The History of Israel Reconsidered: A Talk by Ilan Pappe

FROM GYAKU

Professor Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University. He is the author of numerous books, including A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle East, The Israel/Palestine Question and, most recently, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006. On March 8, he spoke at a small colloquium in Tokyo organized by the NIHU Program Islamic Area Studies, University of Tokyo Unit, on the path of personal experiences that brought him to write his new book. The following is a transcript of his lecture, tentatively titled "The History of Israel Reconsidered" by organizers of the event.

Ilan Pappe: Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. I hope that you will ask me, afterwards, questions of a more general nature because I'm not sure how much I can cover in 40, 45, 50 minutes. I will be a bit personal, to begin with, and then move to the more general issues. I think it will help to understand what I am doing.

CONTINUE:  The History of Israel Reconsidered: A Talk by Ilan Pappe

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Japan Focus: North Korea, Japanese Uyoku and Koreans, Press Freedon in Japan, Abe & Comfort Women…

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	Jeff Kingston	Convulsions of Nation-Building: Violence-ridden East Timor on the eve of elections	786 Email
	Takahashi Tetsuya	Koreans Under Assault From the Japanese Right	785 Email
	T McNicol and D McNeill	Is Press Freedom Being Eroded in Japan?	784 Email
	Wada Haruki	The North Korean Nuclear Problem, Japan, and the Peace of Northeast Asia	783 Email
	Nishioka Hideko	'As Japanese, we wish to live as respectable human beings': Orphans of Japan's China war	782 Email
	Rowena Ward	Left Behind: Japan's Wartime Defeat and the Stranded Women of Manchukuo	781 Email
	Tessa Morris-Suzuki	Japan's 'Comfort Women': It's time for the truth (in the ordinary, everyday sense of the word)	780 Email
	David Fullbrook	China's Strategic Southeast Asian Overture	779 Email
	Denys Lombard	Another "Mediterranean" in Southeast Asia	778 Email
	Stefan Eklof	Piracy in Southeast Asia: Real Menace or Red Herring?	777 Email
	W Underwood and Kang Jian	Japan's Top Court Poised to Kill Lawsuits by Chinese War Victims	776 Email
	A Dudden and K Mizoguchi	Abe's Violent Denial: Japan's Prime Minister and the 'Comfort Women'	775 Email
	Christopher P. Hood	Bullets and Trains: Exporting Japan's Shinkansen to China and Taiwan	774 Email
	Hisane MASAKI	The Great Japan-Mongolia Love Affair: What price the UN Security Council Seat?	773 Email
	C. Caryl and A. Kashiwagi	The Good Son Falters: Japan's Abe Regime in Decline	772 Email
	Brenda Peterson	The Whale and the Cherry Blossom Festival	771 Email
	Susan Orlean	Robert Lang and the Global Reach of Origami	770 Email
	Sara L. M. Davis	Dance, Or Else: The Politics of Ethnic Culture on China's Southwest Borders	769 Email
	Jacob Stevens	Prisons of the Stateless: The Derelictions of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the Japanese Role     ALSO THESE CATEGORIES   Diplomacy and Security The Military and Security War and Peace History Politics and Ideology Economics Social Issues Culture Education The Atomic Bomb Atomic War Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Monday, February 19, 2007

The Courts, Japan’s Comfort Women & the Conscience of Humanity: Ruling in VAWW-Net Vs. NHK

By Norma Field

FULL ARTICLE (WITH CITATIONS) IS HERE:
http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2352

For those inclined to keep their hopes well under control when it comes to the Japanese judiciary’s capacity to deliver decisions even mildly critical of the political establishment, news of the Tokyo High Court’s finding in favor of the Violence-against-Women-in-War Japan Network (VAWW-Net Japan) against the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) was stunning enough to provoke initial eye-rubbing. At least I can say for myself that I had to read twice, and thrice, the first brief listserv message from Nishino Rumiko, one of VAWW-Net’s two co-representatives since the premature death (2002) of founder Matsui Yayori.

The High Court fined NHK and two subsidiary companies two million yen in total, whereas the District Court had not found NHK liable. Although the charge of political interference was denied, NHK was deemed to have reneged on the autonomy fundamental to the editing rights it claimed as a broadcaster in making alterations to a documentary on the Women’s International Tribunal War Crimes Tribunal of which VAWW-Net Japan was a major organizer. NHK immediately appealed the ruling.

The Context of the Tokyo High Court Decision

The subject of the contested television program was the December 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery (the “Women’s Tribunal"). The Women’s Tribunal, proposed by Matsui and actualized through the efforts of an international army of legal experts, scholars, citizen activists, and of course, the survivors of Japan’s military sexual slavery, construed itself as the continuation of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (1946-48), which notably had refused to take up the issues of sexual slavery and bacteriological warfare.

During the three days it was in session in Tokyo (a fourth day, during which the international team of justices deliberated to produce a preliminary finding, was devoted to testimony about current acts of sexual violence perpetrated in war zones the world over), the Tribunal put on record a mountain of historical documentation; demonstrated the solidarity of prosecution teams from China, East Timor, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Taiwan, with North and South Korea memorably producing a joint indictment; and perhaps mostly importantly, gave the aging survivors from eight Asian countries and Holland a respectful hearing in a formal setting including a large, international audience.

