Rumsfeld's exit triggers concern in Tokyo

11/10/2006
The Asahi Shimbun

Reacting to the sudden resignation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Japan made clear Thursday it is committed to assisting in Iraq's reconstruction and implementing the planned U.S. military realignment here.

While Rumsfeld's departure prompted officials in Tokyo to ponder the ramifications, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki touched on concerns Thursday over a plan to relocate the functions of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, to Nago in another part of the prefecture.

The plan, which centers on a new V-shaped runway in Nago, is a major part of the U.S. transformation plan affecting Japan.

"This is something that was agreed on between our governments, and from our position, there is no change in the plan to proceed calmly while gaining public understanding," Shiozaki told reporters.

Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Foreign Minister Taro Aso and then Defense Agency Director-General Fukushiro Nukaga in May in Washington to finalize the plan.

In his November 2003 visit to Japan, Rumsfeld stopped by Futenma to see the facility. As a result, Rumsfeld pushed forward on the relocation, officials said.

Rumsfeld and Nukaga also agreed in April, during three hours of intense negotiations, the amount Japan is to shoulder for shifting thousands of Marine Corps troops from Okinawa to Guam.

The Defense Agency and the Pentagon are now working out final details of that relocation.

A senior agency official hinted Thursday at anxiety about future negotiations with Washington. "Rumsfeld was able to sum up various positions on the U.S. side and at the same time reach common ground with Japan," he said.

Taku Yamasaki, chairman of ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Research Commission on Security, commented on Washington's Iraq policy in connection with the Democrat victory in the U.S. midterm elections Tuesday.

"There is bound to be a shift from use of power to priority on dialogue," Yamasaki told fellow party members.

A senior Foreign Ministry official was more pessimistic. "There isn't much choice (on Iraq policy), and whatever means are taken, they don't seem likely to work," the official said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday night emphasized Japan's continued support for U.S.-led efforts in Iraq.

However, the same senior Defense Agency official said Thursday, "(Rumsfeld's resignation) is sure to affect the SDF dispatch to Iraq."

Although the Ground Self-Defense Forces stationed in Samawah in southern Iraq were withdrawn this summer, Air SDF personnel and aircraft are still based in Kuwait to airlift multinational forces and United Nations personnel in and out of Iraq.

The special measures law to support the Iraqi reconstruction, which covers the SDF dispatch, expires in July 2007. To extend it, the government will have to submit a bill to the Diet next year. (IHT/Asahi: November 10,2006)

The Democrats and Defense

By Peter Baker
Friday, November 3, 2006; Page A19

The New Politics of National Security
By Kurt Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon
Basic Books, 319 pp., $26.00

HARD POWER

The last-minute campaign furor over Sen. John F. Kerry's "botched joke" about the uneducated becoming "stuck in Iraq" was no joke for the Democratic Party. Once again, with an election looming, it found itself cast as the peacenik, antiwar, hostile-to-the-military, soft-on-defense, weak-on-terrorists party.

Whether that will stick won't be known until Tuesday. Polls have shown that voters for a change are more likely at the moment to trust Democrats on Iraq and terrorism than Republicans. But that support seems perishable, and even if Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they face a long-term challenge of redefining their image when it comes to national security.

That's where Kurt Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon come in. Their provocative new book, "Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security," offers a manifesto of sorts for a party still struggling to find its voice in the post-Sept. 11 world. As a party, Democrats have been torn between two poles as represented in the extreme by Joseph I. Lieberman, the hawkish Connecticut senator, and Ned Lamont, the antiwar liberal who beat him in a Democratic primary.

Campbell and O'Hanlon come closer to Lieberman than to Lamont, offering a muscular vision for U.S. power in a dangerous world tempered by the sort of pragmatism they say the Bush administration has been missing. "Democrats must make clear that they, like Republicans, understand that effective diplomacy must often be backed by the credible threat and sometimes use of military force," they write.

