials are pushing Korea and Japan to make real progress in restoring working relations, even to resolve the issues of wartime history that continue to plague their relations. So far, however, there is no evidence of serious talks on the history issues.
The recent decision of the Seoul Central District Court to dismiss a suit by Korean victims of wartime sexual servitude, so-called military comfort women, has generated some hopes that both governments might find a route out of the current impasse.
The South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in has been signaling some flexibility and interest in improving relations. Senior Korean officials have gone out their way to tell their American counterparts that it is the Japanese who are holding up any progress.
The Japanese government has indeed offered a cold response to the Korean signals, arguing that they first need to see actions to shut down the legal challenges over comfort women and forced laborers. Japanese officials have written off the Moon government and place their hopes on a conservative government coming to power next year in South Korea.
Both Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and President Moon are weakened politically and their room to maneuver is even less than previously.
“It is unlikely that the Korean government would change its positions and suggest mutually agreeable solutions to Japan,” says former South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan, a key bridge between the two countries. The losses by the ruling progressive party in the Seoul and Busan mayoral elections, and Moon’s plummeting popularity, make it highly unlikely there will be a breakthrough until after the presidential election next March, predicts Yu, who previously served as Korean Ambassador to Japan.
The recent Japanese parliamentary by-elections have similarly weakened Suga and made him even more under the sway of hardline conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who oppose any concessions on wartime history issues. Japanese public opinion, shaped in part by conservative media in Japan, reflects the view that Korea is an unreliable partner.
“Suga has to pay attention to public opinion because the LDP is facing difficulties in the coming election of the House of Representatives this year,” observes Tokyo University Professor Kawashima Shin, an expert on wartime history issues. “If Suga makes any positive response to Moon’s approach, it would be a negative factor for Suga and for the LDP.”
The war for Washington’s favor
At the moment, the two American allies are engaged in a fierce, though undeclared, the war in Washington, trying to convince the new administration to take their side.
The latest exchange of fire took place when Prime Minister Suga visited Washington in April. The attention of Japanese and American media was focused on the discussion of China, and on Taiwan. Most observers missed the rather blunt statements on Korea issued by Suga, first at his joint press conference with Biden and then again in an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
While making a nod toward trilateral cooperation, Suga pointedly pressured the U.S. not to retreat from a commitment to complete denuclearization of North Korea, using a term favored by the Trump administration, calling for “CVID,” or Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Denuclearization.
Suga’s remarks were a clear effort to head off any move by the Biden administration, after its policy review, to seek an arms control style deal with Pyongyang that would leave its shorter-range missiles, and its existing nuclear arsenal, intact.
He called recent tests of short-range ballistic missiles by the North Koreans a “clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions” and a “threat to the peace and security” of Japan and the region. Negotiations, he said, must eliminate the threat of “ballistic missiles of all ranges possessed by North Korea.”
President Moon, who is heading to Washington in May, responded with an interview with the New York Times. Moon laid responsibility on Donald Trump for the failure of the summit talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. His message to Biden was to resume direct talks with the North Koreans as early as possible, a goal that is central to Moon’s own political agenda.
The court ruling opens a door – will Suga and Moon walk through it?
Despite the battles for Washington’s favor, the April 21 decision by the Seoul District Court could have a significant positive impact on the history wars. The decision effectively contradicted the decision by a similar level court in early January which had ruled that the Japanese government had to provide compensation to 12 former comfort women, supporting the argument that principles of international human rights overrode claims to exemption from such suits based on state sovereignty.
The April decision in a suit by a separate group of women was in line with established international law, say Korean legal experts and likely to be upheld over the earlier decision.
“The court came back to the classical authentic attitudes on the sovereign immunity issue,” Seoul National University legal scholar Heo Seongwook told me. “Most probably, this conclusion will be maintained at the appeals court.”
In his ruling, Justice Min Seong-Cheol also significantly referred to the 2015 agreement reached by Japan and the previous conservative government of Park Geun-Hye in South Korea to attempt to settle the issue of compensation and apology to the Korean women victims.
That agreement created a Japanese-funded Fund which provided compensation, accepted by two-thirds of the surviving victims, along with an expression of apology. The suits were filed on behalf of supporters of the Korean organization representing those who rejected this settlement.
Justice Min acknowledged that the results of that agreement may not have been “fully satisfactory compared with the pain they had to suffer through in the past,” but that it did have validity as an existing agreement and was a Japanese offer of a “remedy for the violation of rights.”
