Asia-Pacific

Japan seeks to come clean from secret nuke deal

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-11 11:02

Japan seeks to come clean from secret nuke deal

Protesters shout slogans during a mass rally against a US base in Ginowan on Japan's southwestern island of Okinawa, about 1,600 km (1,000 miles) south of Tokyo, November 8, 2009. [Agencies]

But the deal with Nixon was a clear violation of Sato's pledge that Japan would not make, own or allow the entry of nuclear weapons. Sato won the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize in large part for pushing those principles. According to Japanese media accounts, the trade-off drove him to tears of remorse. But the principles became policy all the same.

The previously declassified US documents include State Department papers on the 1960 US-Japan security pact, accounts of meetings at which the entry of warships with nuclear weapons was discussed and a memorandum on the 1969 Nixon-Sato meeting, where the Okinawa deal was discussed.

And even in the 1990s, after US warships stopped carrying battle-ready nukes and the issue became moot, it remained sensitive enough for governments to go on misleading the public.

Japanese today are more shocked by the cover-up than by the deed itself, but they remain attached to the non-nuclear principle.

A survey by the Mainichi newspaper, which interviewed more than 4,500 people, found 72 percent of the 2,600 respondents want to stick with the principles, and the number rose to about 80 percent among Japanese in their 20s and 30s. No margin of error was given.

Shoji Niihara, a scholar of US-Japan relations, said Japanese are hoping their new reformist prime minister will redefine Japan's relationship with the US and work with President Barack Obama in his call for a world free of nuclear weapons.

"There's a strong feeling that Japan was never truly treated as an independent country," he said.

Robert A. Wampler, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, an American group that seeks to declassify historical documents, welcomed Hatoyama's investigation.

"The longer they denied this, the harder it was for them to come forward and say they weren't telling the truth. They backed themselves into a corner on this one," Wampler said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Bunroku Yoshino, a former Foreign Ministry official who oversaw relations with the US, did his part on December 1.

Testifying in a lawsuit brought by a former newspaper reporter, 91-year-old Yoshino reversed his earlier denials and acknowledged signing some of the Okinawa agreements.

"It is a major historical truth," he said afterward.