Each member of the audience will have her own set of outstanding moments. For me, these include the compact live history lesson in serial colonialism—the Netherlands, Japan, Indonesia, East Timor--in which a member of the Indonesian prosecution team who had just examined witnesses from her country covered her face as an East Timorese prosecutor told the court that evidence she had hoped to introduce had been destroyed by the occupying Indonesian military; the remarkable instance of perpetrator testimony by two Japanese veterans who had served in China; and finally, the pronunciation by Chief Justice Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (President of the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) that the judges had found the late Emperor Hirohito guilty of crimes against humanity. That moment, when the audience rose to its feet in response to the utterance of words that few who know Japan would have thought likely to hear in public, is well captured in the Tribunal documentary produced by VAWW-Net Japan. [1]

The drama and the historic significance of the Tribunal amply justified the presence of over 300 representatives of the media from around the world. Of that number, however, only one-third were from Japan, and resulting coverage was scanty at best, restricted principally to the Asahi Shimbun (where Matsui had been a pioneering woman foreign correspondent and member of the editorial board) and regional papers carrying the Kyodo News Service. [2] All the more important, then, was the prospect of NHK’s educational channel devoting one program in its four-part series on war responsibility in January of 2001. The disappointment and anger when the program actually aired on 30 January, four minutes short of the scheduled forty-four, are proportional to the hopes raised when subcontractor Documentary Japan (DJ), took its detailed proposal for the program to VAWW-Net in October of the previous year and secured promises of full cooperation. The changes cut the heart of the promised film that had been proposed by subcontractor Documentary Japan (DJ) in its detailed proposal for the program to VAWW-NET in October of the previous year. Gone was Chinese survivor testimony, perpetrator testimony, and of course, the guilty verdict against the emperor. Instead, there was an interview with Hata Ikuhiko, a historian known to be critical of the Tribunal, who had not attended it, whose knowledge of the actual proceedings, given the paucity of media coverage, was accordingly confined to precirculated announcements and most especially the yield of his preconceptions. Inordinately lengthy as it was, the interview filled in only some, not all, of the emptied minutes, suggesting how frantically the last-minute alterations had been made.

VAWW-Net Japan sued NHK, DJ, and NHK Enterprises 21, Inc. (an NHK subsidiary that had subcontracted the project to DJ), in July of 2001, for 20 million yen, charging them with having violated its trust in making fundamental alterations to the program without prior explanation in response to right-wing pressures. The Tokyo District Court verdict of March 2004 found only DJ guilty of having violated expectations raised by the original proposal and imposed a fine of one million yen. NHK was found not to be liable under the principle of “freedom to edit” as provided for in the Broadcast Law. Both defendants and plaintiffs appealed. The High Court hearings were scheduled to conclude at the end of January 2005 when the Asahi broke the news of whistleblowing by the program’s chief producer, Nagai Satoru, who, taking seriously NHK’s compliance regulations, had come forward in December to state that the program had been altered in response to pressures by then Deputy Cabinet Secretary Abe Shinzo and Economics and Industry Minister Nakagawa Shoichi. On January 13, the day after the story appeared in the Asahi, Nagai himself appeared in a moving press conference in which, in addition to addressing the issues at hand, and calling on the top leadership of NHK to take responsibility and resign, he referred to the difficulty of coming forward, wishing no more than anyone to risk turning himself and his family out on the streets, and yet concluding that the truth had to be told. [3]

In response to these disclosures, VAWW-Net applied for and received an extension of the hearings. Abe and Nakagawa vehemently denied having intervened, and the media embarked on a feeding frenzy, framing the issue as a contest between media giants NHK and Asahi, but in effect pillorying the latter on the dubious grounds that any favorable reporting on the Tribunal would promote pro-North Korean sentiment. It will be recalled that revelation of North Korean abductions had fanned hostility to North Korea and also provided the occasion for Abe’s meteoric rise to prominence. [4] For its part, the Asahi conducted an internal investigation and appointed an external review committee consisting of four lawyers and scholars, and announced on October 1, 2005, that while there had been some regrettable shortcomings in the preparations leading to the first article, it stood by the main point of the original article, namely, that “‘remarks by politicians had in effect exerted pressure and led to the alteration of the content of the NHK program.’” [5]

The Tokyo High Court Decision I: Editing Rights vs. Expectation Rights and Duty to Disclose?

In the High Court case, VAWW-Net accused the defendants of having violated the plaintiffs’ “expectation rights” (kitaiken) and also failed to fulfill their “duty to disclose” (setsumei gimu, literally, “obligation to explain"). The reason NHK and its subsidiaries committed these violations, they charged, was external intervention, first by rightists, and then by elected politicians. The defendants denied political intervention and countered the “expectation rights” and the “duty to disclose” with their own “freedom to edit” (henshu no jiyu in the Broadcast Law, Article 3, “freedom to compile a broadcast program,” hoso bangumi hensei no jiyu). [6] The court, with Judge Minami Toshifumi presiding, acknowledged VAWW-Net’s claims with the exception of the charge of interference by elected politicians. [7]

Although most media attention has focused on the drama of charges and countercharges over Nakagawa’s and Abe’s roles, the question of political interference goes to the heart of broadcast freedom and therefore, to freedom of expression. The media’s sensationalizing treatment has left in the shadows the key terms of the court battle, that is, “expectation rights” and “duty to disclose” on the one hand, and editing rights on the other. The first is unfamiliar enough that the Asahi glosses it as a key word after one of its articles on the High Court decision. [8] There, its examples are drawn from medical malpractice cases or labor cases in which the employer goes back on words that had led an employee to expect contract renewal. “Duty to disclose” usually pertains to consumer transactions (real estate, securities, etc.) and health-care issues. [9] In other words, in according legitimacy to the plaintiffs’ use of these concepts, the Court is effectively expanding the terms of argument for broadcasting cases.