In fact, they argue that President Bush has it right in some ways, praising his priorities in terms of promoting democracy and free trade, defeating terrorists, and opening a new relationship with India. "Hard-power Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans should therefore not run against the Bush legacy on matters of ideas so much as of seriousness, competence, and execution."

This may be a hard sell even within their own party, where the loudest voices these days argue for a radical departure from Bush's policies. A succession of think tanks and foreign policy elites have been trying to counter the angry blogosphere with a more nuanced position for the party, with limited success. If Democrats win on Tuesday, the internal fight over national security will grow even more pronounced. Democrats have prospered this year mainly by being against Bush without coming up with a genuine alternative. If they find themselves in charge on Capitol Hill, they will face pressure to develop a common posture.

Campbell and O'Hanlon bring years of experience and study to the debate. Campbell served as a Pentagon official under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and now works as senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator on foreign policy.

As they note, Democrats have been hobbled for decades by the public perception of weakness. The party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy was transformed by the Vietnam War and has wrestled with national security ever since.

Clinton's discomfort with the military -- his awkward initial salute to Marines standing guard at his helicopter, his fight over gays in uniform, his tentative response to Bosnia -- exemplified the problem to many. But during eight years in office, he grew more accustomed to his role as commander in chief, responding more confidently to the Kosovo crisis.

Bush, though, has used the issue against Democrats as a cudgel for years, managing to paint Kerry, a combat veteran decorated for service in Vietnam, as weak on security. This year, Bush has cited votes against his counterterrorism legislation to assert that Democrats do not even want to spy on, detain or try terrorists; he went so far this week as to declare that if Democrats win, so will terrorists.

The authors argue that it is not enough to simply shout back; Democrats, they say, "sometimes try too hard to sound like anti-Republicans -- and wind up weakening themselves more than their political opponents in the process."

Instead, they propose a detailed agenda dealing with homeland security, the military, Iraq, terrorism, nonproliferation, energy and China. They propose increasing active-duty armed forces by 50,000, creating State Department rapid-response teams for post-conflict situations and setting up regional National Guard planning centers to better respond to crises such as Hurricane Katrina or a terrorist attack. They would continue missile-defense development but at a lower level, cut the F/A-22 program in half, revamp the Joint Strike Fighter program, retire more Minuteman missiles and Trident submarines, and cut back the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

On Iraq, they heartily agree with fellow Democrats that Bush "bungled" the war and "dispelled any notion of innate Republican superiority in matters of international hard power." But they criticize their party's rush for the door. "Democrats have focused mostly on missteps in Iraq. But there has been a less vibrant debate about the potential downsides of a precipitous American military withdrawal and how the dangerously eroding U.S. position in Iraq might somehow be made more promising."

It's a debate Campbell and O'Hanlon want to make more vibrant. If Democrats find the right course, the authors argue, the party has a chance to make a historic shift in the party's political perception. If not, they say, "Democrats are apt to remain on the political sidelines, left to contemplate what went so terribly wrong."

Baker is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post.

Okinawa mayor protests U.S. missile defense system deployment

Oct 2 12:37 AM US/Eastern

NAHA, Japan, Oct. 2 (AP) - (Kyodo)—Okinawa Mayor Mitsuko Tomon lodged a protest on Monday with the local bureau of the Defense Facilities Administration Agency against allowing the deployment of an advanced surface-to-air missile defense system at a U.S. base in the city without local consent.

The first batch of equipment for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 interceptor system arrived Saturday in Okinawa Prefecture ahead of the deployment of the system later this year at the U.S. Kadena Air Base and the U.S. Air Force's Kadena Ammunition Storage Area.

The U.S. forces started delivering the equipment early Monday morning from a military port in the Okinawa prefectural capital of Naha to the Kadena base, about 20 kilometers away.

The mayor of Okinawa and the village heads of Kadena and Chatan, which host the Kadena base, earlier agreed to oppose the deployment, saying it will lead to strengthening the functions of the base.

The deployment is being implemented based on an agreement reached between Japan and the United States in May on the realignment of the U.S. military presence in Japan.

