Tien An Men...Or Should I Say "Ten An Mon?"

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Retired officials and think tankers...they really are not just allowed to have their own opinions...but their own facts.

What Roosevelt would do in the South China Sea
The Financial Times

James Clad and Robert Manning

Planting flags on islets, declaring cities where there are too few residents to fill a restaurant, and huffing and puffing over uninhabited rocks are acts more suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan farce than to nations in the 21st century.

Absurdities aside, the tensions in the South China Sea could shape the balance of power in Asia and put at risk the $18tn east Asian economy. However, a century-old diplomatic idea used by a former US president offers a solution to the crisis.

[snip]

To find something new, we might try looking backwards - to a type of split-the-difference US diplomacy last deployed after Russia and Japan had fought a war in 1905. The next year, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace that lasted three decades, allowing China, Europe and the US to adjust to Japan's rise as a major power.

(Link)

Mr. Clad and Mr. Manning, please elaborate, in written form, precisely which three decades of peace, starting when and ending when, you are talking about. Please send the results to the following addresses (since these are local addresses, you will be saving on postage):

2450 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008

and

3505 International Place NW
Washington, DC 20008

I am sure the recipients will be surprised...though I cannot guarantee it will be pleasantly so.

The Great Peace of Portsmouth: we all remember it so well.

Your Serve, Region

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko gave a live press conference last night, outlining what his government is doing regarding the territorial disputes with the Republic of Korea over Dokdo and China/Taiwan/Hong Kong over the Senkakus. (J)

The approach the Noda government will take is quite simple: it will assert its claims, which it has heretofore done quietly, mostly in the form of including the disputed territories in official maps, wherever appropriate in its interactions with the international community, leaving international opinion to judge the validity of Russian, South Korean and Chinese/Taiwanese behavior.

This approach is in line with the standard procedures of normal democratic states. Authoritarian regimes can enforce, as Deng Xiaoping suggested, the sweeping of competing claims under the rug for later, wiser generations to resolve, with the obvious postscript: "In the meantime, let's stay in power by letting our people make money." Democratic states cannot -- voters like problems resolved in clean, simple and tidy ways.

Adjusting to the new stance will lead to some fumbling. Even foreign policy experts will not "get it" -- see this CNN op-ed by Jimbo Ken, where he argues at the beginning that status quo policies are no longer operative, only to argue at the end that the conduct of relations between Japan and China needs the kinds of personal relations that lubricated and protected the status quo approach.

However, the chances of the new assertiveness' succeeding in freezing further escalation of territorial disputes are at least 50-50. All the governments in the region ex Japan remain at least semi-authorian -- the exception being Taiwan, which has opted out of the current round of the fighting over the Senkakus despite being led by a man whose law degree is based upon studies of Chinese claims in the East China Sea (E and E). The semi-authoritarian regimes can still rely upon considerable powers of persuasion to repress populist behavior - if the regime in question wants to do so. China has deployed both its 50-cent Party of Web commentators and its police forces (E) in a short-circuiting of anti-Japanese mob action in relation to the visit of Hong Kong activists to the Senkakus. That the South Korean president has gone in the other direction, choosing to heighten regional tensions rather than use his presidential powers to tamp them down, over a territory where South Korea has dug-in military forces, is...to be honest, not something I do want to delve into right now because it will be, inshallah, discussed in a future op-ed for Al-Jazeera.

The takeaway from last night's speech is that the balls are now in the courts of the nations surrounding Japan. The government of this blessed land is not going to keep quiet, as was demonstrated in the most recent Defense White Paper where the government put it writing That Which Must Not Be Said: that the civilian government of China and the People's Liberation Army may not be reading from the same piece of sheet music.

It will be up to the governments in the region, coping with their own internal instabilities and tensions, to come up with new narratives to cope with Mr. Noda's New Reality.

He Just Keeps Getting Better And Better

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Over at Japan Security Watch and the search-engine-optimization-hostile σ1, Corey Wallace takes a grand tour of East Asia and the pitfalls looming in the massive wave of government changeovers this fall.

READ IT. (Link)

Mr. Wallace hedges in his final paragraph, describing the post's viewpoint as as "mostly cynical."

You can relax, Mr. Wallace: no one has ever lost any money on "mostly cynical" -- ever.

The League Of Incurious Stenographers

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Journalism is a profession, or at least it should be.

This Kyodo news report declares it to be a profession in peril:

Experts scoff at allegations of spying by diplomat Li
Kyodo

BEIJING/TOKYO — Some people in diplomatic and intelligence circles are skeptical about the spying allegations leveled against Li Chunguang, a diplomat at the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo who fled Japan last month after rejecting a request to be questioned by the Japanese police.

The Metropolitan Police Department's Public Security Bureau handed over information on Li, a 45-year-old first secretary at the Chinese Embassy, to prosecutors for potential prosecution action on May 31, on suspicion that Li used a false identity to renew his alien registration card.

The prosecutors appear likely to decide against indictment in the absence of the diplomat, who left on May 23.

"Although we did need to question him, if we could (the request was turned down), so we decided to send the case to prosecutors after nearly completing the investigation," a bureau official said.

Initially, police and some media outlets speculated that Li was involved in espionage. A newspaper said the first secretary is suspected of having obtained information from classified documents leaked from the farm ministry about a project to promote exports of Japanese produce to China.

The public security investigation bureau had been following Li, who is thought to have belonged to an intelligence unit within the People's Liberation Army, since he was posted to Japan in July 2007 as an economic affairs officer.