The progressive government had unilaterally dismantled the 2015 agreement, closing down the operations of the Fund in support of activists who opposed the deal. But following the January court decision, which triggered a harsh response from Tokyo, Moon reversed course slightly. He expressed dismay at the decision and acknowledged that the 2015 agreement remained in force as an official pact.
Moon’s shift seems to have set the stage for the reversal in the District Court. “President Moon’s remarks…indirectly influenced the decision,” says Professor Park Cheol Hee, a prominent expert on Japan at Seoul National University. “Still there is no evidence that Blue House gave any guideline to the court.”
By reaffirming the 2015 agreement, the Korean court and Moon have “opened the door to diplomatic negotiation between Korea and Japan,” says Professor Park. But the obstacles remain considerable. On the Korean side, Moon is reluctant to take the next obvious step and reopen the comfort women fund established in 2015, accepting that as the basis for dealing with those victims who remain to be included.
Japanese official response to the court decision has been extremely cautious, led by the Prime Minister’s Office and the LDP.
“I think that now it depends on Suga,” says former foreign ministry official Togo Kazuhiko, who has been a voice for compromise on history issues. “If Suga sees this verdict as an opportunity, he has a room to move.” And if the April ruling loses on appeal, Suga can always argue that he did his best to improve relations, says Togo.
The other time bomb hanging over this is the potential decision of the Korean courts to dissolve the assets of Japanese corporations which were judged to have to pay compensation to former Korean forced laborers from the wartime period.
That case is legally more solvable as it involves individual plaintiffs and private firms but the Japanese government has pressured the firms not to yield, arguing it is a violation of the 1965 treaty which normalized relations between the two countries and settled, in principle, such wartime claims.
In Japan, there are voices in favor of improving relations with South Korea, echoing American officials who see the strategic importance of bringing Korea in with Japan in the broader response to China. But Suga personally opposes any concessions and shares a deep mistrust of the Moon administration, based on his eight years as Chief Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, says Professor Kawashima.
That leaves Washington waiting for an opening to help repair these damaged relations.
“President Biden fully understands the delicate history issues between Korea and Japan,” former South Korean foreign minister Yu told me. Biden played the role of mediator on these issues during the Obama administration, setting in motion the diplomatic engagement that led to the 2015 agreement, in which Yu played a key role. But conditions may not yet be ripe to repeat that effort.
“I believe President Biden will wait until next year, when a new team is installed in both Korea and Japan and ready for compromise,” the Korean diplomat says, “a compromise for the sake of their legacy and also for the betterment of all involved, including the United States.”
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Japan’s Looming Climate Showdown
By Richard Katz, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and is writing a book on reviving entrepreneurship in Japan. He is an APP member.
Foreign Affairs, April 21, 2021
In October of last year, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced that Japan was shifting course. The country—which in 2020 came in a miserable 45th out of 61 countries in addressing climate change—would now commit itself to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a goal the country had once hoped to achieve sometime between 2050 and 2100.
That Tokyo’s record on climate change has been so dismal might surprise observers who associate Japan with technological innovation. But almost a third of the country’s electricity derives from coal—the single largest contributor to anthropogenic climate change. Worse yet, Japan is currently constructing 15 new coal-fired plants and is planning another seven, all to be finished within the next five years. Its carbon tax is a mere $3 per ton of carbon dioxide, compared with $33 in France and $126 in Sweden.
That makes Suga’s new stance a significant reversal for Japan. To reach the country’s new benchmark, the prime minister has pledged to “fundamentally shift” Japan’s policy on coal-powered electricity, initiate a study on the feasibility of carbon pricing, and phase out gasoline-fueled vehicles by 2035. “[Responding] to global warming is no longer a constraint on economic growth,” he explained.
Strong and rapid measures will not only decrease Japan’s own emissions but might also help induce other countries in the region to take similar steps. Just days after Suga’s speech, South Korea, the world’s ninth-largest emitter, committed to net zero by 2050. Activists in Australia, a major coal exporter, have called on Canberra to match Tokyo’s shift. Whether or not Japan delivers on its lofty promises, however, will depend on the policy battles now raging in Tokyo.
STOP AND GO
Japan’s feeble response to climate change has its roots in a national trauma. In 2010, carbon-free nuclear energy supplied a third of the country’s electricity. That number was supposed to increase to 40 percent by 2017 and 53 percent by 2030. With an additional 20 percent to be derived from renewables such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric, Japan was on track to cut overall emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels.
