Cables Show U.S. Concern on Japan’s Disaster Readiness

The cable, sent by Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer, said Japan was preparing for earthquakes and even cyberattacks, but that it might prove less adept at responding to unforeseen disasters. “Compartmentalization and risk aversion within the bureaucracy, however, could increase Japan’s vulnerability to threats for which it is less prepared,” warned the cable, dated March 18.

Bureaucratic decision making has been cited as a factor in Japan’s lack of preparedness, almost exactly three years later, for the record-breaking tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. While the cable offers few specifics about the weaknesses in Japan’s disaster planning, it does go on to warn that a blow that disables the country could have catastrophic consequences for global trade and finance.

Scores of secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks give an inside view of Washington’s sometimes rocky relationship with Japan. The most recent cables are from February 2010, long before the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11 of this year. They also offer a detailed look at the United States’ response to the political upheaval that had just upended Japan’s long stagnant political landscape — the end of the Liberal Democratic Party’s almost continuous rule for more than 50 years.

After the Democratic Party of Japan won a landmark election in August 2009, American officials appeared uncertain in public how to react to the country’s new leaders and played down the damage to the relationship as teething problems in a nation that had seen opposition parties take power only once before since 1955. But in private, American diplomats were delivering a much more pointed message to the government of Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama.

This is clearly seen in a classified cable dated October 2009 that describes a visit to Tokyo at that time by the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Kurt M. Campbell.

A few days earlier, Mr. Hatoyama had visited Beijing, where he publicly said that Japan needed to end what he characterized as its historic overdependence on the United States. According to the cable sent to Washington by the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Mr. Campbell warned a Japanese deputy minister of defense at the time, Akihisa Nagashima, that the remarks “drew surprise from the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“Imagine the Japanese response if the U.S. government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than Japan,” the cable quotes Mr. Campbell as saying. He warned that such remarks “would create a crisis in U.S.-Japan relations.”

Though the cables give a distinctly American view of events at a volatile time, they also provide glimpses of how the end of the Liberal Democrats’ long run in power had opened the floodgates in Japan for reconsidering the cold war-era security alliance with the United States. The cables show alarm and concern, in both the United States and Japan, about the Hatoyama government’s often clumsy and erratic efforts to lessen Japan’s postwar dependency on the United States and to flirt with closer ties to China.

The cables reveal that, in private conversations, American officials repeatedly warned the Japanese to take China’s military rise more seriously, though they avoided raising the issue in public for fear of angering China. They also played the China card to get Japan to be more cooperative.

An Oct. 15, 2009, cable described a delegation of a dozen high-ranking United States officials — including diplomats, Pentagon officials and a Marine Corps major general — who tried to persuade Japan to honor an agreement to keep an American air base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. They described the history of the agreement, and promised to address the concerns of the Democratic Party, which had vowed during the election campaign to move the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, off Okinawa.

Then one of the Japanese officials asked whether the base could be moved to the United States territory of Guam. An American official bluntly replied that the United States needed to keep the base on Okinawa as one of three runways there that its forces would need to defend Japan from “the dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities,” the cable recounted.

The cables also reveal the active efforts that American diplomats were making to reach out to the new government, as well as some setbacks, including an attempt to build personal ties between Mr. Hatoyama and President Obama.

In a cable dated Dec. 10, 2009, John V. Roos, the current American ambassador to Japan, told the Japanese land minister in blunt terms that the United States had “a problem with Hatoyama telling POTUS” — the president of the United States — “to trust him, but not following through.”