The amount of equipment which arrived Saturday is enough to fill some 500 vehicles and will take four or five days to finish carrying. Another, smaller, amount of equipment is expected to arrive at the Naha military port by the end of this week, according to the U.S. forces.

The PAC-3 missiles and launchers are scheduled to be brought within two weeks to a U.S. military facility in Uruma, Okinawa Prefecture.

The United States plans to partially begin the operation of the PAC-3 system by the end of December. It is expected to become fully operational by the end of next March.

The PAC-3 system is designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles in their final phase, after they have reentered the Earth's atmosphere and have descended to altitudes of just over a dozen kilometers and before they reach their targets on the ground, Japanese officials said earlier.

Mayor says U.S. air station in Okinawa failing safety standards

Nov 1 06:30 AM US/Eastern

NAHA, Japan, Nov. 1 (AP) - (Kyodo) — Yoichi Iha, mayor of the Ginowan City in Okinawa Prefecture, said Wednesday the United States is operating Futemma Air Station in the city when the military facility fails applicable safety standards in their homeland, a move apparently aimed at calling on the U.S. and Japanese governments to move toward its early closure.

Iha said the United States defines an area within 4,500 meters from the edge of an air base runway as having the risk of accidents and ban the usage of the land.

Noting that schools and houses are densely built in areas adjacent to the air station in the city center, Iha said "the operation of the base disregards the safety and lives of residents."

In a bilateral agreement struck in May on realigning the U.S. military presence in Japan, Tokyo and Washington plan to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps' Futemma Air Station within the prefecture by building a new airfield by 2014.

Iha told a press conference that "the danger should not be left unattended until then."

"Any accident like the one in which a U.S. helicopter crashed into the Okinawa International University campus could happen," he said.

Three crew members of the helicopter, which took off from Futemma, were injured in the 2004 accident. It sparked an outpouring of protest against the base among local citizens.

International Affairs Forum Interview

October 16, 2006
By Jason Miks

Steven C. Clemons serves as the Executive Vice President of the New America Foundation and is the Director of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He is a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. His blog – The Washington Note – is one of the most widely read such websites in Washington. Steven C. Clemons is also on the Center for International Relations’ Editorial Board. Jason Miks has recently caught up with him in Tokyo for this interview.

International Affairs Forum: You had an op-ed in the Washington Post a couple of months ago warning that political debate in Japan is being stifled by far-right nationalists. What do you see going on here?

Steven C. Clemons: I think what is beginning to happen, why the issue of right wing intimidation of Japanʹs blue chip intellectuals, business leaders and politicians matters, is that for the first time since I can remember, you are seeing cases of self censorship by Japanʹs best and most thoughtful parts of civil society.

The right wingers in Japan have been lurking around politics for centuries, so that is not interesting. But in the Washington Post article I compare this to the 1930s. This is to some degree an unfair comparison because Japan now is nothing like Japan in the 1930s, and I know that. But there arenʹt a lot of good metaphors to show people what is happening.

Also, Japan is cocooned to some degree from a lot of these big conflicts about identity. Many people just avoid it. So it is important to look at these issues when there are times of stress, or crises.

So it is not like we see storm troopers outside. But you do see a kind of thought-control going on. I wrote the piece because of an incident in which the Japan Institute for International Affairs took not just one controversial article, but a whole raft of material, off its website. It was a remarkable act of contrition by one of Japanʹs leading former diplomats, at a kind of official government foreign policy think tank.

What is happening is that Japan got a lobotomy in the 1950s from the United States. And that lobotomy pre-empted a lot of thinking about Japanʹs national interests - about what sort of global engagement it wanted to have, what kind of military forces etc. So now Japan needs to have a discussion with its people about what sort of nationalism it wants to wear. When Junichiro Koizumi became prime minister he began to tack to the right simply to cover himself from attacks from people like Shintaro Ishihara [Tokyo’s ultranationalist governor]. But that opened up an appetite in Japan for more and more flirtation with symbols such as Yasukuni shrine... and an opportunity for the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to rise.