Then came March 11, 2011. A horrific tsunami ripped through Fukushima prefecture, killing 20,000 people and causing a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that narrowly missed spewing radiation on millions. Had the utility company TEPCO simply followed global best practices and its own engineer’s recommendations, the meltdown would never have occurred. Worse yet, TEPCO had falsified safety data while government regulators turned a blind eye. The disaster destroyed nuclear energy’s credibility. All of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were shut down, and public opposition has thus far prevented most from reopening. In response, Japan turned to coal.
Today, however, a combination of what the Japanese call gai-atsu (foreign pressure) and nai-atsu (domestic pressure) is shifting Tokyo’s response to climate change. Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president also bolstered those in Japan who were already urging robust action. During their April 16 summit in Washington, Biden and Suga announced a new Climate Partnership, which includes measures to help other countries decarbonize.
Meanwhile, global companies have begun to include the practices of their suppliers in their net-zero commitments, and Japan’s leading corporations are feeling the heat. Apple, for example, will stop buying from suppliers that do not use 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Some Japanese producers have European facilities that could meet this goal, but those located inside Japan cannot. Only 19 percent of the country’s electricity comes from renewables, and the government’s current goal for 2030, set in 2018, is for that number to rise to between just 22 and 24 percent. The CEOs of Sony and three other major Japanese companies warned Administrative Reform Minister Taro Kono that failure to reach at least 40 percent renewable electricity by 2030 could compel many Japanese firms to shift some production offshore.
At the same time, extreme floods and disastrous heat waves over the last several years have visited the direct effects of climate change on Japanese citizens and companies. An astonishing 90 percent of voters supported Suga’s October declaration to reach net zero by 2050. In 2018, several leading companies—including heavy hitters such as Sony, Nissan, SoftBank, and Mitsubishi Estate—created a new alliance called the Japan Climate Initiative (JCI). The group was designed to pressure Tokyo into meeting the decarbonization goals set in the Paris climate accord, and today it has almost 400 corporate members. This January, 92 member companies urged the government to expand renewable electricity generation to between 40 and 50 percent of overall production by 2030 as part of the Strategic Energy Plan to be released in June. Keizai Doyukai, a separate federation of executives from 1,000 leading corporations, urged similar action last summer.
Climate-minded politicians are also rising through the ranks of the country’s perennially dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). This includes Suga and two potential future prime ministers, Kono and Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, both of whom support aggressive action on climate change. According to a source close to Suga, the prime minister was frustrated by the slow pace of decarbonization under his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Suga believed that Abe was too reliant on advice from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), which—according to the same person—was “not aggressive about carbon neutrality because the business world was reluctant to make a big change.”
Kono, for his part, told the JCI in November 2020 that he planned to remove regulatory obstacles to renewable electricity production—an important step toward Suga’s 2050 goal. Japan’s regional utility companies, for instance, can currently give their own power plants priority access to transmission lines. Kono has cited cases in which the utilities blocked new companies from transmitting wind-generated electricity, even on unused lines. Similarly, land use laws prevent abandoned farmland from being used for nonagricultural purposes, such as solar and wind farms.
With a combination of these regulatory shifts, current technology, and an upgraded grid, the country could generate between 40 and 45 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, according to Mika Ohbayashi, a member of the JCI secretariat and a director of Japan’s Renewable Energy Institute. Net zero by 2050, however, will require what she called “revolutionary technologies.”
BUMPS IN THE ROAD
Although Japanese efforts to decarbonize are gathering strength, there is still strong resistance. In a “Green Growth Strategy” document published on December 25, for instance, METI included hybrid gas-electric vehicles as part of Japan’s plan to eliminate gasoline-powered transportation by 2035, contradicting Suga’s talk of fully electric cars. And in April, a METI advisory committee proposed that coal should supply 26 percent of Japan’s electricity in 2030, the same goal set in 2018. If accepted, the target would defy Suga’s promise to “fundamentally shift” the country’s coal policy.
Similar opposition to change also exists in parts of the corporate world. The Toyota chieftain Akio Toyoda railed against Suga’s talk of ending sales of gasoline cars by the mid-2030s, inaccurately asserting that “the more electric vehicles we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets.” Separately, Keidanren, Japan’s most powerful business federation, has endorsed net zero by 2050 but opposes many of the measures needed to reach that goal. The federation insists that coal is necessary until reliable battery storage and hydrogen fuel become commercially feasible. “Energy security means Japan must have diverse sources of energy, including coal, at least in the short term,” said Masami Hasegawa, a Keidanren director.
