The Japanese government publicized a new defense outline, including a rejiggering of the mission of the SDF, Friday. The Yomiuri‘s English article is ineptly translated but gives good background; the Asahi‘s English article gives more information about the outline itself. The new outline stresses that flexibility and resilience (not to mention missiles, which the LDP’s coalition partner the New Komeito has not been keen on) will be key elements in the portfolio of possible responses to terrorist and military threats from here on. It also breaks new ground by naming names: China and North Korea are referred to as potential threats, and the Middle East is deemed a key strategic region with respect to Japan’s defense. The old assumption that SDF activity would be limited to reactions to threats in or very close to Japanese territory is gone. And a good thing, too. The last time the government updated its SDF mission statement was to deal with the end of the Cold War, nine years ago. The world is a different place–or rather, we now recognize how different it is.



On the other hand, the head of the SDF announced this weekend that if the situation in Iraq becomes too dangerous, the non-combat SDF personnel, whose deployment there has been extended for a year, will be pulled out anyway. That’s fair enough. They are not, after all, on a combat mission.

For anyone who’s been sleeping too soundly, here are two reports from the Asahi that I didn’t get around to mentioning. One relates that, while Japan is pouring money into its spy satellite network, it is still overwhelmingly dependent on information actually picked up by US satellites:

It was only after North Korea lobbed a Taepodong missile over the Japanese archipelago in August 1998 that the government decided to step up monitoring of the reclusive state via satellite.



Almost five years and billions of yen later, Japan launched its own reconnaissance satellites–one optical and one radar–in March 2003.



Two more were planned to go up last November but remain grounded after the H2A rocket No. 6, which was to carry the satellites, failed to launch.



In the past 18 months, a whopping 250 billion yen has been spent on the project. To top that off, annual running costs are in the range of 20 billion yen. In August, the government announced that another optical satellite will be launched next fiscal year. A second radar satellite is slated for fiscal 2006.

As always, my point is not that Japan’s image as technologically advanced is a lie. It’s that Japan, like every other country, is better at some things than at others. And at the moment, rockets are not its strong suit. (Last November is not the first time one has failed to launch or had to be shot down.) As someone who loves both America and Japan, I’m glad as always that we’re helping each other out.



Of course, America is not the only country Japan trades with, and investigators are now trying figure out exactly how measuring instruments (which can be used to make aluminum tubes–we all remember from Colin Powell why those matter, right?) shipped to Malaysia ended up in a Libyan nuclear facility:

Seemingly innocuous but high-tech precision instruments that found their way to a nuclear facility in Libya were rerouted after being shipped directly from a manufacturer in Japan to a company in Malaysia, sources said.



The devices included precision instruments for three-dimensional measurements, which can be used to develop nuclear weapons.



…



Asked for comment, a senior official with the Kanagawa company said it “was beyond imagination” that the equipment ended up in Libya.



A spokesman for the Scomi group, parent company of SCOPE, said it had no idea how the instruments were resold for onward export. It strenuously denied having links to the nuclear black market.

There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the Japanese company knew its instruments were going to be routed illegally to Libya, which is good, of course.

The Yomiuri reports that prefectural governments will be responsible for drawing up new local security procedures to deal with potential attacks, particularly by missile or terrorism. For its part, the federal government is revising its own outdated Cold War-era rulebook, with a choice of model that I find nothing short of thrilling:

The government is following Israel’s example in compiling manuals stipulating these measures and distributing them to the public.



Israel was hit by about 40 missiles from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. At that time, Israeli authorities distributed manuals that included such measures as having people seal windows and avoid the outer walls when inside a house or building.



It was reported that only two people were killed by the missile attacks as a result of such measures.



The government believes that the public distribution of such manuals will be effective in fully informing people of evacuation and other safety measures, according to the sources.

