Category: Japan

There is no doubt that China has a long-term strategy to absorb Taiwan at some point, but I think a military attack is too risky due to a possible US military response. I don’t see the security environment changing that much by 2025 to make such an attack less risky:

 A former Japanese military officer recently made waves after saying he believes China plans to invade and annex Taiwan by 2025 and Okinawa by 2045.
The comments by retired Lt. Gen. Kunio Orita, a 35-year veteran of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force and a former commander of the 301st Tactical Fighter Squadron and 6th Air Wing, appeared last month in the English-language Taiwan News.
Orita, who retired in 2009 and is now a guest professor at Toyo Gakuen University in Tokyo, recently told Stars and Stripes he expects Beijing will attempt to expand its sphere of influence by first taking control of Taiwan and then militarizing a key disputed islet in the South China Sea.
Once that’s accomplished, he said, China will set its sights on Japan’s southern island prefecture, which hosts about half of the approximately 54,000 U.S. troops serving in Japan.

Stars & Stripes

You can read much more at the link, but Lt. Gen Orita also claims that the anti-US protest movement on Okinawa is sponsored by Beijing. He even says Beijing is providing funding to Okinawa media outlets. That is a very serious accusation if true and I would hope the Japanese government is vigorously working to find out who these Beijing agents are.

Apparently the Japanese government is concerned that President Trump will cut a deal to eliminate North Korea’s ICBMs, but leave them with nuclear weapons. This is significant to Japan because North Korea’s shorter range missiles can easily target Japan with nuclear weapons:

When U.S. President Donald Trump sits down to talk peace with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this month, one of America’s closest allies — Japan — will be looking on with apprehension.
Like the first time Trump met Kim in June, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has found himself on the outside peering in before their second summit set for Feb. 27-28 in Hanoi. The meeting brings both the promise of a less-dangerous North Korea and the potential peril of a weak deal that leaves Japan exposed to Kim’s weapons of mass destruction and does nothing to help ease Tokyo’s own hostility with Pyongyang.
Mitoji Yabunaka, who served as Japan’s envoy to six-party talks with North Korea more than a decade ago, said the country feared “a half-baked, deceptive agreement which leads to the Trump administration taking a soft line on North Korea by removing economic sanctions” without serious progress on disarmament. That would be “the nightmare scenario,” Yabunaka said.
While Japan and the U.S. — which guarantees the country’s security under a 1960 treaty — both want North Korea to give up its weapons, their interests could diverge as talks progress. Kim’s short- to medium-range rockets pose the most immediate danger to Japan, not the intercontinental ballistic missiles that now threaten the American homeland.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but if such a deal is reached with the Kim regime I suspect that the Trump administration would make certain security guarantees towards Japan that North Korea would face an overwhelming counterattack if they ever targeted Japan with their missiles.

I guess we will see what deal is struck in about a week.

Here is the latest US military servicemember getting himself in drunken trouble in Japan:

A U.S. servicemember was arrested Saturday in the home of a Japanese couple who found him naked after he’d used their shower, according to local news reports.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Nathaniel Williams, 27, is accused of walking through the unlocked front door of a home in Ebina City while intoxicated ‪at about 5:10 a.m.‬, the Kanagawa Shimbun reported Saturday.
Williams is assigned to the Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Depo at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Navy officials said Saturday evening.
Williams was discovered after an unidentified 44-year-old man who lives in the home woke up to use the bathroom and heard water running, the Kanagawa Shimbun report said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but at least he smelled good while sitting in the Japanese jail after his shower.

The Japan Times recently had an editorial advising against getting tattoos and working in the english teaching industry Japan:

Reader PP is arriving in Japan soon to begin a stint as an assistant language teacher (ALT). He writes: “I am very interested in getting an irezumi (traditional tattoo) in Japan. Are there any artists that will tattoo a foreigner? If so, who and where? My interviewer for the teaching position tried to warn me that tattoos are a ‘no-no’. ”
He goes on to describe a story he heard about another ALT: The man had taken off his shirt to water some plants on his balcony, when a student’s parent happened to walk by and saw his tattoo-riddled back. The parent apparently called the school, claiming that they had hired a member of the yakuza — the Japanese mafia, who traditionally have tattoos. The ALT had to change jobs and cities as a result.

Japan Times

You can read the rest at the link, but this article got thinking what experiences English teachers in Korea have had with having tattoos?

It looks like Japanese Prime Minister Abe wants to try his hand at Trump style diplomacy with Kim Jong-un:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday made public his determination to have talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in a bid to normalize bilateral diplomatic relations.
In a policy speech to the Diet, Abe said he will “act decisively without losing any opportunity” to settle the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by the communist nation decades ago and its nuclear and missile programs.
“(We) should break the shell of mutual mistrust in order to resolve the North Korean nuclear and missile issue, and the most important issue of abduction,” he said. “The goal is to settle the unfortunate history with North Korea and normalize diplomatic relations.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The Abe administration must be getting a good domestic political bump from the radar issue with the ROK because you would think at this point they would just let it go:

The Defense Ministry announced Monday it will terminate talks with its South Korean counterpart over the radar lock-on dispute, while revealing what it claims are sounds, converted from radio waves, of the fire-control radar system of a South Korean destroyer.
The 18-second audio file, if genuine, reportedly shows that continuous, intense radar waves were directed at the P-1 anti-submarine patrol airplane operated by the Maritime Self-Defense Force on Dec. 20 in the Sea of Japan.

