Forum Sur l'Armée Algérienne chinaview.cn 2009-11-22
TOKYO, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) — Japan’s Foreign Ministry will admit that a secret pact between Japan and the United States, which allows nuclear-laden U.S. military vessels and aircraft to stopover in Japanese territory, does exist according to a statement made by the ministry on Saturday.
Following increasing allegations and mounting evidence that such a pact was in existence, Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka set up a task force in September to conduct a « full and comprehensive » investigation into the allegations.
The task force now headed by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and consisting of around fifteen ministry officials, has looked into some 3,200 in-house documents and 3,700 documents from the Japanese Embassy in Washington since Sept. 25. During Okada’s in-house probe, documents have been found that corroborate the existence of the secret nuclear agreement, according to sources close to the matter.
Coupled with this finding, a former vice foreign minister recently came forward attesting to the Japan-U.S. clandestine understanding, saying that he was privy to the minutes of the meeting in which the secret pact was made in 1960.
« I saw them. I remember we looked into them after something happened, » the former top official, who served in key Foreign Ministry posts in the 1980s and 1990s, said on condition of anonymity.
The ex-official added he does not remember the exact incident that led him to view the minutes.
The minutes in question are currently being kept by the U.S. government, according to declassified U.S. documents.
»The probe is now in the final stage, and we will announce the outcome in January, » Okada said Saturday, in a brief statement devoid of any details and negating Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka’s pledge to issue a detailed report on his findings in November.
OUSTED LDP IN « CYCLE OF DENIAL »
Under the 1960 bilateral security treaty between the two nations, Washington is required to consult with Tokyo before any nuclear weapons are brought into Japan, however Japan’s Foreign Ministry has now indicated that its recent probe into the documents has revealed that stopovers of U.S. military vessels or aircraft with nuclear weapons are not subject to prior consultation.
According to former Japanese ministers and top bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry involved with handling the deal, in revising the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960 the two allies also made a secret agreement under which Tokyo would give tacit approval to Washington on the stopover of U.S. military aircraft or vessels carrying nuclear weapons in Japanese territory.
Thus, Washington construed that any prior consultation with Tokyo would only need to be made in the case of the deployment of nuclear weapons on land or in the air and that stopovers of aircraft and vessels with such weapons were not bound by prior consultation.
According to former top ministry officials of the administration of then Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who inked the revised security pact, the Prime Minister accepted the U.S. interpretation of the new deal.
Hence it’s could be deemed reasonable to assume that in light of the loophole in the 1960 treaty and amid mounting testimony from former high-level Japanese ministers, that such stopovers could have frequently been made by U.S. military vessels, with nuclear payloads, over the past half-century.
Although the secret deal itself has already become known to the public by declassification of U.S. diplomatic documents in the late 1990s, the former Japanese government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has consistently denied the existence of such a secret deal between the two countries, saying, « As we have never faced demands for prior consultations, we have no other choice than determining that nuclear (weapons) have not been brought into Japan. »
Suffice to say if Washington has been acting under the assumption that stopovers were exempt from needing prior clearance, then it’s of no wonder the ruling LDP government(s) at the time claimed that nuclear weapons were not being brought into Japanese territory by U.S. military vessels — but the facts, including recent testimony, suggest Japan’s previous administrations have, for a long time, known otherwise.
Four former top Japanese ministry officials who have all served as vice foreign minister (the most senior bureaucratic post at the ministry) have all recently acknowledged that a secret pact has been in existence for decades, although perhaps the most compelling testimony comes from a former Foreign Ministry administrative vice minister, Ryohei Murata in a well-publicized interview with a Japanese national newspaper.
Ryohei Murata, a former Foreign Ministry administrative vice minister, told the Mainichi newspaper that Japanese and U.S. governments have had a secret accord whereby Japan would tacitly approve port calls and passage through Japanese territorial waters by U.S. warships carrying nuclear weapons.
Murata, who served in the position from July 1987 to August 1989, said the accord was reached in 1960, when the two countries renewed the bilateral security treaty.