When the Japanese tendency toward decentralization hits the post-War Japanese tendency toward rigid procedure-worship, the results are often very poor. But there’s an equally strong tradition of initiative at the village level–you can still see it in the organization of parades on festival days, which a fascinating article I read long ago posited was the origin of the Japan, Inc. corporate structure–that at its best combines group loyalty with idiosyncratic local knowledge. The new security plans are still in process, but if they really do succeed in allowing the federal government to expose the nation to the wisdom of Israel’s experience while allowing local authorities to devise the actual protocols that work best for them…well, I’ll be happy as a pig in sh*t.

The DPRK’s People’s Army* has a unit of hackers that is operating at a first-world level, says South Korea’s Department of Defense:

こうした専門要員は人民武力省（国防省）の指揮自動化局や偵察局に配属され、ハッカー部隊として韓国や米国、日本などの軍事情報収集、軍の指揮・通信網を混乱させるなどのサイバー戦を担当しているとした。



These specialized personnel are assigned to the Command/Mobilization and Reconnaissance Agencies of the Ministry of the Korean People’s Army (the DPRK’s department of defense) and are believed to be in charge of cyberwar strikes such as disrupting South Korean, US, and Japanese intelligence gathering and armed forces command and communications networks.

You can’t really be shocked by this, but I think it does underscore that North Korea (despite its ineptitude in many areas) is not just sitting there counting its long-range missiles while we natter about “getting back to the negotiating table.” Yet another reason to be thankful that we have resilience and dynamism on our side.

* Is that what they call it in English? I’ll look later…uh, yeah, it is. Well, it’s the Korean People’s Army, to remind us all that those heirs to the Shilla in the South are not real Koreans but stooges who have sold out to the West. Don’t bother bringing up that if we extended the metaphor, we might remember that the Shilla cooperated with the Chinese to take down the northern Koguryô kingdom, and the side that’s allied with China now is…. It’s not the Tang Dynasty anymore.
BTW, have you seen the official DPRK website? Not hours of amusement, but certainly minutes. I notice there’s no link to a Korean Friendship Association in Japan, too.

The DPRK may be preparing to test-launch another missile:

The United States and Japan have detected signs that North Korea is preparing to launch a ballistic missile capable of reaching almost anywhere in Japan, Japanese government sources said on Thursday.



The preparations were detected after the reclusive communist state refused to take part in a fourth round of six-party talks on ending its nuclear ambitions and said it would never give up its nuclear deterrent.



Tokyo and Washington had detected the signs after analyzing data from reconnaissance satellites and radio traffic, the Japanese government sources said.

The Nikkei Japanese edition also reports that the North Korean central news agency was published as saying, “If the US brings about a nuclear war (on the Korean Peninsula), it is inevitable that US bases in Japan will draw Japan into the same nuclear war as well.*” Don’t you love that? The DPRK regime was just sitting there south of the Yalu, minding its own business, getting on with the quiet domestic tasks of deciding which citizens to imprison and which to let starve to death from its incompetent economic policies, when the US swaggered by and forced it to get all bellicose.



Fortunately, no one’s certain that there’s a launch planned; everyone’s just on watch. We’ll see. As far as the blow it might deal to the six-member talks goes, who seriously believes the DPRK would have been persuaded to give up its missiles, anyway? It has a notorious record for breaking agreements. I don’t think negotiations should be stopped, of course–things could get really ugly if everyone openly gave up speaking to each other–but I think the disruption of this particular round of talks is less significant than having yet another show of animosity in the region.

* Lit., “US bases in Japan will become a fuse that draws the flame of that nuclear war to Japan, too.” Evocative metaphor, huh?

