 Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Ralph Casa, I'm the President of the Pacific Forum, CSIS, where the poor country cousins of the CSIS here in Washington, but we do have the benefit of living in Honolulu, which is slightly warmer than it is here in D.C. this morning. We tried to bring some of the Hawaiian sunshine with us, I think it arrived yesterday but disappeared already this morning. We're delighted to have you all with us. This is our 20th anniversary of our U.S.-Japan Security Seminar, 17 out of the 20 meetings have been held in San Francisco, but for the 10th anniversary and the 20th anniversary, we've done our meeting here and also the 50th anniversary of the alliance we did it in Washington. So we're not unfamiliar with the D.C. environment and we thank you all for coming. As we have done in the past when we've done our meetings in D.C., we've tried to have an opening public forum in the morning to expose a larger audience to the importance that we all share of the U.S.-Japan alliance being the foundation for American security policy in East Asia. We have run our conference through good times and bad. We started out during a period of Japan passing, went through Japan bashing, Japan surpassing and now we are, I think, at a point where once again the alliance is sometimes hitting the front pages. Today there are a couple of distractions, the Malaysian airlines, of course our hearts go out to all of those people who still are unaware of what has happened and of course the situation in the Ukraine which is tying up, of course, many of our national leaders. But we want to remind people that at the end of the day it's still the U.S.-Japan alliance that provides the foundation for security in the Asia-Pacific region. We have an all-star cast here to speak with you this morning. Ambassador Secretary Armitage is in traffic on his way here. He said for us to go ahead and start without him and he will make a grand entrance at some point shortly but we thought we would go ahead and get started. For the last five or six years I guess I've been grateful to have as my co-host for these meetings Ambassador Nogami from JIA in Japan and I would invite him to make some opening comments at this point Nogami-sensei. Thank you Ralph. My name is Yoshijin Nogami. I'm president and director of Japan Institute of International Affairs, Sink Tank in Tokyo. As Ralph put it, this is the 20th anniversary session of this U.S.-Japan security seminar which has been going on for 20 years. During the past 50 odd years U.S.-Japan security alliance has been going through the bumps and up and down and bumps and all these difficult situations. This year as well I think as we hear from distinguished panelists this morning we would like to go through perhaps yet another test year when it comes to U.S.-Japan security relationship. This is an important year for the U.S.-Japan alliance. The practical term the both governments agree to go through the revision of the U.S.-Japan defense cooperation guidelines which is going to be revised by the end of this year that the previous revision was in 1997 and the situation has seen a sea changes. No pun intended but there is a sea change. On the part of Japanese government I think Prime Minister Abe is going to go through this new interpretation of collective self-defense right which would certainly expand the scope of cooperation between the two countries in the area of security cooperation. On top of that Prime Minister Abe has to go through a more fundamental task that is strengthening the Japanese economy which is a cornerstone of the Japanese quote power. So on the Japanese front there are lots of tasks ahead of us and also on the U.S. side I think as Ralph briefly mentioned there are a number of issues including Ukraine and others but one big task is as the recent opinion polls show that the general public care is no longer interested in outside affairs about two-thirds of the population say that stay out of the mess outside of the United States. So this is going to be perhaps a very important challenge for two countries and for the next day and a half we are going to tackle this difficult situation and by going through all these difficult tasks I think relationship particularly the security that US-Japan security relationship would be once again re-strengthened. Having said that I would like to ask the ambassador to say a few words at the outset or yes okay so let's move on to the set the first half of the session this public session the yeah good again and we're very honored to have ambassadors aside with us thank you sir very much we will at the conclusion of this open session we will then sort of force the principles from our conference into labor not only this afternoon but all day tomorrow and closed or what has traditionally been very frank discussions on on the Alliance we do publish sort of summaries of the key findings of each of these meetings they're available on the Pacific Forum website which is part of CSIS websites you can either search for us through the CSIS org or go to PAC forum org and and find that information before introducing our speakers I want to just do a very quick commercial I think many of you are already on the Pacific forums mailing list and get our pacnet newsletters if you're not and you put a card in the bowl out front we will make sure you're on our mailing list you will also see a lot of young faces in the crowd Pacific Forum has a young leaders program where we bring young people essentially age 22 to 35 who are interested in foreign policy to our various conferences we will have a group of about 20 young Americans and Japanese who will be sitting in on the conference in the next two days and then they will meet separately actually they have a program on Sunday and then all day Monday to talk about what they've heard and come up with better solutions than the old folks have managed to come up with so if if you're between 22 and 35 or if you know young people who are who are interested in foreign policy please let us know let one of the ladies out front know we talked to myself and we're happy to give you more details you'll also find them on our website we also have fellowships at Pacific Forum particularly fellowships for people who are interested in pursuing learning more about the U.S.-Japan relationship we each year bring one Japanese to Pacific Forum he or she will spend five months with us in Honolulu in one month in Washington learning about the alliance and one American who'll spend five months in Honolulu in one month in Tokyo again doing research project on on the alliance information on all of those things is available on our our website so please or see that any of us from the Pacific Forum and we're happy to provide you with more information on it we have sort of arbitrarily broken the session into alliance challenges and alliance opportunities although I think all challenges have opportunities in them and vice versa but what we will do is have our first two speakers speak we'll take initial Q&A then we'll take a break and then we'll come back have our second two speakers speak and then do a Q&A essentially for for all of them so let me ask professor Takihara who is a professor at the University of Tokyo and also an adjunct fellow at JIA if you would begin with his opening remarks please sensei thank you very much Ralph it's an honor to be given this opportunity and it's an honor to be acting as first batsman as it were I don't expect me to play as well as Ichiro Suzuki so the session the first one is on challenges and I am going to focus on China because China is the largest concern of Japan for example China hasn't stopped sending its government vessels to the territory of waters around the Senkakus its defense budget increase was a big one once again this year which was announced at the National People's Congress it reached 12.2% and this compares with other expenditure items such as social welfare and employment which saw an increase by 9.8% education 9.1% energy saving and environmental protection 7.1% so you can see that defense has got the lion's share now in discussing China I am going to talk first about its politics and its society because there is a close linkage as I see it between these areas and China's diplomacy and security policy I think the domestic political scene what's going on there and also in society has a lot to do with how China's been behaving in the international scene particularly in recent years so let me begin by touching on politics now it is widely known that Xi Jinping the general secretary and the president the leader of China is in the process of consolidating his power base I do think that is what's going on but the way he's conducting this is actually rocking or shaking the party in a very violent way as it were on the one hand he is setting up new organs in the party and in the military also that have the commanding heights over a wide range of areas and Xi Jinping is becoming the head of all these new organs and taking control of them this is very important because a general secretary compared to the chairman of the party in the past you know Mao Zedong used to be the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party but the Chinese Communist Party abolished the chairman system in 1982 because the chairman has immense power and reflecting on what happened during the Cultural Revolution too much concentration of power on one person is not good they thought so they switched over to the general secretary system and usually a general secretary does not have so much of a concentration of power but that's one thing that Xi Jinping is doing now but on the other hand as you think have been reading in the press in the western press and the japanese press also he is hitting and detaining the so-called big tigers on corruption we all know about Bo Xilai the former party secretary in the Chongqing city and now there's Zhou Yongkang who used to be the boss of public security operators who you also used to be a standing committee member of the Politburo a very big tiger and now at this moment the focus is set on a man called Xi Caihao who used to be the vice one of the vice chairman of the central military council and even Li Peng the former prime minister's family there being rumors about corruption surrounding that family as well so the political atmosphere in Beijing at this moment is extremely tense so I hear and the situation the political situation on that level is rather volatile but even if Xi Jinping succeeded in winning all these battles and even if he prevailed that does not necessarily mean that the party can be united partly can be the party can be unified why do I say that because I can see that there are very deep divisions within the Chinese Communist Party over many serious issues that could define as it were the direction of China the direction of Chinese development and I can give you many examples of all these issues but briefly let me discuss this by taking up the three reforms that Wen Jiabao the former prime minister repeatedly emphasized while he was a premier the first reform that he repeatedly argued for was to break the oligopoly of the state-owned enterprises you know the state-owned enterprises have an oligopoly in many key sectors the so-called key sectors of the national economy such as finance banking energy telecommunication transportation and Wen Jiabao tried many times to break this oligopoly system at one point of time he even tried to apply the anti-monopoly law on the telecommunication sector but all these efforts were in vain and secondly he argued many many times about distributional reforms we all know how skewed distribution of income is in China at the moment the genie coefficient which represents the level of inequality in income distribution according to the official announcement it was 0.47 some academics in China have found out according to their survey that it had reached even 0.61 which is extremely high and the international level over which the society gets unstable is 0.4 you know the bigger the figure closer to one the more unequal the income distribution is so China's income distribution is a very serious potential political problem and Wen Jiabao was one who tried many times to rectify this but in vain and what's happening in China now is that the rich continue to be rich the children the children of the rich become rich the children of the bureaucrats become bureaucrats and the stratification of society is such that the so-called Chinese dream is almost shattered you know the individual dream of a Chinese who want to make way in life through toil and sweat it's very difficult now in the 1980s there was a lot of hope that reforms can be implemented in many areas including political reform so people had a lot of hope in the 90s that's after the Tiananmen incident in 1989 the dream of a political reform was shattered however marketization was promoted very forcefully and there was the Chinese dream even if you were born as a poor peasant with toil and sweat you could make way in life however let's say in the past 10 years or 15 years or so this Chinese dream is almost shattered and as I said the children of the rich become rich children of the bureaucrats become bureaucrats that's a saying that is very prevalent amongst Chinese people now the third reform that Wen Jiabao argued forcefully was political reform because all these questions about distribution about the state-owned enterprises it all relates to the vested interests that have taken root in society so he Wen Jiabao quoted Deng Xiaoping the great leader Deng Xiaoping argued in 1986 very forcefully and repeatedly that without political reform there will be no thorough economic reform he understood very well that the vested interest in the system especially in the bureaucracy would resist all these efforts for or systemic reform in society and therefore Deng Xiaoping argued in 1986 that political reform must come along with economic reform otherwise the economic reform is not complete and Wen Jiabao repeatedly used this phrase however we all know that nothing substantial happened now it is true that Xi Jinping is trying he's trying to introduce reforms in many areas as we saw in the so-called third plenum a big meeting of the Chinese Communist Party that was held in November last year and he's trying to do what he can I suppose but I would say that power concentration on him is yet to reach a level that allows him to cut into vested the vested interest and implement the essential reforms in the core part of the system and secondly I am also I have to say skeptical at this moment that Xi Jinping has the will to do so it's not only a matter of capability but also whether he has the will to implement these substantial reforms of the core part of the system an interesting case is the question of universal values the official position of the Chinese Communist Party is that yes there is such a concept we accept we acknowledge the concept of universal values so China has signed the UN Convention on Human Rights both A and B but the way Deng Xiaoping used to put it is because we are a developing nation we cannot implement all the human rights that are written in our constitution you have to be patient and wait but we will get there after we develop and this is the conventional position of the Chinese Communist Party which had been succeeded by Jiang Zemin by Hu Jintao but since let's say five years ago or so five six years ago there has been another voice that emerged in the Chinese Communist Party no no there is no such thing as universal values human