Soft power

Hiroshi Nakai, minister in charge of the abduction issue, has asked education minister Tatsuo Kawabata to bar schools that cater to the children of residents with ethnic ties to North Korea from the planned tuition-free subsidy program, government sources said.

Nakai...wants the exemption put in place to demonstrate Japan's firm stance on the abduction issue...Japan Times

One just has to figure that when your influence over another country drops to the point where you have to start targeting children of an ethnic group in your own country in spite, you're out of ammo.

According to the article, guidelines being considered might mean that these schools could be disqualified anyway because due to the lack of diplomatic relations because Japan cannot assess if schools in North Korea nearly match Japan's educational standards, so it seems that Nakai's idea does nothing more than show Kim Jung-il that we mean business and we can back it up. Take that Mr. Kim.

I am sure that Kim Jung-il, who has not shown any special sympathy to seeing his own people starve, or been reluctant to imprison and execute unknown numbers, is going to be moved to resolve the abduction issue because some fine examples of leadership in the Japanese government want to withhold education money from certain residents of Japan.

２／２３Feb: A short article from LA Times on the Chosen schools in Japan is here.

Japan worried about Obama?

Ayako Doi writes of the Japanese response to Obama's election:

Surfing Japanese news Web sites for commentaries on the Obama victory from a key U.S. ally, I was taken aback by the skeptical, even negative, tone that prevailed...

...The most astounding article appeared in Sentaku, a monthly magazine with a reputation for objectivity and solid analysis. Writing in anticipation of an Obama victory, the magazine raised most of the same charges the Republicans had leveled against the Democratic candidate, including Obama's associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former Weather Underground leader William Ayers and "communist and socialist professors." It called him "the most dubious character in history to occupy the White House." Criticizing Obama's foreign policy statements as "abstract" and "strings of empty words such as 'consultation' and 'cooperation,' " the article concluded that under Obama, the United States would lose its position of global leadership and drag the world into "enormous chaos."

Although she says Japan has now begun to warm up to Obama, she discusses some reasons for the initial skepticism:

...Then there's the issue of anti-Americanism...the main cause of the current round of America-bashing is no doubt the Bush administration's opening to North Korea...

...it is disturbing that no senior politician, journalist or scholar in Japan has had the courage to say that it is in the country's interest to go along with the U.S.-backed six-party talks to put a halt to Pyongyang's nuclear program and integrate North Korea into the community of nations -- or that a "solution" to the abduction problem is likely to be found only in that context.From the Washington Post here.

Perhaps Japan should just leave the six-party talks and solve the abduction issue on its own. The rest of the world will continue, though Uncle Sam may be slightly discomforted because it could not suck funds for any agreement from Japan.

Oh, wait! Japan knew---at least unofficially---about the kidnappings 25 or more years ago. At least Japanese citizens did. The government did nothing then, but now wants to play hardball with someone else's balls. As always.

Japan will not have any choice in the matter of dealing with the next U.S. president. One hopes Obama takes a fresh look at the relationship and does not simply accept the standard "The Japan/US relationship is the most important in the world" nonsense.

Now we know

I wondered just how Japan would react to the apparently shocking news that the US was going to delist North Korea as a terrorist nation. I was especially curious about the fine folks of the right-wing.

Tobias Harris of Observing Japan has a post with the similarly shocking news that a politician has put Japan in its usual position of being a victim. The DPJ's Ichiro Ozawa (is he a right-winger now? Was or wasn't he before? A leftist? Or was he sort of a US-style free-trading Republican? He has been so many things I forget which he is today. I do know he was some sort of ship captain last year.) has reacted by saying that the US never takes Japan's thoughts into account. Mr. Harris takes the view that Ozawa is mainly playing to domestic considerations and that Ozawa's comments were more aimed at the LDP for poor management of the alliance than at the US.

I don't know Ozawa's true intentions, but no doubt he is playing domestic politics. The claim that the US done did poor little Japan all wrong is not a rare thing and it does play well. Ozawa's comments were rather mild.*

1:07AM *I meant Ozawa's comments were mild compared to what can be expected from some of the commentators and columnists and perhaps LDP right-wingers. For a politician of Ozawa's stature and position they weren't so mild.

North Korea off US terror list

North Korea has submitted its nuclear declaration as required. Japan was earlier assured that its kidnap victims would not be forgotten by the US (like they were forgotten by the Japanese government until Koizumi met with Kim Jong Il). Some may consider this a good sign, a solid step forward for Northeast Asia and the rest of the world. But let's not celebrate yet because somebody may feel a bit left out.

