iS cS ened

LL RUITR Ne a

The re-birth of Japan’s right

By MARK ALLEN
Yasuhiro Nakasone, the former Japanese World War

— Wnaval Officer, militarist auu expansionist, is Japan’s

new Prime Minister. He is also a creature of the CIA and

the Reagan Administration — one the world may regret

Seeing unleashed on the world. :

le most of the major U.S. media is focusing upon
Serious balance of trade conflicts between the U.S.

and Japan, the two leading industrial powers in the

Capitalist West, the real import of the Japanese Prime

Inister’s visit to Washington in January is the
Strengthening of the strategic military alliance between

€ two countries and the rearmament of Japan.

akasone, former director general of the Japanese
fense Agency, has long had ties to the CIA, and in
Particular to one Nathaniel Thayer.

These ties played a crucial role in his election as the
“lberal Democratic Party's (LDP) Prime Minister last
November. Nakasone, when challenged by Communist
Members of the J apanese Diet (parliament) Dec. 22 ad-
Mitted Thayer was ‘‘not connected with but a member of

the CIA.”

“Under the Carter Administration,’’ Nakasone said,
Thayer ‘was in a post of CIA in charge of Far East
Affairs,”

Speaking before the Budget Committee of the House
of Councillors, Nakasone admitted knowing Thayer for

_ 4 Years, beginning when Thayer worked at the U.S.

Mbassy under then Ambassador Edwin Resichauer. It
Was Resichauer who coordinated the secret stationing of
8. nuclear weapons on Japanese territory in clear
“olation of the Japanese post-war Constitution and its
tee Non-Nuclear Principles.”’
N an interview with a Japanese journal May 18, 1981
Resichauer admitted that under a secret part of the 1960
S.-Japan Security Treaty the Japanese government
had Secretly allowed the U.S. to permanently station
nuclear weapons off the coast of Iwakuni. U.S. ships, he
Said, again in violation of the Constitution, secretly
transported nuclear weapons while in Japanese waters
for 21 years.)
A Chosen Man

- Thayer, who now lives in Washington and is the direc-
‘or of Asian Studies at the John Hopkins University

School for Advanced International Studies, told a cor-

Tespondent for the Communist daily Akahata that he had
Served as an intelligence agent in Japan since 1951. He
Was CIA station chief from 1977-1979. Some 14 years ago
hayer featured Nakasone in his book, ‘‘How the Con-
Servatives Rule in Japan.’ 5
Last June, Thayer returned to Japan in the midst of a

News Analysis

mounting government crisis to help groom Nakasone.

Nakasone’s predecessor, Prime Minister Zenko
Suzuki, had responded meekly in the eyes of the Reagan
Administration to its demands for increased military
spending and lower trade restrictions that would ease
U.S. corporate penetration of the Japanese market.

When Suzuki’s government, wracked by economic
woes and scandals similar to those that have charac-
terized the ruling LDP since its birth at the end of the
U.S. occupation, was brought down, Nakasone’s for-
tunes, with the help of Thayer, went up.

The right-wing LDP has held a parliamentary majority
since World War II, and therefore has controlled the
succession of prime ministers. The LDP, U.S. author
Richard Halloran wrote in his book Japan: Images and
Reality, ‘‘is neither liberal, nor democratic, nor a party,
but is a conservative, authoritarian alliance of ‘habatsu’
(factions.)’”

During Thayer’s stay in Japan he helped Nakasone
edit and translate his book, My Life in Politics. Thayer
then took that book to friends in the National Security
Council and the CIA and used it to lobby for Nakasone
as the U.S. choice in what was shaping up to be a heated
four way primary contest among the various factions of
the LDP.

The book was actually distributed by the State
Department. In early October, U.S. Secretary of State
George Schultz told a group of visiting Japanese
businesspersons how “‘advisable”’ it was that the next
Prime Minister ‘tbe chosen from persons within the Di-
rector General Defense Agency.’ Nakasone was cho-

sen.
Deleting Peace

Nakasone, as one major U.S. journal put it, “hit the
ground running.’’ He immediately appointed the most
reactionary cabinet in post-war history; announced his
intention to raise military speriding 6.5%, on top of last
year’s 7.5% increase by Suzuki. He allied himself forth-
rightly with the Reagan Administration’s nuclear first
strike policy and called for closer ties with the Reagan
Administration and the South Korean dictatorship be-
cause of what he alleged to be a ‘‘recent strengthening of
Soviet military presence in the region.”

Further, Nakasone advocates a rewriting of Japan’s
Constitution to delete the peace and anti-militarist pro-
visions, designed to prevent Japan from again becoming
a major military power, its ban on nuclear weapons, and

its commitment to a non-offensive military posture.
While the major U.S. media has portrayed

Nakasone’s military concerns as being for the safety of

the island nation itself, current talks now taking place

with the Reagan Administration are directed at Japanese
military involvement in so-called Soviet overflights and
protection of sea lanes, which have nothing to do with
Japanese security.
: Rearmament
Nakasone has repeatedly expressed his support for his

party’s proposal for “‘administrative reform.’ But, he-

has also expressed his concern that such reform could be
stalled by an entrenched bureaucracy. ‘‘It is impossible
to carry out the ‘administrative reform’ unless there is a
coup d’etat or revolt,’’ he said last month. His mentor
Kita called it “‘internal renovation.”

