Former Defense Ministry analyst Maeda Hisao warns of the emergence of a national warfare state and the further decimation of the provisions of Japan's peace constitution. He targets for criticism two Koizumi administration documents: The Defense White Paper of summer 2002 and the War Contingency Bills currently tabled for debate in the legislature. Maeda critiques the transformation of Japan's “self-defense” policy into one of aggressive “pre-emptive defense” as its defense perimeter is extended far beyond the Japanese islands. In contrast to the careful legislative analysis of Maeda Tetsuo (also available at Japan Focus), this manifesto by a former military establishment insider offers a blunt criticism of Japanese leaders. While warning of the consequences of an aggressive Japanese defense posture, the author, like a number of other SDF insiders, is equally critical of the consequences of the usurpation of the autonomy of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, that is, its subordination to American global military designs. From Gunshuku (Disarmament) in November, 2002.

In the course of 2002, Japanese peace activists laid the groundwork for the convening of an International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan to try George W. Bush for war crimes. Following three research trips to Afghanistan and research in Japan, the Tribunal convened the first of a series of hearings in December. Maeda Akira, a convenor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan, is a professor of international law at Zokei University in Tokyo. This article appeared in Kinyobi 10, January 2003.

Gavan McCormack is a research professor of East Asian history at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, co-author of Korea Since 1850 and author of The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence.

I first became aware of the relevance of the idea of refugee to my own life when I read Ghassan Kanafani's writing in the late 1970s. Kanafani (b. 1936), a Palestinian refugee, was a spokesman for the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1972 he was assassinated in Beirut by a car bomb. Kanafani's work, which appeared first in Japanese and then in Korean translation, also played an important role in the South Korean pro-democracy movement during the 1970s. Korean movement leaders such as Paik Nak-Chung were inspired by Arab literatures of resistance, and called for South Koreans to define their own struggles as part of a global Third World liberation movement.

A government-sponsored bill to send the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq to take part in postwar reconstruction cleared the Lower House last week. There is little doubt this legislation is a demonstration by Japan of its willing cooperation with the U.S. global strategy.

It was indeed a shocking confession and apology. Admitting that North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s had abducted 13 Japanese, of whom eight had died and five survived, Chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission, Kim Jong Il, apologized for it. It was admitted that 10 of the 11 on the list of suspected abductions published by the Japanese government had indeed been abducted. Yokota Megumi had been abducted, and so had three dating couples. Worst of all, the fact that 8 had died showed how savage state crime can be. It was astonishing to learn that Arimoto Keiko, together with Ishioka Toru, who is said to have been living with her, died in 1988.

North Korea ranks high on the Bush administration's list of ‘terror states’. The January 2002 ‘Axis of Evil’ speech and the June 2002 commitment to preemptive war were stark signals from Washington to Pyongyang. The formal presidential statement of strategy presented to Congress in September 2002 referred only to two ‘rogue states’, meaning states that brutalize their own people, ignore international law, strive to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, ‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.’ These states, which constituted ‘a looming threat to all nations’, were Iraq and North Korea.