Japan’s new center-left rulers plan to lift the lid soon on secret Cold War nuclear and military pacts with the US that were denied for decades by previous conservative governments.
Soon after coming to power, the government set up a panel of historians to probe the long-whispered existence of pacts between the two countries. Their findings are expected to be released some time this week.
The report comes at a sensitive time for relations between Tokyo and Washington amid a squabble over details of the post-war US military presence in Japan and the relocation of a controversial US base.
The clandestine pacts are already open secrets, thanks to whistle-blowers, media leaks and declassified US documents, but the reformist six-month-old government has made a point of clearing the air once and for all.
The “secret treaties” — some of them only hinted at in yellowed diplomatic memos — point to what has long been Japan’s security paradox.
Since its World War II defeat by the US, which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has maintained a pacifist and anti-nuclear stance, yet relies on the superpower for nuclear deterrence.
One of the pacts was agreed under late prime minister Eisaku Sato, who won the 1974 Nobel Peace prize for stating Japan’s hallowed “three non-nuclear principles” of not making nuclear weapons, possessing them or allowing them on its soil.
The report is set to confirm that Sato quietly gave the green light in 1969 to then-US president Richard Nixon to take nuclear arms to Okinawa in an emergency even after the island was handed back to Japan in 1972.
The Sato-Nixon deal was kept secret by successive governments of the conservative Liberal Democrats, who ruled Japan with only one break for over half a century until their ouster in last year’s landslide election.
An original minute of the hush-hush deal only saw the light of day last year when Sato’s son, former lawmaker Shinji Sato, gave the paper, which he said he found in his father’s private desk drawer, to Japanese newspapers.
The report is also expected to confirm a 1960 pact allowing US troops to use Japanese soil “as needed” in case of conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
In another Cold War agreement, Japan gave the nod to the US to sail nuclear-armed warships through Japanese waters and make port stops, declassified US State Department documents suggest.
Yet another deal refers to Japan’s quietly paying for the restoration of former US military areas on Okinawa after the island’s return. Okinawa still hosts more than half of the 47,000 US troops in Japan.
The island is at the center of the current row with Washington, after new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama launched a review of a 2006 pact that would see a controversial air base moved from a city to a coastal area there.
Many people on the island, the site of some of the bloodiest World War II battles, oppose the US military presence and want the base removed altogether.
Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has pledged a less subservient stance toward the US after long criticizing the Liberal Democrats for their more hawkish stance, including sending non-combat troops to Iraq.
Japan’s new government says it owes the truth to its people, in a show of transparency that has also been criticized as political grand-standing ahead of upper house elections in July.
Some political experts warn that making a show of the secret pacts in the report, which newspapers have said will be released last Tuesday, could further harm ties with the US.
Takehiko Yamamoto, professor of international politics at Waseda University, who recently visited Washington, said he felt mounting distrust among US political experts against Hatoyama and his government.
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