Friends in need?

TOKYO: President Arroyo may be jetting off to Mindanao with US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone and Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, and she may continue issuing official statements of support for US operations in Iraq.

But privately, candidate Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo must be worried about how much her open support for the Iraq operations might cost her in the May elections. And what good is her all-out support to the Americans if she is out of the picture by mid-2004?

She may find some consolation in the fact that she is not alone in her dilemma. If the President comes here next month for the ASEAN-Japan Commemorative Summit, she will find that her country is not the only one agonizing over how far it is willing to go with the United States in the war on terror.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose ruling party was shaken by its poor showing in the recent elections, had initially committed to send some of his country’s Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. But recent developments in that country, particularly the killing of foreign troops, are forcing the first serious Japanese rethinking of close security ties with the Americans.

"The Japanese people are feeling very uncertain about their future, about their place in the world," said Masahiko Ishizuka, managing director of Japan’s Foreign Press Center. "The United States is going in that direction. How much can we follow, how much should we follow?"

Ishizuka, a product of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said many Japanese acknowledge the benefits they have derived from being under the American security umbrella for nearly six decades now. But the terrorist threat, whose principal target is America, is putting a great strain on the closest allies of the world’s lone superpower.

"How can we now reject an American request?" Ishizuka told a group of visiting foreign journalists here the other day. "Mr. Koizumi is in great agony about what to do. He didn’t expect the situation (in Iraq) to be so bad."

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Refusing to send troops to Iraq is not that simple for Tokyo. Japan considers American military presence in the region a foil against the nuclear threat posed by North Korea.

There are American officials who think North Korea’s Kim Jong-il is merely bluffing about his country’s nuclear capability. But as far as the Japanese are concerned, the threat in their own backyard is real. Now some Japanese are starting to wonder which is more worrisome: the threat from North Korea or the purported warning from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda about attacking Tokyo if Japan sends troops to Iraq.

Terusuke Terada, Japan’s ambassador to Seoul from 2000 until early this year, insists Tokyo has proof that Pyongyang has extracted enough plutonium from spent fuel rods to build a nuclear weapon as powerful as the one that obliterated Nagasaki in the last world war. Japan believes North Korea now has up to 8,000 spent fuel rods, deemed reprocessed, cooling somewhere. Terada says that since the days of Kim’s father Kim Il-sung, Pyongyang had wanted nuclear capability, not necessarily for the glory of North Korea but for the survival of a despotic regime.

Terada, who once served as his government’s representative to the Japan-North Korea Normalization Talks, told us that the international community’s tack of "buying up Pyongyang’s nuclear capability" was a complete failure.

In October last year, Japan ceased its cooperation with North Korea amid reports that Pyongyang had started a new nuclear weapons program in 1999 using technical know-how from Pakistan.

"We’re definitely determined to get rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons," Terada said. "Now we’re facing a much more difficult situation."

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The Americans know it’s not that easy for the Japanese to say no to Washington. As in the days leading up to the war in Iraq, the United States is again finding out who its friends are.

"Some say that as a friend, we should try to restrain America," Ishizuka told us. But with the dramatic change in the Japanese political landscape, the national leadership here is at a loss on what to do, he said.

With an economy refusing to perk up, Japan cannot afford another headache. While the Japanese economy is expected to grow by 2 percent this year, nominal growth is negative and deflation remains a problem. Japan has also suffered from the slowdown in the US economy. And there’s the competition posed by Japan’s giant neighbor China. The relocation of many Japanese manufacturing plants to China has been described as a "hollowing" and "de-industrialization" of Japan.

Ishizuka said economic indicators show that "the worst is over" for Japan. "That’s the consensus. But how high the rebound will be, no one knows… Japan has been very slow in changing because of too much success in the past."

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The depressed Japanese economy has been bad news for Southeast Asian nations for a decade now. Japan rivals the United States as the largest trading partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and ASEAN is Japan’s second largest trading partner, next only to the US. Japan is also the largest source of foreign direct investments in ASEAN. Members of the regional grouping account for the biggest chunk of Japan’s bilateral official development assistance.

Tokyo has been toying with the idea of gradual economic integration in the region similar to the European Community, but knows this is a long way off.

At the ASEAN —Japan summit next month, Tokyo will "reconfirm" its "deeper sense of togetherness" with the region, according to Shinichi Nishimiya, deputy director of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The summit here on Dec. 11-12 has for its theme "acting together, advancing together" — buzzwords of Prime Minister Koizumi.

That’s three weeks away. Right now Koizumi must decide whether or nor to act and advance together with the Americans in the war on terror.