rights universal values no human rights are western values but the western people are calling them universal values to impose them on us and this is not acceptable to China it will destroy Chinese values we should not fall into the trap of the west and surprisingly I would say that in the central propaganda department which oversees ideology education media a very powerful organ in the party the main argument now there is that they deny universal values so it was very surprising in January 2011 when Mr. Hu Jintao then president came to Washington had a meeting with President Obama and held a joint press conference in the lawn of the White House and there Mr. Hu said very clearly in the Q&A session that he acknowledges universality in human rights I was a bit surprised because I knew that the debate was going on but the way Xinhua news agency the state owned agency under the central propaganda department the way they reported this it was rather interesting they reported that there was a joint press conference they distributed photographs of the press conference but they did not report what Hu Jintao said so this is unthinkable in a any communist party all over the world because they are under this Leninist principle of democratic centralism and these things should not happen but it does show signify how deeply divided the Chinese Communist Party is at this time so without and Xi Jinping's position I was going to say that Xi Jinping apparently does not acknowledge that there is such a thing as universal values it seems he's more inclined towards the conservative side and that makes me rather worried now without respect for human rights I don't think there will be any rule of law and China's social order at the moment remains to be based on crude power and not on law or norms or ethics I call this order tax communista because it is based or it is supported by the outstanding power of the Communist Party now how do the Chinese public view this situation I would say that the public is dissatisfied with the present and anxious about the future despite the surge in the per capita GDP why we are all familiar with all sorts of social problems that the Chinese are facing at this moment income gap I mentioned corruption talked about environmental pollution air pollution lack of water now many Chinese cities are beginning to sink because they pump up too much underground water it's very very worrisome and also nepotism which is very rife the shattering of the Chinese ring etc etc etc we are very familiar with them and the result has been that there is an increasing number of people believing in religion they want peace in mind because they are worried that's one and two those who have the means to do so the rich people they are emigrating out of the country the emigration boom hasn't stopped now what is Xi Jinping doing about this as I said he's trying with some reforms promoting marketization and so on while he is forcefully suppressing any sign of budding of dissent in society we all I think are familiar with this situation and it's so ironic that this effort therefore in my mind further antagonizes both the left and the right because by promoting marketization it sort of aggravates income the income gap for example and it makes the conservative people very unhappy and by continuing with the suppressing of any voice against the government and without really tackling the core problems in the system as I mentioned earlier and this is making the right orientated or the reform-oriented people rather unhappy so he really has to tackle the core issue if he really wanted to change the situation well another attempt by Xi Jinping is to integrate the fragmented nation and garner support for the authorities by arousing nationalistic sentiments and immediately after he came to power he started talking about the china dream the china dream of realizing the great rejuvenation of the chinese nation what that means to me is very unclear but I can see I think it is the case that the china dream is a concept that substitutes is a substitute for the chinese dream all right your individual dream may be shattered but don't worry identify yourself with the state or the nation and you'll be very happy because the nation is going to be the champion of the world in fact china dream chung wuomeng or jiu goku no yumei in japanese in chinese and japanese this was a title of a book written by a colonel and a professor of the defense university of china and it was published in early 2010 and the content of it is rather short of mystic so I was very much shocked when I first heard these words from Xi Jinping in november 2012 well thus the party is corrupt and divided society is fragmented but the system of one party rule does not have the effective mechanisms to absorb and reflect different views and coordinate divergent interests but still china is growing which is amazing so let me turn to the international scene in relation to this domestic situation what is the nature of china's maritime advancement which we worry about what is the japan u.s alliance facing now first let me briefly go over the various factors in china's maritime advancement first and foremost of course there is the increase in china's national power you know china now can do what they were not able to do in in the past and second china now has a lot of overseas interests and they need to protect them yes that's fair but I try to tell my chinese friends that try don't try to do it alone and third there is this america's relative decline as seen by some chinese since 2008 the layman brother shock and the world financial crisis that follow now what the chinese is targeting for in its relationship with the united states in the so-called new type of great power relations it seems to me is equality with the united states so we recall shijin pink's words the latest said directly to president obama in sunny lands california last june that the pacific is big enough to accommodate both united states and china now what does it mean well at the end of the day or be at the end of the first half of the century china wants half of it and this also means that taiwan is no longer the focus of contention with the united states and taiwan in fact since 2008 when kmt leader maingio became president has not been an object of tassel as far as the ccp is concerned so next as far as the struggle with japan is concerned there is another factor in china's advancement to the senkaku islands and i would say it is the utility of having a tassel for unity it works as a centripetal force in the party and in the society according to one of my chinese enlightened friends he described the current situation that the government the chinese government takes no rest in bringing up all sorts of issues to criticize japan the latest of which include accepting a court case of force labor during world war two which the chinese had not been doing for decades but now they have gone that far and the anti-japanese media campaign goes on and unfortunately it has been rather effective i would say why because i think one reason is the general sense of frustration and irritation shared among the public provides a rich breeding ground for nationalistic sentiments and anti-japanese sentiments well some people could ask but isn't it the case that the media literacy amongst the chinese people is rather high they don't believe in the reportings in the official media i think that's true as far as the domestic reportings are concerned because people's perceptions are formed by the daily information that they have access to and when the government or the official media reports something about china about the chinese society they since they know the facts that surround them and they can make an easy judgment whether the reporting is true or reliable or not but when it comes to international issues when it comes to japan they do not have a reference point and they tend to believe what the government media says okay then as china gradually expands its influence what does it bring to us what does it mean to us i think here we would benefit by taking history as the mirror as the chinese say take history as the mirror we all remember that world war two was a war in which the aggressors germany and japan were defeated and what followed was independence of the former colonies and self-determination of former oppressed nations and on the western side of the cold war structure at least a rule-based international order emerged and was supported by the outstanding power of the united states pax americana was not without mistakes i must point out but in the past 40 years east asia has enjoyed basic peace and stability thanks mainly to the american presence in the region and no doubt the japanese alliance has played a large role in upholding this order unfortunately however it seems that pax cynica is likely to be an extension of pax communista in the domestic context if we are to make a judgment by china's recent behavior and action in the east china sea and the south china sea so finally what should japan and the us do we need to draw a common vision of the future i would say there are two paramount excuse me there are two permanent members of the united nation security council that attempt to change the status quo by physical force rewinding as it were history back into the previous centuries this is indeed a deplorable situation and my hope therefore is that when mr obama next month visits japan he could issue a joint statement with mr abbe on how we should restore the world the world order into the shape that it should be restoring a rule based order should come at the top of our agenda and second the prime minister and the president should share their notes on china and coordinate their china policy in my view it is of utmost importance that they take time discussing china in a candid and constructive way the japanese do understand what the united states is trying to do through its rebalancing policy but we also need to know what america's policy towards china is in the bilateral context for example are you going to accept the chinese concept of the new type of major power relationships or if you are going to do what do you mean by that and three what we should be aware of is the fact that in japan people tend to see china and the alliance with the united states mainly in the regional context whereas in the united states some tend to see china and the alliance mainly in the global context i think we need to take this possible gap into consideration always now the importance and urgency of a crisis in the region may not be understood immediately in washington although we could have global implications next do all these mean that we want to exclude china from our common future not at all quite the quite the opposite i would say we need china sustainable development and soft landing and the japanese government still provides oda official development assistance to china for this purpose and i know there is a reservoir of goodwill towards china in both japan and united states so when we look into the future our hope resides in the fact that there are moderate internationalists in china who share our values and our sentiments although japan bashing by the government unfortunately is likely to continue for some time the cooperation and exchange that we have had between japan and china in the past 42 years of diplomatic relations have been have not been conducted in vain so there are many intelligent and good-hearted chinese people playing important roles in japanese society and it is interesting that the number of chinese tourists visiting japan in january this year hit a record high so my impression is that finally there is an increasing number of chinese who love japan no less than they hate japan thank you very much for your attention thank you our next speaker is probably best known as being co-chairman along with joe and i of the pissaric forums board of governors he does however have a couple of i think jobs in washington previously and including deputary secretary of state rich armitage please well thank you very much ralph let me start with a sincere apology to the those of you in the public for my late arrival and to my colleagues on the podium here i hate nothing more than be late i was late today and i'm mad at myself so sincere apologies i want to talk for a few minutes about uh mista obeys successes because we all spend a lot of time talking about complaints about historical issues i'll get to those of course but i think we should remind ourselves that if you look around the world stage and you see politicians on that stage few have accomplished as much in a shorter time as mista obeys and i think it behooves us to remember that whether it's a secrets act it might have been rolled out in a rough manner but it uh we do have a secrets act this is going to improve our ability to share uh with japan and for japan to share with their members of the diet these are good things uh it's got a national security council which has been a long-held u.s a desire i think it's a very coherent way for a prime minister to make competent judgments well he's got it through he joined tpp this is as we all know not without some political sacrifice by mista obeys and his colleagues and uh tpp or the member nations who are discussing in a 40 percent of the world's economy and 70 percent of that 40 is the u.s in japan so japan stepping up the tpp was a huge huge issue for us and i think for japan and for the region uh we all know of is working on economic revitalization for japan it's gone better than some would be expected not as well as others it's not over it's got a ways to go tpp could add to it uh and would add to it if we're successful but i think we should give credit to that realm as well uh the 2020 olympics has to be mentioned uh if japan gets us right it will have the effect of i think increasing english capability in japan it will certainly have a certain amount of of investment i think it can very strongly empower women which something mista obeys talked about at the united nations when he gave his talk he's increased the defense spending after more than a decade of decline uh it wasn't a huge amount but at least it's staunched the bleeding and that takes some thinking uh he's revised the national defense program guidelines he's considering uh and his colleagues are considering ending the prohibition on the uh to the export of defense articles uh i think mr abbey has had spectacular diplomacy in southeast asia and in south asia uh and the image of japan in those areas has gone up enormously and look at even yesterday or the day before a tough issue a crimea and an issue uh regarding the russian federation with whom japan had been moving to a much more congenial relationship the prime minister stood up and put his nation on the side of the west uh and imposed some sanctions on the russian federation uh concerning investments in space exploration and some relaxation of visa requirements so i think before we offer criticism of the imi administration we should remind ourselves uh of how much they've done and then look at all of our leaders and see how little they've done in most cases now on to the historical you cannot mention japan today without saying something about the historical record no mr abbey in his recent statement uh about the kono statement and concerning being humble in the face of history i think was a very good start uh and i can't overestimate the importance of the upcoming a trilateral meeting in the hage i think our korean friends have announced this today but this is very important it's a