This article republishes a passage originally posted on October 5, 2015.
Using a front-page essay by Yoshiko Sakurai in the Sankei Shimbun as a point of departure, it examines how political irresponsibility on both the ruling and opposition sides left serious gaps and legal deficiencies in Japan’s postwar security system.
Through the North Korean spy ship incident, the case of Chinese illegal entrants, and the response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis after the Great East Japan Earthquake, it reveals how Japanese politics has long depended on the self-sacrificing spirit of Self-Defense Force personnel.

2019-04-21
Political irresponsibility, applicable to both the ruling and opposition parties alike, left many gaps and legal deficiencies in postwar Japan’s national defense system.
One element that barely compensated for them was the spirit of Self-Defense Force personnel.

The following is a passage I posted on October 5, 2015.
Those who had subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun must have thought that Yoshiko Sakurai, the author of this essay, was a person of the right.
But since last August, when the Asahi Shimbun confessed the truly intolerable reality concerning the comfort women issue….
The malice of the Asahi, born of its childishness, which had covered Japan throughout the seventy postwar years….
Was exposed in broad daylight.
Abiru, the Sankei Shimbun reporter who had recognized the absurdity of this issue from the very beginning, splendidly accomplished what a newspaper reporter ought to do.
The years he devoted to it and his achievement would have been worthy of a Pulitzer Prize in the United States.
In Japan he remains without honors, but….
As for transforming the Sankei Shimbun into what is now the most decent newspaper in Japan, his accomplishment was immense.

The following is from today’s front page of the Sankei Shimbun, shown to me by a friend.

The Contradictions and Hypocrisy of the Democratic Party
Yoshiko Sakurai

The security legislation has been enacted, but Katsuya Okada, leader of the Democratic Party, insists, as he declared at the plenary session of the House of Representatives on September 18, that the security legislation should be repealed.
By denying the new legislation, to what kind of condition does he intend to drag Japan’s security back?
The characteristic of Japan’s security system has been that, while reality has made it necessary for the Self-Defense Forces to assume certain duties in accordance with changes in the international situation, hypocrisy has run rampant as if refusing to acknowledge that reality and maintaining a rigid posture were somehow justice itself.
Political irresponsibility, applicable to both the ruling and opposition parties alike, left many gaps and legal deficiencies in postwar Japan’s national defense system.
One element that barely compensated for them was the spirit of Self-Defense Force personnel.

One example is the spirit of self-sacrifice shown by the Maritime Self-Defense Force in dealing with a North Korean spy ship off the Noto Peninsula in 1999.
Yuyasu Itō, who was then navigator of the Aegis destroyer Myōkō, looked back on the event.
“There was no doubt that the North Korean operatives had powerful weapons, and if we boarded them it would become a firefight.
But we did not even have bulletproof vests.
So, as the barest possible protection against bullets, we wrapped magazines from the ship around our stomachs in preparation.”
By chance, however, the other side’s engine started and they fled, so the boarding did not take place.

In 1997, twenty Chinese illegal entrants landed unlawfully and fled on Shimo-Koshikijima in Kagoshima Prefecture.
Thirty Air Self-Defense Force personnel, carrying no weapons whatsoever, were dispatched at their own risk under the pretext of field training.
They detained all of the Chinese, but had those men been armed, it is possible that the unarmed SDF personnel would have become casualties.
In both cases, the point is that SDF personnel deployed at the risk of their lives, fully aware of the danger, in order to protect Japanese lives and national territory.
The overseas PKO activities of the Self-Defense Forces are the same.

Whether at home or abroad, national defense and security premised on the sacrifice of Self-Defense Force personnel are fundamentally wrong.
Another striking example of political irresponsibility that turned a blind eye to this occurred at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

On March 17, 2011, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said at a press conference, regarding the water-dropping operation by SDF helicopters on Unit 3 of the exploded Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric Power Company, as follows.
The day before yesterday, in discussions with Prime Minister Naoto Kan, we reached the conclusion that “today is the limit for water-dropping.”
The heavy decision by the Prime Minister and myself was judged by Chief of Staff Ryoichi Oriki, and it was carried out on the decision of the Joint Staff Chief.

In other words, the Defense Minister did not issue the order, and instead his subordinate was left to infer the intent and make the decision.
The Democratic Party, which had constantly emphasized the importance of civilian control, abandoned the responsibility of civilian politicians at one of the most important moments, and threw onto the field the responsibility of sending personnel into the skies above a nuclear plant where dangerously high radiation levels were expected.
It was truly a case of evading responsibility.
I see the same spirit of contradiction and hypocrisy in the Democratic Party’s stubborn refusal to recognize the right of collective self-defense.