While I am thrilled that Abe went to China and seems to be saying a lot of the right things, his career so far has been marked by pugnacious nationalism rather than healthy nationalism. You can look at other nationalists like Ichiro Ozawa [leader of main opposition party the Democratic Party of Japan]. Heʹs not perfect, but heʹs a much healthier kind of nationalist in terms of what a normal nation would look like. And heʹs sometimes also a hawk... so it’s not a question of being a hawk or a dove, it’s a question of whether you can organize your nationalism around both national interests and national security issues and do it in a way so it doesnʹt engage in international rejectionism, which I think is happening.

IA-Forum: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe surprised many with early visits to China and South Korea. Do you think he recognizes the need to repair relations, or was he prodded by the United States into doing it?

Steve Clemons: I donʹt think he was pushed by America, because I donʹt think America has much influence in this case. I think he was pushed by the prospect of the Upper House elections just around the corner and that when he looks at the polls in contrast to Koizumi, his numbers are already falling, because when people look at him they see a strident nationalist who is making Japan less safe.

This doesnʹt mean people donʹt want to see people confront China over bad behavior or even confront North Korea. I basically support what Japan has done with regard to North Korea. But he is saying a lot of things that, to some degree, alienate the fundamentalist right wing in Japan who are supporting him. This creates tension for them, which I think is a positive thing. But it also creates doubt among the more reasonable or moderate parts of Japanese society about whether he is saying a lot of these things to get along and to be pragmatic about his current political weakness, and whether he will turn back, when he gets through the more difficult times. It may be that we are not seeing the real Abe. In my view we should keep our powder dry and stand back and see what happens.

IA-Forum: Abe got a boost in his political fortunes in the Liberal Democratic Party leadership race by taking a tough line on North Korea, following its missile tests in July. Do you see Abe
trying to exploit the North Korea situation in the future for political gain?

Steve Clemons: He became big because of the abduction [of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents] issue. North Korea has been a useful issue for him to exploit for his own success. Will he continue to milk that? Yes, he probably will. But now that he is prime minister he canʹt just be highly strident. He needs to produce results now. So I suspect that what you will see is a softening, a less crude commentary from him about that, and hopefully he will move in that direction. This is what he has done in his first few weeks in office. I have my doubts about him though. I knew his father very well. In my mind Shintaro Abe was one of the great, under-appreciated, diplomats when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was almost single-handedly trying to solve the Iran-Iraq war. Unfortunately Abe does not remind me much of his father. He reminds me more of his grandfather, [Prime Minister Nobusuke] Kishi, who was much more of a strident, hard-edged nationalist who defined military means as the way for Japan to assert its interests.

IA-Forum: Koizumi was the third longest serving post-war Japanese prime minister. Do you expect Abe to be this successful?

Steve Clemons: At this moment I donʹt. I see him disliked by significant parts of the LDP. If he stays moderate and centrist, he alienates his base. If he moves towards a healthy nationalism, he loses credibility with those who put him in power. If he swings back, he looks duplicitous. I think he has a built-in fragility. But that does not mean he wonʹt find a way to stay around for a while. Koizumi, I would say, was not policy savvy, but he was certainly savvy politically. Thereʹs no doubt that Abe is more ideologically driven than Koizumi was and my sense is that he doesnʹt have the same facility with the art of politics that Koizumi clearly had.

IA-Forum: The current leader of the DPJ, Ichiro Ozawa, once wrote about his vision of Japan as a ‘normal country’. What kind of ‘normal’ would be healthy for Japan?

Steve Clemons: When you compare Japan and Germany in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, Germany, despite my problems with the anti-Americanism that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder cultivated, Germany seemed to earn back its sovereignty. It showed that it would be a peer of the United States in common challenges. Japan in contrast turned out to be disappointing in this respect. I think Germany is psychologically better off for it.

A normal nation is one that figures out when it is going to converge with certain interests of other global players and when not. In my view the Iraq war and the way Koizumi sent the Self Defence Forces over was a rejection of the kind of multilateral institution building that Japan had been working hard on.

