Japan's unprincipled policymaking

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The Japan Times 
February 7th

A pattern of unprincipled policymaking

by BERNARD KRISHER 
Special to The Japan Times

Kim Dae Jung's election as the new president of South Korea dramatizes the
desire of people everywhere to be governed under a liberal democracy despite
the claim of Asian leaders that democracy in the region must be based on
"Asian values."

A freedom fighter who?like Nelson Mandela?traveled the long road from death
row to the presidential mansion, Kim never abandoned his principles. As a
result he endured two assassination attempts, was jailed, confined to house
arrest, kidnapped by KCIA thugs in Japan and spent more than five years in
exile. Now he has finally been rewarded by Korean voters for bringing them
the democracy they cherish. Kim said recently that if the rulers of
Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia had provided citizens with a liberal
democracy, an open-market economy and guaranteed transparency, the close
secret ties between politicians, banks and businessmen could never have
developed and economies would not have collapsed.

Kim's victory further underscores Japan's unprincipled foreign policy, which
is motivated by self-serving economic goals at the expense of moral values.
Beyond that, it confirms Japan's failure as potential regional leader,
capable of inspiring Asian countries to build the kind of open societies
that would prevent economic crises of the kind they face today. 

Japanese Foreign Ministry, which has been responsible for this short-sighted
policy, never counted on Kim Dae Jung's election and therefore neglected
both his human and civil rights when they permitted him to be kidnapped in
1973 from a Tokyo hotel room by agents of the Park Chung Hee regime. Without
protest from local authorities, Kim was clandestinely moved out on a
motorboat and transferred to a ship on the high seas, where he would have
been dumped overboard had the U.S. government not intervened to save his
life. Kim was then ditched on a Seoul street, rearrested and subsequently
tried and sentenced to death.

Kim pleaded with Japan to demand that the Korean government return him to
this country, but the ministry ignored him repeatedly out of concern for
Japan's relations with the authoritarian Park regime and its economic
interests in Korea.

The pattern is a familiar one. The Foreign Ministry has consistently tended
to support questionable regimes for the sake of its economic interests.

Japan was the first to recognize Hanoi because it wished to establish a
stronger economic base in Vietnam, and it has never seriously criticized
China's human rights violations. It is active in Myanmar, where its
businessmen maintain warm ties with the ruling junta that continues to place
Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi?who gained more than 80 percent of the vote
in 1990?under periodic house arrest. Furthermore, Japan maintains much
closer ties with Libya, Iraq and Iran than do the other democratic,
industrialized countries. Japan also moved quickly to embrace Cambodia's
Prime Minister Hun Sen, while refusing to meet First Prime Minister Norodom
Ranariddh, who was popularly elected but later deposed in a coup led by Hun Sen.

Japan has rejected only North Korea, where it has little to gain
economically. Until recently, Japan has stood alone while its rice surpluses
grew by leaps and bounds, reluctant to provide emergency food to stem a
famine that particularly harms children and the elderly.

This kind of policy follows a pattern of unprincipled action that goes back
to World War II. During the war a very courageous Japanese diplomat named
Sempo Sugihara was stationed in Lithuania. There Sugihara stamped the
passports of thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler's concentration camps, which
allowed them passage through Japan to a haven in Curacao.

Yet the rigid Foreign Ministry never forgave Sugihara for violating its
inhumane rules against issuing such visas, and he was dismissed in disgrace
from the foreign service after the war.

Sugihara was eventually honored, 50 years after the deed, but unfortunately
not before his death. His widow had to accept on his behalf the award for
one of the most humanitarian individual acts in recent Japanese history. It
was another tragic example of the Foreign Ministry always doing too little,
too late.

	Bernard Krisher has worked in Japan for more than 30 years as a journalist
He is the publisher of The Cambodia Daily, where this article first appeared

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