Stuck in a Bad Romance

Lady Gaga must have written this song with the US-Japan Alliance Managers in mind. She certainly caught on to their dialogue and the state of this Pacific relationship.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Caught in a bad romance

Ra Ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma Roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la

Want your bad romance

On Friday, January 15th, the public portion of the two-day 16th Annual Japan-US Security Seminar was held. What started as a Japanese initiative to create and cultivate a group of Americans sympathetic to the remilitarization of Japan and who could provide access to the inner workings of U.S. defense policy has evolved into a Japanese government and American defense industry collaboration to maintain, promote, and mythologize this constructed group of  American and Japanese Alliance managers.

This group so often talks about architecture, because it is architecture. They create a fragile structure based on increasingly out of date plans and inadequate codes. The annual seminar simply slaps a coat of historically incorrect paint on a historic home.

This year the conclave was held earlier than usual and in neither Hawaii nor San Francisco. Instead, it was in Washington, DC on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the US-Japan Security Treaty (January 19th). The venue was the very expensive and elegant Willard Hotel. It is in the lobby of this famous hotel during the Grant Administration that the term "lobbying" was coined .

I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love

The day prior to the Seminar was the Alliance Manager's  "Young Leaders Program." This is designed to cultivate the next generation of Alliance Managers. It introduces a select group of younger scholars to well-known Asia policy types, to the good life (all got to stay at the Willard), and to that special feeling of being included in private, invitation-only dialogues. It entices like a drug.

In all, it ensures good behavior. If the young public intellectual to-be expresses skepticism or asks where the money is coming from, then those jaunts to the onsens and mountains at Aspen are over. Oh yes, they are looking for more candidates to participate in this program. I say, go for it. You will be fed well and many nice things can be said about free travel to Hawaii.

You know that I want you
And you know that I need you
I want it bad
A bad romance

To a man, and they were all men, the Alliance Managers at the public seminar confessed how unprepared they were for the Hatoyama Administration. None had expected much change in Japanese foreign policy. And some even thought like Yukio Okamoto, Japan's foreign policy shadow shogun, how it was "wonderful" that Hatoyama wanted a "close and equal relationship."  As Okamoto admitted, they had misinterpreted what equal meant. It did not have any relationship to increasing the reach and capabilities of the Japan's military.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage agreed, they had been "too complacent." He too confessed he did not anticipate the changes in Japan. Armitage felt that they (assume the Managers) still needed to have "a real understanding of the real hearts of the leadership of the DPJ."  For right now, he felt that the DPJ is not speaking the same language as those interested in strengthening the Alliance. The new Japanese government just did not understand deterrence.

Armitage a longtime consultant to Japanese interests, is best known for organizing a nine-page election-year vanity paper, written primarily by Dr. James Przytup, that summarizes the discussions of the Japan-US security seminars during the 90s. The Armitage Report served as the basis for Bush Administration's Japan policy. He is also known for having revealed to the press the identity of a covert American operative, Valerie Plame.

President of the Pacific Forum Ralf Cossa introduced Okamoto and Armitage as "two of the superstars" of Alliance management.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

[This post will be in two parts. The music just makes me wanna dance...or something.]

Between What Friends?

Why would a conservative nationalist, former Japanese Foreign Ministry official reveal a purported state secret that could undermine confidence in the US-Japan Alliance and the ruling LDP?

If this is a way to encourage a Japanese debate on nuclear weapons or to convince the US to sell Japan F-22, it is sure misguided. In reality, it is part of a convoluted Rightist strategy to repeal Article 9 and create a military independent of the United States.

On June 29^th, former Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Ryohei Murata asserted that there is a secret written accord between the Japanese and U.S. governments under which Japan approves port calls and passage through Japanese territorial waters by U.S. warships carrying nuclear weapons. He knows this, because as Administrative Vice Minister, it was his job to explain to the foreign minister the contents of an envelope that briefly outlined the agreement. The foreign minister then briefed the prime minister at his discretion.