There are degrees of democracy, but Japan is still a group driven society, which can often be anti-democratic. So when I see right wing thugs engage in intimidation and violence or systematic harassment, I believe it stifles that modern debate from taking place. You canʹt have one wing of the political environment have a disproportionate effect by stifling debate elsewhere. A normal nation has to get over this lobotomy and Ozawaʹs book laid out many of these questions beautifully.
.
IA-Forum: Thank you very much for your time.

Comments? Please send them to editor@ia-forum.org

International Affairs Forum Op-Ed:

October 15, 2006
By Jason Miks

Too Close for Comfort? Will Japan under Shinzo Abe finally be able
to shed its image as a U.S. satellite state?

Last month British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered his final speech as Labour leader to the annual party conference. Well-judged and eloquent, it was good enough to make one forget his low approval numbers and left one wondering why he is being pressured to leave the office – despite unprecedented political successes.

One major reason is his relationship with U.S. President George Bush which has alienated even some of his moderate allies. The price of friendship between the two leaders, they argue, was being drawn into the ongoing and costly war in Iraq. But while Blair has beein excoriated at times – at least in Britain – for his close relationship with Bush, he is not the only politician to have his friendship with the US administration questioned. Until late last month, Blair shared the label of “lapdog” with then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Indeed, Koizumi’s decision to commit troops to Iraq took him out on a longer limb than Blair. Although Japan’s forces were limited to non-combatant roles, their deployment still set off a fierce debate at home as use of military force in international disputes is expressly barred by Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. And military co-operation between the US and Japan is likely to grow closer still as Japan acts with growing national confidence and heightened concerns over North Korea’s military activities.

The close working relationship that Koizumi and Bush struck up was much in evidence during Koizumi’s trip to the U.S. in June, with the Japanese leader’s reception noticeably warmer than that offered China's President Hu in April. And this closeness has extended well beyond the military sphere. In counter terrorism the two have worked closely on projects such as the Container Security Initiative and in terms of trade Japan is the United States’ fourth largest partner. The warm relation between the two leaders corresponded with the broadly favourable view of the US held by many Japanese – 63 per cent, according to a recent Pew Global Attitudes study. Growing up in the immediate post war period, Kazuhiro Suzuki speaks for many of his generation when he talks of the appreciation he feels for US reconstruction efforts following World War II. “We owe a lot to America,” he told me when I asked his opinion of the occupation. “We imported ideas from them, technology, and they gave us our constitution.”

Indeed he thinks the close security cooperation has been hugely beneficial for Japan’s development since World War II. “The relationship has been very good for Japan because we have not had to worry about defense. America provided that for us, which allowed us to invest in industry,” he added. In the decade following the Second World War this bond was cemented by Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who believed that Japan’s well-being depended on maintaining close political ties with the United States, a focus on economic rebuilding and relying on the US for protection. This so-called ‘Yoshida Doctrine’ has been a dominant feature of Japan’s foreign policy landscape ever since, despite challenges from right and left.

Yet the Koizumi-Bush rapport masks a shift in recent years. Japan has been wrestling with its identity for decades. As its economic bubble burst and after the critical reception of its Gulf war chequebook diplomacy, the question of Japan’s role in the world and its relationship with the US has been hotly debated. Many Japanese feel that they are tied too closely to the US and, though grateful for the security this arrangement has provided, long for greater diplomatic independence.

Such independence has been more in evidence under Koizumi as Japan has been more willing to stand up for itself. A ban on beef imports from the U.S. to Japan – despite intense U.S. pressure – was upheld over BSE concerns. Japan’s refusal of a US request to bear 75 per cent of the costs of relocating 8,000 marines from Okinawa to Guam was another show of increasing self-assertion.

Akihiro Takahara, a 30 year old systems engineer from Aobadai, Kanagawa, believes this independence is a good thing. “I think the partnership between Koizumi and Bush has made the relationship more balanced,” he said. “If a prime minister always says yes, yes, yes, then this is bad. Koizumi has been much more willing to negotiate.”

