Japan Focuses on One Enemy at a Time
TOKYO — One of the hottest-selling books here this spring is Ryu Murakami's "Get Out of the Peninsula," a novel set in 2010 that portrays a Japan in ruins, ravaged by economic and social collapse.
Armies of homeless and unemployed have been cast adrift. Japan's alliance with America lies in tatters. Chinese and Indian criminal gangs run amok.
But Murakami's main villains are a group of North Korean commandos. On the opening day of the baseball season, they storm the Fukuoka Dome stadium on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. As incompetent Japanese politicians fail to act, more North Korean troops arrive, sealing Kyushu off from the rest of Japan.
In Japan these days, bad guys just don't come any more sinister than North Koreans.
Despite the recent war of words between Japan and China, it is North Korea and its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il, that remain enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Japanese public. Pyongyang achieved that notoriety with the 1998 launch of a long-range ballistic missile that crossed Japan's airspace, and cemented it with the admission 2 1/2 years ago that it had abducted more than a dozen Japanese citizens to train its spies in Japanese language and customs.
There is deep unease here about the prospect of North Korea testing a nuclear weapon. Although North Korea's main antagonist may be Washington, Japan is a far closer target.
"In the Japanese mind, North Korea is the devil," said Yasuhiko Yoshida, a North Korea specialist at Osaka University of Economics and Law.
That enmity has been a catalyst for pulling Japan out of its postwar pacifist shell, and has spurred Tokyo to take an increasingly hard line on national security issues.
Amid this loathing for North Korea, Japan's alliance with Washington is seen, more than ever, as indispensable, and its public accepts such moves by Tokyo as sending troops to Iraq and joining the planned U.S. antiballistic missile defense shield.
Yet opinions diverge in Japan on whether North Korea or China poses the gravest threat to national security. While the media and public remain obsessively focused on North Korea, some Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and military leaders may be using fear of Pyongyang's erratic behavior as a cover to prepare for what they see as Japan's sharpest long-term security problem: a rising China.
