Inability against Invasion

So, what did they want to know? Was that the information on whether or not a naïve prime minister still keeps on murmuring about comfort women, on secret plan for selling Senkaku to the Chinese as the “fourth” arrow of Abenomics, or on possible nuclear weapons project taking advantage of plutonium produced by reprocessing of nuclear fuels used in power plants that will be resumed with new regulation standards being adopted next week?

A newspaper in the United Kingdom, Guardian, revealed that United States National Security Agency wiretapped in the Embassy of Japan in Washington, DC, as well as other 37 embassies in the city. “I’m going to protect our sovereignty.” That is what Prime Minisiter, Shinzo Abe reiterates. Ok, what are you going to do, Mr. Prime Minister? Without any answer on it, the government of Japan is not waiting for any response from US, but for Japanese people to forget about it.

“We are asking some appropriate confirmation to the United States through diplomatic channel,” told the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga. It is something every diplomat knows, however, that embassies in foreign countries are wiretapped. Diplomats do their work on that premise. The talking point should not be whether US did it, but whether there was something worth for doing it.

Guardian made the story based on the information it had got from Edward Snowden, a former agent in Central Intelligence Agency. After leaving CIA in 2009, Snowden stationed on a US military base in Japan as a worker for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility. Then he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in,” told Snowden to the interview of the newspaper. If Japanese government has something to do, it should be investigating on what Snowden was doing in US military base in Japan.

“That is why,” Abe would say, “we need Japanese version of National Security Council in our government.” Even though you have NSC in Japan, Mr. Prime Minister, you cannot know what Snowden was doing, because security of Japan mostly depends on US. “That is why we need to get rid of, or redefine, the post-war regime,” he may say. Are you going to leave US and reach China, Mr. Prime Minister? Weren’t you a China hater and Taiwan lover?

If the government of Japan is serious about protecting privacy in Japan, it needs to start negotiation with US to have some agreement on regulation in seeking information. But the effort must not be achieved by the information wiretapped by US government, which indicates Japan is trying to do some negotiation against US.