Okay, you know that mushroom cloud they saw over North Korea across the border from China on Friday? Well, we certainly heard about it here in Japan (flyover country for the DPRK’s test missiles). There didn’t seem to be much to say about it, since, unlike the explosion a few months ago, when casualties were reported almost immediately, there have been none from this weekend. It seems to be as certain as it can be that the explosion this weekend wasn’t nuclear. The DPRK says it was for a hydroelectric project. North Korea is very mountainous and has plenty of hydroelectric potential–in fact, it’s significantly more resource-rich in many ways than the South–so that’s not a far-fetched explanation. Neither is South Korea’s conjecture that the explosion might have been an accident in an underground munitions facility. In any case, the Chinese have reported no influx of the injured into their hospitals across the river, so it’s possible that it was a controlled blast with no injuries, or (more darkly) that the operation was so secret that the DPRK is not allowing the injured to be treated where they might be noticed. You never know, especially since the North Korean government would account for its actions the same way no matter which was true:

The BBC said that when [DPRK Foreign Ministry official] Paek was asked why North Korea had not explained earlier about the blasts he told Rammell Pyongyang had not done so because all foreign journalists were liars.

So Prime Minister Koizumi went to Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il has said he was welcome, most welcome. The meeting apparently ended in less than two hours–perhaps there was a spontaneous city-wide banquet in Kim’s honor that he had to rush off to–but there was plenty to talk about. There’s that little matter of nuclear disarmament, for one thing (the DPRK has been known to file missiles over our heads in Japan–just testing, you know).



But the focal point was clearly the Japanese abductees. Five have returned to Japan; that leaves eight that the DPRK says are dead (I can’t remember all the cover stories, they’re so lame; one involved graves being washed away in a mudslide and therefore unrecoverable–things like that) and two that it claims never entered North Korea. So from the Japanese viewpoint, there are five abductees repatriated and ten missing, of whom the DPRK acknowledges eight. That’s a total of fifteen, which I’m pretty sure is lower than the number of cabinet ministers and party officials currently implicated in the non-payment-of-pension-premiums scandal, but I could be wrong.



The Japanese are trying to get abductees’ family members (mostly children) in North Korea to Japan, which is why there’s such a fuss over US Army deserter Charles Jenkins, who defected to North Korea in the ’60’s and is married to abductee Hitomi Soga. The US has indicated that it may, in fact, expect him to be handed over for court martial if he accompanies his daughters to Japan to see their mother. All of this making nice with the DPRK makes me sick, but I guess diplomacy wouldn’t be a delicate business if it always involved dealing with good people.



Added at 1 a.m.: Predictably, the families of abductees are stomping mad that Koizumi didn’t push more for information about those unaccounted for. One’s heart goes out to them–most of these people were snatched off Japanese soil in their teens or early twenties, remember. But I have a hard time imagining what good a hard-line stance would do in this kind of case. The DPRK is run by whim-driven nut cases, unfortunately. In the meantime, children from two families came from North Korea and were reunited with their repatriated parents near Haneda Airport. It’s been a year and seven months since they’ve seen each other. One of the parents, Kaoru Hasuike (beautiful name, that: Kaoru means “fragrance,” and Hasuike means “lotus pond”), said, “My daughter has become so lovely….and my son has grown tall.” The last sentence in this article reports, “With that, he broke into the smile of a proud father.” Good for them. Let’s hope the rest of the endings are as happy as they can be.

Wow. Two trains containing inflammable materials have collided in North Korea near the Chinese border. Both the CNN and the Nikkei (Japan Economics Journal) articles report that the DPRK news agency hasn’t broadcast the incident. This is not just some little sideswipe in the middle of nowhere that’s going to cause a government energy agency to lose (even more) money. There may be up to 3000 casualties. Those poor people. Given that the accident involved fire and industrial chemicals, the injuries are probably pretty nasty.



It isn’t hard to imagine the combination of mismanagement and substandard equipment that might have brought this kind of thing on. It also isn’t hard to imagine the quality of medical care people will get, even with China’s assistance. The proximity of “self-sufficient” North Korea, with its news blackouts and constant leakage of refugees (not to mention those missile tests), is one of the creepiest and most depressing things about living in this part of the world.