TRANSCRIPT (Subtitles)

Chaesung Chun: Thank you very much for coming. So today we have Professor Ken Jimbo from Japan.

This is a very important time because we have a new Japanese Prime Minister, Ishiba Shigeru, and there is growing curiosity in South Korea and in foreign countries on what kind of foreign policy the Ishiba administration will pursue in the future related to the alliance with the United States, his policy toward the Indo-Pacific and neighboring countries—especially how it can maintain the improved relations with South Korea and also his approach for the Korean Peninsula broadly. So I think this is a very good chance to learn from Professor Jimbo about all those things.

Q. Prospects for PM Ishiba Cabinet’s General Foreign Policy Direction

So the first question will be very broad—what kind of foreign policy will the new Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba pursue in the future?

Ken Jimbo: Well, thank you for inviting me once again.

To begin with, I think that it is very important to emphasize how Ishiba was elected in the recent LDP election. And this was quite unusual or unconventional, given that the history of the development of LDP leaders has been the product of internal negotiations among factions of the LDP. The LDP is a long-standing ruling party, and it hasn't been challenged except for several cases and the LDP has its own internal coordination mechanism among the different interests and the factional groups they have. So whenever they decide on the leaders, leadership competitions are prearranged among those factional members. There will be a voting, but the voting can be counted prior to what formally things happen.

But this time, because of the money scandal that many of the factions has encountered, former Prime Minister Kishida decided to dissolve his own faction followed by many of other faction including the influential Abe faction and others. The only remaining faction that existed was the Taro Aso faction. So there was no grip for who should be the candidate and what kind of followership that the LDP members should pursue. As a result, there were nine different candidates running for the LDP election. That was unprecedented.

So Ishiba didn't really collect the vote from the parliamentary members, but had a very strong support among those party members who reside in the countryside and predominantly they are elders and then they are pretty much conservative. Ishiba was supported by the party members rather than the parliamentary members.

I don't want to go into the very details of the system, but there was a first round of voting and he was able to go to the deciding vote, and then dealt with Sanae Takaichi, another candidate from the LDP. She was also popular among the party members because of her conservative ideologies, Takaichi declared that if she became the prime minister, she will go to Yasukuni Shrine, for example, and that will really exacerbate the tension with Korea and also with China and that will really undermine the diplomacy that Japan and Korea had worked on over the past few years. And I think those concerns led many of the parliamentary votes, eliminating others and collecting eventually to Ishiba. So if that is the dynamic of how Ishiba was elected, I need to say is that Ishiba's leadership is based on a very weak basis in the LDP. So the cabinet coalitions, how they are elected, and how the bureaucracy will be supported, have lots of shaky aspects in the supporting mechanisms in place. That is one sense.

And the second sense is because the functional politics has collapsed, I don't think there are any kind of Foreign Ministry, National Security Secretariat screening process of each candidate's campaign promises. For example, Ishiba mentioned that he wished to create the Asian version of NATO and that he wished to revise the status of force agreement of the U.S. forces in Japan. Those are the huge issues that are very unconventional. In his first speech in the Diet, he actually dropped many of those things. So my hunch is that his policy foundation is very weak and his own assertion about the foreign policy has been reviewed, and almost none of them has been become realized in the foreign policy agenda. So with that, I think that there should be more continuity with what Kishida has achieved so far. However, the responsibility for carrying this continuity will fall much on the bureaucracy rather than on Ishiba himself.

Chaesung Chun: I see. So there is a view that Prime Minister Ishiba’s foreign policy will be a shift from the mainstream LDP foreign policy line established by former Prime Minister Abe, which Kishida also followed. Do you expect that there will be some continuity in foreign policy between Abe’s and Ishiba’s?

Ken Jimbo: At this moment, my safest answer is that you will expect more continuity than changes, but there are some emphasis or circumstantial evidence or transaction that we need to emphasize.

First of all, Ishiba was the cabinet member of the Koizumi administration followed by the Fukuda administration. I think his last cabinet position was the Defense Minister in 2008, but since then, the older factional politics came in and Ishiba has not belonged to the mainstream LDP for almost like 15 years. He is a member of many committees in the LDP, including those on foreign policy and defense, and so he has been informed through these kind of channels. However, he has not been directly involved in the inner circle of foreign policy decisions, especially during the Abe and Kishida administrations. on Ishiba was once the Secretary General of the LDP, but once he was sidelined, he was no longer inside the loop. So he has generated his own viewpoints, but I think that none of them have been consulted with the bureaucracies and the National Security Secretariat. So what I mean by continuity is that there has been a strong foundation for foreign policy, driven by existing executive branches rather than the Ishiba himself.

Q. PM Ishiba’s Personal Approach Toward Foreign Relations Management

Ken Jimbo: Coming back to Ishiba's personality, I do not think he belongs to the conservative school, nor do I think that he has a conservative ideology to be reflected in his policies. His track record on how he mentioned Korea, China, and Southeast Asia has been pretty much moderate, in a way that he emphasizes listening very carefully to neighboring countries and finding ways to coexist and balance the mutual interests. This is somewhat a convincing element showing that he is not just a national security hardliner, but he prefers coordination and is someone who listens to the voices of the neighboring countries.