very big issue we may be talking about north korea in the hage but the implication of such a trilateral is much broader i think it takes courage on both sides uh to step up to that um and i know that our friends in japan for that matter friends of korea are tired of listening to each other in korea they call it or in japan korea fatigue and then japan fatigue and korea they're just tired of all the whining on the issues uh and i understand that i think your american friends are tired too we're all tired of it but it's not going to go away it has to be addressed it has to be addressed because it's the humanitarian thing to do it's a respectful thing to do to these women who are dying in korea and it is in keeping with japan which is in the last 70 years taken a major stance on the world stage in respect of human freedoms and human rights and the protection uh thereof you know our nation has some experience with humility and apology we treated african americans terribly and we'll be apologizing for this for an awful long time to come for that matter we treated japanese americas terribly during the second world war and we have apologizing we'll continue to face that these are enduring issues and they last for a long time they take a long time to resolve but there's another reason beyond the humanitarian and being the right thing to do to resolve this issue without the resolution of this historical issue the cacophony of noise surrounding these issues is so great that the real story of japan and particularly the historical story of the last 70 years can't be heard and that's a historical record of enormous generosity of enormous achievement of enormous as i say respect for human rights and human freedoms so there's a practical reason to respond to this issue now i was asked by ralph to talk a little bit about the challenges to our alliance well i am one of those who think that today our alliance is actually troubled and it's troubled for a lot of reasons uh the first instance i think has to do with the awkwardness for the united states of the difficulty of the republic of korea and government of japan's stance towards each other it's very awkward for us it's very hard to get our arms around it and try to make progress with both sides uh on other issues so that has thrown a little bit of a monkey wretch if you will into the alliance but the real big issue and the real troubled issue is an issue of confidence and it's got several layers i don't think there's much question in japan about the confidence of our alliance at the high level the high end uh the nuclear umbrella all out war i think most do understand uh and have confidence in the u.s relationship in the alliance but at a lower level the so-called gray area there are huge questions of confidence and how much more so now how much more so now that we have Crimea which is an example of a gray area conflict as far as i'm concerned and is that an analogy for the Senkakus well you can bet China is looking at it i don't know how they think what they'll decide but these there's lack of confidence knowing what the united states is and isn't going to do and what we should do together i think is really interfering in our relationship it's it's gotten so that for the first time in my uh experience the japanese diplomats and politicians but mainly diplomats are actually parsing the statements of all of our senior leaderships seeing if secretary hagel left out one word or mr carrey forgot one phrase or joe biden said x y or z this was not it's not historically been the case there's been enough confidence to understand that very often u.s diplomats u.s uh the people who work in the foreign policy field are a little more careless with their statements than perhaps they ought to be but it is when you deal with americans this is what you get uh but never before have we had this parsing of all the phrases uh it's very troublesome uh we have i think questions of confidence surrounding our so-called rebalancing if you're all an assistant secretary in the pentagon the other day came out and said rebalancing we can't do it it's too expensive well much of the credit of the department of defense they didn't trot at this lady out again and made her eat her words but it's still bouncing around in the press can we afford the rebalancing uh are our budget difficulties too big is the president of the united states a pacific president in fact or just rhetorically or just because he was born in hawaii well he's going to have an opportunity to address all these issues in the not too distant future when he travels to japan and he's going to have to address these issues and he's going to have to persuade the prime minister and others that he is serious about asia he's serious about our commitments he's serious about our relationship with japan and that's going to take a little more than rhetorical skill it's going to take sincerity uh we've also had a bit of a problem with messaging as far as i'm concerned and primary i mentioned the message from the acquisition person the pentagon the other day but i think our military officials in hawaii have had a little trouble with messaging uh with all due respect to admiral octler i too am concerned about climate change i think it's a big deal but it's not the big issue that our co-com our combatant commander should be dealing with it is not climate change which is flying around the senkakus and it's not climate change which is firing 25 missiles from north korea into the sea of japan so i think we ought to get a hold of these message messages this is another reason there is this question of confidence how about tpp i've just saluted the prime minister's decision to join the discussions to join the negotiations but it's hard and i know it'll be a major part point of discussion but it'll be so important for our president to be able to persuade mr ibe that we are serious about exerting all of our muscle as an administration to try to get this through congress to try to get some sort of trade promotion authority without it it's hard for me to see how japan or for that matter many of the other countries will show their whole cards in a negotiation if they're not sure that we're going to put the muscle necessary to get it through congress into them into the negotiation uh finally there's there's a problem in my view with us force at japan it's not that they're not fine people and whatnot but it's the headquarters itself this long after tomodachi where we learned so many lessons we still have an administrative headquarters rather than a competent operational headquarters at us force at japan rather than having a competent operational headquarters who can address issues such as missile defense such as humanitarian affairs and disaster relief which from time to time has been necessary in japan and beyond and for planning for gray area contingencies so this is something that this administration ought to step up to quickly now japan has on their side has some challenges for this relationship as well uh first one of them is the constant statements that come from various politicians in japan uh it's not sufficient in my view for the government of japan to say so-and-so said something and that was his personal opinion how hard is it to add that was a personal opinion and is not the policy of the government of japan so there's a messaging problem in my view on japan's side i think prime minister came to the other csis uh sometime ago and announced to very tremendous applause that japan was back and he was back and that was good but what is being back mean what is the japan that we're looking for in six to ten years for now and what place on the world stage is japan going to take and is willing to take and without knowing the answer those questions it's hard to know how we can shape our alliance to do as much as we can as americans to help japan achieve that position hopefully on the world stage uh i hope that our japanese friends notwithstanding the temporary reluctance of the u.s commanders to move forward very rigorously on the defense guidelines will be as muscular as possible as they enter into these debates with the united states now one caution we read uh the newspapers today that uh japan may be on the verge of restarting uh talks with north korea and i'm one of those who was thrilled and when the yakota is finally got some measure of relief and were able to see their granddaughter uh i personally have fought for them and for the cause of abductees for some time and i thank and salute those diet members who have also fought for this and maybe just maybe there can be a resolution the suffering of the families of the abductees but let's be very careful because a negotiation with north korea and a discussion can be used as a wedge between the united states or for that matter in all members of the six party talks so we've got this puts a premium on japanese diplomacy and consultation with the united states with china for that matter with south korea with the russian federation uh we've got to make sure that this does not what is seen as a temporary success perhaps for japanese diplomacy doesn't in the long run turn into a wedge that somehow interferes so ralph thank you very much for the invitation i'll stop there and hope i'm within the time limit good we'd not like to open up the floor for questions and comments uh please raise your hand when you're identified we would ask you to just identify yourself try not to make your question longer than their presentations and i see a gentleman right right here in front please yes please my name is yoshi komori and i'm with the japanese newspaper sanke shinbon question for mr amtage uh everyone agrees that the so-called history historical issues could erode the foundation of the alliance and then i've been we've all been taking comments coming from someone like you very seriously however when it comes to the issue of we ask unifying uh previous american administration in which you play you are playing a prominent role of for policy toward the asia or japan and china did not utter a word of criticism or or even reservations about repeated visit to the shrine by then the japanese prime minister mr koizumi i think he did it for six years he paid he paid a tribute to the ascini shrine six years continuously and no it's a dead silence the part of the administration furthermore senior administration officials at the time including yourself were saying quasi publicly that uh chinese demand and opposition to the ascini uh japanese political leaders visit to yaskini shrine was a part of the chinese diplomatic sort of political strategy against japan designed or intended to weaken or keep or constrain or confine japan into a politically weaker and ethically or morally uh inferior position you know and i i remember hearing that kind of view from you so i think you went even so far as to say that japan should not cave in to the chinese demand but but as i understand your recent comment there have been clear changes so could you explain to us why what what changed uh kumarsan good to see you again first of all you'll notice that i did not mention yaskini in the historical issues i didn't do it deliberately second second of all uh regarding i do say that the what bothered me was not the visit to yaskini what bothered me is you're doing china's diplomacy for them they don't have to lift a finger but the visit itself i don't think is in and of itself of that high moment and i didn't see how one a prime minister who had made a campaign promise and a prime minister who was following other conservative prime ministers such as mr nakasone mr hekozumi and mr hashmodo how he could help but to go that's not the main issue that's why i didn't specifically reference it when i talk about historical issues i'm only talking about the comfort women and i think that japan and prime minister do have a right to visit if this is their religious matter i don't think it's a political matter it's such a good but as a personal matter it's fine it's their business and i think to the extent other countries say you can't yaskini this brings back an understandable reaction uh and in the minds of many in japan many who perhaps are not favorable right now towards the visit of a prime minister to yaskini so uh it's a complicated issue it's an issue in which uh i'm not going to spend an enormous amount of time because i think uh it doesn't rise to the importance of other issues which are more immediate i don't know if that answered the question uh professor takahara you're a china scholar you know far better than i the g's father conducted the first anti-corruption uh purge for mal in the early 1950s and that was clearly designed just to get rid of mal's enemies is this corrupt anti-corruption purge really a purge about corruption or is it a purge to get rid of people who are inconvenient like bozhi lao and some of these other people hi i'm john harper with stars and stripes uh mr armoredage you discussed uh some of the issues of a lack of confidence in the u.s rebalance do you personally believe that the rebalance will go forward to the extent that u.s officials um have said that it will or do you think that budget cutbacks and other geopolitical crises uh will derail at and mr takahara um within the japanese defense establishment how much confidence is there that the rebalance will in fact go forward thank you scott herald from the rand corporation mr armoredage wonderful to see you again sir uh i'd like to uh also pick your brain on another issue that you didn't touch on it's also a slim pickings but uh and that is the issue of uh docto tekeshima because of course um the history issues the comfort women issues some of these can be talked about as uh as historical issues but the docto tekeshima issue is one that's very live and that continues to produce negative results without the chinese having to do anything um and i wonder if there's any any solution there that you can suggest to us one of the issues that i've thought about that i wonder we could take your opinion on sir is that the j a d i z and the korean a d i z overlap but over over the island of iodo which is a submerged rock feature that the koreans currently occupy uh an adjustment to the japanese air defense identification zone of a few miles or a few kilometers would not really hurt japan security very much uh but could be a positive signal ahead of the uh the trilateral summit would that be something that you think uh might be something that the japanese would be able to consider as a as a sop or as a small gesture to the koreans uh giving up something that doesn't matter in a way that would help put some forward momentum in the relationship thank you and then we'll take some more questions yes thank you mr mosty for the question about shijin pain's father and the corruption uh the big tiger beating what does it really mean um unfortunately i think most of the uh carters in the chinese communist party are corrupt and therefore when they choose who to bash on it is more or less a political choice uh so i think it's more related to the power struggle that's going on at the moment about confidence in japan about rebalancing i'm not really the right person to answer that important question but um my general impression is that yes we trust the words of the american leaders um and i don't know for sure what in concrete um how much will be done but uh listening to you know 60 percent of the fleet coming to the pacific etc we do have high hopes on rebalancing i don't think it's only japan but all the other nations facing um chinese rapid rise in the maritime forces and