Fifth Intellectual Dialogue on Building Asia's Tomorrow

Implementing the Human Security Concept: Exploring Approaches to Evaluating Human Security Projects

Response from Japan to the Human Security Commission Report

Takemi Keizo
Member of the House of Councillors

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, changes in social and political attitudes and shifting personal values have brought Japan to quite a complicated turning point. The nation remains sunk in a prolonged economic slump, and structural reforms to address the underlying political, economic, and social factors are making little progress. All this is spreading pessimism and malaise among the people.

Around the mid-1980s, when Japan had achieved a standard of living high enough to deliver affluence even in comparison with Western countries, we began to see a growing number of people, especially among the younger generation, who were no longer satisfied with the economic value of "catching up and passing" Western countries in pursuit of material affluence. They started taking an active part in activities that they themselves identified as having social value. In the 1990s, for example, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that devastated the Kobe area galvanized hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Going beyond national borders, this value shift also made possible the activities of Japanese nongovernmental organizations providing support to refugees during the Kosovo crisis.

Such people have begun to be released from the inferiority complex vis-á-vis the West fostered during the process of modernization, while their sense of superiority toward other Asian nations is being diluted as they bring about a new transnational mutual interest in such fields of subculture as film and music. Globalization, with its transnational flows of people, goods, money, and information, is steadily deepening the new social attitudes of these Japanese and broadening their sensibility so that they are more receptive to diverse cultures.

Young people with these new social attitudes and sensibility are our best hope to spearhead the new "tough pacifism" required of Japan. And they are members of the civil society that has begun to take form in Japan.

The kind of pacifism typified by antiwar feeling rooted in individuals' experience of war is losing its strength as the older generation departs the scene. This pacifism, which led to the harmful "unilateral pacifism," was supported by older Japanese who played a certain historical role after World War II. Apart from anything else, establishing a future-oriented tough pacifism responsive to the exigencies of the twenty-first century is Japan's most important and substantive task if it is to become a nation trusted and appreciated by the international community.

The fact is, however, that the principles and policy concept underpinning this tough pacifism have not yet been intellectually refined on the basis of universal values. That is why I have looked to the Commission on Human Security to refine the thinking behind this tough pacifism and take the lead in investing it with authority. The commission's final report points out that the negative aspects of globalization have become more severe and that the involuntary movement of peoples, such as refugees and internally displaced persons, arising from various conflicts has made it necessary to protect people from serious, wide-ranging threats to human life, livelihood, and dignity and to empower threatened people and communities by equipping them with the skills needed to stand on their own feet. In this way the report succeeds in imposing conceptual refinement and proposing specific policies. To keep this report from being a mere collection of words and enable the commission to fulfill its hoped-for role, we need to educate public opinion and undertake sustained initiatives to ensure that its proposals are reflected in government policy decisions in such areas as foreign affairs, security, and economic assistance.

Below I discuss the political significance to Japan of the commission's activities and its final report.

1. After the cold war the negative aspects of globalization became more serious. The need to prevent regional conflicts grew, while the problem of disparities in the benefits of development became more obvious. To help the international community resolve these shared problems Japan should make an intellectual contribution to the international community by means of the comprehensive policy concept and specific policy proposals articulated by the commission.
2. By engaging actively in forming the policy concept of human security and implementing policies based on that concept, the Japanese government should demonstrate to the international community effectively its firm intent to continue to make an active international contribution through official development assistance and other means. The drastic ODA budget cuts necessitated by Japan's financial circumstances make it all the more important to show a proactive posture qualitatively.
3. By establishing distinctive principles and a policy framework based on universal values for international contributions through ODA policy, peace building, and so on, Japan will deepen the significance of the "international contribution with a human face" seen in the direct involvement of the nation and people.
4. There are serious problems with Japan's ODA policy decision-making process, including the harmful effects of the vertically segmented bureaucracy, inappropriate cooperation between policy-making and implementing bodies, and the limited policy-formulation function of such policy tools as grant assistance, loans, and technical cooperation. The government needs to encourage cooperation among relevant agencies and establish a policy-formulation function that makes overall coordination possible by elucidating policy objectives and putting in place a policy concept enabling the formulation and implementation of a comprehensive policy.
5. Local administration of ODA is the trend of the donor community, but in Japan's case this is obstructed by the presence in embassies of staff seconded from various central-government agencies, a practice that perpetuates the vertically segmented bureaucracy discussed above. A policy concept that encourages local ODA policy decision making invested with authority is necessary, along with the creation of a framework for cooperation between the public and private sectors that includes local and other NGOs.

Although the Japanese government has cut the ODA budget by 5.8 percent, it has also changed the name of Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects (10 billion yen), a tool easy to use in addressing the field of human security, to Grant Assistance for Grassroots Human Security Projects and has increased its budget to 15 billion yen. What is needed is efforts to utilize this budget effectively and bring to full fruition the political significance discussed above, with the community as the target and on the basis of a newly refined policy concept of human security.