Q. Ishiba’s Take on Japan-U.S. Alliance

Chaesung Chun: I see. One more question about foreign policy. I read from his commentary to Hudson Institute that he wanted to raise the U.S.-Japan alliance to the level of UK alliance. Do you think there will be more emphasis on the alliance with the U.S. especially, with the U.S. election is just one month away?

Ken Jimbo: I think Ishiba and his speechwriting team are putting emphasis on the series of the so-called Armitage-Nye reports. 20 years ago, the report said that Japan should be the ally like the UK. So transatlantic relationship performed by the UK is a great model for the future of Japan-U.S. alliance. That was a long time ago, but for Japan, the constitutional restraints and our statehood do not really allow Japan to engage side-by-side in joint operations—we are pretty much focused on defense. Abe addressed this by introducing security legislation that partially allowed Japan to exercise collective self-defense, and Kishida continued this through adoption of the National Security Strategy, supported by three strategic documents.

We have expanded our capabilities and portfolio of the Self-Defense Forces, allowing for more integrated operation with the United States. And so that has taken place, but I do not think that Ishiba's team has incorporated much of those realistic development into their policy framework. The slogan is there, but I don't think that reflects the reality.

Q. Prospects for Personal Rapport between ROK’s Yoon and Ishiba

Chaesung Chun: I see. Great. Next question is about Japan-South Korea relations. You touched upon the subject a little bit.

There was, as far as I remember, more than 10 summit meetings between President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Kishida. So we think that there was a great improvement bilaterally. Do you think there will be a continuation of that trend and what do you think about the personal chemistry between Prime Minister Ishiba and President?

Ken Jimbo: First of all, I'd like to express enormous respect towards President Yoon and his foreign policy team, especially given the domestic pressures and the political capital that Yoon is expending to reach out to Japan. But with his vision and conviction that a strong Japan-Korea relationship is strategically needed for Korea and also for Japan, he has taken major steps to create a better relationship.

I hope that Japan was able to reciprocate Korea's very courageous steps. One example was that one of Kishida's final visits as a PM was to Korea. Whenever we look back on what Kishida has achieved, Korea is one of the central pillars of how he created and connected the dot of the missing link that we have had for many years.

In that context, I think Ishiba's viewpoint on Korea remains to be the same with what Kishida has achieved so far. According to his previous statements, he put huge emphasis on the Japan-Korea relationship, not only in bilateral contexts but also in the wider context of Northeast Asia, particularly in dealing with the risks on Korean Peninsula, and also for connecting alliance functions to enhance deterrence structure collectively. And in these contexts, I think Ishiba fully understands the importance of Korea.

But when it comes to economy and economic security issues, I don't think they are Ishiba's prioritized area yet. But again, the growing importance of supply chain resiliency and identifying the emerging technology—especially in the semiconductor sector—presents a potential that Japan and Korea can move things forward. I hope that Ishiba will allocate resources to the economic security agenda, which will also promote Japan-Korea relationship even further.

Q. Growing DPRK Threat and the Future of Japan’s Security Policy

Chaesung Chun: Lastly, let's touch upon the military side of the Japan Korea relations. You are a specialist about security matters.

There is a growing skepticism about the possibility of North Korea's denuclearization and growing concerns about the linkage between Russia and North Korea. Now North Korea is a European military actor, so Japan has been putting a lot of emphasis on denuclearization and cooperating with South Korea and the U.S. to cope with provocations from North Korea. What do you expect Prime Minister Ishiba's policy on this issue to be?

Ken Jimbo: Personally, I'm increasingly concerned about the developments in North Korea. They seem fully determined to become a nuclear power. Their appetite is almost zero right now for denuclearization, and their continuous development of nuclear and missile capabilities, with the adoption of the new nuclear doctrine, is alarming. They are looking at the tactical use of nuclear weapons at much earlier stages of the escalation, which creates a huge concern for military planning, particularly for South Korea. And for those with conservative sentiments, there has been a rise of a nuclear discussion in Korea, including reintroduction of tactical nuclear weapons, nuclear sharing, or even nuclear armament option for Korea.

While that has been tentatively toned down with the Washington Declaration, which the United States and Korea agreed upon, the fundamental issue has not been solved in Korea because deterrence needs to be customized all the time and that will spill over to Japan to some extent because Ishiba is a proponent of the nuclear sharing idea, although that is a remote agenda from Japan at this moment.

But with the development of how Korea deals with its own nuclear extended deterrence, that will also be the same logic that the Japan needs to pursue. We are currently dealing with the expanding role of the nuclear mutual consultation mechanism with the United States. This year there has been a major development as we decided to upgrade them to the ministry level, although it's tentative and hasn't been institutionalized yet. For the first time, both ministries joined in a 2+2 nuclear consultation.

If a more tangible connection between the U.S.-Japan component of the nuclear extended deterrence and the U.S.-Korea framework, there will be much better mutual understanding on how collectively the nuclear deterrence can be offered to both nations. This will also help avoid misunderstandings, because nuclear issues tend to provoke lots of strong emotions in both countries.

Chaesung Chun: Thank you very much.

■ Ken JIMBO is the president of Asia Pacific Initiative and the Managing Director of the International House of Japan. He is also a professor at the Faculty of Policy Management of Keio University. .

■ Edited by: Jisoo Park, Research Associate
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