the maritime advancement all feel that um this the high speed of change in the balance of power is it's not conducive to maintaining peace in the region thank you on the question my personal view about the rebalancing um i think the administration was sincere uh but uh not uh and went about it however in a very awkward manner uh for instance they uh it was supposed to be a rebalancing not just of security forces but uh of our whole being in the pacific uh foreign direct investment trade policy education etc we want to be a part of the life and uh to the extent it's acceptable to the specific nations in the pacific we want to be part of their life um and we don't want to put them in a position of having to choose between us and china that's what you pay your diplomats for but the manner in which we went about it for instance when president obama first announced his sort of rebalancing he simultaneously there mr frohman our trade rep was with him uh which is a good thing uh but it was simultaneous with the announcement of 250 marines going to darwin austria so the headlines of course were marines to austria and trade kind of fell off uh fell off the the the uh talking points so i think they're sincere and i think they do it poorly uh i'll give you another example our secretary of commerce just was out in the gulf and that's a good thing but if the rebalancing is so important to the united states why wasn't she in her delegation in asia oh she'll get around to it next summer well that's not the sense of urgency that fills me with a great deal of confidence that they're they really know what they're doing uh the question had to do with the uh if i may i had to do with uh tukeshima and perhaps an adjustment to the aid is well i think if tukeshima sat there and tukeshima sat there alone and you didn't have this in kakus and the northern territories weren't at play with the russian federation all and there might be an ability to to uh resolve it but i can't see under present circumstances how any softening by japan if i can use that term wouldn't be misunderstood in china as i just keep the pressure on and these guys will fold so i think at present there is a relationship between the dispute and at tukeshima and this dispute and this in kakus the suggestion you come up with about a slight adjustment to the aid is could be quite beneficial maybe at some point in time but it's not on for now as far as i can see i'm richard katsum from toya okayzai um this is a question for both of you um i have a fear that the tpp negotiations could go the way of the doha round they just go on forever nothing's concluded partly because president obama lacks political clout even with his own party and partly because prime minister abe seems unwilling to spend his political clout on going over the farm tribe and getting serious market access on that and the consequences of that i think are are geopolitical in the sense of a successful tpp would among other things i think get induced help the modernizers in china and those more interested in peace and responsible stakeholder to join tpp and that would be a very good thing for stability so my question is one how do you two see the risk of tpp uh well i should say how how do you see the the opportunity for the chance for success versus the risk of of it going the way of doha and if it does go the way of doha what are the implications for uh integrating china into the regional structure as a responsible stakeholder helping the the modernizers and those who see integration as as china's way versus the nationalists mr armitage you mentioned the six-party talks it's been over five years now since these parties have met during that time north korea has continued this nuclear and missile programs what would be your suggestion of how to get this started again um hi my second year size johns afghan student when you mentioned about tiredness tiredness i think korean public and both probably japanese public feel the same frustration and tiredness as well well when i had like japanese scholar brookings institution a few weeks ago we talked a lot about misperception of both countries uh through the media and conservative constituency so we talked a lot about whether it's like very intentional misperception or true misperception between two public of the country also i believe that it's very pragmatic matters like you said when we have common concerns such as china and north korea issues do you when thinking about historical issues do you have any pragmatic approach that get that we can actually resolve the issue start relationship someone was i think someone was mentioning about joint statement or something like that i'm kumiyoko of heritage foundation uh my question to mr armitage what should us japan alliance run from the current situation in ukraine because we have japan have some problem of our territory of iran with china well i think the first and most obvious lesson is that uh these is a this is a gray area of the situation mr putin didn't use overt military force uh and uh so i think we should it should put some impetus in our planning for gray area situation like senkaku second uh the what we should learn from ukraine and crimea uh is yet to be played out we i think we have to see uh and mr abe will see when he goes to the haig and meets with the g7 they'll be discussing this issue at length i'm sure uh and see how much solidarity in the international community can be achieved and what effect it might have on countries which behave in the same manner the russian federation is so it's an unsatisfactory answer because it's hadn't played out fully uh should i go on the question tpp uh on question of tpp i have a fear that uh it could fail as well uh and i was horrified to find that uh we when harry reid actually surprised our us tr by saying you wouldn't boats weren't there and he wasn't going to bring it up this was shocking to me is that we had no political strategy here in the united states and by the same token i think that the negotiators in japan are actually negotiating in very good faith and are willing to make some tough decisions however we lack something very seriously in japan and that is a political strategy with primarily the ldp i don't think we've done much what's the word that people my daughter would use socializing of this issue with the ldp not to the extent we should uh so uh and what would happen if we don't get a tpp well uh there'll be a lot of uh nasal gazing here in the united states and in the u.s congress i think china will redouble their efforts to try to get what i call their sudo trade agreements with different countries and we won't have uh as we could if there is a tpp success that bring china more into uh open and transparent uh trade policies so uh there's a lot at stake and i think we've got a lot of work to do well i can't pretend i have the capability to gauge the level of risk in the failure of the tpp negotiations but as an ordinary citizen living in tokyo i really hope that we can make this happen and we need this pressure uh in order to reform the japanese system in a fundamental way and i think if we are successful it will um impact upon the thinking of the chinese leaders very much thank you don't worry with china the very new agency of hong kong and my question is for both of you and actually is a follow-up question on uh ukrain do you think the new development in ukrain and crime year uh situation and the tension between the united states and russia will have any geopolitical implications for us rebalancing strategic and u.s japan alliance and also china strategic in the asia pacific area thank you i'm michael mcdevitt and my question is for professor takahara i professor i was very impressed with your analysis of what's going on in china let me press you a little bit though we've got about nine more years of shiji ping assuming he he remains healthy and nothing untoward happens uh if him in charge so let me ask you to forecast what are the implications for the next for nine years hence for japan and the alliance of of uh china that's on their current trajectory under under a relatively new leader uh what are your worries what should we be worried about based upon that and i just wanted to also add uh for rich armitage your i was happy to hear somebody publicly say finally that use u.s force of japan needs to be turned into a turned into an operational planning staff as opposed to administrative staff that's a really important thing that tends to fly under the radar uh my name is jung yabu a research fellow uh from the asian institute for paris studies and so my questions are both to ambasar amity and the professor takahara with regard to the trilateral summit next week uh what do you think uh should be the agenda for trilateral summit and what kind of criteria would you use to see uh this summit uh a successful one or failure i'm gill rosman editor of the asan forum and i have a question for takahara son uh you've expressed a view that the central propaganda department has been controlling information that demonizes japan and opposes universal values and that's precisely what i've seen for the last five years uh now that jung yong gong is being attacked do you see any sign of change do you see any sign of debate that would suggest that there's a a chinese discussion about maybe shifting the balance of covering uh both japan and the united states uh in this very negative fashion hi my name is nadia chow with the uh the body time is from taiwan i have a question for uh professor takahara uh you just mentioned that the taiwan seems to be irrelevant uh from china's point of view especially after president ma you know took place uh my question is that first of all uh there's still different opinions in taiwan about the relationship with china if you monitor what happened in taiwan now you know student occupied the l y uh you know lawmakers uh uh you know uh the places that you know demonstrators still different voices and the second is that uh you know some of your colleague believe the reduction of a tension in taiwan's trade actually helped japan to enhance their relationship with taiwan and when we look back you know what mr abe has achieved with the president ma's uh government so uh from your point of view is this reduction of attention in taiwan's trade is helpful for japan and the nation the asian neighbors thanks i'm young chan what um international strategy and reconciliation foundation my question is to both mr armitage and then professor takahara i think the uh when we discussed about this japanese security we talked a lot about this political and then national matters especially from you know i think the uh no the state perspectives but the other pops the uh the building block here is a sort of what kind of things could actually help and then solidify this uh the alliance uh and then security by uh taking advantage of non-governmental institutions i think the uh in uh china japan uh and the us and because actually uh as we will as we look back to the past you know that case of history between china and then the us or the between uh you know japan and and and the us uh science diplomacy for example has made a lot of important progress uh when you know the political wills were not complementing each other but still many are non-governmental leaders and then you know academics and other people made good i think the uh the uh the support to make things happen so like to hear your thoughts about to what extent this non-governmental leaders were the those folks in science diplomacy can help now all this you know the security and alliance more strengthened uh my name sorry my name is kikuchi and i was washington research um i try to cover 20th century in uh very briefly uh if you look at the historical perspective uh most of the time for about 15 20 centuries japan uh was let's say a cultural student of china even through uh the end of world war two uh when the military dictatorship of japan waged an aggressive war to conquer china let's say but uh going down the route now uh we can easily think that the relationship between japan and china and including korea is a very historical very let's say friendly relationship uh and so when china changes let's say if the scenario of tiana men goes the other way and china becomes an open and more democratic society one can imagine japan and china becoming very close not just economically but also politically uh and even militarily uh could the us uh let's say uh permit such a relationship less closeness with united states stronger ties with china would that be a threat for the united states thank you there are so many questions um on ukraine uh whether that's going to affect uh the us rebalancing policy i'll leave it to mr amitage um forecast uh good china researchers don't forecast but if i'm uh pushed to do so uh the likelihood i think is that they will model through because um listening to my economist friends um there is no sign at the moment that the chinese economy will falter in a substantial way very soon you know they will uh they do have the capacity to continue with their measures like public investments and so on to keep the current pace of growth as it were that's the view as of today and if that's going to happen i don't think there's going to be a big turmoil of any sort not that great social instability of a sort however all the serious issues that we see today will not be solved will not be solved they'll get worse and worse but the system won't collapse that kind of a model through is the most likely scenario i think as of today but please forget about it i mean i did i say that maybe i did the success of the trilateral meeting if the meeting was a very amicable one and if all the three leaders came out smiling that's a success in itself i would say but they will have to address the history issue uh the comfort women issue and i don't know i cannot predict i don't have the knowledge or i'm not sure whether the governments have an idea at this moment you know what sort of um statement or an agreement that they will come up with so that's that now gil's question about johyong kan how much influence did he have on the propaganda lines the policy lines at this point i am the skeptical harm that even without johyong kan even without other people who are being hit and detained now i think the structure is that leftism will be strong because they cannot solve the problems and some people in china are bound to say that this is because of marketization uh so i and i think the people the main stream of the propaganda department are people who are inclined towards that you know it's it's naturally so because um what is the role of the propaganda department what is the role of the organization these two departments are very powerful uh backbones that support the one party rule um and their job is to maintain party ideology uh and criticize the current situation from that viewpoint so i don't think the propaganda line will change as far as their um anti us or anti japanese uh campaigns or lines are concerned taiwan i don't think i said taiwan is irrelevant now but i was just trying to say um that it is not the object of any tussle as far as the chinese communist party is concerned and it is not a major focus of contention when it comes to sino u.s relations um but your question is a very interesting one um is a better uh beijing type a relationship good to japan or not i think the answer is yes and no uh you know it's it's yes because as you said now we can more openly promote our relationship with type a but it's no or because now we are the only target of their