On May 31, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Michihiko Kano said he met the diplomat five times and denied that he or any other farm ministry officials passed classified documents to him.

According to a friend of Li, since returning to Beijing the former first secretary has been fuming about media reports about his alleged spying and reportedly said he never wants to visit Japan again.

The Chinese Embassy in Tokyo said he left Japan because his stint abroad was up. Li's departure in late May came after nearly five years in Japan — which is typical for many embassy officials.

Ahead of that, Li is also said to have consulted with friends about job opportunities after returning from Japan and inquiring about whether there were any good posts with a government organization relating to economic affairs.

Japan's police suspect he renewed his alien card to open many bank accounts to receive "advisory" fees from Japanese firms.

However, people in diplomatic and intelligence circles say a professional spy typically pays for classified information.

"The Metropolitan Police Department tracked him for five years and came up only with the problem with an alien registration card," said an intelligence expert who worked in China. "What's more, evidence shows the first secretary has only received payments when he should have been paying for information."

"It's more than obvious that a fraudulent renewal of an alien registration card will easily be spotted if one does it using his real name," the expert added. "A pro would never do such a thing."

After the latest case, experts say Japan is "too open" when it comes to data held by the government, while China keeps a strict watch via law-enforcement and other government units.

In May 2009, a ranking official of China's Xinhua news agency was sentenced to 18 years in prison for spying and other charges.

The ruling said he was punished for receiving around 207,000 yuan, which was worth around ¥2.5 million at current exchange rates, in cash from then Japanese Ambassador Yuji Miyamoto in return for secret data on North Korea and other matters.

But the "secret" information was said to be about matters already in the public domain.

Unlike China, where even trivial data may be classified, Japan doesn't have strict laws on guarding confidential information. As a result, Chinese spies may view Japan as a sort of heaven where classified data can be obtained legally.

On Li's case, a Japanese police official suggested that the attempt to call him in for questioning was intended to remove someone they suspected of spying. "If we had let him go home without taking any action, he could come back again as a diplomat."

Atsuyuki Sassa, who was head of foreign affairs at the National Police Agency, said, "Requesting his appearance for questioning was perhaps the best they could do, but it certainly had the effect of checking (Chinese moves)."

(Link)*

How quickly we move from "experts" to "some people." The only "expert" named who supports the thesis is an anonymous individual whom we are told has expertise in China.

As for the article itself, it begins in one place, decides to tackle the subject, misses, lolls about regaling us with tales of yesteryear and ends up quoting a single security expert, Sassa Atsuyuki, whose thesis is the exact opposite of the one the article attempts to promote.

"So journalists on deadline on the weekend write crap. So what?"

Wrong! This is what Kyodo is reduced to releasing now that police informants, realizing what a complete disaster the Li case has become, are now either shutting their mouths or pointing reporters into speculating that perhaps Li was not a spy, after all.

Not that the screw up has been all bad for the NPA. As Shingetsu News notes, the Li case is not being used as a lever to pry an espionage bill out of the Diet -- which would be a neat way to play both sides of an issue ("He's a spy; we need a law. He's not a spy; we still need a law!") if the public is lulled into paying no further attention to the machinations of the security apparat.

That both the Japanese and the Chinese government are lying about the Li case is obvious.

Can you imagine how ticked off the career diplomats of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs would be if the story the Chinese government has been shopping around turned out to be true, that the #4 position in the embassy -- in the Economics Division, no less, where the misplacing of a single comma in a bilateral agreement could cost the country billions of yuan -- was handed off to some academic wanderer with loads of Japan experience?

Something big and bad happened here. Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Kano Michihiko, who gave crucial support to Prime Minister Noda in August of last year when Noda was running for the position of party president, will today lose his ministerial post, the prize which he had extorted from Noda in return for his support, because of what may have been the most innocent and perfunctory of contacts with Li.

The government is trying to bury this and bury this fast.

-----------------------------------------------
* I generally forego quoting whole articles. However, this one is so bad it is likely to disappear quickly into the ether, after having emerged from the muck.

I Spy With My Little Eye

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.

- H. L. Mencken (1917)

The Shingetsu News Agency has just put up a story, "Japan’s “Spy” Case That Probably Isn’t." The article very kindly notes my skepticism regarding the narrative spewed out by Channel Sakura, the Yomiuri Shimbun and others -- that First Secretary of the Embassy of China Li Chunguang (now that the National Police Agency has sent papers to the Embassy, the mainstream news media is finally showing his image and reporting his name) used (a) bank account(s) opened under false premises to receive funds from Japanese companies. These funds were then used to pay for spying activities.

The SNA report speculates that a far more probable explanation for the illegal bank account(s) was Li's seeking to build up a little nest egg outside the knowledge of his superiors and outside China.

Correspondence with two veteran Asia watchers, one a Japan specialist, the other a businessman with decades of experience in China, finds them in agreement with the SNA: this is a story about an individual's greed.

I wish I could believe the simple answer. Occam's Razor suggests I should.

However, I cannot.

There are loose ends that make my head ache:

- Li purportedly could open bank accounts in Japan using an alien registration card (gaikokujin toroku shomeisho) which had been issued by a local municipality -- no reports as to which one (See second update below - Ed.) -- after he presented his old Tokyo University ID card.

Can one actually do this? In my experience, unless one can produce a passport, one which the staff members at the ward/town office will always politely ask whether or not they might photocopy, you had might as well not show up at all.

