Asian nuclear politics intensifies

By Edward Neilan

TOKYO (JP): Japan's assertion of leadership worldwide in condemning the recent nuclear tests by France and China has the accidental benefit of superb timing.

Without being facetious, everyone agrees that Japan's credentials are impeccable as a nuclear protester, given that this country is the only one ever to have been the target of nuclear weapons, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Now, 50 years later, nuclear politics are intensifying with a certain geographical focus on Asia and a welcome position of Japan in the spotlight leading the clamor against further testing. The spectacle of Tokyo protesting French nuclear tests in French Polynesia could be observed to background music of Stranger in Paradise, such has been Japan's previous timidity in calling on nuclear powers to halt tests.

If Japan's protests to France's audacious testing half a continent away from its capital of Paris seemed bold, the Tokyo one-two punch of verbal protests plus suspension of economic aid loans to China over its tests was all the more startling.

Japan's past record of rapping China's knuckles for excesses in nuclear issues, human rights, territorial pushiness, interference in domestic discussions about Taiwan, sloppy fiscal management in handling of foreign investments, ignoring of contracts signed with outsiders and other issues has borne a closer resemblance to a limp noodle than to firm policy.

By comparison, Japan's recent freezing of grant aid in protest of continued Chinese nuclear tests was magnificent. Observers could tell the protests had found their mark in Beijing in the way that regime responded. China's official spokesmen characterized the Japanese aid cutoff as "wasted" and "dangerous."

The People's Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist Party newspaper, said Japan has no right to criticize Chinese nuclear tests given that it enjoys protection under the United States' nuclear umbrella.

"China is the country that suffered the most under Japanese aggression. That's why our receiving of Japanese grants-in-aid has a special historical background," the paper said.

Warning that the freeze will damage bilateral relations, the article accused Japan of abusing its economic power to exert pressure on other countries.

The Japanese people's anti-nuclear attitude is understandable in view of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it said, but the bombs were dropped as a result of Japan's war of aggression.

Beijing has reiterated its long-held line about having the "proper right" to conduct a limited number of tests and to maintain a "small nuclear arsenal since China still is exposed to the nuclear threat today."

But China cannot have it both ways. Each time there is some move -- or discussion of some move -- by Japan to distance itself from the United States, Beijing is the first to caution against "Japanese rearmament."

Japan's position was correct in cooperating closely with the United States and South Korea in squelching the North Korean nuclear threat before it could get off the ground. China and Russia, it must be said, offered some pressure toward solution in that case.

The world became weary of Japan's 50th anniversary portrayals of itself as the guilt-free "victim" of World War II atomic bombings. But then regard of Japan's position by world opinion switched through a quirk in timing. Instead of growing more tired of Japanese moralizing and expressions of self-pity -- particularly when other nations had war dead of their own to memorialize -- the world has seemed to respond positively to Japan's call for France and China to halt testing and for a United Nations resolution banning all testing.

French President Jacques Chirac got the message. His office has said he will not visit Japan next spring because of "the recent stance of the political leaders in Japan." In accepting the invitation earlier, Chirac and Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama agreed the nuclear issue "must not be allowed to harm bilateral relations."

Akira Iriye, professor of history at Harvard University, writing in the current Japan Quarterly, gives some valuable atomic perspective.

He notes that some 50 million persons were killed in World War II, about 30 percent in Asia Pacific. Since World War II, another 50 million are said to have died in various wars.

"First, there has not been one Japanese killed among these 50 million, and second, that no one had been killed by nuclear weapons in the past 50 years."

The author implies that Japan may indeed covet the "U.S. nuclear umbrella" since it has given Japan a 50-year span free of war "in sharp contrast to the preceding 50 years in which it lost more than three million of its own people."

The apparent mesmerizing effect of nuclear weaponry use has only led the power to prevent their further utilization, but the result has been a "long peace" of smaller conventional wars.

Edward Neilan is a Tokyo-based analyst of Northeast Asian affairs.