But first we should pause before the apparent tension between “expectation rights” and “duty to disclose” on the one hand, and on the other, editing rights, which is at the heart of NHK’s defense. The Court is sensitive to the tension and lays out its reasoning carefully. It acknowledges that the content of broadcast programs is subject to constant change from the planning stage to airtime and that moreover, it is usual for those who cooperate with and participate in such programs to understand that the content may change from what had originally been explained to them. Because editing rights follow logically from the freedom of speech, the press, and “all other forms of expression” guaranteed by the Constitution (Article 21), they are not to be unduly restricted ("Decision," p. 51). On the other hand, since those who cooperate in the production of a program do so of their free will, the prospective use of their participation understandably constitutes a factor in their decision to collaborate or not. The Court distinguishes between news programming and the case at hand, namely a documentary or a cultural or educational program, and determines that especially in the case of the latter, those who cooperate have a particular interest in the “extent and manner in which [their role] is presented, and how their opinions and activities are reflected” ("Decision," p. 52). In weighing these respective claims, it becomes necessary to examine the overall relationship between the two parties to determine whether the words and actions of the program makers had led cooperators to entertain expectations with respect to the resulting program that exceptionally merit legal protection.

On the basis of careful examination of the detailed program plans presented to representatives of VAWW-Net as well as the frequency and quality of interaction, the Court concludes that the plaintiff was led to form concrete expectations with respect to the program. ("Decision," p. 54). Of special interest is that the Court notes that with respect to questioning by Shoji Rutsuko (co-representative with Nishino), DJ had stated that if the Tribunal were to indict the emperor and produce a verdict, that should be included in the broadcast ("Decision," p. 52). As for the “duty to disclose,” the Court is also cautious about using this principle to infringe on editing rights and therefore on freedom of the press. Balancing interests of the two parties again, it nonetheless observes that had VAWW-Net been told that plans had changed and the program would be considerably different from what they had originally understood, VAWW-Net would have had the option of withdrawing from the program, proposing preferred alternatives, or approaching another broadcaster. Thus, the defendant’s failure to disclose had resulted in the violation of the plaintiff’s legally protected rights ("Decision," p. 66).

Most impressive is the Court’s willingness to spell out alternatives to the deletions made by NHK. It rejects NHK’s reasoning that it deleted scenes of survivors breaking down in sobs or fainting because of the “strong impression” they would create. All that was called for was deletion of the fainting scene, the Court observes. “As for the claim that because opinion was divided on the question of the emperor’s responsibility, the section pertaining to explanation of the judgment was deleted, the defendant could have repeated the explanation that opinion was divided as to the legal responsibility of the Japanese state and the emperor, or to have made clear that it was not NHK’s view ....” ("Decision," p. 62).

Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are so important that even those critical of NHK and supportive of VAWW-Net have worried that the latter’s appealing to “expectation rights” and “duty to disclose” was potentially threatening to freedom of expression, which would be ironic indeed. NHK’s defense is clever because it appeals to a genuinely precious democratic principle: they are saying, in effect, we could not have observed the plaintiffs’ “expectation rights” or fulfill our “duty to disclose” without infringing on our freedom to edit as we see fit, which is constitutionally guaranteed. The Court, however, pierces through this reasoning: NHK, it finds, “abused or deviated from the editing rights valued and guaranteed by the Constitution in the changes [it effected], and it as good as abandoned the autonomy and independence that are the substance of editing rights; to acknowledge the ‘duty to disclose’ owed the plaintiffs is not to infringe on the editing rights of the defendants” ("Decision," p. 65). Rather than restricting editing rights in recognizing VAWW-Net’s claims, the Court is saying, it is reprimanding NHK for having failed to exercise its editing rights. In upholding VAWW-Net’s claims, the decision begins by balancing the interests at hand, but in the end, it seems that the Court in fact sees no opposition between VAWW-Net’s expectation rights and NHK’s duty to disclose, on the one hand, and NHK’s editing rights, on the other. [10] It gets there by considering the process whereby NHK came to justify its actions by appealing to editing rights.

The Tokyo High Court Decision II: What Constitutes Political Interference?

That process, of course, is described by VAWW-Net as NHK’s yielding to political pressure, initially from rightist groups, and subsequently, from powerful LDP politicians, namely Abe and Nakagawa. This is the claim that has caught public attention, or more precisely, the only aspect of the Tribunal that has garnered widespread media attention. The part of the decision reviewing the contacts between NHK leadership and then Deputy Cabinet Secretary Abe describes the scene of the latter stating his own long-held views and following up by urging that the program be “fair and neutral,” as befits a public broadcaster, but goes on to cite a passage from Abe’s personal website in which he records his own account of the meeting with the NHK representatives:

Since I had heard from a concerned party that efforts were being made to manipulate coverage according to the wishes of the sponsors, such as by requiring those who wished to attend the mock tribunal to sign a pledge of “agreement with the goals of the tribunal,” I inquired into the facts of the matter. As a result, I learned that even though the roles of judge and prosecutor were to be filled, there were no lawyers [or] witnesses [for the defense] [11] and therefore, that this was clearly of a biased nature, so I pointed out that the coverage needed to be fair and neutral, as was required especially of NHK. I suspected that this might be part of an underground plan to quell [public reaction] to the abductee problem and to portray North Korea as a victim ("Decision," pp. 45-46).

The Court’s conclusion, however, is that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the politicians in question had said anything concrete or made suggestions pertaining to the program in question that exceeded the bounds of general opinion ("Decision," p. 61). Rather, the problem lay with NHK: tension was mounting even before the program was aired, “with interest expressed from various quarters, such as protests from right-wing organizations,” coinciding with a new budgetary cycle. Anxious to avoid any adverse impact by the program on the budget, NHK leadership sought explanatory meetings with parliamentary representatives. Given the context and content of the words, they took the injunction to be “fair and impartial ... more seriously than necessary and, guessing the intent [behind the words], they attended a prescreening with the goal of producing a program that would not offend anyone, giving repeated and direct instructions for revisions” ("Decision," pp. 59-60).
Both Prime Minister Abe and NHK claimed that the decision refuted the charge of political interference. VAWW-Net proclaimed total victory. Both are right and both are wrong. A literal reading of the decision, which states that there is inadequate evidence to prove political interference, supports Abe and NHK. But to acknowledge broadcasters’ worries that elected politicians’ views of a program would adversely affect budget decisions and their responding to comments from powerful politicians by editing a problematic program is in fact to point to a form of political pressure. To put it all on the subjective response of the broadcasters—recognized, to be sure, as an unfortunate response, one tantamount to reneging on the autonomy that is the whole point of “editing rights"—is surely to ignore the fundamental meaning of the power of the purse.