Takahara sees the changing relationship as something that will continue to evolve as Japan grows in confidence.

“When my parents were growing up people wanted to have what America had. Many people were very poor,” he said when asked about these changing attitudes. “But now Japan is a richer and more advanced country than it was then. We have our own style now and don’t have to follow America as much.”

This change is still lost on some policymakers in the U.S. Congressman Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, earlier this year sent a letter to the US House of Representatives’ Speaker to press Koizumi to cease his controversial visits to Yasukuni shrine if he wanted to address Congress. Instead of a pledge to appease the influential congressman, the Japanese response was the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders.

What will be interesting now is to see if this shift continues under new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Abe has already made an interesting break with precedent by making his first trip as leader to Beijing, not Washington. Earlier this year, I asked the Political Minister Counsellor at the US embassy in Tokyo whether he thinks the close working relationship between the US and Japan will continue smoothly with the leadership change. He said he believes it will - that the two countries “have more in common than a common enemy” and that the close working relationship was not dependent on a personal relation but largely common values.

As Japan seeks to find its place in the world and becomes increasingly assertive, there will likely be more disputes with the US, regardless of who the respective leaders are. As if to point down that road, this year’s Pew survey also showed plummeting support amongst Japanese for the US-led “war on terror”. So long as the United States government remembers that having a independent minded ally is preferable to a browbeaten one and so long as the United States does not forget the importance of Japan over its understandable focus on China, the future for U.S.-Japanese relations and the Asia-Pacific realm look bright enough.

Cold Comfort: the Japan Lobby Blocks Resolution on WWII Sex Slaves

By Ken Silverstein
October 5, 2006 · Washington Babylon

Even as top congressional Republicans were protecting Mark Foley from exposure for soliciting teen pages, they were simultaneously helping Japan cover up its past record of institutionalized rape and sexual enslavement of Asian women. The Japanese cause was greatly aided by Bob Michel, a highly paid lobbyist and former G.O.P. congressman with close ties to the party's leadership.

For the past seven years, a coalition of Korean-American, human rights, and religious groups have been pressuring congress to urge Japan to accept responsibility for forcing women and girls into sexual slavery during the World War II era. This shouldn't be terribly controversial, since the historical facts are clear.

Beginning in the 1930s, Japan rounded up as many as 200,000 women and girls, mostly from Korea, China, and the Philippines, and forced them to serve as prostitutes for its soldiers in order to increase troop “morale.” The Japanese called these sex slaves “comfort women”; many were raped and beaten, and some were killed after they acquired sexually transmitted diseases or became “overworked.” Some of the women were so humiliated that they never returned to their homes after the war, and many of those who did kept quiet about their experiences.

Japan long insisted that the comfort women were willing prostitutes and only acknowledged the sex slavery system in 1993 after documents discovered in the Japanese Army archives proved its true nature. The Japanese government backed the establishment of the quasi-governmental Asian Comfort Woman Fund in the mid-1990s but it has refused to offer direct compensation. Many of the women and their families have refused to accept money from the fund because they say Japan has never taken responsibility for its actions.

Japan has always been able to block attempts to pass a congressional resolution on the exploitation of comfort women, partly because it runs a lavishly-funded Beltway lobbying operation. The Bush Administration has quietly assisted in attempts to block a resolution on comfort women. According to Mindy Kotler, the director of Asia Policy Point, a research center on Japan and northeast Asia, the Administration views Japan as the key regional bulwark against an emerging Chinese regime that may be hostile to the United States in the future. “The administration wants Japan to be a central part of America's Asian security architecture—above Australia, India, and the British Navy,” she said. “Any issue that the Japanese have defined as disturbing has been shunted aside to ensure that nothing upsets the alliance with Japan—and I mean nothing, whether it's a trade dispute or taking responsibility for the comfort women.”

