Japan Focuses on One Enemy at a Time

By Bruce Wallace

May 30, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

TOKYO — One of the hottest-selling books here this spring is Ryu Murakami’s “Get Out of the Peninsula,” a novel set in 2010 that portrays a Japan in ruins, ravaged by economic and social collapse.

Armies of homeless and unemployed have been cast adrift. Japan’s alliance with America lies in tatters. Chinese and Indian criminal gangs run amok.

But Murakami’s main villains are a group of North Korean commandos. On the opening day of the baseball season, they storm the Fukuoka Dome stadium on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. As incompetent Japanese politicians fail to act, more North Korean troops arrive, sealing Kyushu off from the rest of Japan.

In Japan these days, bad guys just don’t come any more sinister than North Koreans.

Despite the recent war of words between Japan and China, it is North Korea and its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il, that remain enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Japanese public. Pyongyang achieved that notoriety with the 1998 launch of a long-range ballistic missile that crossed Japan’s airspace, and cemented it with the admission 2 1/2 years ago that it had abducted more than a dozen Japanese citizens to train its spies in Japanese language and customs.

There is deep unease here about the prospect of North Korea testing a nuclear weapon. Although North Korea’s main antagonist may be Washington, Japan is a far closer target.

“In the Japanese mind, North Korea is the devil,” said Yasuhiko Yoshida, a North Korea specialist at Osaka University of Economics and Law.

That enmity has been a catalyst for pulling Japan out of its postwar pacifist shell, and has spurred Tokyo to take an increasingly hard line on national security issues.

Amid this loathing for North Korea, Japan’s alliance with Washington is seen, more than ever, as indispensable, and its public accepts such moves by Tokyo as sending troops to Iraq and joining the planned U.S. antiballistic missile defense shield.

Yet opinions diverge in Japan on whether North Korea or China poses the gravest threat to national security. While the media and public remain obsessively focused on North Korea, some Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and military leaders may be using fear of Pyongyang’s erratic behavior as a cover to prepare for what they see as Japan’s sharpest long-term security problem: a rising China.

“There is clearly concern about North Korea’s missile capability, but in the longer run there is a much greater fear among professionals about what China will become,” said Robert Dujarric, a northeast Asia specialist for the Washington-based Hudson Institute who is based in Tokyo. “Japanese officials are reluctant to talk publicly about the China threat, whereas it is politically correct to talk about the threat from North Korea.”

But Japanese leaders’ enthusiasm for joining the U.S. missile shield would not be nearly as acute if there were no sense of an ultimately bigger threat posed by China. The North Koreans may be frustrating to deal with, but most officials in Japan believe a diplomatic solution to Kim’s nuclear weapons program will eventually be reached.

The real need for a defensive shield, in Tokyo’s eyes, is for protection against Chinese nuclear missiles. Yet at least until last month’s anti-Japanese riots in several Chinese cities, the Japanese public had given little thought to the possibility of a clash with their colossal rival.

Until China’s recent spate of Japan bashing, the Japanese public thought of China as little more than a good investment opportunity or a fresh tourist destination. Even Japan’s right-wing extremists have directed most of their venom at North Korea and, to a lesser degree, South Korea, rather than at China.

So the Japanese public was mostly baffled by the flag-burning and window-smashing at Japanese consulates and businesses in China.

“People are generally indifferent about China, and they were completely shocked to discover that the Chinese hated them so much,” said Masaru Tamamoto, a senior fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo. By comparison, every hiccup out of North Korea sustains anti-Kim sentiment in Japan.

No issue has driven that animosity more than the kidnapping during the Cold War of at least a dozen civilians. Five of the abductees have been released. Pyongyang says the rest are dead -- a claim few in Japan believe.

It requires no stretch of the Japanese imagination to accept that a regime willing to kidnap Japanese teenagers from the streets of their hometowns would also be willing to launch a nuclear attack. And a breakdown of old social and financial networks among ethnic Koreans living in Japan has virtually wiped out any voices that might defend Kim’s regime here. Pyongyang’s natural allies in the communist and socialist parties have been marginalized, while hard times in the Korean-controlled pachinko gambling business have dried up much of the money that pro-Pyongyang groups once directed to sympathetic Japanese politicians.

Furthermore, ethnic Koreans in Japan were appalled by the abduction revelations, weakening the hold Kim’s supporters wielded over the community.

The near-universal loathing of Kim’s regime explains the allure to a Japanese novelist of a plot that casts North Koreans in the villain’s cloak.

“Japan is a hierarchical society that wants hierarchies in everything, even foreign relations,” Tamamoto explained. “But because of our history, we haven’t been allowed to look down on anyone.

“Except North Korea,” he said. “That’s the one country, because it is so demonstrably crazy, that Japan is permitted to look down on.”