So Li showed up at the ward/town office with his expired Todai ID and a fake passport. The simplest answer as to how he procured this fake passport was from Chinese intelligence. However, it is not the only way he could have procured a faked passport.

Li, for attempting this runaround, must have nerves of steel: so many things could have gone wrong, exposing him. Except, of course, if higher authorities from the central government had forewarned the ward/town office of Li's request for an alien registration card, resulting in Li's documents not being examined with the ward/town's usual level of diligence.

- News reports have Li being under surveillance since 2007. The NPA knows/learns that he is a graduate of the People's Liberation Army language training program and a member of the PLA General Staff. It follows him around for five years (a long span of time for a diplomat to remain at a post - a flashing red light) as he visits and interacts with members of the Diet, the bureaucracy and the business community.

He is likely the highest-level asset China has in Tokyo. He has been followed for half a decade...and the NPA burns him over illegally obtained bank accounts?

Non, non, non, non, non...je suis un con, mais je ne suis pas con au point de croire cela...

We must assume that NPA counterintelligence would never permit the exposure of a compromised asset of Li's stature.

So the most plausible scenario is that someone inside the NPA made a huge mistake, such as:

- NPA counterintelligence uses the illegal bank accounts in order to threaten Li in what is a clumsy attempt to turn Li into a double agent. Knowing his cover blown and his illegal accounts compromised, Li goes back to his superiors with the bad news. Having failed in its amateurish attempt to blackmail Li into betraying his country, the NPA places a formal request with the Embassy to question Li. His usefulness in Tokyo now zero, Li is whisked back to China.

- A misguided patriot inside the financial crimes division, learning that a Chinese diplomat is conducting business inside Japan using false bank accounts and furious that his division does nothing to stop such criminal behavior, leaks information on Li to the right wing press -- in the same way Isshiki Masaharu leaked the video of a Chinese fishing vessel colliding with two Japan Coast Guard vessels in November 2010. The NPA, realizing that Li's cover is about to be irretrievably blown, resigns itself into allowing the financial crimes division to pursue Li through formal procedures.

Far-fetched?

...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth...

- Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four (1890)

Later - In my first post on the Li Chunguang Affair, I identified Akihiko Tanaka as the Vice President of Tokyo University. Reader RS reminds me that since April 1, Tanaka has been the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) - Link.

Later still - For the record, the NPA's sending of papers to Li via the Embassy of China makes sense only as a courtesy to the news media, allowing them to start showing Li's face and referring to him by name. As a holder of diplomatic passport, Li had full immunity from arrest for his violations of the Alien Registration Act.

Also for the record, Li filed his false application for an alien registration card and received it in Katsushika City (Katsushika-ku).

The Bloodletting Begins - China, Spying and Phytosanitary Restrictions

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The dirty game of leaking from the Li Chunguang case has begun. Unsurprisingly, the Yomiuri Shimbun is at the forefront at publishing the leaked information, targeting members of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan with missiles of filled with innuendo and non-sequiturs.

Agriculture leak to be probed / Ministry team to investigate Chinese diplomat's link to secret documents

The agriculture ministry will set up an investigation team within the ministry to investigate the alleged leaking of classified documents, following Wednesday's report by The Yomiuri Shimbun that a Chinese diplomat may be responsible for the security breach.

Speaking to reporters at the ministry on Wednesday, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Michihiko Kano said: "As long as such a report was made, I believe it's important to thoroughly investigate the case as a ministry. I told this to the team members."

The leaked documents are believed to contain information on a program for exporting agricultural products to China. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported the 45-year-old first secretary at the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo, who is suspected of espionage, was involved in the program organized by the Promotion Association of Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries & Foods Exporting to China, a Tokyo-based incorporated body.

The diplomat, who also is suspected of violating the Alien Registration Law, has already left Japan

Senior Vice Minister Tsukasa Iwamoto will lead the ministry's investigative team, whose members include several senior officials, such as Parliamentary Secretary Tetsuo Morimoto and a vice minister, Kano said

The ministry's other senior vice minister, Nobutaka Tsutsui, who led the program in question, was not included in the team

Asked about Tsutsui, Kano said, "I guess we'll have to ask him [about the leak]."

Read the full story (Link) though there is really not much of a story. A shipload of Japanese produce and fish destined for a special Japanese agricultural products promotion got held up at agricultural inspection by the Chinese government's failure to waive its usual phytosanitary restrictions. Li went to visit Vice-Minister Tsutsui, presumably to explain what was going on and/or offer an apology. The shipment eventually had to be destroyed.

End of story.

TV Asahi has a report out alleging that Li entertained members of the DPJ's agriculture tribe, MAFF elite bureaucrats and representatives of agricultural interests at restaurants and other venues (ANN News - J - time sensitive).

The Mainichi Shimbun's coverage of the story hones in on the opening of the bank accounts and the money allegedly transferred to those accounts (E). That the Mainichi acquired such detailed information as the exact amounts transferred to the accounts says very little that is admirable about the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's ability to protect information with possible vital national security implications.

As can be seen from the Yomiuri and Mainichi texts and the TV Asahi segment, the mainstream media is clinging with desperation to their at once inconsistent and overbearing applications of restrictions on revealing the identities and images of persons under investigation (Why the giant, floating blue ball, TV Asahi, on what seems to be footage from open government sources?) Internet news outlets, You Tube and the non-Japanese press are circulating reports featuring Li's name and image. The hopeless maintenance of a veil of secrecy makes the story seem more sinister, which may be good for ratings. However, the effort at concealment makes the mainstream press look like fools, in the same way their tentative coverage of the Olympus scandal did, after FACTA and the foreign press had already broken the case wide open.