A wink, nod, and the back of a napkin, that’s Cold War diplomacy for you.

Murata received the envelope containing the secret document from his predecessor. He said the contents were written in Japanese on a single piece of clerical stationery used in the Foreign Ministry in those days. He made no mention of signatures.

When asked why he is now acknowledging the existence of the secret agreement, Murata indicated that he was disturbed by the lies told in the Diet. "Successive administrative vice foreign ministers have conveyed the contents (of the secret agreement) to successive foreign ministers. But they have said in the Diet that nuclear weapons have not been brought [into Japan]. I think that [secrecy] is inappropriate," Murata said.

More inappropriate are Ambassador Murata’s views on the United States. Yes, ambassador, and it is odd that none of the press reports I have read mention that he was ambassador to the United States 1990-1992 and Germany 1992-94. He is not a fan of Americans and has long expressed these views.

In 1985, he co-authored, Between Friends, a book with two other less than enthusiastic Foreign Ministry supporters of the United States: Hiroshi Kitamura and Hisahiko Okazaki. Kitamura who had numerous posts in the US went on to become ambassador to the UK while Okazaki become ambassador to Thailand and then head of the Okazaki Institute that funded and encouraged all the men and research for the Armitage Report.

Murata wrote, and the others agreed, that Americans are "self-centered" and suffer from a "superiority complex" that makes them always "want to blame their problems on the other guy." He also contended that "it is inevitable for Americans to view with a certain amount of alarm a non-white nation rapidly overtaking them" in economic or technological strength.

In case you think that the Ambassador’s views have softened since 1985, you are mistaken. In a March 2002 article (pp67-69) published by the conservative journal Shokun!, Amb. Murata wrote:

Now with the 21st century starting, what the people of Japan need to do is to think and discuss how their nation can become "an ordinary country." This nation must do this because Japan is still "a country out of the ordinary" in spite of the fact that some 55 years have passed since its defeat in World War II.

Even before the war, Japan had been a country out of the ordinary, though in a different sense, and its defeat in the war brought about a change. But the pendulum of the change swung too far in other direction at that time, turning Japan into a country out of the ordinary in a reversed way. There were two major reasons why that happened.

First, the nation was shocked and shaken up tremendously by its very thorough defeat in the war, which was the first defeat in its history.

Second, the United States successfully emasculated Japan by carrying out large-scale and organized mind-control programs on the people of Japan. For instance, while taking steps to make it look that Japanese themselves chose to do so, the United States pushed on Japan a constitution with provisions that banned itself from having combat capabilities to defend itself -- something unprecedented. The United States asserted all the past acts of Japan were evil in the Tokyo trial [of war criminals] that even had lawyers attending. That was another clever case of effectuating mind-control on people. Censors the United States conducted in various forms, the education system it adopted, and interventions it made in domestic affairs were the additional cases of exercising the mind-control on Japanese people. Indeed, it is impossible to cite all the cases of such mind-control actions here.

Anyway, thus was produced the post-war idiosyncrasy of Japan that can be summarized as follows:

First, Japan has turned into an insensitive country that cannot see whether its rights as a sovereign are infringed or not. It turned into a country that was unable to see its national dignity and pride though it was an independent country.

Second, the people of the nation have come to believe that the exercise of force is something very evil and this thinking has made the nation very cowardly.…

The above along with other statements and memberships (he is an active adviser to the Nippon Foundation and a board member of the Japan Education Regeneration League) places Murata with the likes of Okazaki, Tamogami, and others who are sophisticated strategists working together to use any means to engender mistrust between Japan and the U.S. as well as its neighbors. They want to create the political necessity of aggressive rearmament and an independent, nuclear armed defense force. Murata’s declaration, I believe, must be seen as part of a larger campaign to discredit the U.S.-Japan alliance and the Japanese Constitution.