“Last month’s election of the hawkish Mr. Nakasone
confirms a drift in Japanese politics toward the right and
a weakening of anti-military sentiment,’’ Ronald Steel
wrote in the New York Times Dec.’7, 1982. But, further,
it represents the success of U.S. pressure that began in
earnest with the visit of Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger to Japan in Spring of 1981 to urge higher
military spending, and resulted in then Prime Minister
Suzuki’s five year $64-billion rearmament plan.

To Weinberger and the White House the rearmament
of Japan means both. strengthening an anti-Communist
alliance in Asia and expanding U.S. military sales on
behalf of the U.S. defense industry.

As regards the former, Nakasone has wasted no time
in establishing his fidelity to such alliance. He has spec-
ifically called for renegotiating the U.S.-Japan Security
treaty, upgrading it to a ‘‘military alliance of equal
partners.”’

Further, on the eve of his arrival in Washington,

Nakasone took a trip (the preplanning for which was

- totally in secret) to South Korea. There he met with

South Korean dictator and U.S. client Chun Doo Hwan,
the first such summit in history. He immediately con-
cluded a $4-billion dollar aid package to Seoul the largest
single bilateral aid package by Japan, and one the Reagan
Administration had called for as long ago as 1981. Suzuki
had balked, but Nakasone had no qualms.
“The aid package, $4-billion in ‘soft’ loans, commits
Japan implicityly to South Korea’s defense, gives its
shaky economy a shot in the arm, and firms up the
Washington-Tokyo-Seoul connection,’’ the Wall Street
Journal commented Jan. 17. It also provided South
Korea with money to purchase more U.S. arms.

Mark Allen is a foreign affairs writer for People’s World.

i

| International Focus

_ Tom Morris

Pees

Fox in the
Chicken coop

Can you imagine Klaus Bar-

bie or Adolf Eichman sitting as”

West Germany’s representa-
lve on an international human
ts commission? -

Or how about appointing
Roberto d’Aubuisson, the
Night-wing psychopathic killer,
to look into human rights viola-
Uons in El Salvador. Perhaps

the “‘born-again’”’ president of —

Guatemala Rios Montt could
MVestigate the reasons for the
Mass exodus of refugees from

S country.

Chile’s Pinochet could
Check into the whereabouts of
thousands of disappeared per-
Sons rounded up by his police.
“Baby Doc’? Duvalier might
be asked to conduct an investi-
8ation into civil rights abuses in
Haiti. eS

_The whole scene appears
bizarre. It couldn’t happen,
you may say.

It’s happening at the United

uman Rights Commission
Session in Geneva where a rep-
Tesentative of the genocidal Pol

Pot regime occupies Kam-

puchea’s seat. =
A letter protesting this in-

sulting situation is circulating

at the session signed by the

USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Nic-
aragua, Ethiopia, Syria and
Democratic Yemen.

It points out that the real,
elected government of Kam-
puchea speaks. for that coun-
try, not the spokesmen of a re-
gime that butchered three mil-
lion people in four short years.

The reason, of course, that

SN

Pol Pot’s mouthpiece is there,
is that the U.S. and its western
allies have successfully man-
aged to keep the legal govern-
ment out of Kampuchea’s UN
seat. It maintains Pol Pot anda
motley gang of Khmer Rouge

waiting in the wings in the vain

hope they may some day re-
turn to power.

This will never happen. The
Kampuchean people, quite
understandably, have no desire
to see a repeat of the ‘*100%
High Level Socialist Revo-

men atten

Piles of human bones left by Pol Pot’s regime. Today his spokes-
d the UN Human Rights Commission sessions.

lution” which nearly obliter-
ated their land.

So the dance macabre at the
UN continues — with the sup-
port of Canada — resulting ina
spokesman for Pol Pot’s killers
discussing human rights.
Maybe next he’ll get onto the
UN Children’s Fund or the UN
Environment Program where
his expertise and experience
will stand out.

It’s time to
be independent

Reagan’s drum-beating
speech to the American Legion
Feb. 23 was billed as a mid-
term assessment of U.S.
foreign policy. It contained
every ingredient — Soviet ex-
pansion, U.S. weakness,
Cuban terrorism, Vietnamese
hegemony — all to urge accep-
trance of his colossal military
build-up.

_ Just preceding his boss by
two days, Assistant Secretary
of State Thomas Enders

(Reagan’s . Latin American’

guru) pulled all the stops to
paint Nicaragua and Cubaas di-
rect threats to U.S. security.

“If we don’t act clearly now, in
four or five years we'll be fight-
ing in Panama and on the Mex-
ican border,’’ Enders said.

Enders pleaded for con-
tinued military aid to El Sal-
vador or “there will be a period
of anarchy there,’’ he warned.
He threatened Cuba and the
Soviet Union for “‘trying to
convert Nicaragua into a threat
against the USA”’.

These are the maniacs with
whom Canada has signed a
weapons testing agreement.
These are the people who ex-
press satisfaction that Cana-
da’s defence spending will go
up by 12% in 1983-84 to $7.5-
billion (and then say. it’s still too
little).

Defence Minister Lamon-

-tagne may get his thrills flying
in the billion dollar F-18 and ~

External Affairs Minister
MacEachen can drone on
about ‘‘our NATO commit-
ment’’, but they are out of step
with this country which wants
peace, disarmament and co-.
operation. Tying our rowboat
to Reagan’s battlewaggon is
sheer suicide.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 4, 1983—Page 9 _