Two experts clarified the merits and limits of the decision shortly after it was announced. While commending the court for criticizing NHK’s self-censorship, University of Tokyo professor Takahashi Tetsuya, who had appeared as a commentator in the program, goes on to say, “The decision fails to understand that to be told by politicians to be ‘fair and neutral’ constitutes pressure . . . . The decision should have indicated what it is that has the potential of turning into pressure.” [12] Media critic Matsuoka Hiroshi points out the astonishing fact that even though there have been countless instances of alleged political interference in programming and self-censorship in the postwar decades, this is the first instance where the issue has been fought in the courtroom. Even if the words “political interference” do not appear in the decision, the causal relationships are clear. Excessive self-censorship is promoted by the LDP practice of summoning NHK management from the executive on down for the purpose of budgetary deliberations. The budget, in effect, is held hostage to the government and the majority party. [13]

In the Meanwhile and for the Future

The case will now go to the Supreme Court. Under the circumstances, it is almost tempting to think that in refusing to pronounce what it must surely have recognized, namely, the presence of political pressure, Chief Judge Minami’s decision was leaving the door open, just a crack, to avoid being overturned.

In the meanwhile, the high court victory brings sorely needed encouragement to progressive forces in Japan. Worries remain, nevertheless, about the long-term consequences of the introduction of what have essentially been contractual concepts (expectation rights and disclosure) into deliberations about freedom of the press: what if a rightist politician were to sue a broadcaster or a publisher on the grounds of violation of expectation rights? The knotty challenges of this case underscore the difficulty of getting dissenting views heard in Japan today, with minority parties at a severe disadvantage since the electoral system was changed in 1994 [14], and the mainstream media increasingly inhospitable to controversial views challenging the political establishment. A lawsuit, protracted and costly as it is, is one of the few avenues for gaining visibility.

The current regime is going full steam ahead to assure NHK subservience to ruling party priorities. In November of 2006 the Minister of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications directed NHK to give priority to coverage of the North Korean abduction issue in its international short-wave broadcasts. The Japan Congress of Journalists promptly issued a demand for retraction of the directive, citing freedom of expression and “freedom to edit” as guaranteed by the Constitution and the Broadcast Law. [15]

In February, the first exhibit in Hokkaido of artwork by former comfort women opened in a department store in the city of Obihiro. The sponsors had originally requested use of space in a municipal citizens’ hall but were turned down on the grounds that such space was reserved for the “promotion of arts and culture.” The city’s education board, asked to sponsor an event scheduled for March titled “A Gathering to Listen to the Testimony of “Japanese Military Comfort Women” refused, saying that the terminology deviated from the government’s use of “so-called (iwayuru) military comfort women.” [16]

The Abe administration still formally stands by the Murayama Statement of 1995 expressing remorse and apology for the “facts of history"—i.e., a “mistaken national policy” that led to war and through “colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations” [17] and the 1993 Comment by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei acknowledging the fact of the establishment and maintenance of comfort stations directly or indirectly by the Japanese military and the deceptive and or coercive recruitment of women. [18] Yet many of its supporters seem bent on undoing the historical understanding they represent. Recently, Democratic Representative Michael Honda (California) called attention to this in the preface to his Congressional resolution calling for Japanese government apology. The Japanese government will lobby, again, to demonstrate how it has already apologized and the efforts made through the Asian Women’s Fund (coming to an end in March of this year). Honda is well aware that apologies have been made:

However, it is clear that these statements are not viewed by the government of Japan with unequivocal respect, and the comfort women themselves do not consider them formal apologies. Japan has equivocated in its stance on this issue, which is made clear in their recent attempts to alter previous public statements and their school textbooks .... Today, some members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party strive to review and even possibly rescind Secretary Kono’s statement. [19]

Addressing “Madame Speaker,” Representative Honda refers to a fact of which both the Japanese government and VAWW-Net are exquisitely aware: “the few surviving comfort women in the world who live with this burden are dying.” For rightist zealots, an increasingly vocal group, their natural passage from this world seems inadequate: the women must somehow be discredited for the restoration of Japan’s honor. For VAWW-Net members and other Japanese committed to postwar responsibility and reconciliation with Asia, seeking justice for the frail and dwindling group is also crucial to their self-understanding, and to the kind of society that Japan will become.

The International Women’s Tribunal for Japanese Military Sexual Slavery has been repeatedly referred to as a “mock” tribunal (in Japanese, mogi saiban). It is gratifying to see the organizers’ term of “international people’s tribunal” (kokusai minshu hotei) appear in the high court decision. The Women’s Tribunal took its inspiration from the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal of 1967, formed, as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said in his inaugural statement, “to decide whether the accusation of ‘war crimes’ leveled against the government of the United States as well as against those of South Korea, New Zealand and Australia, during the conflict in Vietnam, are justified.” [20] It was to be a tribunal of “simple citizens,” who, “coopting ourselves from all over the world,” have been able “to give our Tribunal a more universal structure than that which prevailed at Nuremberg.” The importance of this point rests not in numbers of countries represented, but rather, in the fact that US citizens were among the members of the jury. The tribunal, in other words, could not be characterized as one set of nation states trying another.

