Corine Hegland (Email this author )
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Noel Paul Stookey’s hairline hasn’t changed much. The sideburns are gone, and everything is gray, but the man in the picture is still bald on top and full behind.
The tall third of Peter, Paul, and Mary has an album out this month, Facets, his first solo studio recording in 20 years, and it sounds like his music hasn’t changed much, either. His guitar bebops and sidesteps through lines about “fillin’ your heart with the promise of love,” and starting a revolution by smiling “at every solitary person that I meet!” It’s pleasant, and toe-tapping.
Then, suddenly, he’s crooning in — Japanese?
Kaze no nokani
Anata no koe ga
Ki koe masu.
Return, Megumi, to me,
Across the waves of the sea.
Send me your spirit; my heart will hear it
Stookey wrote “Song for Megumi” for Megumi Yokota, a 13-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who was kidnapped on her way home from badminton practice in 1977. The North Koreans abducted her and at least 12 other Japanese citizens to train their spies in Japan’s language and customs. It was an aberrant thing for an aberrant nation to do, and both the North Korean and Japanese governments simply pretended for years that it never happened.
In 2002, however, North Korea admitted to the abductions and allowed five of the victims to return home. The others, they said, were dead — the result of suicides, traffic accidents, gas explosions, and the like, although documentation was either missing or forged. They provided the cremated remains of only two, Megumi and Kaoru Matsuki, a young man who disappeared from Europe in 1980. DNA testing suggested that neither set of ashes was a match for either victim, and although the tests’ validity has since been questioned, Megumi’s face was suddenly everywhere. “She became the symbol of this issue,” said Yuki Tatsumi, a Japanese research fellow at the Stimson Center. Stookey learned about the situation last year and performed the ballad in Japan for Megumi’s parents, who were seen dabbing away tears on the televised broadcast.
As Japan’s prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, prepares to make his first visit to Washington on November 16, an old folksinger’s song is as good a place as any to try to make sense of the U.S.-Japanese relationship. Nothing happens without history in Asia, and very little is ever forgotten. The Koreans are still angry with the Japanese over their forced prostitution of women, turning them into “comfort women” for the Imperial Army during World War II; the Japanese are still angry with the North Koreans over kidnappings that took place more than 20 years ago; and the Japanese constitution, written by America during the postwar occupation, still prevents military action.
All of that history is bubbling over now, leading the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Ryozo Kato, to opine recently that the current relationship between the two countries is “the most difficult and delicate” that it has been in six years.
It is an impassioned affair, which is why Stookey’s song is apt. This summer, the U.S. House passed a resolution calling on Japan to accept full responsibility and apologize for the comfort women of World War II. The Japanese government made a careful decision not to react, beyond saying that the resolution was “erroneous in terms of fact.” But the House action set off a popular firestorm in Japan, where right-wing comic strips and cartoons blasted the United States.
Japanese prime ministers had apologized to the comfort women, and the Japanese government had helped to establish a private fund to provide restitution, but South Korea never accepted the apology or the money, and the issue of Japan’s wartime behavior lingers in current relationships.
“When we try to get people in the region to discuss security issues, this always surfaces,” said Mindy Kotler, director of a nonprofit think tank called the Asia Policy Point. “The objective of the comfort women resolution was to create a road map to point our most important ally in Asia to solve a lingering problem that was deeply affecting our foreign relations in the region.”
But Japan chose to ignore the resolution’s road map. Still, the spat is a mere thundercloud compared with the storm that will break if Japan loses its next political battle with the United States: the removal of North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terror.
The U.S. added North Korea to the list in 1988 after the bombing of a South Korean airplane; Pyongyang has made North Korea’s removal a condition for dismantling its nuclear program. The Bush administration agreed to do so in February, and it is now helping Pyongyang to qualify. Tokyo, however, wants North Korea to remain on the list until it receives a full accounting for Megumi and the other kidnapped Japanese.
The negotiations over North Korea’s removal have been held in such tight circles that the U.S. ambassador to Japan, J. Thomas Schieffer, sent a private cable to Bush at the end of October warning that removing North Korea from the terrorism list without substantive progress on the abductees would harm U.S. relations with Japan.
“The Japanese are really mistrustful of how [Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher] Hill is handling the six-party talks,” said Chris Nelson, who writes an insider’s daily briefing on Asian affairs called The Nelson Report. “The Schieffer telegram is a red-light indicator of danger: If I can’t trust you on something fundamental to my politics like abductees, how do I trust you with the big stuff?”
If North Korea comes off the list without accounting for the abductees, said Michael Green, who holds the Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served as the National Security Council’s Asia director, it will “raise some fundamental questions about our credibility. And it’s a bad time for those questions, because North Korea has nuclear weapons and we need to be credible if we’re going to stop proliferation” in East Asia.
“Japan’s reaction [to the delisting of North Korea] will not be rational,” the Stimson Center’s Tatsumi said. “It will be emotional, in the lines of, ‘The Bush administration betrayed Japan.’ ”
The terrorism list is at the top of Fukuda’s Washington agenda, but there are other items. On November 1, a Japanese tanker and its escort received orders to steam home to Tokyo from the Indian Ocean. A special anti-terrorism law had allowed the ships to provide more than $190 million in fuel for Operation Enduring Freedom since 2001, but the law expired that day; under Japan’s pacifist constitution, the military could no longer stay. Although it was a small contribution to the war in Afghanistan, it made for a politically powerful alliance, and Schieffer had pressured the Japanese to renew the law. Fukuda placed himself firmly behind the bill, arguing that Japanese involvement in the war was important to its role as a world leader, but he was unable to maneuver it through the opposition-controlled upper house of the Japanese parliament before November 1.
In addition, the Japanese government, facing a budget crunch, is planning to cut its support payments for U.S. bases in Japan, over America’s objections, and there’s a general anxiety in Japan over the future of its relations with the United States. In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote that America’s relationship with China will be “the most important bilateral relationship” in the world. That distinction has historically been given to Japan; combined with the Bush administration’s relative silence on the House’s comfort women resolution and the North Korea negotiations, it has given rise to fears in Japan that America is slowly abandoning it.
“The Japanese can be very needy,” Green said. “They take a lot of hand-holding, and some of their big friends, like [former Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage, aren’t in the administration and so they’ve got no place to go for help.”
Kotler suggests that Fukuda’s visit might be a dose of old-fashioned realpolitik. Anxieties can be addressed, but both countries need to make some real-world policy decisions. “We’re dealing with a maturing alliance,” she said. “We can’t agree with everything Japan wants if it is counter to what is going on in the rest of the world. To tie up de-nuclearizing North Korea for a vague hope that seven or eight people are still alive is counterproductive. We have an alliance fabricated by words and hope, and the realities are now settling in.”
