Mr. Obama's Japan Visit

     Mr. Obama conferred with Japan’s Prime Minister Abe on 24 April, but the joint communique was issued only a few minutes before his departure for Seoul the next day, showing how the discussions between the two came across with difficulties.

     The particular difficulties were in the area of trade, centred around the possible TPP agreements.  The US were putting enormous pressure for lowering the Japanese tariffs on the five items, i.e., rice, wheat, sugar, meat and milk products.  These are the life and death problem for many of our farmers, who have been putting up a stiff fight against our own government.  The chief US negotiator is reported to have mentioned ‘breakthrough’, and it makes us suspect that there could be an untold story about the negotiations, but officially our government has not yielded yet, and let us hope that they would continue to do so.

     On the security question Obama said, for the first time as a US President, that the Senkaku Islands have been under the Japanese rule, and as such are placed under Article 5 of the Japan-US Security Treaty.  This would justify the US going into action on the Japanese side in case of an external attack.  Obama, however, did not go further and said that the US would actually take such an action.

     He had, of course, China in mind, which he is not visiting this time, and took a great care in discussing the East Asian scene.  On the question of the right of collective self-defence also, a very fashionable subject in Japan today, while Abe said that the matter is under study by his government so that the right would become exercisable, presumably with the US, Obama simply said that he would support such a study, but did not say that he supported the direction of the study itself.  Seen in this light we must say that Abe is more war-like of the two.  He did not spell out any idea on how to ease the current tension in East Asia not militarily or strategically but peacefully and politically, thus, I am afraid, exposing the poverty of thought among our politicians.

     Incidentally, Abe and the ruling LDP have recently started an argument in connection with the right of collective self-defence which is, to say the least, funny.  Back in 1959, the Tokyo District Court made the famous “Date(a surname) Judgment” to the effect that the US military presence in Japan was against the Article 9 of the Constitution prohibiting the state to have any fighting potential.  The astonished Japanese and the US governments put pressure on the Supreme Court(which itself is a matter of great shame) to do something about it.  Thereupon it passed the “Sunagawa(a place name) Judgment” later in that year.  It says that the Article 9 does not deny Japan’s right for self-defence, the stationing of foreign troops in Japan outside the Japanese command cannot be called Japan’s fighting potential, and Japan may exercise her right of self-defence through the US military presence in Japan.  Apparently both of them discuss Japan’s right of individual self-defence, but not of collective self-defence.  The LDP, however, have chosen to take it that they, especially the latter by the Supreme Court, have admitted that Japan has both types as is defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter.  This is startling as back in 1959 nobody dreamt of discussing the collective self-defence.  The LDP is thus really running short of their intellectual resources.