http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/22/content_12520430.htm
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.
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