struggle well other reasons too but that's the major one now there was a question about the role of ngo's the role of societal exchange as it were in promoting security uh in this in east east asia i think that's a relevant point relevant question and it does count for example in the relationship our relationship with china i see two aspects one is that of fragility you know security issues history issues and so on but there is also an aspect of resilience there is a very resilient part of japan-china relations of course an economic exchange is an important pillar there that supports the resilient aspect but also the societal ties there are many many japanese ngo's operating in china now planting trees working on sanitation and education and so on and so forth and this um has not been weakened you know now it's the age of the age of globalization 21st century is very different from the 19th century or 20th century in the sheer size and uh both quantity and quality i would say of the exchange that exists amongst the people at the societal level so i think it does play a very important role one example is that we academics in japan just last year formed the new association of the scholars advocating renewal of japan-china relationship and professor ezra bogo on our first international symposium that we held about three weeks ago especially flew in from boston to take part and this kind of effort goes on and in that sense i think the ball is in the chinese court we want some we want to see the ball being hit back from the chinese side thank you if i understood the questions correctly one was on the trilateral summit in the agenda i if i were involved in it i'd have a very minimalist agenda uh and let the uh perhaps i have only a safe topic such as north korea and i think use the mr obama miss park and and mr abbey should use it just to get a little more familiar with each other if you try to load it it will fail so i think a minimalist agenda and a safe topic such as north korea mrs park has good views on it japan has equity so do we perfectly safe topic and i would further hope that possibly out of it could come one small other agreement that is that perhaps the foreign ministers or something like that could be depotized to talk about these issues i think this is important otherwise if there's not a process that you can point to a sincere process let me underline that sincere process uh then i think the upcoming trip of mr obama to tokyo and to so will be dominated almost solely by those issues and and we will fail to get real guidance on the big issues that we have in front of us and to to be able to really communicate on on all those other things some of which i've already explained uh question on will the ukrain Crimea situation have an effect on rebalancing well the answer to that today is not yet but it could have an interesting effect i think that at a minimum uh depending on was hopeful to get a little relief in their budget to the tune of 30 to 35 billion dollars i think that will happen so one could say that maybe uh in that short to medium term uh we'd have a little bit more flexibility with the defense budget which would at least in the security end of things uh make uh the rebalancing a little easier uh however as you know there are approximately 20 000 troops on the ukrainian border russian troops on the ukrainian border now and if they were to move into uh karkiv or donets or something of that nature in eastern ukraine this would be another kettle of fish a whole new ball game and that possibly could disrupt uh the plans for rebalancing and that's something we'll have to see on the question of of lessons that from china it gets out of uh out of Crimea lessons for Russia lessons for japan well i think the lessons for japan is yet to be learned first of all we're going to see if Crimea to some extent becomes a small bone caught in mr pooms throat uh it could it's going to cost he's got to provide the water he's got to provide the gas he's got to pay the pensioners uh and Crimea is in a terrible state economically so this is going to cost the russian federation a little bit and it's going to cost the russian federation during a time their economy is just stumbling along maximum 1 percent so uh there's a cost right now it's a cost that russia can bear whether they learn a lesson however that any other adventures would also have a cost uh we'll see the lesson to japan is one i think that it should redouble the efforts to try to engage the united states into into these gray zone conversations because uh Crimea could look a lot like senkakus uh but senkakus don't have people involved in it so maybe senkakus looks looks easier maybe that's the lesson china gets i don't know i think we're going to have to let it play out a bit and and see um you said to to wrap up was there one other one if i may in taiwan if you'd like well only that taiwan right now it doesn't seem to be a bone of any contention uh that uh mind joe administration although they had some difficulty yesterday getting the services agreement that i read through the uh ly and there was some occupation by students that appeared to be an organized demonstration and perhaps certainly the business community in taipei is much more excited about a services agreement should give them much more confidence about back and forth bank flows etc uh so from china's point of view i think things are moving along pretty well in taiwan and they don't want to uh they don't want to have as much as i dislocated i've got a personal view uh from the time of the taiwan relations act when it was enacted in 1979 till now this is the longest time we've ever gone without a congressional notification uh of sales of defense equipment to taiwan now that's as much because of taiwan as the united states don't get me wrong taiwan is not uh willing to have much deeper draws on their defense budget and uh outside of some things which are very difficult such as submarines don't have many wants so but it it is something to note finally uh you mentioned it sir uh and i think it is something that we have to address and i don't know the answer so i'll just ask the question uh in sunny lands shijin pen and president obama had a i thought an excellent discussion where president she tried to get president obama to buy into the new model of great power relations and he basically said no we don't do slogans or bumper stickers which was the right answer certainly since we don't know what is meant by a new model of great power relations well apparently that has morphed through joe biden's trip to Beijing into yeah we buy into the new model of great power relationships well we still don't know what we bought into nor does china i think they haven't defined it either but this is it certainly is one thing it's a demotion for india for korea for indonesia for japan they're not part of the new model of great power relationships uh and i don't i just think it's something that we're going to have to address and i just want to leave it in front of you uh maybe one of you has the definition of a new model of great power relations in which case i would refer you to the administration they need to help so well during our next session if anyone has the definition we will welcome that or maybe we can discuss it over coffee at this point we're going to take a break and then we'll come back have our other two speakers speak and then reopen the floor for questions but please join me in thanking our two speakers for this morning and there's coffee set up outside restrooms around the corner let us start the second half of this public panel session i'm not really sure the task before the two speakers uh in this session we are much easier or more difficult but since we dealt with the various challenges uh that face the u.s. japan alliance we would like to ask uh professor nai of harvard university and uh mr ikyo okamoto the uh of uh senior fellow at the international center center for international studies at the mit to speak on the opportunities of the for the uh the the alliance the uh actually the challenges that we talked about give a huge hint for the uh underlying opportunities for the alliance but nonetheless i uh would like to ask first uh to speak of ask uh that professor nai to to kick off the uh discussion thank you very much ugami son um i apologize if i wind up repeating a bit of what we heard earlier because i'm not sure i understand the difference between a challenge and an opportunity uh every challenge presents an opportunity and every opportunity seems to be a challenge so it uh so they may be a bit of overlap but i'll try to to uh sort it out uh but i want to start by saying um how impressive it is to see the uh the 20th anniversary of this specific forum event um i believe i spoke at the first one in uh 1994 in san francisco and i have attended many since then and it's always struck me as a particularly valuable chance for americans and japanese to get together and have conversations which are are deeper and and uh more fruitful than uh in many other settings so i want to congratulate uh ralph and brad losman for the 20th anniversary of a successful venture um but it's also gives me a kicking off place for my thoughts about opportunities because it might be interesting to go back and ask what were the opportunities that we saw in 1994 and indeed what were the challenges and it's hard to recall but um the big challenge was the end of the cold war and the opportunity was what are we going to do with the u.s japan security treaty and alliance after the cold war uh it's hard to recall the uh the way the world looked at that time but in japanese public opinion in 1994 uh 93 94 there was a view that particularly as the socialist party was becoming more important in the coalition politics of the after the first end of an ldp government there was a a feeling that maybe the u.s alliance wasn't needed anymore that maybe what uh maybe japan should rest its security upon the united nations there were commissions that uh that looked at this internally um there was a good deal of writing about this that uh that maybe the u.s japan security treaty was a relic of the cold war and now that the cold war was over and many people felt that uh liberal democracy had triumphed that uh uh this wasn't necessary anymore the other side of this is the united states the clinton administration had been elected in uh the 92 election on the slogan it's the economy stupid and the feeling was that japan was destroying the american economy by what it regarded by what the americans regard as unfair trade practices and that uh the dominant theme in the first years of the clinton administration first year was uh largely trade disputes with japan so we think back of challenges and opportunities the challenge 20 years ago was how do we keep this treaty alive if it should be kept alive and the opportunity was to think through how to do that i can remember believing at the time when i was in the clinton administration that both these views on the american and the japanese side were mistaken and i used a uh a phrase that uh uh to try to explain it which is that the growth of east asia and the great triumph of east asia uh for the prior decades before 1994 had been based on uh an unspoken assumption that there was security every economic relationship requires a security of relationship all markets require a political structure to surround them it's very easy to take them for granted and uh i argued that uh security is like oxygen you don't notice it until you begin to miss it and that i think was the situation in east asia in 1994 i think the american presence in the region had provided and the which of course was based on largely on the american japan security treaty but also the treaty with korea south korea uh had provided this kind of security which allowed economic growth and the challenges that we faced were how could you preserve this or should you preserve it as an opportunity faced with really two things that were changing in the region in security one was north korea and the other was the rise of china on north korea uh if you will remember correctly this uh was the final days of kim il sung north korea broke out of its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty uh it had a hundred thousand men massed within 60 kilometers of the of the demilitarized zone and uh it provided a severe threat uh and that has lasted to this day one thing i don't think we expected in 1994 is that we would still be dealing with a totally unpredictable kim family uh which is a relic of the cold war uh in a post cold war period two decades later and the fact that that north korean situation is unpredictable and still a threat is why the cooperation with south korea is such an important opportunity for the alliance now um even if uh uh park go ahead and prime minister abe uh meet for a photo opportunity at the hag next monday as many people expect um that's not going to be enough uh the just to get a photo op um and a little brief discussion about the north korea so forth isn't going to be sufficient what we're going to have to see are steps following up on that which actually deepen the relationship and make it possible to cooperate in case there is some unpredictable set of events arising out of north korea uh rich armitage mentioned earlier uh the problem of korea fatigue in many of my japanese friends have told me that they're tired of this but as rich said excuse me it doesn't matter whether you're tired of it north korea is not tired of it and you also need to pay much closer attention to this so this strikes me is a is a very important opportunity for the alliance that we really have to start making some progress let's hope monday is the beginning of that um the other great challenge that we faced and similarly the opportunity was the rise of china which professor toky described so ably in his presentation before the coffee break uh it was clear that china was rising what wasn't clear was how should we react to this challenge and what opportunities did it present at that time i may be working with ezra vocal who's here in the front row who is the national intelligence officer for east asia and ezra did a very interesting assessment of the potential futures for china it was interesting was that some futures could turn out badly but some didn't have to turn out badly and this affected the way in we looked in which we looked at the major options that were on the table then one of which was to try to contain china to hold it back before it grew in strength and the other was to try to engage china and bring them into what bob zealock eventually called the relationship as a responsible stakeholder and as we looked at those options we felt that there were many more opportunities on the second than on the first for one thing the idea of containing china was not popular in most of asia uh countries wanted an american presence they wanted a chinese growth they didn't want to have to choose so the idea of trying to range containment of china was very unlikely indeed i again use the phrase then which still works today which is the only country that can contain china is china and china incidentally in the last couple of years has been in a pretty good job doing a pretty good job of containing itself if you look at its relations with its neighbors because of how it treats maritime issues in both the east china sea and the south china sea but the other point about the option uh was the opportunity which is if you treated china as an enemy which containment would have meant then you were guaranteeing an enemy