Keidanren also prefers the current lax emission enforcement system, where industry associations voluntarily create goals for their member companies and the government reviews the results. Although Keidanren points to progress in reducing emissions, at the current pace, Japan will not even come close to net zero by 2050. Keidanren also opposes a carbon tax, which Hasegawa contends “would deprive companies of the funds needed to develop indispensable revolutionary technologies like hydrogen fuel and CCS [carbon capture and storage].” It will take at least two or three decades, however, before hydrogen and CCS become commercially competitive.
In reality, carbon pricing would have a dramatic effect even with current technology. Steelmaking, for example, is responsible for about ten percent of Japan’s total carbon emissions—mainly because 80 percent of the country’s crude steel output is still made in carbon-intensive coal-fired blast furnaces, compared with 33 percent in the United States. A carbon tax would make steel from blast furnaces uncompetitive in the marketplace, forcing companies to switch to cleaner alternatives.
An important factor in the outcome of this dispute is Suga’s waning political capital. His mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and poor communication skills have tanked his popularity. In September, he will have finished filling Abe’s term as the LDP president and must run for reelection on his own. Suga’s vulnerability could weaken his leverage over resistant bureaucrats. If he falls, the pace of progress will depend on the LPD’s choice of a successor. Polls currently show that the public overwhelmingly prefers Kono, who is strongly committed to fighting climate change.
SEA CHANGE
Despite the opposition to change among some leading companies, others have already altered important practices. Until last spring, Japan’s three megabanks—Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ—provided a third of all global financing for new coal-fired power plants. Last spring, they decided to stop underwriting new projects (although some loopholes remain). Several giant trading companies have also stopped investing in coal mines, and JCI member Toshiba announced that it will not build new coal-fired plants.
These actions are a good start. But Tokyo’s long-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 will be unreachable unless the government commits to sufficiently ambitious short-term objectives in its forthcoming Strategic Energy Plan, which sets targets for 2030. To succeed, Japan will need a much larger cut in emissions than the current and fiercely criticized target of 26 percent from 2013 levels. The Environment Ministry is advocating for a 45 percent reduction, while METI is pushing for a more modest 35 percent. Washington, for its part, is reportedly urging 50 percent.
Turning any eventual target into reality, however, will require a dramatic increase in the renewable electricity supply (potentially between 40 and 50 percent), along with Suga’s pledge to phase out gasoline vehicles. Japan, moreover, would need to immediately stop building new coal-fired plants and phase out all existing facilities by the 2030s. The government will also need to take advantage of market forces by adopting a more demanding carbon price or tax.
Tokyo’s ability to deliver on these measures will have a vital impact on global efforts to address climate change. Some argue that Japan’s actions make only a marginal difference since the country produces just three percent of global carbon emissions. That number, however, makes Japan the world’s fifth-largest emitter—behind only China, the United States, India, and Russia. And unless each nation does its share, addressing climate change will be an impossible task. If Japan stops shirking its responsibility, its behavior might pressure others to follow suit—accelerating global action on decarbonization and hastening the adoption of climate friendly technologies. The next signal will be the specifics that Suga announces, or fails to announce, at Biden’s April 22–23 climate summit. The world awaits Tokyo’s decision.
Saturday, April 3, 2021
Japan Finally Gets The G2 It Wants
By Daniel Sneider, Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University, APP member.
Toyo Keizai, April 3,2021
When Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide walks into the Oval Office of the White House on April 16, he will not only be the first foreign leader to meet President Joe Biden. The Japanese leader will showcase the Biden administration’s central foreign policy goal – to challenge and encircle China.
“We need Japan at the center of our grand design for Asian security, and we are going to get it,” says Columbia University Emeritus professor Gerald Curtis, the doyen of American Japan hands.
“Japan is foundational to achieving the vision,” echoes former Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster, who credits former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as the original author of that concept.
For the Biden team, the visit is intended to give a vote of confidence in the current government in Tokyo. But they also are well aware that Suga may not succeed in lengthening his stay in office. Their goal is to give Japan an unusually high status in their Indo-Pacific strategy.
“They all believe that to get China policy right, you have to get Asia right, and to get Asia right, you have to start with Japan,” says James Schoff of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a former Obama administration Japan expert who advised the Biden campaign.
A new G2 is formed
For the bureaucrats in Kasumigaseki and for the politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party who hope this will lead to an election victory, this is a triumphant moment. For years Japanese government officials have been working to block the formation of a G2 – a dreaded axis of China and the U.S. that would leave Japan by the wayside. Now the G2 has finally arrived, only it is not the one they feared – it is a G2 of the US and Japan.