Later - Will opposition parties go bananas about Li Chunguang's activities, the extent to which the government's had knowledge of them, the possibility of security breaches and the compromising of appointed officials and bureaucrats, tying the Diet's schedule into knots, making it impossible for the Noda government to pass the legislation necessary for the implementation of its political program?

Let us say, to be brief, yes.

Later still - Li's purported efforts to influence opinions at MAFF and among legislators with strong ties to agriculture interests will mean that the MAFF will likely be off-limits to foreign entities trying to encourage the loosening of restrictions on agriculture trade and the ending of agriculture and fishery subsidies. This would indicate that Japanese participation in TPP negotiations are deader than Elvis, for the time being.

First Secretary of the Embassy of China, Economic Section -- Spy, Hustler Or A Combination Thereof?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, This story makes no sense. (E)

If anyone never needed to open an illegal bank account, using a false foreign resident's card somehow received thanks to his old University of Tokyo ID, this in order to receive money transfers of consulting fees from Japanese companies, then First Secretary Li Chunguang of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China was that person.

Li was as well-connected as any Chinese could conceivably be, having studied both at the prestigious Matsushita Institute of Government and Management -- the finishing school of both Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko and Foreign Minister Gemba Koi'ichiro-- and at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Oriental Culture, presided over during the years Li was there by the extremely influential Tanaka Akihiko, now Todai's Vice President.

Li should have never been in need of money, at least not in performance of his duties. In addition to his diplomatic salary, he was secretly a member of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army. With his fluent Japanese and his contacts in business, government and politics, it is inconceivable that China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chinese security agencies and/or the PLA would not have a limitless and quite legal ATM account for Li to draw upon to pay for information, when he needed to do so.

So I think Channel Sakura, which has an old Okazaki Institute (!) seminar video showing Li's face, name and affiliation (Your tube - J) and the major news outlets are mistaken in claiming that Li used the money he accepted as consulting fees for spying purposes. It just does not stand to reason that anyone in the Government of China would sign off on such clumsy method of buying information.

Then again, it is impossible to understand how someone as valuable as Li would ever stoop so low as to be shilling for what amounted to pocket change.

Like I said, this story makes no sense.

The only person who can explain it is Li, who made it out of the country on May 23, just ahead (?!?) of Japanese authorities ready to detain and expel him for violations of the Vienna Convention prohibiting serving diplomats from conducting business in the countries in which they do their service.

My guess is that no one will be seeing much of the handsome and worldly Mr. Li for quite some time.

If ever.

The Chinese Fishing Boat Captain Slips Through The Net Again

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, So much for all that.

The other day I had a post on the Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution, the liberalization of indictment procedures intended to serve as a backup route for citizens to bring to justice politicians and power brokers prosecutors found too intimidating to challenge. Unfortunately, the Committees have morphed into tools for conspiracy theorists and self-righteous vigilanteism.

Except in the post I praised the decision of the Naha Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution to indict the Chinese fishing boat captain who rammed two Japan Coast vessels patrolling the waters off the Senkaku Islets in September 2010. The captain was arrested on charges of interfering with officers of the Government of Japan carrying out their duties -- which any sane person would admit he did. The Naha Prosecutors Office, however, after receiving the captain from the Coast Guard, dropped all charges against him on the peculiar, extra-legal excuse that the arrest had become an international incident.

"So what does that have to do with anything? That the arrest is becoming an international incident is Kasumigaseki's problem, not yours," was the response from the public -- which saw the release as the result of base and craven (no one in Tokyo would admit to having pressured the Naha prosecutors) political meddling in the judicial process.

For once, it seemed, a Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution was going to perform the function for which it had been created: indicting and bringing to trial someone the prosecutors would not touch due to their spinelessness.

Indict him they did and bring him to trial they did -- but that is the end of the story. Last Thursday the presiding judge Suzuki Hideyuki revoked the right to prosecute (koso gikyaku) in the case, ending the trial.

The judge's action came after the three court-appointed lawyers failed to deliver a letter of indictment to the ship's captain within the requisite 60 days after they filed their mandated indictment (kyosei kiso) on March 15, 2012. The lawyers had until midnight, May 16 to provide the court with proof the indictment had been delivered. (J)

That they failed to complete their task in the allotted time should surprise no one. Under the Treaty between Japan and the People's Republic of China on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (2007) indictments handed down in Japanese courts are sent to the Homusho (Ministry of Justice) which then forwards them to its counterpart in China, the Zhongguo Renmin Gongheguo Shifabu.

Funny thing happened to that Naha District Court letter of indictment, or did not happen, as the case might be. The Zhongguo Renmin Gongheguo Shifabu seems to have not forwarded the letter to local authorities to serve to the captain. Indeed, just to demonstrate that tough-minded justice ministry bureaucrats that they may be, those working at the Zhongguo Renmin Gongheguo Shifabu are not without a sense of humor, they waited, according to the Sankei Shimbun, until May 15, the day before the expiration date of the letter of indictment, to send a message to Ministry of Justice of Japan that:

"As the Senkakus Islets (sic) are our national territory, we cannot accept applications made by the judiciary of Japan." (J)*

The Sankei Shimbun is understandably up in arms about these developments. It demands to know why Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko did not bring up the matter of the non-delivery of the letter of indictment when he met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on May 13.

