Japan nod for national security council bills amid tensions

Reuters/Tokyo

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government yesterday approved legislation to set up a national security council, moving to strengthen the premier’s grip on foreign policy in the face of North Korean missile threats and a territorial dispute with China.

The hawkish Abe has pursued the formation of Japan’s version of the White House’s National Security Council to centralise information gathering and speed up decision-making, a move welcomed by US security experts.

“We have put in place a structure that allows Japan to comprehensively monitor the country’s security,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters at a news conference.

The bills are now to be submitted to the current session of parliament, which ends on June 26, for possible enactment in an extraordinary diet session in the fall. The need for a centralised national security body has been highlighted by North Korea’s recent sabre-rattling and a deadly January raid by jihadists on a natural gas plant in Algeria.

Japan struggled to obtain information on the Algeria hostage crisis, where 10 Japanese nationals were among three dozen foreign workers killed during the four-day siege of the desert gas plant.

In the East China Sea, a maritime territory dispute has escalated to the point where Beijing and Tokyo scramble fighter jets and patrol ships shadow each other, raising fear that miscalculation could lead to a broader clash.

Similar legislation was presented to parliament six years ago when Abe served his first term as prime minister, but it was dropped after his resignation in the wake of a one-year stint troubled by cabinet-level scandals and his Liberal Democratic Party’s rout in an upper-house poll. Referring to the Sino-Japanese island spat, former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told a seminar last month that several Japanese ministries were involved but there was “no process which can get all the information ... to the prime minister in a timely fashion so he can make a decision.”

“This formation of an NSC will be very key to Japan’s decision-making as we move forward,” he said.

Under the security council framework, the prime minister, chief cabinet secretary, foreign and defence ministers would meet regularly to hammer out strategy, while relevant ministers would be called together to respond to emergency situations.