Newsletter No. 667
News-Analysis
July 6, 2007

 

KYUMA NUKES HIMSELF -- YURIKO KOIKE BECOMES DEFENSE MINISTER

If you follow Japanese political news, then you have already heard quite a bit about Fumio Kyuma’s politically-disastrous public comment about how the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “couldn’t be helped” and how this eventually led to his resignation as Japan’s first defense minister. I don’t intend to repeat here what most of you have probably already read elsewhere. What I will do is to make a few brief points.

Fumio Kyuma, aside from being defense minister and a senior LDP politician, was also the chairman of the Japan-Iraq Parliamentary Friendship League. In the Abe cabinet, he was perhaps the most senior foreign policy moderate, with the possible exception of Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki. During the Abe Era, Kyuma has had trouble keeping his mouth shut, saying several things in public that are arguably true, but politically unwise.

Yuriko Koike, Kyuma’s replacement as defense minister, is someone whose career we have been following at the Shingetsu Institute because she is the only Arabist in the senior ranks of the Japanese government. However, unlike Kyuma, she comes off as much more of a rightwing ideologue, quite in tune with the spirit of the hopefully-brief Abe Era.

I have one key point to make about Koike’s appointment as defense minister that I have not seen elsewhere -- So, umm, what about her old job as “national security adviser to the prime minister”?

When the Abe cabinet was launched last October, wasn’t Abe’s “big initiative” going to be the concentration of expertise in the Kantei, and most notably an American-style “national security council” that would significantly upgrade Japan’s decision-making capabilities? So where does that project now stand? Isn’t Koike’s appointment to the defense ministry a silent admission that his initial policy was an abject failure?

The “national security adviser” position was starved of resources and stonewalled by MOFA and the defense ministry. The high-profile Yuriko Koike has been almost invisible for months. She traveled around the globe, was supposedly in charge of Iran policy, but I’m not aware of a single concrete achievement during her term in that office.

I don’t doubt that Yuriko Koike is intelligent and capable, but it is not quite clear yet if she can make things work in the male-dominated and often narrow-minded councils of the Japanese bureaucracy. Can she really handle the defense ministry?

Or is it irrelevant anyway, since Abe is desperately struggling to regain some of his earlier popularity, and there is a reasonable chance that she may only be in the defense ministry until the end of this month?