The charter of the Women’s Tribunal acknowledges that its organizers are “Mindful that while the Tribunal, as a people’s and women’s initiative, has no real power to enforce its judgments, it nonetheless carries the moral authority demanding their wide acceptance and enforcement by the international community and national governments.” [21]

A still more recent tribunal created by international civil society, the World Tribunal on Iraq, which met in Istanbul in June 2005, states as its principal objective “to tell and disseminate the truth about the Iraq War, underscoring the accountability of those responsible and underlining the significance of justice for the Iraqi people.” Its legitimacy is said to be “located in the collective conscience of humanity.” [22]

Each tribunal has sought to have a real effect in the world. Each has amassed knowledge for the future in the form of gathered testimony. That is a palpable legacy, more so than the effect any has had on the moral obtuseness of national governments. And yet the most powerful effect of all may be their reminder of an inextinguishable desire to make visible the “collective conscience of humanity.”

The Tokyo High Court decision of January 2007 represents a moment when that conscience met with recognition, however faulty, however impermanent, on the part of an institution of the nation-state.
The joy of a legal victory won on behalf of the conscience of humanity is perfectly expressed by the figure darting from the courthouse to unfurl the white banner bearing the characters, “shoso,” “case won.” Shoji Rutsuko, co-representative of VAWW-Net, wrote the organization listserv that when she heard the decision, along with incredulity, the long-held desire to raise her hands in joy just once in the courthouse yard overcame her, so she “raised her hands and ran.” [23]
The conscience of humanity will have its day.

Norma Field is currently working on the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji and together with Heather Bowen-Struyk, preparing Literature for Revolution, an anthology of Japanese proletarian fiction and criticism for the University of Chicago Press. She is a member of VAWW-Net Japan. She wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted February 10, 2007.

Japan and the Whaling Ban: Siege Mentality Fuels ‘Sustainability’ Claims

By David McNeill

It is a question that puzzles much of the world: Why does Japan thumb its nose at one of the environmental movement’s few lasting achievements—the ban on commercial whaling? As Japan’s whaling fleet ploughs the Antarctic in search of minke and endangered fin, David McNeill talks to politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and environmentalists and finds that far from weakening in the face of worldwide condemnation, the campaign to overturn the ban is gathering strength. February 2007, indeed, sees an important attempt by Japan to bypass what it perceives as the paralysis of the International Whaling Conference (IWC), when Tokyo plays host to a gathering dubbed the Conference for the Normalization of the International Whaling Commission. Despite being boycotted by New Zealand, Britain, the United States and around 20 other countries, many fear that this conference could seal the fate of the IWC.

‘Decadent and Dying’: The International Whaling Commission

For journalists used to the smooth diplomatic hum of the global conference circuit, covering the poisonous annual meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is akin to being slapped on the face with a slab of week-old minke. Government representatives from across the world squeeze into tax-funded conference halls and tear verbal strips off each other in language that is almost comically impolitic.

‘Barbaric,’ ‘cruel’ and ‘imperialist’ are part of the standard lexicon of insults traded by delegates with elephant-like memories for barbs inflicted decades ago. Top of the list is June 30th, 1979, when anti-whaling protestors in London chanted ‘murderers’ and ‘barbarians’ at stunned Japanese bureaucrats and splashed them with red paint; an experience burned deep into the collective cortex of the Japanese Fisheries Agency (FA).

Discussion moves at the pace of a harpooned humpback, bogged down by bickering and grandstanding. At the last IWC meeting in St. Kitts, delegates even called for a vote on the translation of a single word. “I couldn’t believe how decadent the IWC had become,” says environmental consultant Rémi Parmentier, who has been involved in the anti-whaling movement for decades. “This organization is really sick. No international body can function like this.”

Yet terminally ill as the IWC is, this has been the main international forum for debate on whaling since 1949. As whales have climbed to the top of the endangered list and become a sort of poster child for the plunder of the environment, the debate there has grown increasingly vitriolic and uncompromising.

Emboldened in St. Kitts by the pro-whaling lobby’s first IWC majority in over two decades, Iceland has again begun selling fin-whale meat and Japan’s whaling fleet has stepped up its ‘scientific whaling’ hunt for 1,070 minke and 170 Bryde’s, sei, sperm and fin whales. In 2007, it will also kill 50 humpbacks, a ‘red-list’ endangered species and one of the dying planet’s most beloved mammals.

Japan’s determination to thumb its nose at the whaling ban puzzles many, not least because the domestic whaling industry is on life support, kept alive by a steady infusion of government cash. Whale eating is now a minor, luxury pastime. Even before the moratorium, its popularity was plummeting.

In the year that ‘scientific whaling’ began in 1987, 70 tons of whale meat went unsold from a catch of 1,873, a tiny fraction of the 230,000 metric tons consumed in the peak whaling year of 1962. The whale-meat inventory reached a record 6,000 tons after the return of Japanese whaling fleets from the Antarctic this year, according to researcher Junko Sakurai. Japan, in other words, risks worldwide opprobrium for a product it can’t sell.

“What is Japan doing?” said an exasperated Chris Carter, New Zealand’s conservation minister, during the humpback debate in St. Kitts. “It seems determined to anger the world.” Ben Bradshaw, the UK’s environmental secretary, expressed the British view. “I can’t understand it. We are a great friend and ally of Japan in almost every other field. And it is completely inexplicable to me that Japan, Norway, and Iceland continue to push for a resumption of commercial whaling.”

The View from Japan

The FA, which drives the pro-whaling campaign in Japan, naturally sees things very differently. Among FA bureaucrats, there is thinly veiled contempt for the finger-wagging of Britain and New Zealand, a country with millions of acres of rich farm land and a tiny population. Japan’s food self-sufficiency in contrast, is extremely low—just 40 percent, down from 73 percent in 1965.