Not long ago, though, it looked like a measure had a decent chance of getting through. The coalition pressing Congress on the issue had traditionally sought to win a concurrent resolution, which must be approved by both chambers. This year the coalition worked for a resolution in only the House, and one was finally brought forth in April by Democrat Lane Evans of Illinois and Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey. The non-binding measure called on Japan to formally “acknowledge and accept full responsibility” for the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” and to stop denying its crimes—for example, by stripping mention of the topic from school textbooks.

The resolution was referred to the International Relations Committee and quickly gained co-sponsors, which alarmed the Japanese government. Enter Bob Michel, a top Washington lobbyist with Hogan & Hartson and a thirty-eight-year House member from Illinois, who served fourteen years as the G.O.P.'s minority leader. The Japanese government pays his firm about $60,000 per month to lobby on the sole matter of historical issues related to World War II, which also include claims concerning Japan's vile abuses of American P.O.W.s, including the use of slave labor. (Michel, incidentally, is only the most prominent of a small gang of lobbyists which Japan retains to handle World War II issues.)

Michel, I'm told, met in late May with Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the International Relations Committee. He told Hyde that passing the resolution would be crippling blow to America's alliance with Japan and reminded the congressman that Japan's sexual enslavement of several hundred thousand women had taken place some sixty years earlier—bygones should be bygones. Japan's then–Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had already announced that he'd be visiting the United States at the end of June (when he would visit Graceland with President Bush and sing “Love Me Tender” in the Jungle Room) and Michel argued further that it would be embarrassing to Japan if the measure was approved around that time. “The whole deal came to a stop,” says a source who was working to pass the measure. “I've never seen anything like it. We had a lot of momentum and suddenly it was just dead.”

But the groups working on the issue kept at it and got a big break in September when Hyde shifted gears and backed their cause. He was apparently moved by an emotional trip he made to Korea and two other Asian countries over the August recess. More importantly, Hyde was said to be angered by Koizumi's decision on August 15—the date of Japan's defeat in World War II—to visit the Yasukuni Shrine. More than 1,000 war criminals have their names inscribed in the shrine's Book of Souls, including Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor and who was hanged in 1948. Koizumi's visit provoked outrage across Asia and didn't sit well with Hyde, the last remaining combat veteran of the Pacific campaign to sit in the House.

With Hyde on board, the source says, “We went from zero to 100 immediately.” Several members of the International Relations Committee did push to soften the resolution (removing, among other things, language that explicitly defined the treatment of comfort women as a “crime against humanity”). The advocates reluctantly accepted those changes, and on September 13, the Committee passed the resolution by unanimous consent.

Supporters believed the measure was now unstoppable. They expected it would soon be put on the “suspension calendar,” which would allow the resolution to pass the full House with a simple voice vote. The only obstacle to passage at that point was potential opposition from House Speaker Dennis Hastert—also of Illinois, and a former colleague of Michel's—or House Majority Leader John Boehner, who controls the voting calendar.

On September 22, twenty-five congressional co-sponsors of the measure, including Mike Honda of California, the leading Japanese American in Congress, sent a letter to Hastert and Boehner asking them to bring the resolution to the floor before Congress adjourned for the November elections. But mysteriously, no word was heard from the G.O.P. leadership about when the resolution would be brought to a vote.

Exactly what happened next is not clear, but word on the Hill is that the Bush Administration, Michel, and other Japanese lobbyists went to work on Boehner—and on Hastert, who reportedly is hoping to be named ambassador to Japan after he retires and who made clear that he was unhappy with the resolution. By last Wednesday, Boehner's office had made clear that the comfort women resolution would not be brought to a vote before the end of the week—a key deadline since Congress would be adjourning until after the midterm elections. (Michel declined to return calls, as did the offices of Congressmen Boehner and Hastert, both of whom may be preoccupied with other pressing matters at present.)

The measure could conceivably be revived during the upcoming lame-duck session, but for now it looks like Japan has again bought itself victory on the Hill. “The reality is that there is little we can do for the comfort women,” says Kotler. “They've lived with this hell for sixty years and most of them are going to find peace soon. The real importance of the bill is that it would serve as a precedent for going after the miscreants and perpetrators running today's rape camps and help protect future generations of women from similar violence.”