in the future but if you try to engage china as a responsible stakeholder you weren't guaranteed friendship but you were at least keeping open opportunities for a better world and our view was that to try to contain china where it wouldn't work and to throw away all the possible positive futures that were opportunities would it be a mistake in policy the net result of that of course was that you found in clinton's policy acceptance of chinese trade help for china to join the world trade organization acceptance of chinese students and other social contacts and i've always said when chinese complained today that the rebalancing toward asia is containment i say go back and read your history books in the cold war containment of the soviet union meant virtually no trade and it meant virtually no social contacts instead of that we not only have massive trade but a massive trade deficit in addition to that we have 200 000 chinese students in our universities this is not your grandfather's containment so i think in that sense the option that we chose presented an opportunity for both the u.s and japan but at the same time both the u.s and japan needed an insurance policy suppose as china grew stronger as it rose along the lines that professor takahara ably described suppose they did become a bully suppose they did become uh excessively aggressive in that case our insurance policy for both the u.s and japan was to maintain the u.s japan security treaty and by maintaining the u.s japan security treaty we had something to fall back on in case our bet on an opportunity with china turned out to be a risky bet and that of course was the basis of the clinton hashimoto declaration which was issued in 1996 in tokyo which said that the u.s japan security treaty is not a relic of the cold war but on the contrary is the basis of stability for the post cold war era in east asia so that essentially was how we saw the opportunities 20 years ago and in that sense i think we were largely right we needed to keep the u.s japan alliance and that remains true to this day we saw that there were potential common interests of the u.s japan and china working together and that includes issues like float global financial stability dealing with climate change issues of energy security problems of pandemics and so forth there are areas where there is a joint gain game that is being played for us japan and china and that means that the basis of our policy the opportunity is one which you think of east asia as a triangle of good relations between the u.s and japan the u.s and china and china and japan and that third leg is probably the most difficult at this moment but it's also worth remembering that if you conceive of these opportunities in east asia as a triangle it's not an equilateral triangle it's a triangle in which the u.s and japan are much closer because we have this alliance and this alliance essentially is the insurance policy which allows us to dether to cope with this historical change of the rise in the power of china now in that sense i think it's important therefore that among our opportunities are things that strengthen the alliance and in that sense i think prime minister abhi's program has many good things in it rich mentioned some of them the secrets act allows us for example to deal more with cyber security with japan the nsc makes it easier to coordinate between nsc's on constitutional interpretation i think japan has a right of collective self-defense under the un charter i don't think this requires amendment but does mean that there can be interpretation of the constitution after all what are japanese ships doing off the coast of samalia if that's not collective self-defense in any case to my mind the abhi package whether it includes the things i just mentioned or arms exports or the economic programs which include tpp i think the package is actually good and provides good opportunities for what's needed in the u.s japan relationship my objection is not to the package it's to the nationalistic rapping that's over the package it's self-defeating abhi is essentially doing things like threatening to revise the kono statement or muriyama statement or his appointments at nhk or the visit the yasukuni shrine where i do disagree with my friend rich armitage these are things which essentially arouse suspicions about a package which is actually a sensible package and if the package were presented without the wrappings it would be a lot more successful so one of the opportunities that we face is how can we get across the things we need to do to strengthen the alliance without frightening the neighbors and without disrupting that stability of the triangle of good relations that i mentioned if we look ahead i think the interesting question is how likely are we to see this opportunity succeed that i mentioned when prime minister abhi was at davos where i talked to him about some of this he mentioned the analogy of 1914 and one of the questions we have to ask is is there any danger that we could see a 1914 situation occurring in east asia i've written to say that this type of analogy is somewhat exaggerated it's true that in 1914 most of the countries in europe had high degrees of economic interdependence and did not expect war or at least not a world war merely a third balkan's war so surprises can happen but i was struck that when rich armitage and steve hadley and jim steinberg and i were sent by secretary of state clinton to call the prime ministers of japan and china in the october of 2012 to discuss the questions that have risen over the senkaku or as chinese call it dieu islands when we talked with top chinese leaders it was clear that none of them wanted war none of them wanted to disrupt relationships with japan one of the things that we pointed out was that if the second and third largest economies in the world got into a boycotting or tit for tat retaliation sanctions with each other this would be bad for china bad for japan and bad for the world economy and i was struck that the top chinese leaders that we talked to agreed with that it wasn't as though they were chomping at the bid on this but the thing that was more worrisome to us was the dangers of miscalculation that something could arise like the situation in 2010 where a chinese trawler smashed into a japanese coast guard ship twice not once and led to the first great problems over the recent problems over the senkaku dieu island dispute and in that case what was interesting was the captain of the trawler was drunk it wasn't he had that he had orders from beijing to do this he was showing how tough he was under the influence of alcohol and yet once that happened given the atmosphere of nationalism in beijing and throughout the bureaucracy it became impossible not to escalate until you finally got the embargo of exports of rail earth materials to japan so the danger that we were worried about as we looked at this situation is not that somebody in beijing like shijing ping gives an order to go do something stupid it's that somebody on the scene does something stupid and as it escalates up the chain and is exacerbated by and magnified by nationalism becomes very difficult to manage the problem so the message that we gave the three of us four of us gave it to our interlocutors was threefold we said first of all don't make any mistake there is a deterrence message here when the secretary of state and secretary of defense both say that the senkaku islands are covered by the us japan security treaty that is serious the fact that we don't take a position on the ancient history whatever happened in the 19th century doesn't mean that we don't have a very clear position on the situation since 1972 when we handed back okinawa in 1972 it included the senkaku islands and that meant that japan had administrative control and has administrative control and therefore these islands are covered by the us japan security treaty make no mistake on that and for people who say yes but doesn't the current occasions in ukraine and Crimea doesn't that undercut that not at all notice something what happened in Crimea and Ukraine was not determined by distant far off things was determined in those cases was local military superiority uh george w bush certainly indicated strong willingness to use military force with his invasion of iraq but when putin basically invaded georgia and had local military superiority george w bush didn't do anything about it so if you say doesn't this show a weakness of obama that he hasn't used force or something in relationship to Crimea on the contrary what it shows is that uh putin had local military superiority there the key point to maintain is that in the senkaku daio islands that the united states has overwhelming military superiority if it were to come to that and if you look at the air and naval capacities that's something that we need to see as important for the future of the alliance we certainly have it now but in any case deterrence was one message the second message was communications we were struck not only that japan and china didn't understand each other very well in their communications we were also struck that the communications between the national capitals and what was happening on the ground not on the ground in the sea in the east china sea uh was often not adequately controlled and there have been some improvements in those systems of vertical communications uh since then and the third thing that we worried about was the point i mentioned earlier about nationalism and the danger of escalation when nationalistic forces are powerful in both national capitals so as we looked at the opportunities for east asia the opportunities that are presented by this triangle of good relations between all three states resting on the security of the u.s japan relationship we feel that those opportunities are there they're strong but to seize them we have to maintain the strength of the u.s japan security alliance and so i think in that sense the right answer to the challenges that we face is to make sure that we keep open opportunities by maintaining the alliance and in that sense there's a surprising degree of continuity between the problem we face today and the problem we faced in 1993 94 and i'm pleased to say that we rose to the challenge in 93 94 and seized the opportunities to strengthen u.s japan security treaty and i think we can do the same again today thank you thank you for tonight now i would like to ask yuki okamoto to make a few he's going to use uh i think uh slides thank you thank you noemi-san um thank you organizers you two really did a fantastic job except for uh potemi in a hotel next to the room of a very passionate and loving couple and uh if i sounded a bit too dizzy that's uh because of your two fold um you know it's uh always easy to speak right after uh john i because uh he uh structuralizes uh where we stand in such a beautiful manner uh and i support him 100 percent so i have a review to add but looking at uh young faces uh i am going to show you some basic slides of where things are something still in my view uh can be unwound and uh reversed but uh uh what leaders say matters very much when the president uh of korea says the relationship between an aggressor and the victim uh does not change for 1 000 years as in his in her famous speech of last march um people will easily get influenced and uh you see this famous picture of uh the u.s. uh house uh chairman uh kneeling in front of comfort woman's statue uh in california uh and this is uh at the heart of uh current korea japan um complexities and uh you know uh let me talk something about my personal matter this is my mother uh here uh she wrote a book recently 100 years old she is 100 years old and uh she doesn't like to talk about the comfort women case uh says that uh you know what koreans are accusing us uh is not right uh in many respects at which point i'll have to tell my mother mother that's not a correct thing you should say you should never say a word about comfort women because uh the system was a barbarian inhuman inexcusable system of bringing women to the battlefront so we all must shut up otherwise anything you say will be used against you at which point my mother shuts up in a very grumbling manner and changes the subject to her favorite topic uh picking on my wife uh you kill you have you have changed after your marriage under the bad influence of your wife and blah blah so at which point i leave uh just to tell you that uh uh there are many views still in japan um koreans have to have a more relaxed view they have to change to believe our goodwill uh this is uh a photo uh criticized by korean media you know why because of the number uh yomiuri giants gave uh mr abe uh a uniform with the number 96 because he is the 96th prime minister of japan but korean campaign was that uh look this is a mr abe's campaign to revise article 96 of japanese constitution uh article 96 uh revision will make uh the revision of the entire constitution nija um they're going a bit too far uh sorry uh this is what i have shown you earlier uh this is uh chinese feeling towards japan uh and again just in the case of uh korean feeling towards japan it only starts from 2005 so before that there were much more favorable time when chinese people were friendly towards japan but now um partly because of uh political orientation especially the young people of china are really against uh japan showing low thing if not uh hatred towards japan and some of them have uh begin to carry the banner you can see uh here sorry wait should no it's gone sorry uh those banners those banners read uh uh liberate okinawa take back okinawa uh which seems to be the favorite slogans of uh uh the young chinese uh not every one of them but at least uh diehard anti-japan demonstrators and of course you know at the heart there is this uh uh issue of uh senkaku um i just uh show you pictures maybe you have not seen before these are uh senkaku islanders uh japanese of course who started live there in 18th century until 1940 uh this is the port they have constructed and this is uh a fisheries factory that uh uh existed until 1940 chinese never lived much less landed sorry never landed much less lived uh on senkaku the first uh uh chinese who landed senkaku uh were the activists from hong kong in 2004 or by the way uh united states must bear the blame uh because you have bombarded senkaku islands for look 394 times and uh if this was the chinese territory you are subject to reparation from them at the later stage um now the more the seriousness uh in my view is this um senkaku sitia china has a two tier naval strategy and uh uh which is by 2010 they will have the complete control of uh the waters within the first island chain uh white dotted line uh and uh by 2020 they will have uh what is called the a2 ad capability um anti-access area denial capability within the uh second island chain uh which is uh here now as you can see so long as the strategy remained uh in their first phase senkaku was nothing but uh uninhibited small islands at the periphery of the targeted waters um now it is different as they enter into the second stage of their naval strategy senkaku sits at the gateway of their entry into the pacific so military significance of senkaku's has changed dramatically and uh china will not compromise on the issue if they can get hold of these islands they are uh as they there these are the three major fleets of uh china uh and uh it will be 400 kilometers uh closer to west as their uh military naval post 1200 kilometers closer to jintao as their naval supply spot so militarily this is