Gosh, why would he not bring the matter up? Why would that be? Can anyone think of a reason? Or any number of reasons?

So the case -- which had the potential of becoming a major irritant in the bilateral relationship -- ends not with bang, but with a snigger.



Later - This post has been edited for clarity.

-------------------------------
* The Sankei Shimbun commits a howling error here. There is no way that the PRC Ministry of Justice would refer to the islands in question as the Senkaku shoto.

This Will Damage Japan's Own Security As Well

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Nice going, Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Japan.

I can imagine the cable back to Beijing:

"A protest letter! A great idea. I cannot agree more. We have to make clear our position to the hosts of the meeting of the traitors and thieves falsely claiming to speak for the loyal Uighur citizens of Xinjiang.

Could not agree more with the idea of sending the letter to the offices of the members of the Diet misled into supporting the Uighur terrorists and splitists. After all, these Diet members are to be speakers and guests at the meetings.

(By the way, that works out to over 100 letters. Could we talk about a bumping up of the postage budget in the next cable?)

I love the text. Brilliant! However, any possibility of our deleting that one little phrase? Japanese is such an indirect, suggestive language. Expressing ourselves in such bald terms will seem uncouth. The rest of the text makes our point clear anyway. The phrase is just superfluous.

Thanks in advance for your consideration of this request."

And I can imagine the response from Beijing:

"Send out the letter as is, or I will have you stamping passports in Yinchuan for the rest of your career."

Well, Ambassador Cheng Yonghua did as he was told and sent out the letter, with this killer sentence in it:

中国への内政干渉で、日本自身の安全にも害がある。

Chugoku e no naisei kansho de, Nihon jishin no anzen ni mo gai ga aru.

This is interference in the internal affairs of China and will damange Japan's own security as well.

(Link - J)

Way to sway the opinions of Japanese legislators, PRC leadership!

As 90 of the 100 or so Diet members who received this charming missive are members of the Liberal Democratic Party, it is should not be surprising that LDP headquarters hosted a little show-and-tell party today, releasing the text of the response to the Ambassador's letter (J - personal blog）, complete with the signatures of 46 members of the Diet on it.

You have to admit, it is an effective document. When you would expect it to scream, it hisses, to devastating effect:

独立主権国家の国会議員への書状としては、著しく適切性に欠いているといわざるを得ません。

Dokuritsu shuken kokka no kokkai giin e no shojo to shite wa, ichijirushuku tekisetsusei no kaite iru to iwazaru o emasen.

We must tell you that sending such a document to the national legislators of an independent sovereign state shows marked lack of a sense of propriety.

Ouch!!!

I tend to give the LDP lots of hell...but this is the epitome of cool.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The World Uighur Congress is holding its triennial conference in Tokyo this week, the first time the conference is being held outside Germany or the United States, the home-in-exile of the movement's leader and former delegate to the People's Congress Rebiya Kadeer (E). The Chinese government is, true to form, completely beside itself over Tokyo's hosting this conference. The conference's opening , along with the recent waking up sleeping dog that should be left to lie, the status of the Senkaku islets, poisoned the atmosphere at the weekend's vitally important trilateral meeting. (J)

It is hard to not feel some sympathy for the Uighur cause. A host of nation states emerged out of the collapses of the Chinese, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the period 1912 -18, only to be reabsorbed in their successors in the world-wide descent into madness of the late 1930s and 1940s. Almost all of these absorbed nations have since been reestablished as independent and autonomous states, with the exceptions being the continental Asian states on China's periphery: Tanu Tuva, Tibet and East Turkestan. The Tibetan and Uighur claims on their homelands are being undone by the irrational (the Cultural Revolution) and rational (urban development) destruction of the physical traces of their distinctive cultures and mass Han Chinese immigration into these formerly undesirable areas. That the Han immigrants, sick of the altitude (in the case of Tibet), the lack of water and isolation will likely move out again in a few generation's time is pretty much a given, but hardly a salve for the present generation of Uighurs and Tibetans. (E)

[The Tuvans, due to the extreme isolation of their land, the lack of a demographic need for ressetlement of Russia's population -- which is indeed collapsing at an alarming rate -- and the lack of Russian government interest in stirring up trouble with any of its dozens of ethnic oblasts or republics, given what has happened and is still happening in the Caucasus Region, have shown zero interest in reestablishing their independence, limited as it was.]

However, the Uighurs are courting real disaster by coming to Tokyo. Their hosts here are not a coalition of conservative and liberal organizations and individuals, as would be the case were the conference being held in the U.S. or Germany. Instead, their hosts and likely underwriters of the costs of holding the Congress in Tokyo -- where the hard yen would blow the budget of any normal non-profit - are the most retrogressive of this blessed land's hard right wing. The above linked article's mention of:

"Several members of the Japanese political opposition participated in the opening session and expressed support for the Uighur cause."

is a very bad sign. Arch-conservatives parliamentarians Hiranuma Takeo (J) and Fukuya Keiji (J - personal blog) and three other Diet members have been reported as having attended sessions of the conference. Fellow traveler Yamatani Eriko (possibly one of the attendees) and other MPs have hosted their own gatherings publicizing the Uighur struggle for self-preservation and self-determination. (J - personal blog)

[Incidentally, several of these MPs made a Golden Week pilgrimage to Palisades Park, New Jersey, to buttonhole the mayor there into removing a monument commemorating the Comfort Women (E). All the members of this expedition into enemy territory -- ironic really, given that during the Bubble Years, Palisades Park and its neighboring town of Fort Lee were home to the expatriate Japanese community -- documented this brave endeavor (J - personal blog and J - personal blog), part of the GWOSG (the Global War On Symbols and Gestures*). Given that the present population of Palisades Park is 50% Korean-American, the mayor told the visiting members of the Diet they were wasting their and his time. (J)**

These same Diet members were flabbergasted when they visited Washington, this time to publicize the plight of the families of the DPRK abductees, only to be greeted by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and the Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell telling them, "We here in the U.S. have our own abductee problem of young American citizens being abducted to Japan, often against the custody rulings of U.S. courts (J)." Hiranuma's blood pressure probably hit the roof, which is bad for him, as he has already had one debilitating stroke.]

