Japan’s South Sudan Controversy

The story of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF) pulling out from South Sudan requires going back to December 2016 – when, in response to a journalist’s query, the Ministry of Defense (MOD) reported that the documents relating to Japan’s participation in the UN mission had been discarded. The daily reports were “discovered” in digitized form in February when a request for information was made by a group of lawmakers.

As Japan debates the GSDF involvement in South Sudan, there are two separate issues that deserve to be untangled. First, there is the issue of whether Japanese GSDF personnel ought to have been in South Sudan since July 2016.

At the heart of the matter is whether the daily reports from the GSDF in South Sudan included the term “sento” (fighting) or not, and if they did, when. To most countries, the distinction between “sento” and “shototsu” (clashes) may seem trivial, but for Japan, it is critical: Japanese forces cannot operate in areas where “sento” is occurring under Japan’s Constitution and the five conditions that allow the government to dispatch SDF members to participate in peacekeeping operations (PKO).

As it turns out, the released reports include descriptions of the fighting that broke out in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, in July 2016 as “sento” –  damning the government’s continued PKO efforts in the country as unconstitutional and illegal.

As a result, on March 10, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the five-year deployment of Japanese GSDF would end when troops complete their last scheduled round in May 2017. The current 350-person team, focused on road construction, had been in South Sudan since November of last year, and had been the focus of particular attention as they were the first to be assigned “kaketsuke keigo” (literally, “rushing to the defense of”) missions with the mandate to use force if necessary to protect civilians and UN staff and peacekeepers from other nations. Withdrawals began on April 17.

The second issue is whether there was a deliberate attempt at some level – within the SDF or the MOD – to “cover up” the July 2016 daily reports. To address this issue, on March 16, Inada called for a special investigation by the MOD to determine the extent of SDF officials’ involvement in the announcement that the daily reports had been deleted.

Abe’s critics are also trying to make the matter a question of improper civil-military relations. In a February 22 editorial, Asahi, Japan’s left-wing daily newspaper, declared, “The revelations have laid bare not only the problems of information management by the ministry and the SDF, but also the fact that the civilian control system is not working properly.”

Such concerns would be alarming in any country, but is a particularly thorny issue in Japan, where people are hypersensitive to anything that resembles the pre-war slippery slope that dismantled institutional brakes on the military and the hawks – leading to the Pacific War, the greatest catastrophe the Japanese nation has ever known.

The Japanese government has insisted that it was not the deteriorating security situation that led to the pullout, pointing to the fact that it is staying engaged through other ways – such as food and humanitarian support, as well as a deployment to the house command of the United Nations Mission until February 2018. Abe stated to reporters, “As South Sudan enters a new phase of nation-building, we have decided that we can now put an end to our infrastructure building efforts.” It is curious what could possibly be meant by “a new phase” when UN officials have been raising alarms about the risk of genocide in South Sudan as ethnic conflict between the current President Salva Kiir’s supporters and former Vice President Riek Machar’s supporters escalates.

Rhetoric aside, it truly is an embarrassing situation for Japan – precisely because things are getting worse on the ground. The August 2015 peace deal failed, and the violence has only increased since last July, with tens of thousands of people being killed and 3.1 million being forced to flee.

As always, when the going gets tough, Japan turns to money to solve its problems and “make a contribution.” On March 12, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to send $6 million (about 690 million yen) in famine relief. Almost two decades after the first Gulf War, Japan has yet to take the kind of stand that allows it to shed the opprobrium of “checkbook diplomacy” earned then.

Money may satisfy the UN and South Sudan – as money can always be used to hire PKO forces from countries like Pakistan – but there is only so much that money can do to resolve the negative optics of Japan abdicating its responsibility to the international community. This appears all the more hypocritical because Abe has been pushing the concept of “proactive pacifism” so strongly to justify constitutional reinterpretation and other security reforms. In an anarchic international system, no country has a moral responsibility to the citizens of another country, but if a country’s leader chooses to claim such responsibilities, it is ignoble to drop it at the first sign of political trouble.

The withdrawal makes sense when one considers the larger context of current Japanese politics. It may have been politically necessary for Abe and Defense Minister Tomomi Inada to approve the withdrawal, as they were both caught up in a scandal involving Moritomo Gakuen, a controversial, right-wing educational institution.

Abe’s critics, who succeeded in this instance, insist that they are motivated by the desire to be true to Japan’s peace-loving constitution. But it seems like a cruel twist of words when blindly pushing for “peace” (read: safety for Japanese lives) condemns others to death.

Rules exist to be followed. So if the daily report used the term “sento” in July 2016, constitutionally and legally, Japan should have pulled out then. But instead of putting up a fight to force the government to stick to letter of the law, the opposition should perhaps consider whether it is time to dedicate their energy to debating whether the rules ought to be changed so they are more in line with the spirit of the law. They may, of course, disagree with Abe’s interpretation of the “spirit” of the law – that Japan is a country that can make a “proactive contribution to peace.” And if the opposition wants to protect Japanese lives at all cost, and convinces the domestic polity of the merits of such a narrow-minded goal, that is a decision for Japan to make that the world must respect. But in an increasingly interconnected world, it would be silly to think Japan can really “go it alone.”

This is a debate that is still unfolding in Japan. As honorable as Abe’s desire to contribute to world peace may be, he must be more careful in how his agenda is pursued to minimize the domestic backlash.