a very very precious target so that's why i'm saying that the issue will not come easier with the lapse of time it will even more difficult in the future years now uh china has to do a lot of work in order to convince the international community uh that it belongs to them so they have two approaches one is to repeat the violation of japanese territorial waters among senkaku to show mainly to the united states that the senkaku is no longer under the effective control of japan henceforth it will not be covered by japan u.s security treaty article five um this is article five the second strategy is to discredit japan all over the world so mr abyss uh visit to yaskuni was a very good occasion for them to tell the whole wide world look uh the prime minister the leader is worshipping war criminals um and they are on their global campaign but look at these pictures um they this is a chinese ambassador making a campaign against japan in at the headquarter of african union uh and these nice african people don't know what happened during the world war two so chinese have to teach anew the atrocities of japanese imperial army eight years ago and to create a hatred uh or contempt among africans on the basis of which they can say that uh now we have this problem with japan and who do you believe us democratic country or japan with uh uh militarism still in the dna um now um before i leave senkaku there is a widespread uh argument in the united states that uh we should stay away from there why should we get involved militarily with china uh for such a small uninhibited islands this is my purely personal view uh but japan should not ask the united states for direct military combat with chinese liberation navy um creating um apprehensions among american people especially within congress um i think it's let's face it foolhardy to expect seven fleet to come to fight with chinese navy it is solely under the purview of japanese self-defense forces to prevent these things from happening and to deal with chinese in the unfortunate event but uh for instance i put the picture of awaks united states under article five must do something to jointly work with japan so why don't you send airplanes give us the information about chinese activities and that is one of the um authentic ways for the two militaries to cooperate fooling another purview of article five so don't raise the fear among your compatriots that you'll be involved in frontal war with japan just because of these stupid uninhibited small rocks far away from okinawa but that's my personal view which i intend to promote in japan um the alliance of everybody go quickly uh it is a sineq one on for japan japan is such a small country militarily this is japan and only aided by the nuclear deterrence of us forces it is facing up to gigantic military states in asia uh we are denying ourselves i hope mr abbe will be changing this constitutional interpretation uh to go for collective defense but uh the heart of japanese security is the alliance with the united states and there i am feeling uh a bit uh uneasy and i'm going to share my uneasiness frankly with you uh this is a uh a public opinion poll conducted by the japanese foreign ministry and gallop since 1970 sorry i can't see uh the the ears but uh it's 1970 uh american opinion leaders were asked which country do you think is the most important country partner for the united states in asia uh those who said uh japan is uh marked blue red is china and you see in at the peak years of uh uh sorry again you can't see the years that's uh 94 and 95 uh it's here this is 94 95 79 percent of americans said 79 uh japan and only 12 or 14 percent said china since then the number keeps going down and down and down and uh this is when dpj came to power in japan sudden drop page uh with the advent of abbe administration it regained somewhat but still staying at uh much lower number than used to be with 39 percent of people thinking that uh japan is the most important partner for the united states as against 43 percent saying no it's china and you have to mark here this is korea 14 percent of american opinion leaders now say it's not japan it's korea which is most important for the united states koreans are doing very very effective campaigning global throughout the united states um you know um my analysis is that uh why did we have uh uh such high score in 1974 94 or 95 um with 79 percent uh that is when japanese economy was at the height of its strength in terms of uh world global share uh in those years japanese gdp was 17.9 percent of the entire world gdp now it's down to seven percent so how united states perceive japan whether it's an important country or not has a lot to do with the economic strength so i say that uh uh one of the most important things for japan is to take back our strong economic position which mr abbey is doing now successfully and uh this is going for the better um for the united states of course uh you have uh this is uh uh george washington in yokosuka uh you can cover the entire west pacific and indian ocean from japan so it is a mutual thing and uh look uh how japanese feeling towards the utility of uh japanese security alliance amazing number 81 percent of people support this system as only 10 percent against it in a democratic society this is almost a unanimous support for our alliance with the united states so from our point of view this necessity will not change so i put uh us japan uh security alliance is a sineq one norm for japan but for the united states how long it will last that's where my uneasiness comes as you can see uh from the uh public opinion poll conducted uh before uh this is american feeling towards japan and uh i guess this is uh when there was some unfavorable um time this was during the gulf war when japan was perceived as not doing anything and uh of course uh economic aggression as well uh but on the whole uh us does like japan too i think uh uh and uh when i have time i will tell you uh how you are wrong during the gulf war to have put us in your dirt list uh this is uh last year's academic uh winning award algo and uh nobody knows that uh there was uh uh almost a similar event during the gulf war when we housed your embassy people 20 of them um taking a risk from saddam's saying but uh it was never reported in the united states i mean so we have a lot to do for um perception uh review uh if both sides know the story from both sides as uh in the case of uh uh iwo jima now i have uh uh prepared several more uh slides so now we have uh assertive of it oops i'm sorry this is september 2006 sorry but but this time it's real um nikke look how uh stock price has been soaring uh he's doing all the good but uh japan need to um overcome the agriculture uh backwardness to sign the tpp and we also have to do something about this this is how japanese uh oda economic assistance has been decreasing we used to be the number one donor in the world but uh with the waning of japanese economic strength now we are down to all may number fifth in the world we have to uh really come back to the world stage as a very constructive uh economic assistance now uh question of confidence uh this is uh because uh joe used this word so i quickly changed the title but uh since i'm running out of time uh i will save it for the next time but uh uh japanese uh uh have uh grown um where one more yeah from lopsided uh relationship uh 68 years ago um it's very easy to count because i am 68 years old born when the war ended so i know how many uh years have lapsed between the two when we started since we started the new relationship uh japan always uh looked up to the united states as a big and benevolent brother and uh as you saw 80 percent of japanese love uh the united states by the way which this is one of the highest percentage of uh friendly feeling towards the united throughout the world and uh on the basis of the friendship uh i think there are a lot of opportunities but uh today i had no time to uh although i prepared some slides which i'll be happy to answer if you have questions we have to face historical issues square um i think uh uh what we did in china and in korea uh has been exaggerated but still we invaded china there are a lot of atrocities no ethical excuse can be made there uh and we have to teach those things to our kids i teach at japanese universities and it is amazing how little uh they know uh it's got to do with uh defective uh highway high school education in japan uh so it takes time but for instance in china the so-called sixth generation uh who are in their 40s will come to power uh at the 20th party congress of 2022 and there will be more neutral views takahara-san can uh say a few words but uh there will be a generation of change and uh since i have been explaining to you the sudden deterioration is the product of the last decade or so uh i'm not that pessimistic and stop here thank you we have about 20 minutes and uh if you'd like to ask comments or questions uh microphone is coming to you and please make your quest identify yourself and make your question sasing and short please thank you very much my name is ginny win with voice of vietnamese americans i thank professor night and mr okamoto and also the whole panelist um especially mr takahara my question has to do with u.s japan security and it has to do with asia pacific but more over it has to do with the global security because i think we're now all in together globally as mr okamoto has talked about the first island chain and the second island chain it has a lot to do with our security and i also applaud the um dr night professor night about the thinking that opportunities and challenges are one and you made it very clear that deterrence and the insurance policy is key so my question has to do with asia pacific and prime minister abe had made it clear that is china sea and south china sea are interconnected and so did the so does the indian ocean my question to you is in the context of asia is there a good deterrence a good insurance policy that japan and us can collaborate cooperate with south korea also maybe would there be a potential asian japan us south korea security treaty as an insurance package to ensure the policy the security of the region so we can have a strong market a strong and long-term sustainable trade among the regions in which china will benefit thank you i will collect a couple of more questions and ask the panelists to respond those hi michael i'm michael meserve i'd like to ask following up on mr armadou's observation that the u.s. forces japan has to switch from a administrative to an operational command and in particular the theme of your panel opportunities what would your ideal action plan be for the next 10 to 15 years to operationalize command and control and the relationship between the self-defense forces and u.s. forces japan in particular what would the united states have to do in terms of budget what would japan have to do in terms of collective self-defense and what more importantly what we have to do for protection of classified information i'm kami okoe of heritage foundation my question is to professor nai on opportunity to make u.s. japan public diplomacy collaboration now washington dc has sakura festival there are many ideas related to public diplomacy to make u.s. japan strong alliance strong how do you think u.s. japan public diplomacy can be a good tool for the mission of u.s. japan alliance i would like to panelist to respond the first okamotsan i drew this picture about too much simplified but this is something we should avoid which is the confrontational relationship between continental Asia and maritime Asia uh i define maritime asia as japan korea taiwan philippines vietnam singapore indonesia australia who are increasingly threatened by chinese expansionary maritime strategy um it is important that these countries get together and not necessarily to form anti-china camp but to exchange views and information sort of loosely need the international society otherwise chinese strategy of uh we have to be very careful there is a very interesting article published just uh a month ago by a man named mr chen shen yang who said uh very very interesting thing we have to exploit the weakness of japan who have uh uh severe natural disaster still suffering from nuclear fallout who has very uh shallow strategy aging society like of energy and resources but still they are still a strong country so in order to completely uh overwhelm japan we need more uh patience and let's encircle japan with international allies who fought against fascists during the seven uh world war two china has to cooperate with korea china has to cooperate with russia and uh uh the united states very important japan is too much dependent on the united states but uh the us not so we have to drive a wedge between us and china make us understand for the larger course to unite with china and cut off the small differences they have with china so i mean very well thought strategy if i were chinese i would write the same uh article um and this is exactly what china is doing so fine uh 10 years ago uh your questions are very pertinent how we could uh bold start uh japan china uh japan u.s security relationship more of course we have a joint exercise japanese uh wanting to uh uh go out to the world india notion iraq and so forth but now uh the most important thing is uh as i told you we have to have completely perceptional concurrences uh between japan and china that this alliance is needed and then uh with the recovering japanese economic uh uh strength uh we'll be able to develop much sounder relationship already your forces in japan uh you can keep them at the cheaper cost than uh even keeping them in the continental united states because you have to pay your soldiers salaries but all the utilities labor cost and uh other expenses are borne by japan i think this is a very good arrangement and japan should uh uh even increase our host nation support more so um it will come as a general uh evolution um of uh uh according to the increase of japanese uh recovery uh but more important that we really did not talk between japan and the united states the issues of history we always thought historical issues are something we have with china and korea but no uh we really have to uh come to um a popular understanding of uh where we are uh in japan as i said has to change its uh education thank you professor night i think the um yukio is right that there is a chinese strategy imaginable of trying to unite the region and drive a wedge between us and japan but the chinese can't do it one of the problems that the chinese have is that they're captured by this rising nationalism inside china and this goes to uh the kind of strategy that they could organize i had a i've had this discussion with chinese high officials and with fellow academics let me give you an exchange with an academic i said um you know if you were really interested in improving your relations with your neighbors you shouldn't do things like take scarborough shoal from the philippines i said what did you do with scarborough shoal you went and you pushed out the philippines fishing ships you now control scarborough shoal so you used your hard power and you won a little at all in the meantime you lost all your soft power in manila no matter how many confucius institutes you start or whatever other propaganda you try in manila people remember that you took scarborough shoal and this professor said to me i said this is i said this is a counterproductive strategy i mean you're you're you're winning the little things and losing the big things and this