The target of this strengthened alliance was clear in the recent 2+2 statement issued by the Japanese and U.S. defense and foreign ministers which for the first time named China as the central shared threat and mentioned areas of potential joint action ranging from democracy promotion to the securing of “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.” Some American policymakers see Japan now as having turned a strategic corner, no longer so careful not to offend Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership.
“I think that Japanese leaders are coming to the conclusion that they can no longer afford not to respond to the CCP's sustained campaign of cooption, coercion, and concealment,” General McMaster, whose book on grand strategy will shortly be published in Japan, told Toyo Keizai.
“If like-minded liberal democracies do not counter China's efforts to promote its authoritarian mercantilist model, Japan could become isolated and the world would be less free, less prosperous, and less safe.”
Increasingly U.S. defense officials envision Japan, based on its revised interpretation of the right to collective self-defense, playing a security role well beyond the boundaries of Japan itself.
“It is essential that from the Himalayan frontier to the South China Sea to Taiwan to the Senkakus, that the PLA [Peoples Liberation Army] understands that it is unable to accomplish its objectives through the use of force,” argues McMaster. “Strengthening the SDF [Self-Defense Forces] is an important part of the effort to ensure deterrence by denial across the region.”
American officials insist that the anti-China approach, which is expected to be repeated in the statement issued out of the Suga-Biden meeting, is coming as much, if not more from the Japanese side.
“They were the ones who wanted that strong language in the 2+2 statement,” a knowledgeable U.S. defense official told me. He credited Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo, and Vice Minister Nakayama Yasuhiro, for this push, calling them “China hawks,” backed by Kishi’s older brother, former Premier Abe.
But this victory for Japanese conservatives comes with a cost. Tokyo will have difficulty delivering what Washington wants in multiple areas, beginning with human rights, but also in the realm of defense, and the push by the Americans for trilateral cooperation with Korea.
“There are questions about how far Japan will be able to go in almost all the areas,” says Schoff. The Biden administration, adds Professor Curtis, “is set up for a lot of disappointment.”
Breaking ranks on human rights
The most visible gap between Tokyo and Washington is over the Biden administration’s desire to put human rights at the center of its China strategy, framing the contest as one between ‘democracy and authoritarianism.’ China’s crackdown on democratic rights in Hong Kong and its oppression of the Muslim Uyghur minority are at the forefront of this drive, along with opposition to the military coup in Myanmar.
The Suga administration has dutifully joined in rhetorical protests over these human rights violations but it has also pointedly refused to join in punitive sanctions adopted by the U.S. and others. Japanese firms such as Muji are not halting purchases of cotton grown by Uyghur prisoners or curbing investments in Myanmar.
“When it came to being tough with China on the Uyghurs, where was Japan? Hiding in a corner,” notes Curtis.
Defense synergy – but less than meets the eye
The area of greatest synergy between Tokyo and Washington these days is defense and security. Japan’s readiness to broaden its security realm beyond the home islands is welcomed in the U.S., manifested in deepening partnerships in Southeast Asia with Indonesia and Vietnam, as well as with the Quadrilateral security dialogue partners Australia and India. The steady growth of defense spending and acquisition of American hardware like the F-35 5th Generation fighter facilitates hopes for closer operational coordination between the U.S. and Japanese military forces.
The inclusion of the Taiwan Strait in the list of joint security concerns – for the first time since former Prime Minister Sato Eisaku’s famous speech to the National Press Club in 1969 – raises expectations that Japan might be ready to deploy forces with the U.S. in response to Chinese use of force. Japanese hardliners are eagerly feeding this with talk of ‘red lines’ around Taiwan.
Some American defense planners echo that idea. But knowledgeable American defense experts caution against this expectation. Japan might be ready to provide logistical support to American forces, with Okinawa only a short distance from Taiwan, but the main goal is to bolster the deterrence of China.
The realities of Japan’s domestic political restraints and its delicate balancing act with China make even that scenario unlikely, says Columbia’s Curtis.
“The idea that Japan is somehow going to step up to the plate and do something significant – NO,” he says. “They are very careful to signal to China that they are not linking up in a new position on Taiwan.”
Pentagon officials have even more ambitious goals in mind for Japan, reflecting the G2 spirit. Admiral Philip Davidson, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the U.S. Congress earlier in March that there is a dangerous “erosion of conventional deterrence” in the region.
Under the umbrella of a new Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), with $27 billion in funding, he envisions fielding “precision-strike” networks of land and sea-based missiles, paired with missile defense systems and air and naval aircraft, “along with the First and Second Island Chains.” While it is still in the planning stage, this includes new long-range missiles based in Japan as well as in Guam and other Pacific islands.