As for the claims that disgraced Air Self Defense Forces Chief of Staff Tamogami Toshio has attended conference sessions or that members of the attending Uighur delegation visited Yasukuni Shrine, these seem to be inventions of Chinese news organizations (I invite evidence of my being wrong here).

[Later - Reader MP has pointed to the Channel Sakura coverage of the conference (J and U - You Tube). Not only was Tamogami Toshio present, he addressed the conference, as did Hiranuma, plus a long list of the usual suspects: members of the House of Representatives Shimomura Hakubun and Takaichi Sanae and author and critic Sakurai Yoshiko. Tamogami clocks in at 7:28 into the broadcast.

As for the visit to Yasukuni, it is hard to argue with the video of Kadeer's visit to the shrine starting at 10:45 in the broadcast.

Interesting how the mainstream media did not report these two stories.

To the members of the Chinese news media, my apologies.]

The association of Japan's ultra right and Islamic nationalism goes back a long way. As scholar of Japan's historical relations with Islam Michael Penn reminded me in a private communication, Japanese support Islamic self-determination movements was a staple of 1930s Japanese involvement in Asia, though by private rightist organizations, not the Imperial government (E). This support was often carried out under the rubric of Pan-Asianism (Yoshikawa Yukie has produced a comprehensive survey in English of pre-1945 Pan-Asianist writing. Scholars of China will likely fault the paper for its unfortunate indiscriminate switching from pinyin to Wade-Giles and back again) which a cynic would, in the Uighur case, put down to a de facto desire to keep China weak.

One hopes that Kadeer and her movement realize that joining hands and accepting the support of Japan's right, because of historical resonances, is a one-way ticket to illegitimacy.

The signs, however, are that she does not:

"The 63-year-old leader said the international community seems more interested in trade with China than in human rights. But she noted that Japan’s support in hosting the general assembly illustrated a growing awareness of the Uighur issue."

Not exactly, Madame President.

--------------------
* To which South Korean organizations, with their crusades to rename the Sea of Japan and their bolstering of South Korea's de facto hold on Tokto/Takeshima through full-page ads in U.S. newspapers, are hardly strangers to.

** Which is not to say that the visit of the arch-conservatives to Palisades Park did not have any affect. According to the Sankei Shimbun, the government of Japan has lodged a formal protest against the monument. (J)

Committees For The Inquest Of The Prosecution - In Other News

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Correspondent SG reminded me yesterday that Ozawa Ichiro's case is not the only criminal case that has been or is the process of being brought to the courts via a Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution -- the Orwellian-sounding citizens councils seeking indictments in incidents where the local prosecutors claim there is no case. Indeed a number of infamous incidents are in the process of being picked over by private lawyers hired by the courts, including:

- The Akashi Pedestrian Bridge Incident - where a crush of people, on there way to view a waterside fireworks display, lurched forward and fell down in a mass on the staircase of a pedestrian overpass, leading to the asphyxiation deaths of 11 persons, mostly children. On trial is the Deputy Chief of Police of Akashi, as the police were providing security for the event. A judgment in the case is expected in November.

- The Amagasaki JR Derailment - the most serious and idiotic rail accident of the last 40 years, resulting in the deaths of 106 persons and the maimings of many, many more. While the obvious culprit was the incompetent train engineer, who had a record of poor performance and sent his train hurtling off the tracks by taking a curve at excessive speed, this in order to make up for time he had lost in overshooting the platform at a previous stop, families of the dead and injured have been trying for a decade to pin the blame on senior JR West executives. The trial of the three past presidents of JR West for dereliction of duty leading to death begins in July.

- The Chinese Fishing Trawler Collision Incident - when a Chinese fishing boat rammed two Japanese Coast Guard vessels in the waters off the Senkaku Islands in September, 2010, the JCG detained the crew of the Chinese vessel, arresting the captain on charges of interfering with the activities of government personnel carrying out their duties. Other than the captain, the crew of the ship were returned to China. The case of the captain, hwoever,was remanded to the Nago District Court. After the Chinese government, both directly and indirectly, ratched the pressure on Japan, the Nago Court released the captain, on the bizarre grounds of his arrest being a matter of foreign policy, not law. Since the case had been remanded to the prosecutors, however, it left open the door for interested parties to pursue the original arrest through a Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution, which interested parties did. Without much of a fuss, an Okinawa Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution issued an indictment of the Chinese captain in March, with no trial date set.

It is difficult to approve of the actions taken by the Committees in the first two cases. These should be civil suits for damages, not criminal indictments for negligence and dereliction of duty. The persons being tried have only distant connections to the accidents, heinous as they were.