professor said to me you're right but we had no choice because it was a matter of sovereignty now think about that think about the number of little atolls rocks and things in the south china sea that china sees as an issue of sovereignty and imagine what that means when you try to develop a strategy such as yukio described they can't do it they can't do it because internal nationalism means the sensible foreign ministry official who says let's give them scarborough shoal it's more important that we're you know have soft power manila that person has said oh you can't think of the hundred years of humiliation since the opium war you can't possibly do this so china is stuck with a really difficult problem and if i were which is that it's very hard for them in rising nationalism at home to make the accommodations with their neighbors and they have what is it 22 neighbors it's not just the maritime they also have problems with india on a border as well and over the period from 19 or 2009 to 2000 to today really their relations with many of these neighbors have gotten worse vietnam japan philippines india this is you know this is not a very impressive record in foreign policy but they'd have a heart and if you point this out to them they have a hard time figuring out how to do something about it so to go to your question about if i were a southeast asian country what would i do i would insist that china implement the code of conduct for negotiations over these islands in the south china sea that officially gives up this nine dashed line and on the questions of particular territories willingness to negotiate in a multilateral context chinese want to keep it bilateral so they can throw their weight around but if the asian countries would hold together they could hurt china in its soft power which is where they're at their most vulnerable so a strategy for asian would be to say live up to what you signed in 2002 and let's have this multilateral framework and i think that would make it much more difficult for china to accomplish uh what it's trying to do in regard to the south china sea as for the u.s. japan alliance and the future of it i do think that there's something in rich arbitrage is point about having operational command not just administrative command but i think frankly the politics is is much more important there are operational things and exercise is important i think the fact that japan and u.s. exercised at camp pendleton this past fall and how to recapture islands well good good good signal of of developing a joint capacity on something that isn't going to be lost entirely in beijing but i do think that the much more important thing is the extent to which the u.s. and japan are able to keep their their political consultations together and having a feeling that that you don't have misunderstandings every time a yasukuni shrine occurs it gives the chinese a place to put that wedge in every time somebody talks about the kono statement uh even with with the chief cabinet secretary suga's statement that we're just looking back at the facts of this why do it japan is a peace loving country with a perfect record for the last 60 years it should be looking ahead and proving that that's its position not going back and rehashing its weak point which is history and that's what i met when i said earlier that i have no objections to abbey's package i just think the wrappings are counter productive it's like giving somebody a present and wrapping it in used newspapers or something from the 1930s it doesn't it's it's not a smart strategy so i think that we ought to focus on the political questions of the alliance and not so much i mean i i'm all in favor of making changes on the operational side but i think it's this capacity to show that us and japan are one and close which is more important than the details of the military operation let me abuse the chair prerogative and ask a question to both of you and and to takihara as well regarding the trilateral meeting in the haig what do you hope will come out of that and then what do you think will come out of that what my my hope is that the first and most important thing is that a photograph will be taken which will be published in all the papers in soul which will show that it's possible to have contact and communication though there's that that this this crazy distancing which we've seen for the last year is no longer a barrier to serious conversations if beyond that they can talk a little bit about something substantive which is what's going on with north korea and how are we coordinating policies and even more important how are a second third and fourth meetings are we going to make sure that we have a common policy on north korea that's what i'd like to see coming out of the haig i agree it's been an absolute anomaly that the two leaders have not talked to each other so far so the meeting itself has a lot of value and they should not talk about the divisive issue from the beginning north korea as joe mentioned is a perfect subject to talk and come to think of it it was only in 1998 when president kim daijun came to japan and made a moving speech at the japanese diet saying that our history is over we will be stepping forward for new era it's only 10 and a couple years ago and we must find a start emotional start to go back to that stage so i think it is a very big opportunity to take advantage of for all the leaders so i ideally i really hope that a clear cut statement will be made on the part of the colonizer that a square apology will be made again and for the colonize to accept the apology i'm from the korea the monthly chosen the peer the writer i have a question to the yuki okamoto you said around the sixth generation i'd be getting better and better i don't think so it's getting worse and worse because we believe after this is some small comment after the abe it's getting much more worse because you said right now the president kim he said the moving speech about the future going to the future but because he said at that time after he heard that the gona statement gona right but now the abe he said he wants reverse go back of course officially he said he doesn't want to do that but now because facing the tractor the summit and then he changed suddenly cream people they don't forget that but you said oh we heard the president kim's very moving speech but they say now the different story but korean saying that is that they kind of you know the endless speech going worse and worse this is current situation and then also you said that the trilateral meeting i'm sorry i'm really excited uh before the korean they released that the trilateral meeting two days before actually they released the meeting between china and the korean so you said the uh professor night that will be covered broadly in the korean newspaper i think so maybe the much more bigger portal we've released in korean paper between seijinping and the metham park actually i don't like that a lot of korean people they worry about that but no choice now the given the generation between japan korean korean you know they're they're pushed in some way they don't want to go that word a lot of people actually don't want to go that direction this is current situation that's just really a comment and if you have something adding to that my idea please let me know that again hopefully a quick question two quick two quick questions to dr nai you've been known as the probably most articulate critic of the aves yaskini uh seijin visit in japan at least in japanese press but why my question do do you see any merit of the public administration going public publicly scolding the leader of an important ally for paying tribute to the its own country well then that's one question the other one is uh uh why is it that american critics including yourself pay almost no attention to what mr abe publicly said about the intention of his visit to the ashikini shrine the first time that he ever issued a statement both in japanese and english and covering all those contentious points that critics raise it's a peaceful purposes no war no i've all of remorse no respect for the order i mean the class a war criminal and all that and you seem to work give more credence to what the koreans and chinese said based on suspicion than the what the leader democratically elected leader of the important ally officially states in writing that well first uh with regard to uh the first question um well i think uh uh you misunderstood me when i said about six generation i was mentioning about six generation in china uh people of those 40 years people like a fusion for uh sun chong sign these people who were educated under a relatively free atmosphere when japan and china uh were at its at their honeymoon uh under mr huya ban and mr nakasone my judgment is that uh people uh educated during this period whom i said uh will become the political members uh in the 20th party congress will have a quite different view towards uh japan but you raise on very interesting question uh because in my personal view in korea it's reverse koreans in their 40s are more anti-japanese than other generations those generations who used to be called 389 no 369 generation uh so uh i think uh it is easier to develop uh to restore friendship with uh china than in korea unless unless something has to change in korea this uh deep-seated animosity uh such as uh uh hailing the um mr anju gong's uh uh assassination of japanese prime minister now the um uh big posters of uh this man uh covers the entire uh korean stadium and uh making uh young people even more uh agitative and uh recently there was uh the memorial museum uh built uh in the uh station of harbin in china um i'm not questioning uh the fact that mr anju gong is treated as a national hero in korea but uh to build such a thing at the point of assassination uh tend to send the wrong message so unless you have uh no not you uh korean government korean government has a serious intention to improve the relationship with japan uh it's not easy to combine japanese always ready we have no uh because admittedly we were the persecutors okay we were the ones to be uh apologetic uh but uh we have uh little hurdles to improve our relationship with korea well um on the question of the u.s statement the government statement that it was disappointed by uh prime minister's visit to the shrine i think that has to be put in the context of the fact that the u.s and japan are allies that we face two important problems together one is the difficult problem of north korea in which we need to get cooperation with south korea if we're to be effective and the second is the larger question of how do we manage the challenge of a rise of china the united states government officials from the very high levels to very modest levels and many many non-governmental friends of japan had spoken with mr abe a number of times and said as allies your visit to the yasukuni shrine your statements about the kono statement and the americama statement are defeating our common purpose as allies you're undercutting what we're trying to do together which is as allies and i think what my minister did was defy that and if that's the case why shouldn't an ally say if we're in a joint venture and you've just made our joint venture more difficult we are disappointed which is a modest word in diplomatic language but makes clear that it was indeed an undercutting of a joint alliance purpose now that's the government what the government did as for my personal statements as somebody who has been known as a friend of japan for a long time i believe that when you see a friend making a mistake and hurting himself a friend warns him that he's doing something which is against his own interests and in that sense i was willing to make statements when asked by various members of the japanese press what i thought of the yasukuni shrine visit i said you have defeated yourself you heard me praise prime minister abhi's package this morning what i criticized with the ways in which he presents that package why he does that you'll have to answer what could be done about it i would hate to say to a representative sanke that there was an editorial in mayinichi this past week which said maybe prime minister should decide not to revisit the shrine while he's in official office but should investigate other ways in which japan can pray proper homage to war dead not just from the world war two but from previous wars without raising the issues that have become so extraordinarily divisive in east asia that's the symbol of yasukuni and in that sense it would be in japan's self interest to find a way to do this and i think the friends of japan should point that out and apparently mayinichi understands that thank you the uh actually uh we are uh running out of time and uh i would like to conclude this public session at this stage but uh the as a co-organizer i would like to thank the uh the panelists for the morning session as well as this second session and i would like to express our deep appreciation for the other panelists and thank you very much i do not intend to give a sort of summary of the meeting or the wrap up remarks but Ralph would you like to say a few words i would just also like to thank all of you for coming i think it's been a very productive time i i would like to comment perhaps on the on the the one comment about the u.s being disappointed and then the japanese being disappointed about the u.s disappointment i i think what's what is of concern to me in this area is that many japanese are now interpreting the u.s disappointment not as a reflection of u.s disappointment with what japan had done because as joe says it undermines our mutual effort but somehow as a symbol that the u.s is kowtowing to china or yielding to china pressure and that quite frankly is insulting to an ally i i think it's much more useful to sort of reflect on what the true motives are and i think you've heard those very clearly from from joe today it's also extremely frustrating to me i spend a lot of time in in korea our organization for many years has worked on the quote virtual alliance trying to bring u.s japan and korea closer together and every conversation i have with someone from korea starts off with a comment well it's abe's fault because he has renounced the kono statement in the moriam apology and i would then say you know i must have missed that because actually i heard abe say just the opposite and the response traditionally is yeah but that's not really what he believes what he really wants to do is to do that and and i think that there is a frustration in in japan today that when mr abe does say the right thing that it does not seem to make the newspapers and when he says something normally adlibbing that says well i'm not sure about this or that that becomes the headline it becomes official policy so i i as someone who is who has dedicated the last 30 or 40 years of his life to trying to bring the trilateral relationship but closer together i would hope particularly the members of the media in in both countries would be a little bit more diligent in in reporting the facts in reporting not what you think he thinks but reporting what is actually being said and maybe that will help us move that relationship forward and in the long term thank you all very much for for coming i want to express my great gratitude to all of the speakers for a very stimulating morning we look forward here for the next day and a half to a closed-door dialogue and we will be publishing on our website the results of that so once again thank you all very much we appreciate your coming