But will Japan agree to this? For now, says recently retired Army General Thomas Spoehr, now with the Heritage Foundation, “there is probably not one of our regional partners in the first island chain that would be willing to base… long-range strike missiles in their country.”
Trilateral cooperation and beyond
The most challenging area for the G2 may be forging real trilateral security cooperation with South Korea. The Biden administration approach, for now, is a familiar one – to use the threat of North Korea to push Japan and South Korea back into some kind of functional relationship.
The meeting of the national security advisors this week is a start in that direction, to be followed later in April with a trilateral foreign ministers meeting. But privately U.S. officials admit that the atmosphere between Seoul and Tokyo is so sour that it may not permit much more than superficial agreement.
The attempt to separate security issues from the history and legal battles over forced laborers and comfort women reflects frustrations in Washington with both allies. There is considerable unhappiness with South Korea for creating the depth of the problem but there is also dissatisfaction with the Suga administration’s unwillingness to discuss problems without Korean concessions first. “It’s not going to be fixed,” a former senior official close to the administration told me. “It’s not going to get much better and it could get worse.”
Ultimately, American experts warn that despite the triumphant talk, Japan is simply not prepared to be the central pillar of the American strategy for Asia. Japan prefers to part of larger groupings – not only the Quad but wider multilateral structures. Groups like the G7, which could be expanded to include India and even Korea, make more sense to many Japanese policymakers as a vehicle to compete with China.
For Tokyo, the goal is to diversify its security and diplomacy, not to hang everything on the American alliance. While it welcomes Biden’s talk of the return of American power and leadership, “Japan cannot rely on the U.S. in a G2 dynamic because we are too mercurial and unstable in some ways politically,” says Schoff.
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Japan and the U.S. Differ
Tokyo Business Today, February 18,2021
In the early weeks of the Biden administration, Japan and the United States have gone out of their way to present a united front. Senior Biden officials, from the President on down, have made clear that the alliance with Japan stands at the center of their broader strategy to meet the challenge of China.
In numerous calls, they have offered Tokyo many sought-after assurances of American security guarantees from the Senkakus to nuclear deterrence and echoed Japan’s favorite idea, the creation of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP).
But beneath the surface, there is growing frustration in the White House with Japan, cracks over key issues that could widen in coming weeks and months. Behind the scenes, there are differences in how to deal with the military coup in Burma and the corrosive relationship between Japan and South Korea. And those tensions are tied to the bigger question, how to forge an allied response to China.
The military takeover in Burma (Myanmar) is an early crisis for the Biden administration, with the Chinese backing the coup while the United States condemns it and has moved to impose sanctions against the coup leaders. Japan has joined the protest but it has been pointedly cautious about taking punitive steps against the military, worrying that it will undermine Japan’s considerable investment in Burma and simply drive the military into the arms of Beijing.
The emerging Biden administration strategy toward China rests heavily on drawing a line overvalues, framing the “strategic competition” as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism.
“Burma is the first test of Biden’s commitment to democracy and to allies,” says a former senior U.S. official with close ties to the administration. In this test, “right now the number one head-butting issue with Japan is over Burma.”
Japanese officials are privately lecturing their American counterparts about how “Asians are different,” the former official reports. He compares it with the differences in the 1980s, which culminated in the response to the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing when Japan resisted American pressure to impose sanctions on China.
“Their attitude toward Burma looks like the same pattern,” a veteran Japanese foreign affairs journalist observed to me. “They claim that too much pressure won’t help the process of democratization.”
Japanese and American officials are doing their best to bridge these differences. Secretary of State Antony Blinken got on the phone last week with Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu to try to find a formula for cooperation and Motegi signaled a readiness to join public statements. But the Japanese Foreign Minister was more interested in talking about the Chinese Coast Guard.
The most serious gap between Tokyo and Washington is not, however, over Burma. It is how to manage relations with South Korea. Within days of taking office, the Biden administration sent a gentle but clear message to their Japanese and Korean allies to move quickly to repair their broken relationship.
In phone calls with their Japanese and Korean counterparts, President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken made a point of the importance to the U.S. of restoring “trilateral U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea cooperation.”
They repeat this at every opportunity – in his call with Motegi last week, Blinken “welcomed further regional cooperation, including through U.S.-Japan-ROK trilateral coordination and the Quad.”
Behind this lies the growing fear in Washington that the breach between Japan and Korea will blow a massive strategic hole in the Biden plan to strengthen regional security networks, including the Quad.
