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By John Pomfret and Blaine Harden

South Korea will formally blame North Korea on Thursday for launching a torpedo at one of its warships in March, causing an explosion that killed 46 sailors and heightened tensions in one of the world's most perilous regions, U.S. and East Asian officials said.

South Korea concluded that North Korea was responsible for the attack after investigators from Australia, Britain, Sweden and the United States pieced together portions of the ship at the port of Pyeongtaek, 40 miles southwest of Seoul. The Cheonan sank on March 26 after an explosion rocked the 1,200-ton vessel as it sailed on the Yellow Sea off South Korea's west coast.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because South Korea has yet to disclose the findings of the investigation, said subsequent analysis determined that the torpedo was identical to a North Korean torpedo that South Korea had obtained.

Of the countries aiding South Korea in its inquiry, officials said that Sweden had been the most reluctant to go along with the findings but that when the evidence was amassed, it too agreed that North Korea was to blame...

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By P.S. Suryanarayana

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has emphasised how difficult it is to say ‘no' to the United States over its military preferences in his own country. The message, after he held urgent consultations with his cabinet colleagues on May 10, is that he remains unable to strike an “equal relationship” with the U.S., despite his efforts to do so since he became Prime Minister over eight months ago.

The U.S. is Japan's long-standing military ally. At the same time, Japan, China, and South Korea are also engaged in trilateral diplomacy at the summit level under what can be described as Fukuoka consensus. The consensus is in essence a political matter of potential hedging against the U.S. by these three neighbouring Northeast Asian countries. It was at...

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By Tobias Harris

The Democratic Party of Japan swept to power last year by promising to "normalise" Japan's political system. After six months in office, this reform is faltering and with it Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's credibility.

Following Britain's Westminster model, the DPJ wanted to concentrate power in the cabinet, subordinating the bureaucracy and ruling party backbenchers to political leadership. The two major parties would in the future contest elections on the basis of detailed policy manifestoes that the victorious party the would try to implement through the cabinet's control of the budget process and the drafting of legislation.

To a certain extent the DPJ has already made important changes to the policy-making process. In the Hatoyama government, the cabinet is responsible for setting policy priorities. While this process has been discordant, key policy questions are being debated by political leaders in the open, instead of being settled by bureaucrats and ruling-party elites behind closed doors. The cabinet also played an important role in drafting a budget that included proposals from the DPJ's manifesto, most notably a program providing child allowances to families.

In addition, under the leadership of Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa the DPJ has concentrated power in Mr Ozawa's office...

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By Todd Crowell

TOKYO -- Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama returned home from Washington last week a considerably diminished leader.

Hatoyama ought to have stood out at a meeting of world leaders convened to find ways to lessen the dangers of nuclear terrorism or nuclear conflict. After all, Japan is the world's only victim of an atomic bomb attack and has championed every initiative to reduce the role of nuclear weapons.

It is also a country that holds one of the world's largest stockpiles of plutonium, enough, it is said, to build hundreds if not thousands of atomic bombs if the right kind of stuff fell into the hands of nuclear terrorists.

But all Japan had to offer at the conference was a plan to establish a "center to enhance human resources development preventing nuclear terrorism" at its Tokai nuclear power research facility north of Tokyo with an initial budget of about $2 million.

That hardly stood out among the several major announcements that emanated from the nuclear summit meeting, such as Ukraine's offer to surrender stockpiles of highly enriched uranium or Russia's announcement that it planned to close a reactor used to make weapon's grade plutonium.

Hatoyama was not among the world leaders who were accorded an opportunity for a formal bilateral meeting with President Barack Obama...

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Gallington

Reality has always been that disarmament is fine as long as it's the other guy who does it. Confirming this, Brazil's vice president recently advocated his country's development of nuclear weapons to "deter aggression" and gain "greater respectability" - while India announced that it has built high-yield nuclear weapons. But these developments are not nearly as disturbing as what's going on in despotic North Korea - now a nuclear-weapons power that loves to threaten war. From Japan is a pronounced turn to the right in national politics and a near-term promise of a more robust Japanese foreign and national security policy. In this context - and a few weeks before the last Japanese national election - the top U.S. general in Japan told the Tokyo Press Club that Japan didn't need its own deterrent to address the growing nuclear threat from North Korea. Since then, of course, North Korea has admitted that it was in the "completion stage" of enriching uranium - the process needed for larger-scale nuclear weapons production. Did the U.S. general's comment and the continuation of threats from North Korea - all widely reported - influence the elections in Japan?...

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By Gordon Chang

Hours ago a South Korean frigate exploded and sank in waters disputed by both Koreas. At last count 58 sailors had been rescued and 40 are missing. The ship, the 1,500-ton Cheonan, had a crew of 104. A naval official confirmed there were deaths.

Apparently the explosion occurred in the lower reaches of the ship, near the stern. The cause at this point is unknown. Seoul has been careful not to attribute responsibility for the sinking.

South Korean officials have confirmed that another of their vessels fired toward the north at a North Korean vessel. Residents on a nearby island reported hearing gunfire lasting about 10 minutes sometime after the Cheonan sank.

What happened?...

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By Dan Twining

In a thoughtful essay in today's Financial Times, Gideon Rachman asks whether Japan may now be tilting towards China after 60 years of aligning itself with the United States. This question is interesting on multiple dimensions -- including with regard to the future of U.S. primacy in Asia, the impact of China's rise on its neighbors, the nature of Japanese politics and identity, and our understanding of the deep structure of international relations at a time of systemic power shifts. Indeed, Japan is a critical case study for assessing how the developed world will respond to the rise of dynamic new power centers in Asia -- and what the implications will be for American leadership in the international system.

The ascent of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after nearly six decades of unbroken rule by the conservative, U.S.-oriented Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has convulsed not only Japanese politics but also its foreign policy. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has mused about constructing a pan-Asian fraternal community based on "solidarity"

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By Donald Kirk

SEOUL - The Japanese may be the most hardline of them all when it comes to a firm approach toward North Korea. If that seems obvious to anyone who has been following Japanese-North Korean relations over the years, it becomes a little more difficult to grasp in the context of the demands of Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama for a revision of a deal on United States military bases on Okinawa Island.

It's one thing to ride popular protest against American bases in Japan but quite another to try to buck opinion about North Korea, especially in view of all those episodes of kidnapping years ago of Japanese citizens on which the Japanese are certain North Korea has never come clean.

Hatoyama is now calling for his ministers and diplomats to come

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NYU Japan Centers Professor Edward Lincoln, discusses whether America is the next Japan with Derek Scissors, Heritage Foundation; and CNBC's Rick Santelli, on CNBC. February 23rd

The accelerator and brake problems afflicting Toyota have become a major news item in the United States over the past couple of weeks. The problems and the manner in which they have played out in the media raise a number of interesting issues that deserve comment.

To begin with, an upfront acknowledgement: Dr. Tatsuro Toyoda received an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business in 1957, and Toyota Motor Company donated $1 million to the school in 2004. However, I am not the direct beneficiary of that money, nor do I have any professional relationship with the company.

Let us first look at Toyota Motor Company, and then at how these issues fit in bilateral relations and American media coverage.

Toyota

Any complex manufactured product is subject to problems, even in the best of organizations. NASA had a long and proud record of careful attention to quality, but experienced two catastrophic accidents with the Space Shuttle in two decades. So we should be a bit cautious in blaming Toyota for something that can conceivably happen in any organization. However, there is reason to believe that something more than the inevitable randomness of accidents is involved...

Continue reading "The Lincoln Log 2010/1" »