What’s in a word?

By Bill Lee

If you’re a soldier and you hear automatic-weapon and mortar fire very close by, do you say that you heard “fighting” or “armed conflict”? Japanese Self-Defense Force members participating in a UN PKO in Sudan in July last year faced that question. Since they were right next to the battlefield, and naturally pretty excited, they called it “hageshii sento” (fierce fighting). But SDF Joint Staff officers and the Abe administration wanted to call it “armed conflict.” The reason is because SDF personnel sent abroad cannot be in an active battle zone; if they are, it’s a violation of the Constitution. Hence the government insisted on the anodyne phrase “armed conflict.”

But the story gets murkier. The SDF soldiers had been writing daily logs in Sudan and sending them to Tokyo. The logs apparently had some raw, first-hand accounts of the actual situation in Sudan, where more than 200 people were killed in Juba last July. It was the kind of information that couldn’t get out; if it did, the government would be forced to withdraw the mission. Aware of their existence, a journalist requested access to the logs. The SDF responded that they had “completely discarded” the logs. It’s inconceivable that they would. Inevitable talk of a “cover-up” followed.

Our favorite magnet for controversy, Defense Minister Tomomi Inada — is there a political controversy in Japan she’s not a part of? — vowed to launch an investigation. In the end, the government decided to withdraw the mission from Sudan, ostensibly because the SDF engineering unit there had completed its duties. The SDF has had to tie itself in knots to avoid violating the war-renouncing Constitution, including, as the example above shows, in its use of language. Another tortured misrepresentation: calling what are clearly the MSDF’s light aircraft carriers “helicopter destroyers.”  By the way, know when the first Japanese UN PKO could have been? In 1958, during the Lebanon crisis. It’s an interesting story why Japan couldn’t follow through on then UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold’s request. If it had, Japan’s international diplomacy may have taken a very different turn. I’ll look at this story in a future post.

Photo by UNMISS via Flickr

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