China and North Korea are “targeting that fissure” between Japan and South Korea, says a former senior Obama administration defense planner. Without restoring some functional trust, the idea of a regional security structure may never be realized, Biden officials worry.
Relations between Japan and South Korea are at “their lowest levels in decades,” a recent report on U.S.-Japan relations issued by the Congressional Research Service concluded. While the administration of Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide gives its nod to the idea of trilateral security cooperation, it is resisting the American push to improve relations with Seoul, particularly when it comes to the battles over wartime history issues.
“On trilateral security cooperation, we also believe it is crucial if we want to pressurize North Korea as well as China on the issue of North Korea denuclearization,” a senior official in the Prime Minister’s National Security Secretariat (NSS) told me. But security should be completely separated from those historical issues, which are matters that “basically need to be addressed between Japan and Korea.”
This reflects what American officials heard from Suga himself in his first telephone talk with Biden after he took office. “The call was great except Suga pushed back hard on Biden’s desire to see Japan-ROK relations improve,” the well-informed former senior official told me. The Japanese leader told Biden that the Koreans have effectively broken the 1965 treaty normalizing relations between the two countries and “they have to make that right first.”
While Tokyo is rebuffing the Biden administration, President Moon has taken a different tack. Last month, Moon surprisingly shifted his tone and signaled an interest in warming up relations with Japan.
The Korean leader reaffirmed that the 2015 agreement on “comfort women” remains intact as an official pact and expressed unhappiness with a Korean court decision demanding that Japan pay compensation to survive women. He also indicated a desire to put off the liquidation of Japanese company assets seized as part of a Korean court decision to grant compensation to Korean forced laborers.
South Korean experts point to several factors behind the shift.
Moon is entering his last year in office and is somewhat desperate to make a breakthrough in his bid to engage North Korea and secure a formal end to the Korean war. The Moon Blue House is worried that the Biden administration will put negotiations with North Korea on the back burner and they are looking for ways to revive momentum.
“Bringing Japan into the diplomatic game is being seriously considered under circumstances when summit diplomacy between Trump and Kim Jong Un is gone,” says Seoul National University Professor Park Cheol Hee, one of the leading Japan experts in Korea. Koreans hope the Summer Olympic Games may offer a venue to revive diplomacy with Pyongyang.
Moon and his advisors also anticipated the pressure coming from the new Biden administration to improve ties with Japan and wanted to get out ahead and demonstrate to Washington their willingness to cooperate. “The Moon administration faced a need to show an initiative to ameliorate ties between Korea and Japan before Biden steps in,” says Park, an advocate of improving relations.
All this takes place as Moon’s popularity is declining and the use of anti-Japanese nationalism to boost popularity seems to have worn thin of late. “The mood of the day in Korea is that blaming Japan is no longer delivering wonderful political scores to President Moon and the ruling party,” Professor Park told me.
Despite these factors, Moon’s gestures fall well short of what either Tokyo, or Korean backers of improved relations, feels is needed. On the issue of the ‘comfort women,’ while Moon affirmed the validity of the 2015 agreement, he did nothing to restore it.
The South Korean government moved to freeze the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation, which was funded by Japan and provided compensation payments to two-thirds of the surviving women.
The forced labor issue is a far more complicated legal issue and also poses a dangerous ‘red line’ in relations if the Korean courts go ahead and liquidate Japanese assets. The Japanese government has argued since the court decisions were issued, that this issue was settled by the 1965 treaty, which provided compensation in a limited fashion, and which also includes a provision for disputes over claims to be settled by an arbitration panel.
Ideas to settle this issue have been circulating for some months, including a proposal floated by a senior Korean politician to create a foundation similar to the one created by Germany some 20 years ago to provide compensation to forced laborers, with funds provided by both Japanese and Korean firms. [The Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, known as The German Future Fund, grants also go to democracy promotion and human rights]
Privately there is some interest in such ideas in both Korea and Japan – and American officials are also aware of these discussions and may offer to help the process.
But it requires the two governments to show the political will to solve the problem, which so far has not been evident.
“Prime Minister Suga would not take a risk in resolving this issue before he is re-elected as Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party in September or has an election victory,” former South Korean foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan, an important actor in Korea-Japan relations, told me.
A senior advisor to Prime Minister Suga expressed deep skepticism that President Moon is really ready to act and even if he did, the Japanese worry that he will shift in response to political pressures, “allowing the South Koreans to move the goalpost once again.”