What right does NZ have to tell us how to use the global sea commons? asks Nakamae Akira, Deputy Director General of the FA. “The reason that New Zealand, Australia and Britain are involved is just egotism. It is quite simple: the countries that are not involved should stay out of the problem. In the high seas, we divide up all resources, so why not whales?”

The FA has successfully positioned itself at home as the embattled defender of Japan’s rights to an equitable share of marine resources. Whaling is the rhetorical line in the sand, beyond which lies that beloved staple of the Japanese dinner table: tuna. Adding to their siege mentality, fisheries bureaucrats also believe they face a growing war for dwindling resources with China.

“If we lose on whales, what will happen next?” asks Nakamae. “It is not just us taking the fish. We take six million tons of fish a year, which is about five percent of the total global catch of 120 million tons. China alone takes 40 million tons, approaching half of the total. In the last decade the amount of fish China takes has exploded.”

Japan has indeed scaled down its marine fishing, but brokers operating for giant Japanese trading companies increasingly purchase fish from other countries. Environmentalists say many of the 132 tuna boats recently scrapped in a voluntary agreement by Japan have ended up in China and Taiwan, whose fishermen help supply the Japanese market.

Nevertheless, the voracious and increasingly affluent market of 1.3 billion people next door to Japan is part of the murky background to the whaling debate. The possibility that tuna may one day disappear from Japan’s dinner plates is a specter regularly invoked by the Japanese media, and to this old story must now be added new bogeymen: China, and the hungry whales themselves.

The FA says the minke (the smallest of the whales) and several other species have recovered and are gobbling fish at a rate five times faster than that of humans, a claim likened by one environmentalist to blaming the woodpecker for the destruction of the rainforests. A research project published in a November 2006 edition of Science magazine forecast that these sea resources will completely collapse by 2050. But pro-whalers in Japan suggest the problem is a ‘lack of balance’ in the oceans. “Whales eat a lot of fish,” argues LDP lawmaker Hamada Yasukazu, a leading member of the Parliamentary Whaling League. “We have to return balance to the oceans by cutting down their numbers.”

Hamada and his colleagues believe Japan has compromised by staying in the IWC, adhering—at least officially—to the moratorium and by spending billions of yen a year collecting scientific data on the oceans. Whales are now among the most researched animals in the world, ironically making it easier for pro-whalers to argue that hunting can restart. And some conservationists support them.

“It is quite clear that there is minimal risk to whale stocks from hunting,” says Sato Tetsu, Professor of Ecology and Environmental Sciences in Nagano University. “We have a method and a system to sustainably manage wildlife and resources, so why don’t we try it?”

Far from wilting under global pressure, the pro-whaling lobby in Japan is growing stronger and more confident that its scientific data is correct. “As long as the anti-whaling countries cannot show us that we are mistaken, we will continue to follow this policy,” says Nakamae. “We will keep going until the world understands this.”

Voodoo Nationalism

Many environmentalists around the world hope that the whaling issue in Japan will simply fade with the now moribund industry. In Japan, though, the political pro-whaling lobby has never been stronger.

The campaign is backed by the 98-strong Parliamentary Whaling League, whose illustrious members include Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, LDP high-flier Hayashi Yoshimasa (both are from the whaling district of Shimonoseki), Foreign Minister Aso Taro and Yokohama Mayor Nakata Hiroshi.

All the major political parties back whaling—even the Communists—and the Diet boasts just one vocal anti-whaling lawmaker—Kina Shokichi, from Okinawa. Supporting the anti-whaling cause in Japan would be as politically popular here as cheering on whaling boats in the British Houses of Parliament.

These politicians champion logic and science, but it is clear that nationalism is one of the pillars that props up the whaling campaign. Many of the most active leaguers are on the right of the political spectrum, and the vast majority has no electoral or commercial ties to whaling: Just over ten percent come from districts with a direct connection to the whaling industry.

Discussions about the loss of whaling are inevitably tinged with loss of national pride. This from Hamada: “We’re talking about managed whaling, so why are we being told that hunting whales is wrong? We were told to stop eating whale because of pressure from abroad and that it is barbarous. They eat dogs in South Korea and monkeys in China, and they call that barbarous too. We should start by accepting the other side’s culinary culture and avoid telling them what to do.”

Such is the consistency of these conversations that it is possible to construct a single narrative: ‘We have been hunting and eating whales since the Jomon Period (8000 B.C.–300 B.C). After World War II, we were starved of protein and were encouraged by the US occupiers to hunt whale again. They then forced Japan to stop and criticized its eating customs as ‘barbaric.’ Now they ignore science, flout logic and embrace emotionalism in the face of our reasonable requests to return to sustainable whaling.’

This narrative even intersects with one of Japan’s key historical nexuses: the Meiji Restoration, when, under threat from the West, the country began the transformation from a closed, feudal society to a modern, trading nation. Pro-whalers seldom fail to point out that the agent of this change, Admiral Matthew Perry, whose ‘black ships’ are credited with opening Japanese ports to trade, was on a mission for the whaling industry, which needed safe ports and supplies for its crews.

“The credit for opening Japan went to the United States, and the common belief is that the United States was a kind of benefactor…but I don’t support [that idea or] that Japan’s development as a modern nation came from an acceptance of US demands,” said Mayor Nakata recently. “What America wanted to do basically was to facilitate its whaling operations…It was in its national interests to protect and secure its supply base.”

For nationalists, the whaling controversy and the loss of the industry are forever linked with the hypocrisy of the West and the humiliation of having to enter the modern world under pressure from US gunboats. This original sin has since been compounded by the pillaging of the oceans by Western whalers (ignoring Japan’s own history of over-hunting) and the forced withdrawal from the industry in the 1980s.