Murata’s testimony, that flies in the face of repeated LDP refutation of the matter, marks the first time a former administrative vice foreign minister has gone on record as saying such a deal has existed.
« My predecessor told me to convey the contents of the secret accord to the minister, in my capacity as the administrative vice minister. »
Murata said that he did discuss the contents of the pact with the foreign minister at the time.
TREADING ON EGGSHELLS
Following the Foreign Ministry’s admission Saturday, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan now has the delicate task of dealing with the Japanese public who, for decades, were led to believe, through such acts as the LDP’s continued « cycle of denial, » that their country’s three non-nuclear principles were being upheld by their government.
From the time of the decimation of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures at the end of WWII, to the present day, Japanese public sentiment has become increasingly opposed to the presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, in its waters and its skies and indeed the Japanese people are, generally speaking, staunch supporters of nuclear non-proliferation globally.
The three principles of not possessing, manufacturing or permitting nuclear weapons into Japanese territory, were first outlined by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1967, amid negotiations over the return of Okinawa from the U.S. The Diet formally adopted the principles in 1971.
Since then every prime minister of Japan has publicly reaffirmed the « Three Non-Nuclear Principles » as outlined by Sato and now Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and the ruling DPJ must tread a very thin line between holding former administrations accountable for deceiving generations of anti-nuclear citizens and not further straining ties with an already testy Washington.
If the DPJ fail to address and amend the 1960 security treaty between Japan and the U.S. in an open and transparent manner, then the newly-elected party who has vowed to chart a more « politically independent » course that is less reliant on military and economic ties with the U.S., will be seen as toothless — as has been the case with previous LDP administrations, whose leaders have been caricatured as Washington’s puppets in the political columns of respected broadsheets.
Analysts have commented that Washington is having a tough time adjusting to Japan’s new political ideologies after half a century of almost unbroken LDP rule, which put the Japan-U.S. alliance at the core of its diplomacy.
Further adding to the strain on the DPJ’s embryonic relationship with Washington and despite President Obama’s recent goodwill visit to Japan, during which he reaffirmed the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance, is the DPJ’s re-examination of the 2006 U.S.-Japan Roadmap for Realignment and Implementation.
This plan outlines a wholesale strategic repositioning of U.S. forces in Okinawa. The Japanese government are seeking to relocate a key air facility outside of Okinawa, or even outside Japan to lessen base-hosting burdens on the local population — a proposal cited by U.S. officials as potentially « testing ties with Japan’s new government. »
Added to this the fact that Japan’s Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa has recently stated his intentions to terminate the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force’s refueling missions in the Indian Ocean, in support of U.S.-led antiterrorism operations in and around Afghanistan, and will pull out its two naval ships when their current mandate expires in January, and the potential for increased diplomatic tension in the near future between Japan and the U.S. is more than tenable, according to analysts.
The U.S. is adamant that its role as a nuclear deterrent in the Asia-Pacific region is paramount to its own national security and those of the region it purports to protect and thus has called for bilateral security relations between the two nations to not be damaged or compromised in any way.
In October, the U.S. Secretary of Defense and Pentagon’s top-official Robert Gates resolutely warned Japan during a visit to Tokyo that it should not let its ongoing probe into an alleged secret Japan-U.S. nuclear pact, damage bilateral relations or undermine the U.S. nuclear deterrence in the area.
The U.S. defense ministry has stated that the secret pact issue is Japan’s « domestic matter, » however if the DPJ’s recent maneuvers away from U.S. military mandates are anything to go by, it would be reasonable to surmise that the secret pact issue, far from being a simple domestic matter, may call for the U.S. to respond to resolute diplomatic action from the DPJ, itself now under immense public scrutiny and pressure to ratify Japan’s original commitment to it’s three non-nuclear principles, as outlined in 1967 — a commitment that has united a nation and inspired a myriad of denuclearization initiatives across the globe.
Editor: Xiong Tong
