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Japan Says It Will Back the U.S. Resolution on Iraq
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
OKYO, March 9 ・Japan's statement on Saturday that it would support a new United Nations resolution on Iraq sought by the United States came after weeks of fence-sitting, marked by almost no public debate on the issue.
"Japan supports the proposed resolution as something that will mark the final step of the global community's effort to pressure Iraq to disarm on its own," Yoriko Kawaguchi, Japan's foreign minister, said in the statement.
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Ms. Kawaguchi's announcement came two days after a strongly worded criticism of the government's failure to discuss publicly its position on the Iraq crisis issued by her predecessor, Makiko Tanaka, who said that Japan should do more to avoid war. The decision also coincided with the first large antiwar protests, involving an officially estimated 14,000 demonstrators, who marched through the central city.
"Japan should not hesitate to deliver a clear message to the United States: exercise patience to avoid war," Ms. Tanaka, wrote in an op-ed column in The Japan Times. "But Japan's government also must stop prevaricating with the Japanese people. It should welcome and encourage debate about Japan's defense posture without fearing that the United States-Japan friendship is so fragile that it will be destroyed."
For all their bluntness, however, Ms. Tanaka's comments produced hardly a public echo here. The column appeared only in The Times, a small English-language newspaper, which took the unusual step of omitting it from its Web site and database. Although Ms. Tanaka is one of Japan's best-known politicians, her criticisms of the government she once served ・and, implicitly, of the United States ・received no news coverage.
Most recent public opinion surveys here indicate that over 80 percent of the population is opposed to war with Iraq. But before Ms. Tanaka's editorial and Saturday's march, Japan had been virtually alone among major American allies in avoiding heated public debate over the threatened American action against Iraq.
The government has bent over backward to accommodate the United States during the war in Afghanistan, by reinterpreting constitutional law to allow the dispatch of warships to the Indian Ocean, where they helped refuel American vessels and patrol sea lanes. Until Saturday, however, senior officials had carefully dodged questions about Japan's support of the United States in the event of an attack on Iraq, and neither the mainstream press nor the Parliament has been persistent in asking.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose normal speaking style is so elliptical it has spawned countless parodies, said last week that "if political decisions are made based on public opinion, mistakes may be made."
Few here doubted that in the end, Japan would obligingly support American policy toward Iraq, as it almost always does on almost every major question of international relations. But even among those who support the need to exert pressure on Iraq, many say that the lack of public discussion among officials reveals a foreign policy that has atrophied and a political culture that lacks oxygen.
A cartoon in Shukan Asahi, a popular weekly magazine, captured that thought last week with an image of President Bush twirling Mr. Koizumi on his finger like a propeller.
"Why can't the Japanese government express any opinion other than support?" said Soichiro Tawara, the host of Japanese television's most important political discussion program, Sunday Project, who was quoted in the accompanying Shukan Asahi article. "Frankly speaking, most of the harsh criticism toward the government or toward America is empty, given Japan's excessive dependence on the United States. What must we do in order to make our own choices?"
For younger Japanese, it is tempting to assume that Japan has always been this way, snug and relatively unquestioning in its relationship with the United States. "In one way, I think that democracy has not taken root in Japan yet," said Takashi Uchiyama, a leader of Saturday's march. "It seems like, since the Middle Ages, we have been stuck with a system where things must be decided by the gods."
Older Japanese still have direct memories of an era of far more vigorous politics, when virtually nothing of importance here was decided without discussion, and the partnership with the United States, in particular, generated intense debate.
In a famous incident in 1960, during heated and prolonged debate over a new security treaty between the United States and Japan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's press secretary had to scramble aboard a helicopter to escape angry protesters.
In contrast, Ms. Tanaka was hounded out of the government last year by powerful bureaucrats, in part for comments in which she called for a review of the alliance with the United States. Undiscouraged, but largely unheard, she returned to that theme in the op-ed column.
"If Japan is a real good friend of the U.S., Japan should be able to express its opinions to the U.S.," she said in an interview. "Japan needs the U.S. but the U.S. also needs Japan. That's the meaning of alliance."
But in the governing Liberal Democratic Party, she added, "conservative politicians seem to still think Japan should accept whatever the U.S. says as it has been doing all these years, and if there is some problem about the alliance, Japan can solve it by paying money."
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