However, it is hard not give three cheers for Committee in Okinawa. The grotesque intrusion of politics into a legal proceeding, which the government promised it would not to do, no matter what the Chinese did, then reversed itself and did, then denied that it had done -- demolished the credibility of Prime Minister Kan Naoto and the Democratic Party of Japan. That the Svengali pressuring the Nago Prosecutors Office to release the captain was Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito was an open secret. His machinations earned him a well-deserved censuring by the House of Councillors, with Mabuchi Sumio, the minister in charge of the Coast Guard, getting censured in what amounted to collateral damage from the chastisement of Sengoku.

It is possible to read too much into the effect the indictment of the Chinese captain will have on Sino-Japanese relations. It will certainly be an irritant to the Chinese. The Japanese government will not pursue the captain, except perhaps by putting his name on a list of international fugitives at Interpol. Even if the courts allow the captain's being convicted in absentia, which he would be, given the video evidence of the collisions, neither government has any incentive to bring the matter up in bilateral negotiations -- so they will not.

Whether Japanese right wingers will transform the captain's indictment into one of their cause célèbres remains an open question. They have already so many different items on their plates...

That Southern Sort Of Sanity

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Usually the thought of a National Bureau of Asian Research interview of a director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy would send me running for the hills.

However, the NBR interview with Rory Metcalf is a worthwhile read, realist in the most positive sense of that loaded word. (Link)

I must confess a particular affinity for one of Metcalf's propositions, though my heart knows it to be little more than a vain wish:

And certainly the closer the Australia-U.S. alliance becomes, the more confident Canberra should feel in offering candid counsel to Washington about Asia policy.

I had always hoped that the government of this blessed land might play a such a role in its dealings with the United States, that of the friend who grabs the other friend's shoulder and says, "Will you please just calm down and consider the repercussions, for just one second, before you react?"

Having the world's second largest economy and a significant capacity to carry out soft power initiatives should have given this blessed land enough leverage to stand its ground and talk sense to the United States, when the United States, for its own internal domestic political reasons could not make sense of a situation. However, strategic confusion within this blessed land as regards its neighborhood, with the right wing ramping up the DPRK abductees issue and fears of strategic abandonment over Futenma to the point where intelligent debate over Japan's own position in the world was driven to the fringes, quashed the development of an intellectual alternative to whatever-the-United-States-says-as-long-as-we-do-not-have-to-provide-troops bureaucratic default response to any of the world's crises.

Of course, internal strategic confusion was only half of the problem. The U.S. prides itself as the defender of democratic values. However, the sheer size of the U.S. security apparatus means those values do not necessarily extend to the U.S. listening to what any of its friends and allies say. The size of Japan's population and economy could have made this blessed land a worthwhile sounding board for the saner minds in Washington, However, the relationship between Japan and the U.S. was and is radically asymmetric, with the U.S. committed to the defense of Japan while Japan is not committed to the defense of the United States. Japanese expressions of caution would have fallen on deaf ears.

A similar asymmetry exists in the Australia-U.S. relationship. Given Australia's intense economic integration with the People's Republic of China and its diplomatic relations with the DPRK, Canberra should and does have a different and useful take on the politico-economic development of East Asia, one the U.S. could profit from if its government and non-government players choose to listen. Unfortunately, because the U.S. is such a disproportionately huge presence not just in the region but around the globe, it will likely refuse to listen to advice, no matter how sound. "Shut up and take our Marines," will be the response from the Washington echo chamber, where flexibility and patience are not considered the worthwhile counsels of serious thinkers.

Yet Another Paraphrase Of Hemingway

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Friendly correspondent Stephen Harner has a new post on Forbes.com regarding the ill-starred Noda-Obama summit and the strategic rebalancing of Asia. (Link)

Mr. Harner is a businessman and sees the world from a businessman's perspective. It is not unusual that he should view geographic proximity, increased trade links and enmeshing supply chains as favoring an ascendant China in regional relations over the continued presence of a dominating United States. He and I would probably be in agreement that Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro were not far wrong in steering the ship of state a little closer to China, relying, perhaps unrealistically, on the United States to understand this blessed land's position.

However the idea of a reestablishment of Chinese suzerainty seemingly going beyond the Finlandization of regional territorial disputes is not on anyone's agenda -- nor should it be. Liberty and autonomy are precious and worth the fighting for...if not for ourselves then for those whom education and wealth have not blessed with the ability to deracinate and resettle wherever there is money to be made.

Good News, For Once

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

The Ministry of the Environment confirmed yesterday that for the first time in 36 years, a pair of Japanese Crested Ibis or toki, a bird so emblematically Japanese its scientific name is Nipponia nippon, had produced a hatchling. The news was so important NHK (and I suppose the other networks as well) flashed a Breaking News chyron across the top of a regularly scheduled program (in NHK's case is was during the atrocious Taiga Drama series on Taira Kiyomori, which is so boring the icky sadaijin on helpless handsome heishi sex scenes almost come as a relief) to pass on the announcement.

The Japanese population of toki went extinct, done in by the industrial polution from Japan's rapid industrialization period, the use of DDT to control mosquitoes, herbicides used to boost the productivity of rice paddies and the paving over of natural flowing streams and estuaries. The last of its kind, a female named Kin, died in captivity at the immense age of 36 years in 2003. ( J)

However, a tiny population of toki was still hanging on in China's Shaanxi province. In an exemplary display of bilateral cooperation (now extended trilaterally, with the inclusion of South Korea, where a captive breeding program has been established) scientists from both countries have cooperated on bringing the bird back from the edge and out of caged environments, first in China and more recently in Japan.   It has been indeed also an example of region-to-region cooperation, with Japan's toki population kept in captivity and released on the island of Sado, where Japan's wild toki population made its last stand.  The toki breeding center has been one of the means of drawing tourists to remote Sado, one of the former places of exile for those who would lose out in medieval period power struggles whose otherwise scenic shorelines and fishing villages were long ago ruined by the Tanaka family.