It is surely no accident that pro-whaling sentiment grew in Japan as its economic and political crisis worsened in the 1990s. Despite the fact that the whaling issue was, in the words of former FA senior official, Masayuki Komatsu, ‘dead in the water’ in the late 1980s and that the government was rumored to be about to ‘euthanize’ the industry, it has since been brought juddering back to life by voodoo nationalism.

Hamada, for example, is quite explicit about why the whaling campaign is so important: “I think it is the only issue that shows Japanese diplomacy can achieve something when it sticks to its guns. Usually for Japan in relation to China and other countries, all the diplomatic cards tend to be held by our opponents. The whale negotiations are the only area where Japan can proactively take the initiative. We were battered ten years ago and beat up 20 years ago. Now we have reached this point. We can show that Japanese diplomacy is effective in whale-hunting negotiations.”

Put in this context, the political energy expended on the campaign begins to make some sense: Japan can demonstrate its diplomatic chops and show it is not completely deferential in the foreign political arena, particularly to the US. Whaling allows Japan to safely let off steam in the international arena, without any significant political risk. But that ignores the huge cost to Japanese taxpayers.

Vote Buying and the IWC

One of the most controversial elements of Japan’s campaign to overturn the whaling ban is the alleged use of overseas development aid to ‘buy’ the votes of poorer countries, an allegation vehemently denied by fisheries officials. “We send overseas aid to over 160 countries, including many anti-whaling countries in the developed world,” says Morishita Joji, the FA’s director for international negotiations. “This is government money and is not connected to political issues.”

So what explains the stunning transformation in the IWC balance of forces: from overwhelmingly conservationist (31–10) at the dawn of the moratorium in 1986 to this year’s pro-whaling majority (32–33) at St. Kitts?

Many of the commission’s 21 newest members, such as the Marshall Islands and St. Kitts & Nevis, have no history of whaling and several, including Mongolia and Mali, have no coastlines. All the newer members are developing countries and nearly half are from West Africa.

Leading pro-whaling lawmakers such as Hayashi flatly contradict the bureaucrats and acknowledge this power shift could clearly only have been achieved by a sustained campaign to recruit allies.

“I think most of the countries that have newly joined, including the Caribbean, African countries and Central American countries like Nicaragua have joined as the result of joint efforts by the pro-whaling camp. We cooperate and recruit new countries. You know, nobody joins without an invitation or lobbying (laughs). When the moratorium was passed we were less than one quarter so now we finally have a majority.”

Hayashi and his fellow leaguers insisted for years that whaling is a matter of, in his words, ‘important national interest’ and should be shoved near the top of the list of conditions for ODA. Since 2002, they have worked closely with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Prime Minister’s Office to coordinate international whaling diplomacy.

Prime Minister Koizumi, for example, expressed his gratitude for support on whaling to the president of the Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanas Geyer, at a summit meeting in June 2004. One month later, Japan cancelled Nicaraguan debt to the tune of US$118.4 million. Japan’s whaling diplomacy has been built on dozens of similar deals.

Accusations that rich countries, including Japan, tie ODA spending to its strategic interests are hardly new. As the refreshingly honest pro-whaling Australian journalist Padraic P. McGuinness puts it: “It is standard practice in world politics for wealthy countries to bribe poor countries.”

But will this strategy succeed in winning Japan, Iceland and Norway the 75 percent IWC majority needed to overturn the moratorium? Oddly, the answer acknowledged by almost everyone involved, is that it will not.

“It is absolutely impossible [for Japan] to get 60 pro-whaling votes, and even if they persuade more allies, more anti-whaling countries will join the IWC,” says Ishii Atsushi, a political science scholar at Tohoku University. Israel, for example, joined the pro-whaling side for the first time in St. Kitts, and there are many more countries where it came from: the more allies Tokyo recruits, the stronger the likely reaction from the conservationists.

Still, the diplomacy goes on. Japan’s campaign to overturn the ban is tied closely to one specific category of aid—‘Grant Aid for Fisheries and its related Technical Cooperation.’ One estimate is that three quarters of a billion dollars in fisheries grant aid have been dispersed to Tokyo’s new whaling allies between 1994 and 2005.

That does not exhaust Japan’s largess. Landlocked Mongolia, for instance, has been the recipient of cultural grants and loan assistance. Japanese aid to Mongolia now accounts “for approximately one-third of total aid by foreign countries and international organizations,” says the MOFA website. Who would feel safe speculating that such largess to one of the world’s poorer countries has no impact on its official stance in international forums where Japan is a prominent presence?

Over the last decade, MOFA and other officials have also logged hundreds of trips abroad to discuss whaling issues with foreign diplomats, and hosted dozens of conferences at home. Estimating the total cost of wooing Japan’s 21 whaling allies, and the ongoing effort to recruit more, is therefore clouded in mystery but runs into billions of yen.

Remarkably, in a climate of swinging public budget cuts, there is little apparent media interest in this expensive exercise in whaling diplomacy, despite the fact that it has no hope of success.

Even the FA’s Nakamae concedes there is little chance of recruiting 60 countries: “Given the current situation with two sides operating at opposite ends, it will be terribly difficult to realize three-quarters of the IWC,” he says. (Bear in mind here a useful rule-of-thumb in the world of bureaucracy: Yes means maybe; maybe means difficult; terribly difficult means impossible).

Pro-whalers hope that changing the composition of the IWC will swing the debate back toward sustainable whaling, says FA spokesman Moronuki Hideki. “We’re hoping the atmosphere of the IWC will change drastically.” The stage is set for a stalemate that could last for years and in the meantime, ‘scientific whaling’ goes on…

A Return to Managed Whaling?

The whaling issue then is, in the words of one environmentalist, ‘a mess.’

Inside Japan, the FA runs the show almost free of critical scrutiny by the media or the influence of other parts of the government (such as MOFA) that might take a less confrontational approach; lawmakers back them at zero political cost, and the miniscule whaling industry happily survives on subsidies.

