CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/15/asia/japan-north-korea-missile-reaction/index.html
— Residents in northern Japan were woken abruptly
Friday by blaring air raid sirens signaling a North Korean
intermediate-range ballistic missile was about to fly over their
heads.
It was the second time in just over two weeks the rogue state
had fired a projectile over Japanese territory, a provocation
which was immediately condemned by Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe.
The missile passed over the northern island of Hokkaido where
anxious residents told local media they didn’t understand why
North Korea was acting so antagonistically.
But CNN’s Tokyo producer Yoko Wakatsuki said broader reaction in Tokyo and across national media was more
measured.
“People know what North Korea is doing is a little bit of provocation … they know this is not a direct attack to
Japan, it’s not an overture to war,” CNN Tokyo producer Yoko Wakatsuki said.
But underneath the calm exterior, Friday’s launch has widened a growing fault line in the ideological war over how
Japan should deal with the North Korean threat to the region.
Abe’s government have sought closer ties with the United States while working to change Japan’s post-World War
II constitution to allow the country to actively defend itself against external threats.
But Koichi Nakano, Political Science professor at Sophia University, told CNN Abe’s opponents are angry their
supposed ally in Washington was making Japan less safe under President Trump and want to soften their ties to
the US, while upholding their nation’s pacifist values.
“The danger of North Korea has been if anything heightened after Trump came to power (due to) his sometimes
really provocative language and tweets. He’s not really helping that much,” he said.
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The push for re-militarization
For decades, Japan has debated revising its pacifist constitution which prevents it from initiating war.
But in recent years, under the threat of attack by an increasingly antagonistic North Korea, Shinzo Abe’s
government has made a renewed push for change.
“If the government gets its way, it’s quite conceivable Abe will
use this to try to revise the constitution to ‘normalize’ Japan’s
defense position,” Nakano said.
The constitution came into eect
in 1947, after Japan’s defeat
in World War II, and says “land, sea and air forces, as well as
other war potential will never be maintained.” The Japanese
military is currently known as the Self-Defense Forces.
In mid-April, Abe said Japan’s security situation in the region
was “getting increasingly severe,” referring to the North
Korean threat. But repeated polls among the Japanese public
have found no appetite for constitutional change.
“Abe and his government are trying to make the most of this
crisis and the opportunity, almost, to try to make an argument
(for) the push towards remilitarization,” Nakano said.
But Heigo Sato, vice president of the Institute of World Studies
at Takushoku University, told CNN Abe was first and foremost trying to change the constitution to legalize Japan’s
current armed forces.
“We don’t know if Abe has a hidden objective to remilitarize Japan after those changes to the constitution,” he
said.
The nuclear option
Speaking to CNN on Thursday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said while he was in charge there would be
no nuclear weapons in his country, no matter what the North does.
This has long been the stance of Japan as well, but in recent
years some politicians have begun to raise the possibility of
nuclearization in the wake of North Korea’s nuclear testing.
“There are politicians who are arguing about nuclear sharing
with the US, meaning to bring in tactical nukes into the
Japanese mainland so we can have some sort of deterrence,”
Sato said, adding it was considered an option of last resort.
Japan is the only country in the world to suer
the eects
of
an atomic explosion within a civilian setting. The bombings,
which occurred in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have
colored attitudes to nuclear weapons ever since.
Additionally, it is still recovering from the nuclear disaster at
Fukushima power plant in 2011, when an earthquake followed
by a tsunami blew out safety systems and triggered a
meltdown.
“The opposition to the idea of Japan going nuclear is even stronger obviously than the idea of revising (the
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“The opposition to the idea of Japan going nuclear is even stronger obviously than the idea of revising (the
constitution) … even the discussion of that continues to be taboo,” Nakano said.
But a nuclear South Korea under Moon or another leader could change that, Tong Zhao, fellow at the CarnegieTsinghua
Center for Global Policy, told CNN.
“If South Korea pursued its own nuclear program, Japan will feel a great pressure to follow suit and there will be
broader implications in China and Russia,” he said.
Arms race in East Asia
Japan already has a number of defensive options to deal with a missile fired out of North Korea, experts say.
Naval destroyers fitted with Aegis missile defense systems can be positioned to shoot down projectiles, but the
system is far from perfect, Zhao said.
“Japan has to place the Aegis-mounted ships in the right
place before the missile launches in order to have a good
chance to engage the missiles. (Plus) interception is not
perfect, it’s unlikely to be fully successful,” he said.
Tokyo continues to improve its defensive capabilities in the
face of constant provocations from North Korea, but any rapid
expansion of its military or changes to its constitution could
have implications far outside Pyongyang.
Zhao said, in an eort
to deter North Korea, Japan could
provoke an arms race in East Asia with South Korea, China
and even Russia.
“There is deep distrust among the regional countries … some
Chinese argue Japan is stirring up tensions over the Korean
peninsula in order to have an excuse to have its own military,”
he said.
Nakano said any knee jerk reaction to the North Korean threat could risk inflaming tensions across the region.
“North Korea is performing provocatively, no doubt about it … but the tense conditions are not just about North
Korea but about China and the US as well,” he said.