You can argue that the Japanese people do not agree with their goals or ideas, however, these men do have the ability and resources to create a lot of anxiety and doubt among their fellow citizens as well as Japan's allies and neighbors. These old men measure their success by the discord that they can create--if we allow them.

Alliance Managers Meet

If you are reading this you are clearly not a manager of the Japan-US alliance.

If you were, you would be in San Francisco at the 15th Annual Japan-US Security Seminar hosted by CSIS’s Pacific Forum and MOFA’s Japan Institute of International Affairs. This is a long weekend of presentations, discussions, and meals with a carefully selected group of mostly white men and honorary white men. It is all very serious business for those selected to manage the Japan-US relationship.

An invitation—and you can only go with an invitation—ensures your designation as an official Japan-US alliance/relationship manager. Note that the relationship is only defined by security and military interactions thus excluding many Japan experts familiar with contemporary Japanese society.

There are also serious and not so serious invitations. The serious invitations come with all expenses paid. If you are invited and not offered funding, you are not expected to attend, but to understand that they don’t want to get on your bad side.

Also invited (and funded) are a “young leaders” group of up and coming alliance managers. These young men (few are women) are nurtured and watched to ensure that they know how to talk the talk and walk the walk. They will be able to go back to their schools and think tanks and say, “the Gaimusho (showing off your Japanese) North American Bureau chief told me at the bar…” or “sharing the limo to the airport with Amb…”

Before these seminars had a formal designation, they were sponsored by the Okazaki Institute with a loose relationship with the Government of Japan. They served as the intellectual genesis of the Armitage Report. The Institute’s funding of research and meetings created a cadre of like-minded relationship managers in both the US and Japan. Amb. Hisahiko Okazaki is a quintessential conservative nationalist. He believes that Japan needs a “robust” military and that the peace Constitution remains because of Japan’s masochistic history. He has lots of friends in Washington.

It appears that the Okazaki Institute is fading like its aging namesake. From its list of sponsors you can surmise that its major funder was the Sasakawa family of foundations. It tends to be a pattern that one or multiple Sasakawa-backed foundations experiment with various foreign policy-oriented projects until these efforts are either deemed successful or not. I suspect it has something to do with deniable accountability. Once projects are successful, they are institutionalized and handed over to a more explicitly Japanese government-affiliated organization.

The Okazaki experiments nurtured the entire generation of Bush Administration Japan managers and weeded out those who disagreed. The result was the 7-page Armitage Report that set the "intellectual" foundation for emphasizing the military relationship with Japan. Thus, MOFA now funds and runs these annual gatherings on Japan-US security (note that Japan comes first in the title, this word order is nearly unheard of in programs in the US, no matter the funder).

In addition, after the Bush Administration’s Japan officials all left the government it was likely thought unseemly to reward these folks with money from a minor, albeit successful relationship-building project, such as the Okazaki’s. Tying up their time with meaningless research on essentially the same topic over and over and holding resort-sited conferences of now-senior, seasoned relationship managers needs more money and more prestigious funding sources such as corporations and government institutes.

But MOFA funding is not enough. The Pacific Forum took advantage in February of Harvard Professor Joe Nye’s (pictured above) putative nomination as Ambassador to Japan (this has yet to happen). Their Board of Governors dinner in Hawaii featured a speech by Nye and face-time with him. The dinner was to honor former assistant secretary of State Jim Kelley and to establish a Korean studies fellowship in his name.

Since no one is really sure if Mr. Kelley is breathing or not, he was not the highlight of the fundraiser. Indeed, an “anonymous” donor pledged a million dollars if a million was raised. I do not know if the goal was achieved. It is possible the Korean focus might have undercut some fundraising potentialities.

Anyway, I am not in San Francisco. When I asked some folks on the Hill why they were not there, they said they were too busy. When I asked a leading scholar on Japanese security why he was not even invited, he responded he would not have gone even if he were.

Updated 3/28/09