The recovery and release program has suffered some terrible setbacks of late.  In March of 2010, a Japanese marten (Ten - Martes melanpus ) found a small hole in a group pen at the Sado center and in a few seconds of blinding carnage at a full run, killed 9 of the birds.  Of the 78 of the long-lived birds released since 2008, 32 have either died or are missing and presumed dead, and none of the breeding pairs produced a hatchling. (J)

Until yesterday's confirmation.

Break out the sake.

Image courtesy: Ministry of the Environment, via News 47

Some Very Tense Family Dinners

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, A sweet little tidbit from the Yomiuri Shimbun's home page:

LDP secretary general postpones China visit

Jiji Press

Nobuteru Ishihara, secretary general of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party, has decided to postpone his visit to China, party sources said.

The decision came after his father, Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, unveiled a plan earlier this week for his metropolitan government to buy the Senkaku Islands claimed by Japan and China, provoking fierce criticism in China.

The junior Ishihara had planned to visit China for four days from Friday to give a lecture at a university in Shanghai. However, he was informed by the university that his safety could not be ensured, the sources said Thursday...

(Link)

I would not be at all surprised if Ishihara fils is convinced that Ishihara père is out to ruin his future.

Poor I. Nobuteru has a decent shot at replacing Tanigaki Sadakazu as the president of the LDP this fall, his only plausible rival being former defense minister Ishiba Shigeru. However, I. Shintaro keeps sucking up all the oxygen in the room -- whether through his linking up with Kamei Shizuka and Hiranuma Takeo to create a "true conservative" party, his crusade (a remake) to bring the Olympics to Tokyo or his pulled-from-out-of-his-nether-regions proposal to buy some of the Senkaku Islands from their private owner (E). At every moment, I. Nobuteru has to be ready to crouch down to duck the shrapnel flying out from his father's playing around with explosives.

One can imagine I. Nobuteru thinking, "Dad, why can't you announce incredibly expensive idiot plan to eliminate cloud cover over the Tocho, just to ruin my older brother's day?"

Questions About Chinese Intentions

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, With democracy in Myanmar seemingly moving forward as if mounted on a freight train and the Chinese vote in the UN Security Council yesterday in favor a resolution condemning the DPRK for its rocket launch last Friday, are we seeing the results of a reassessment by the Chinese government, even during a leadership transition year when policy changes are presumably destabilizing and thus verboten, of the policy of having Asian pariah states as its clients forming "a buffer zone around China" or giving access to the Indian Ocean and natural gas? Are dictatorial regimes that isolate states from the rest of the world and leave their citizens in dire poverty now seen as being more trouble than can be justified?

Just asking.

In Memory of Fang Lizhi

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Chinese atrophysist and dissident inspiration Fang Lizhi has died (E), in exile, as free-thinking Chinese seemingly must.

The newspaper obituaries note that Fang and his wife hid in the U.S. Embassy for 13 months following the nationwide crackdown on dissidents, connected or not to the Tien An Men protests. What they fail to clarify by saying "hid" meant that at the time their whereabouts were completely unknown.

I once attended one of a pair of lectures given by Fang at my university. The morning lecture had been for his fellow scientists, on his research into mathematically possible universes. The afternoon lecture was about the situation in contemporary China. During the lecture he talked about Tien An Men and his and his wife's disappearance, during which many around the world thought he had been imprisoned or even killed.

He impishly pointed out that even while in hiding he continued to publish his research in scientific journals, somewhat undermining theories that he was dead. "And it was not really a secret where I was," he continued, as he showed a slide of a blow up of the "about the author" section that appears on the first page of a scientific paper.

There at the bottom, as clear as clear could be, was "Dr. Fang can be contacted at the U.S. Embassy, Beijing..."

Handing DPJ Strategy To The Contrarians

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Yesterday, Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Koshi'ishi Azuma announced that some of the party's most senior and experienced leaders will be charged with the mapping out of long-term party strategy. The areas which will be examined by these party advisors and senior party post holders will include foreign policy, energy policy, defense policy and reconstruction policy.

The first two appointments announced yesterday?

For Foreign Policy: Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio

For Energy Policy: Former Prime Minsister Naoto Kan

No, I am not making this up. (J)

The opinions of these two men differ from the prevailing status quo just about as much as one can imagine. Rather than being wary of China and close to the United States, the Hatoyama program is to position Japan in between the two giants, effectively meaning Japan's having more intimate relations with China and more distant relations with the United States.

As for Kan, his experience in trying to manage the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster has made him an adamant foe of nuclear power and close friend of the renewable energy industry, particularly biofuels. His views run counter to the Noda government's so far very quiet push to rehabilitate nuclear power. (E)

It remains to be seen whether these appointments represent a Japanese version of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson's quip regarding J. Edgar Hoover or an honest attempt to integrate the contrarian views of these two senior politician into the pool of ideas that the party can draw upon when drafting its next electoral manifesto.

Let us say that this cynical would say it is the former, while the hopeful would pray it is the latter.