TOKYO (IPS) – The filing of a suit against his own government by a Japanese activist, blaming it for his ordeal in Iraq when he was briefly held captive there, is an indication of a new side to Japan’s young people.
More of them are heading overseas to troubled spots, in defiance of official warnings, to engage in their own brand of humanitarianism at the risk of being taken hostage by armed militants.
To date, five young Japanese have experienced the horrors and psychological trauma of being hostages in Iraq before being released.
Nobutaka Watanabe, 35, is seeking $46,000 for mental and physical hardship he suffered during his four days as a hostage.
In his suit filed at the Tokyo District Court this week, Watanabe claimed he was in danger of being killed by his kidnappers who were enraged by President Junichiro Koizumi’s decision to send troops to Iraq. He also questioned the constitutional legality of Koizumi’s actions.
The deployment of troops to a war zone marks a precedent in post-war Japan’s constitution that prohibits the sending of its troops overseas.
“His captors told him that he had been taken because he was from a country that had sent troops to Iraq,” Watanabe’s lawyer Masatoshi Uchida told reporters.
While in Iraq, Watanabe filed dispatches for his activist group from the southern city of Samawah, protesting Japan’s deployment of some 550 Self Defense Forces (SDF) there on a humanitarian mission to rebuild infrastructure.
He was taken hostage along with freelance journalist Jumpei Yasuda while travelling near the besieged city of Fallujah on Apr. 14.
While mainstream Japanese media downplayed gory reports from Iraq, like the killing of four U.S. contract workers and the mutilation of their bodies, Watanabe’s dispatches, however, were the opposite.
His reports were fiercely debated at home and many of his readers were bewildered at Iraq’s sudden transformation into a land of anarchy. This was contrary to media reports that the Iraqis were grateful for Japanese humanitarian aid delivered by the SDF.
Watanabe infuriated his readers to such an extent that they started filing suits against the government in what they claimed as an unconstitutional act, by Tokyo, in sending the SDF to Iraq.
According to the Kyodo News agency, Watanabe’s suit against the government was the 56th at the Tokyo District Court, on the same matter.
But the government is digging its heels in.
At the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in the U.S. state of Georgia, which ended Friday, Koizumi said Japan would keep its SDF troops deployed in Iraq under the just-endorsed United Nations Security Council resolution.
Before departing for the G-8 summit, the Japanese premier referred to the young Japanese as “irresponsible” and called them “trouble makers” for going to Iraq.
He added Japan would not recall its troops back home, just because Japanese were taken hostages.
This deeply upset Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photojournalist who was taken hostage together with Noriaki Imai, 18, and Nahoko Takato, 34. All three were released by their Iraqi captors on Apr. 14.
Imai was in Iraq to look into the effects of depleted uranium weapons and Takato worked with an aid agency in Baghdad.
“Living in Japan in this current environment, just stifles me,” Koriyama told IPS.
Ironically, the photojournalist now wants to go back to Iraq.
Adding salt to Koriyama’s injury was the storm of media criticism that greeted him and the other embattled young hostages when they returned home on Apr. 18.
Most media editorials lashed out at the released hostages.
“If one goes to a dangerous place after ignoring the government’s advice, he or she should not automatically assume the government will come to their rescue,” wrote the Yomuiri Shimbun, Japan’s leading daily.
Adding to their torment was the Foreign Ministry’s insistence that they fork out 20,000 U.S. dollars as charges for their rescue and costs for flying them back to Japan from Iraq.
According to analysts, the icy response at home represents a dangerous phenomenon in Japanese society following the tragic September 2001 events in the United States and Tokyo’s subsequent decision to send SDF troops to Iraq.
“The hostage crisis shows clearly the government’s resentment against any civilian who dares to pose a challenge to the state,” Professor Hiroshi Komada, who teaches philosophy at Hitotsubashi University, told IPS in an interview.
But Komada pointed out: “The captives also exposed the dark side of getting embroiled in a war overseas.”
Komada said Japanese now were targeted because of the government’s support for the United States so-called war on terror.
But public skepticism over the deployment of Japanese troops to Iraq has grown as violence there surges, in some cases involving Japanese.
On Wednesday family members of two Japanese journalists killed in an ambush near Baghdad returned home with the victims’ remains.
Shinsuke Hashida – one of Japan’s top freelance combat photographers – and his nephew, Kotaro Ogawa, were killed May 27 after unidentified assailants opened fire on their car and blew it up.
“That disturbing specter is something the government wants to avoid. In pacifist Japan, such a concern can be politically devastating,” explained Komada.
Indeed Japan is facing an important turning point and the hostage crisis has already had far-reaching consequences, pitting conservatives against the new generation.
Professor Satoshi Daigo, who teaches economics at Tokyo University, warns the government’s criticism of the hostages could backfire.
“The biggest mistake the hostages made was to challenge the Japanese government’s position to send troops to Iraq. But the government’s reaction in turn is dangerous and threatens democracy,” Daigo told IPS.
Daigo, angered by the government’s strong-arm tactics against the young Japanese, launched a website in April to support them.
The site gathered more than 6,000 signatures before it went off-line on May 31.
“What’s amazing,” said Daigo, “was the large number of messages expressing fear and anger at what they consider is an attempt by the government to crush individualism in Japan.”
