Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Japanese Hostages

     Two Japanese have been taken hostages by the IS.  One of them is believed to have been already killed.  The second one has said in his broadcast late last night, Japan time, that he has been given twenty-four hours to live unless a woman terrorist captive by the Jordanian Government is released.

     Here I would like to write several questions concerning Japanese PM Abe's recent Middle East tour which immediately preceded this crisis during which the IS made the first announcement that they would murder the hostages.

    Abe and his entourage left Japan on 16 January.  Their first visit was to Egypt, where Abe gave a speech outlining his Middle East policy on 17.  My first question is why he said that he would give $ 200 million as humanitarian grant-in-aid specifically to those Arab countries fighting the IS.  Abe must have been known about the two hostages in their hands.  Did at least this part of his speech not amount to provocation to the IS?

     After the  speech he conferred with the Egyptian President, the former Army Chief of Staff, who and whose Government are strongly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood, and said that democratic transition of power was in progress in Egypt.  This was clearly another provocation.

     Then he visited Jordan on 17 and 18, meeting the King on both days, and proceeded to Israel. He conferred with the Israeli Prime Minister on two days, 18 and 19, reportedly on how to cope with the Islamists.  He, incidentally, also met the hawkish US Republican Senator McCain.  My third question is if he did not notice how dangerous it could be for the lives of the hostages to show publicly such intimate relations with the Israeli Government.

     On 20, the next day, while Abe was still in Jerusalem, the first announcement by the IS was broadcast.  Abe denounced it in a press conference in Jerusalem.  He then visited the Palestinian President in the West Bank on the same day, returned to Jerusalem, and came home on 21. Before coming home, however, he put the Vice Foreign Minister, who was in the entourage, in charge of the on-the-spot operation to be based at the Japanese Embassy in Jordan.  Jordan is among the US-led coalition of the willing against the IS.  Is the location appropriate?

     My fifth and final question is, why even now does Abe not try to keep distance from the US? The IS is, after all, a part of the legacy of the Iraq invasion of 2003.  Japan supported that invasion, and even sent a token military contingent.  For this reason alone, it is high time Japan might come away from the US intentions.  At the moment she is moving in the opposite direction. When the murder of the first hostage had been broadcast on 24, Abe phoned up Obama who was in India the next day.  This is hardly the way Japan can make contribution to a peaceful solution of the many-faceted Middle Eastern crisis.              

       

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Terror in Paris

     The great terror struck into the mind of the people of Paris and elsewhere, which started with an armed attack on a weekly newspaper on Wednesday, 7 January 2015, has not come to an end.  I would like to join all the others who are mourning the death of the victims.  I would also like to express my solidarity with those who are making a determined condemnation of the violence.

     I would like to make it clear, however, that I am not able to bring myself to support the view that the way the weekly newspaper was publishing under the name of satire should be defended in the name of the freedom of expression.  The freedom of expression should be certainly defended.  As a matter of fact it has been fought for and won by the efforts of the numerous people.  But is it worth the name, the glorious name, of that freedom to publish whatever one wishes to, even if it offends many innocent people?  And knowingly?

     And it is no ordinary minority of people.  There are said to be five to six million Muslims in France alone.  Some of them must be devout followers of the faith, many others must be secular.  However that may be, is France, meaning the ordinary French people, going to live with them in the many years to come or not?  If yes, is it not necessary for the French to come to terms with them by adjusting some of the traditional ideas they have been entertaining?  Even if they do so, it would not amount to the repression of the freedom of expression, which is part of the universal values of the mankind.  But perhaps they would have to modify their interpretation of it if necessary.  What is currently going on is a case in point.

     Many French would ask, why there are so many Muslims they have to cope with in their own country?  But it is the end-result of their own colonial history in the past, and they are reaping what they have sown for a long time.  They would have to take into consideration that many of those immigrants are in a disadvantageous condition.  Moreover, they are facing the rapid rise in recent years of the extreme Right in French politics who should not be there in a country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

     There is one more thing I would like to say here.  It is the relationship among the ordinary French, the immigrant Muslims, and the Jewish in France.  The terrorists have also attacked a Jewish supermarket.  Needless to say this was an unprovoked action, and it is likely to enhance hostility among the Jewish toward the Muslims.  It will also damage the position of the Palestinians.  What I would add here is that the Muslim immigrants are also facing the strong pro-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudice in the Jewish-Muslim spectrum.  Take, for example, what the French Prime Minister said on the street this time.  He said, 'We are all French Jews'.  Beautiful words if seen as the expression of solidarity with the victims.  But why not some words of solidarity with the ordinary, innocent Muslims at the same time, who must be deeply hurt by the terror and are badly in need of those words?                 

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Year-end Lower House Elections in Japan, 2014

     A Happy New Year to you all.  Let us hope, and we are entitled to hope, that the world will be more peaceful, with less socio-economic inequality, at the end of the year.

     Japan's Prime Minister Abe dissolved the Lower House of the Parliament much ahead of the end of its term, and the elections were held on 14 December.  We will take up three prominent features out of the results.  But why did he decide to go to the electorate to begin with?

     In short, in this writer's view, he lost confidence in his ability to manage economy.  It had been taken for granted that the economic performance would prove to be poor in the April-June quarter because of the hike in the consumption tax from 5 to 8 % on 1 April.  But contrary to the forecast, the downward trend continued in the July-September quarter, inviting sharper criticism of the "Abenomics".  The share prices continued to go up, but that was the only positive-if we may say so-upward trend in the economy, and its benefit was apparently limited to a very small stratum which includes lots of foreign buyers.  Almost every opinion poll would indicate that the great majority felt that the benefit of Abe's policies had not reached them.  He had been compelled to postpone the next stage of the hike to 10 % scheduled for 1 October 2015.

     The first prominent feature of the election results was that, in spite of all the above, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), together with its coalition partner, Komei Party, got a little more than two-thirds majority of the 475 seats in the House.  The voting rate was the lowest ever, 53 %.   A poll conducted soon afterwards says that only 11 % replied that it was because Abe's policies were highly valued by the electorate, but an astounding 72 % was of the view that it was because the opposition parties could not present viable counter measures.  The disaffection with the Abenomics was more clearly shown in the near wiping out of some of the opposition parties positioned more to the right of the LDP.  The foreign media called it the winning by default, and they were right.

     Another aspect of this was that, while the LDP got 75 % of the seats in the single-member constituencies, accounting for the majority of the seats, with only 48 % of the votes, they could get only 33 % of the party-wise proportional representation.

     The second feature was that the Communist Party of Japan nearly doubled their votes in the proportional representation to 11 %, and thereby increased its seats dramatically from the mere 8 to 21.  

     The third was the fact that in Okinawa Prefecture, where the main issue was whether to construct a new air base for the US forces stationed in Japan by the US-Japan Security Treaty, the candidates of the opposition alliance defeated the LDP candidates in all the four single-member constituencies.   This was also an epoch-making event, which took place on the heels of the anti-Abe, anti-LDP victory of the opposition alliance in the elections both for the Governor of Okinawa and the Mayor of Naha, its major administrative city, on 16 November, just four weeks previously.

     How will the Japanese politics move on from these points this year 2015?  Has the pattern in Okinawa shown the shape of things to come?  And will Abe and his LDP try to go ahead with their two-thirds majority in the Lower House in the direction of the Constitutional Amendment?