Such is the strength of this unhappy compromise. Some wonder whether it cannot continue forever.

“Japan is not really serious about lifting the moratorium because the current situation is not bad for the pro-whalers,” says Nagano University’s Sato. “They are widely supported by the public, congressmen and industry.”

The IWC is impotent, finely balanced between two warring sides suspended on a cushion of political hot air. For most IWC environmentalists, the loss of the whaling ban would spell disaster but oddly, they help to sustain the campaign by adding rhetorical fuel to the FA’s arguments that the rest of the world ‘doesn’t understand’ whaling culture.

“People in Japan are not really pro-whaling,” says Ishii. “They’re just anti-anti-whaling. They believe the FA when it says the world is stopping them eating whale.” Just as there is no political capital to be made in Japan from opposing whaling, environmental groups—many kept afloat by fees from millions of anti-whaling supporters—have nothing to win by compromise.

Protests by Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain will not diminish the strength of pro-whaling feeling in Japan and may even add to it. Only the prospect of a strong anti-whaling campaign in America, it seems, might rattle the FA’s confidence, one reason why environmentalists may concentrate their campaign for the humpback there next year.

Some conservationists then are beginning to ask, it time to call Japan’s bluff? If the FA is determined to kill whales, let it, and test its claim that sustainable whaling is now possible. The agency has agreed to let international observers board its whaling ships to prevent over-fishing. “These are not sardines,” says Nakamae. “They are big animals, relatively easy to monitor.”

Ideally, such a compromise would be limited to Japan’s exclusive 200-mile fishing zone but may have to concede limited high-seas whaling, in which case the IWC Revised Management Scheme—a “method of setting safe catch limits for certain stocks in areas where the numbers are plentiful”—would be crucial.

“The RMS is very well designed,” says Sato. “It is one of the strictest, most advanced resource management systems, and it is very robust. This is the best system we have right now.” And he adds: “If the moratorium is lifted they will find it hard to sustain the commercial industry and impossible to revive.”

Conceding on commercial whaling would be a bitter pill to swallow for conservationists, who would in effect be gambling that it will take the steam out of Japan’s campaign and expose the weaknesses of the whaling industry.

At its peak in the 1960s, the industry boasted eight fleets with 30–40 vessels producing more than 200,000 tons of meat annually; it now has one fleet of six boats. Although lawmaker Hayashi claims that ’60 percent’ of the Japanese population could again be persuaded to eat whale meat, most neutral observers believe that with the current figure at just one percent, this is wildly optimistic. Whale-meat will never be a mass-consumer product again.

Other dividends might follow. The Ministry of Health, known to be worried about the dangerous levels of PCB, mercury and dioxins in whale meat, would have more clout against the FA, as might MOFA, a reluctant partner at best in the whaling mission. And with the FA unable to claim that Western ‘cultural imperialists’ block their legitimate claims, one of the ideological pillars of the campaign collapses.

“The whole whaling issue is just a sort of parlor game in which petit nationalism flourishes,” says Takeuchi Keiji, veteran science writer for the Asahi newspaper. “The Japanese side loves going to the IWC conferences. It’s an excursion for them, like a boxing bout. And the environmentalists have been going for 20, 25 years. But there is no real discussion. They all love the debate, but this is a relatively minor problem and it should be easy to solve.”

The Whaling Debate: The Experts Speak

“There are a number of factors, both biological and economic, which led the industry to destroy one whale species after another, even though the industry was dependent on their survival. Thus, the commercial whaling ban should be kept and not mixed up with the idea of preserving tradition and/or culture. More than 70 percent of the Japanese public don’t support whaling in the Southern Ocean, but the Japanese government keeps sending its whaling fleet to do ‘research.’ This should stop.”

—Sato Junichi, Greenpeace Japan Ocean Campaign Project Manager

“We’re not talking about hunting whales to extinction. We all know that whale resources were once over-used. But the idea of thinning out some stocks exists in all other kinds of animals, ranging from deer to kangaroos. I wonder why people overreact to whales only. We used to eat as part of our tradition but it was banned because of external pressure. So we’re forced to protect our tradition under the name of research hunting.”

—Hamada Yasukazu, LDP lawmaker and leading member of the Whaling Parliamentary League

“As a way to familiarize children with whale meat, we are supplying elementary schools with whale meat. The meat comes from whales that were captured for research purposes and is sold at a lower price than the usual market rate. The schools then serve the whale in a variety of ways: as cutlets, hamburger steaks and as a fried dish. For many children, it is the first time they have eaten whale meat. They all say it is tasty.”

—Hatanaka Hiroshi, Director General of the Institute of Cetacean Research.

“The fundamental root cause of the whaling issue in Japan is a kind of trauma or destroyed pride which is handed down through generations of bureaucrats. The trauma came from Japan being labeled a cruel country, and having eggs and paint thrown at it. To lift this trauma the bureaucrats really need for the moratorium to be lifted. They would see this as a victory for their own value system. It is not really a problem of reviving the whaling industry now; it is a problem of national pride, or at least government and bureaucratic pride. They basically need a symbolic victory.”

—Sato Tetsu, Professor of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Nagano University.

“Japan, Iceland and Norway are taking whales outside of the IWC. It is lucky it is just these three. We have no guarantee that other countries will engage in self-controlled, self-restrained fishing. It should be about sustainable management rather than arguments about different philosophical views of whales.”

—Morishita Joji, Director for International Negotiations, Fisheries Agency.

David McNeill writes about Japan for the London Independent and other publications. He is a Japan Focus coordinator.

This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Japan Times on February 11, 2007. Posted at Japan Focus on February 13, 2007.

For an earlier McNeill report on whaling click

http://japanfocus.org/products/details/1927