How will Japan react since it has been critical of any move to delist North Korea? More specifically, how will the right-wingers of the LDP's Abe/Aso crowd react? Has the US done Japan wrong? Is Japan a victim here? Inquiring minds want to know.

DNA evidence, Megumi Yokota, and Japanese Gov't manipulation

I posted an article about this in June 2005, but the Japan Focus article I referred to seems to have been removed from Japan Focus. (Just like the Gregory Clark article of last month criticizing some of the right-wingers).

Japan has claimed that the North Koreans lied about the remains of Megumi Yokota. The cremated bones sent to Japan were analyzed by a Japanese scientist who agreed to check them after other experienced scientists declined as they did not think accurate DNA analysis was possible.

A summary of what happened, available on the web in several places including Time and Wikipedia follows (This has been barely, if at all reported in Japan.) :

The independent scientific journal "Nature" has published an article highly critical of the DNA testing performed by the Japanese. An article in the 3 February 2005 issue revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio. Yoshii, it later transpired, was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor. Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.

When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki, referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual editorial (17 March), saying that:

"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent. ... The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them? Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."

Foreign Press is Beginning to Notice

Japan's right-wing trend is finally beginning to be noticed even in the U.S. press.Belatedly, the New York Times has figured out a possible connection between Japan's hard line on North Korea and the right-wing here. The fact that the supposed DNA proof that the North Koreans were lying about the remains of one of the abductees was scientifically flawed was not enough for them. (The Washington Post and to a lesser extent, Time magazine picked that story up months ago after Nature magazine exposed it.)

Yesterday, there were rallies in Tokyo and Washington DC over the abductions. Whether or not North Korea still has abductees is not really known. What is known is that the Japanese government had to have been aware of the kidnappings for decade. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when I was either visiting or living in Toyama City that everyone knew that it was risky to go to the beach because of possible kidnapping by North Korea. Everyone except for Tokyo, apparently.

Naturally, these kidnappings are serious and North Korea needs to fully answer for them. Should they apologize to Japan? Normally one would say yes, but since Japan cannot seem to give a believably sincere apology to anyone for its past actions, that ain't likely.

A Japanese NYT reporter covered yesterday's protests and draws the connection between the rightists and the anti-(North) Korea hard line and the effectiveness of the rightists on stifling accurate reporting on the issue:

Outside Japan, the abductions may have played out long ago, after North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, admitted four years ago that the crimes had occurred and returned five survivors. But here, they are still a burning issue, kept alive in the news media every day by nationalist politicians and groups that pound at the topic as firmly as their cherished goals, like jettisoning the pacifist Constitution and instilling patriotism and moral values in schools.

The highly emotional issue has contributed to silencing more moderate voices who expose themselves to physical harm or verbal threats from the right wing.
Read it HERE.

Notice that as is becoming more and more common, any dissent from the status quo is not tolerated. The threat is so real that even the media is cowed (although the media has always been afraid to take on the rightists.)

A South Korea point of view on Japan's manipulation of Megumi Yokota's kidnapping is here:

Japanese government manipulation of science

I suspect most people know of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by the North Koreans. Perhaps you even know of Ms. Megumi Yokota whom North Korea claims to have committed suicide in North Korea. When what were said to be her remains were returned to Tokyo, DNA tests were conducted which supposedly showed the remains were of 2 different people, not Megumi.

This has caused the tensions between the two countries to continue to rise. North Korea obviously cannot be trusted very much here, but how about the Japanese government? But did you know that 2 DNA tests were conducted, the first by the government which determined that it was not possible to determine whose remains they were or weren't after they were cremated at 1200 degrees centigrade. The second test was conducted by a lecturer at Teikyo university who had no experience testing cremated remains for DNA. The same scientist later told Nature magazine that the test really proved nothing. The Japanese government, as is their custom, did not debate the point, but instead attacked the magazine. You can read the full story at http://www.japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=306 (Sorry, dead link, article has been removed by Japan Focus. Why?)

The story in short, available from several sources on the web, including Time and Wikipedia:

An article in the 3 February 2005 (Nature) issue revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio. Yoshii, it later transpired, was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor. Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.

When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki, referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual editorial (17 March), saying that:

"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent. ... The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them? Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."