Japanese defense officials said the wave patterns are completely different from surface search radar waves that Seoul claimed were being used by the South Korean Navy’s Gwanggaeto destroyer.
“We believe a third party would be convinced that what we have said is true if they examine the sounds, a video footage and other materials in a comprehensive way,” said a senior Defense Ministry official who briefed reporters at the ministry, referring in particular to 13 minutes of video footage.
The video footage also included the voice of the pilot of the MSDF P-1 aircraft, who the ministry said heard the same radar sounds while flying near the destroyer.
Japanese officials said that they had identified FC (fire control) waves as being directed from the STIR-180 fire control system of the South Korean destroyer.
However, it is not yet clear — and is perhaps unlikely — that the newly-revealed evidence will put an end to the Tokyo-Seoul dispute.
“We express deep regrets over its decision to stop consultations designed to verify the facts,” Choi Hyun-soo, a spokeswoman for Seoul’s defense ministry, said of Tokyo’s move, according to Yonhap News Agency.
“The sounds that the Japanese side presented are just mechanical sounds from which we can never verify the pieces of information we have demanded — the detection date, angle and traits of electromagnetic waves,” she added.

Japan Times

You can read more at the link, but the Japanese Defense Ministry even admits this is not a smoking gun, but believe all the evidence released so far would convince a third party observer that a fire control radar was in fact used by the ROK on the Japanese aircraft.

This issue is not going to be completely resolved unless the Japanese release sensitive radar data collection evidence which they likely will not do. Releasing how sensitive their radar wave detection capability is just to make a political point against the ROK is probably not worth it.

Just all the more reason the Japanese should just lets this issue go:

Hopefully no one that follows this issue closely is surprised by North Korea continuing to develop their nuclear weapons program:

North Korea‘s Kim Jong Un is “gaining time” as he fine-tunes his nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, a Japanese analyst said.
During a conversation Monday with former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus at Japan Society, former Lieutenant General of Japan’s Self-Defense Force Koichi Isobe said North Korea has not stopped military developments despite refraining from provocations.

“Kim Jong Un is gaining time to continue developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles,” Isobe said. “The threat of intermediate ballistic missiles [that can target Japan] still remains.”
The former Japanese commander added Tokyo faces challenges across three strategic fronts, including the Korean Peninsula.

“Since the 2010s, all three fronts have become tense. Traditional geopolitics has come back to the region.”
Gen. Petraeus, best known for leading the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, agreed North Korea is developing nuclear and missile capabilities, but said the testing of missiles stopped because of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s confrontational approach.
“The only way to [stop provocations] was to get the attention of China, and this is why you had some of the rhetoric, not all of which would have been my choice of words at various times,” Petraeus said, referring to Trump’s threat in 2017 to “totally destroy” North Korea and “rocket man” Kim.

UPI

You can read more at the link.

This is so anti-Black and imperialist, I can't even. In fact, I'd argue that K-pop, esp the inclusion of rap, is in many ways Koreans adapting Black musical forms as a reaction to their own experiences with racist colonial oppression by Japan. https://t.co/RL1b3ffpxS

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧🌈 (@IBJIYONGI) January 9, 2019

For those that have not been following this issue, the Japanese side does not dispute the forced labor claim, what they dispute is that they already paid compensation with the 1965 treaty. Instead of handing out money for individual compensation, the ROK government used the money to develop the economy instead.

A South Korean court said Wednesday it has ordered the seizure of local assets of a Japanese company after it refused to compensate several wartime forced laborers, in an escalation of a diplomatic brawl between the Asian neighbors.
Japan called the decision “extremely regrettable” and said it will push for talks with Seoul on the issue.
In a landmark ruling in October, South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. to pay 100 million won ($88,000) each to four plaintiffs forced to work for the company when Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula in 1910-45.

But the company refused to follow that ruling, siding with Japan’s long-held positon that all colonial-era compensation issues were settled by a 1965 treaty that restored diplomatic relations between the two governments. Japanese officials said they could take the issue to the International Court of Justice.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link, but is the ROK government going support someone who makes a compensation claim against China for their role in the destruction of South Korea during the Korean War that killed tens of thousands of South Koreans?

By the way Joshua Stanton over at One Free Korea makes a good point, I wonder how much the sagging Moon administration approval ratings have to do with this?

I haven't read the news today. Are the South Korean president's approval ratings down? https://t.co/Tway5G267Y

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) January 9, 2019

Probably wouldn't go as far as to say that Korea doesn't care, but it's been notable how comms from the ROK side have been largely siloed to MND, while those from Japan have often come from Abe's circle. One side is clearly eager to make a bigger deal out of this than the other. https://t.co/fLgg2XhQG9

— 이주민 / Chris Lee (@oldtype) January 7, 2019