For the Biden administration, this is an early lesson in how grand visions – in this case of an Indo-Pacific regional partnership and revived alliances – can founder on the rocks of domestic politics.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Japan welcomes end of Trump era
But has its doubts over Joe Biden-led US
President-elect Joe Biden’s administration has a lot to prove but inherits a relatively strong US-Japan relationship. He will also find Japan is ready to move beyond US President Donald Trump’s “America first” transactional approach to diplomacy. One can imagine Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s quiet fist pump when he learned of Trump’s defeat.
Tokyo hopes Biden will revive US multilateral engagement and provide greater coherence in Washington’s diplomacy but fears Biden might be soft on China. Following his congratulatory conversation with Biden, Suga sought to dampen such doubts by singling out his reassurance that the US-Japan mutual security treaty covers the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.
Even so, scepticism lingers that Biden will seek rapprochement with China to the detriment of Japan, a concern former president Bill Clinton ignited a quarter-century ago when he visited China and bypassed Japan.
This underscores how symbolism matters in diplomacy and has implications for Biden’s choice of the next ambassador. Japan favours candidates who have strong political connections to the White House and know little about the nation because they are easier to manage.
Biden can send a different message, though. The United States has had a Chinese-American ambassador to China in Gary Locke, a Korean-American ambassador to South Korea in Sung Kim and an Indian-American ambassador to India in Rich Verma but so far no Japanese-American ambassador to Japan.
It is time to rectify this situation and Glen Fukushima, fluent in Japanese with extensive Japan-related public and private sector experience, is eminently qualified.
Trump shredded the US image with his browbeating of allies and fawning over despots, an improvised diplomacy of blunders and disrespect. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe nurtured a relatively good personal relationship with Trump, but on matters of importance, that goodwill did not seem to have much impact on the president’s actions.
For example, Trump ran roughshod over Japan by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, put sanctions on Japanese exports to the US, instigated a trade war with China that inflicted collateral damage on Japan and threatened to defund the World Health Organisation amid a global pandemic.
He did all this while repudiating multilateralism overall, the mainstay of Tokyo’s diplomacy.
He also played hardball on Japan’s financial support for hosting US military bases, calling for quadrupling the annual subsidy to US$8 billion.
Tokyo slow-walked those negotiations, probably hoping US voters would solve that problem. Biden will probably not take such a hard line but is also unlikely to offer Okinawans a reprieve from the controversial Henoko base construction project they rejected in a 2019 referendum.
To some extent, the Japanese government favoured Trump, mostly because he took a hard line with China and explicitly promised the US would militarily defend the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. This went beyond his predecessors’ reassurances that the US would respond according to Article 5 of the security treaty, which does not actually spell out how America would respond.
Trump also earned kudos for raising the abductee issue with Kim Jong-un, but Tokyo worried that his grandstanding diplomacy might lead to a deal on intercontinental ballistic missiles that left some of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal intact. Like many of his gambits, though, fanfare did not produce results.
Much has changed in the US since the Obama-Biden first term when there was an emphasis on engaging China and treating it as a strategic partner.
In 2012, then-president Barack Obama soured on engagement and announced the pivot to Asia, although not much happened in reality. Relations further soured under Trump, and some are convinced the US and China are locked into a cold-war rivalry.
While this might be a misleading comparison, it is clear Beijing’s regional ambitions are seen as threats to an Asian Pax Americana.
A war is being waged on trade, intellectual property and tech, and containing China is one of the few issues receiving bipartisan support in the US. Even if Biden knows there are benefits to hitting the reset button on Sino-US relations, this is virtually impossible.
Statements on the campaign trail are often not a reliable barometer, but Biden denounced President Xi Jinping, lambasted Beijing’s massive lock-up of Uygurs as genocidal and pledged to uphold support for democracy in Hong Kong. This is not exactly music to the Communist Party’s ears.
Biden appears to support the “free and open Indo-Pacific” vision championed by Japan but is less inclined than the Trump administration to nudge the Quad security grouping towards a Nato-like institutionalisation. On trade, he might end Trump’s counterproductive tariffs, but tensions will persist.
After Trump pulled out of the TPP, Abe revived the multilateral pact now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The US is unlikely to join that or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, where China is the dominant player.
Japanese leaders have misgivings about Biden over trade as they believe Democrats pander to organised labour. They hope Biden will re-engage in Asia’s multilateral processes and revive its battered networks of influence, but the deep hole Trump dug at home will necessitate an inward focus that cautions against hopes of strong and sustained US leadership.
Tokyo wants Uncle Sam engaged as much as possible but worries the US is a declining power. It is thus hedging by expanding its regional security relations and boosting its autonomous capacity as a counter to China’s regional hegemonic ambitions.