How would you like to be the commander who got the phone call to come pick up Satan from jail after this crazy incident:
A U.S. Navy sailor accused of slamming into a group of Japanese people in a beach town near Yokosuka Naval Base identified himself afterward as Satan, a Japanese police officer testified Thursday. Petty Officer 2nd Class Daniel Krieger, a logistics specialist assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius, is charged with four counts of bodily injury.
He pleaded not guilty during his March 8 arraignment at Yokohama District Court’s Yokosuka Branch. Krieger’s attorneys don’t dispute the facts of the July 9, 2022, incident in Zushi, a beach town on Sagami Bay, said Masahiko Goto, who represents the injured parties in a separate civil suit against the sailor. Krieger’s criminal defense lawyers argue the sailor cannot bear responsibility because he was drunk at the time and suffers from a preexisting brain injury, said Goto, whose clients are demanding damages of about $136,000.
It appears to be more about domestic politics in Japan than actually making any breakthrough with North Korea:
Why is Kishida so interested in holding a summit with Kim? According to expert analysis, Kishida needs a diplomatic breakthrough to change the bleak trajectory of his premiership, which has been plagued by domestic scandals. The approval rating of his Cabinet dipped to a dismal 20.1 percent in February 2024, right when public discussion of a Kim-Kishida summit ramped up. North Korea seems to agree with this analysis; Kim Yo Jong’s March statement claimed that Kishida was not serious about improving Japan-North Korea ties but only seeking a summit in a “bid for popularity.”
Another potential motivation for Kishida is that inter-Korean relations are facing serious challenges during South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s term, and North Korea-U.S. relations are relatively deadlocked. Meanwhile, the threat from a series of North Korean ballistic missile tests, particularly the April 2 test of an intermediate-range ballistic missile equipped with a hypersonic warhead, has pressured the United States and its allies.
Japan, as one of the United States’ traditional allies, intends to take advantage of this chaos as a chance to showcase its “bridging role” in terms of conflict mediation. Kishida may hope to reinforce regional peace and stability, similar to South Korea’s efforts under former President Moon Jae-in.
You can read more at the link, but North Korea has repeatedly said no to any summit with Japan that includes the abduction issue or missile tests. Those two issues are really the only thing the Japanese care to discuss with North Korea thus why there will be no summit.
I have to imagine that even the Japanese diplomats in Seoul must get tired of having to justify the Japanese position on Dokdo. The islets are clearly Korean territory and are not going to be given up. The Japanese government continuing their public posturing over Dokdo continues to be an unnecessary thorn in otherwise improving bilateral relations:
Taisuke Mibae, the deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, enters the South Korean foreign ministry building in Seoul on April 16, 2024, after being summoned over Tokyo’s renewed territorial claim to Dokdo. (Yonhap)
South Korea “strongly” protested against Japan on Tuesday after Tokyo issued an annual diplomatic report renewing its territorial claims to the South’s easternmost islets of Dokdo.
To lodge a protest over the report, South Korea’s foreign ministry called in Taisuke Mibae, the deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.
The claim, strongly disputed by South Korea, which has long maintained effective control of Dokdo with the permanent stationing of security personnel there, was included in the 2024 Diplomatic Bluebook that was reported to the Cabinet by Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa.
In this year’s report, Japan continued to claim that Dokdo is Japanese territory historically and under international law, and that South Korea is carrying on with an “illegal occupation” of the area.
If all these countries join it makes me wonder of the AUKUS is turning into a Pacific version of NATO to counter China:
The United States, Britain and Australia are considering South Korea, Canada and New Zealand as potential partners for cooperation on advanced capability projects of their AUKUS security partnership, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
The remarks came a day after the defense chiefs of the three countries issued a joint statement noting their consideration of Japan as a partner for Pillar II projects of the partnership.
Launched in September 2021 in an apparent move to counter China’s assertiveness, AUKUS consists of two key pillars. Pillar I is to support Australia in acquiring conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, while Pillar II is for cooperation in high-tech areas, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonics.
“The AUKUS partners are considering a range of additional partners who may bring unique strengths to Pillar 2, including the ROK, Canada and New Zealand, in addition to Japan,” the official said in response to a question from Yonhap News Agency. ROK stands for South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.
You can read more at the link, but China is of course complaining about this announcement. If China would quit trying to forcibly take over other nation’s territory there would be no need for AUKUS in the first place.
It appears the Japanese government is seeing the economic benefits the ROK is receiving from their growing defense industry and wants to get their own piece of this growing market:
Japan’s Cabinet on Tuesday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it’s developing with Britain and Italy to other countries, in the latest move away from the country’s postwar pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project and part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to countries other than the partners.
It will be interesting to see if Japan and the U.S. militaries created a combined forces command similar to what USFK currently operates with the ROK military with:
Japanese troops from 1st Amphibious Rapid Deployment Regiment secure a space for a U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey to land during a combined exercise in Japan on March 15, 2022. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will reveal a plan to restructure the U.S. military command in Japan next month in light of concerns over China, The Financial Times reported Sunday. The aim is to boost military planning and drills involving the allies, according to the newspaper, which did not reveal its sources.
The two leaders will announce the plan during a meeting April 10 at the White House, the newspaper said. U.S. Forces Japan, headquartered at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo, referred queries Monday to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. A spokesman for the office, John Supple, by email to Stars and Stripes declined to comment on the newspaper’s report.
I am wondering if the Japanese effort to start talks with North Korea was nothing more than political theater? The Japanese spokesman had to have known that his statements about discussing the abduction issue would lead to North Korea ending any possibility of bilateral talks which is what Kim Yo-jong did:
North Korea will refuse “any contact and negotiations” with Japan in the future, the powerful sister of the nuclear-armed country’s leader said Tuesday, just a day after she said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had requested a summit with her brother, Kim Jong Un.
In a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, Kim Yo Jong pointed to the comments by the Japanese government’s top spokesman on Monday that Tokyo would never accept Pyongyang’s claim that the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s had already been resolved.
“Japan has no courage to change history, promote regional peace and stability and take the first step for the fresh DPRK-Japan relations,” she said, adding that a summit meeting between the two countries’ leaders was therefore “not a matter of concern” to Pyongyang.
“The DPRK government has clearly understood once again the attitude of Japan and, accordingly, the DPRK side will pay no attention to and reject any contact and negotiations with the Japanese side,” KCNA quoted her as saying, using the acronym for the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
A tragedy has just happened off the coast of Japan involving a South Korean tanker ship. Interestingly the article does say what chemicals were being transported in this ship. Hopefully this doesn’t lead to an ecological disaster as well:
A South Korean chemical tanker capsized off Japan’s west coast Wednesday, claiming eight lives with two still missing, Japan’s coast guard officials said.
The Keoyoung Sun vessel, carrying 11 crew members, made a distress call to the Japanese Coast Guard at around 7 a.m., reporting that it was tilting in waters near an island of the Shimonoseki city in the Yamaguchi Prefecture.
Of the 11 crew members on board — two South Koreans, eight Indonesians and one Chinese — nine have been rescued and two others were unaccounted for.
The next time I am in Tokyo I have to check this place out:
Travel enthusiasts living in Japan can “visit” another country at First Airlines, a restaurant that uses virtual reality technology to transport customers to a variety of destinations. First Airlines, on the eighth floor of Parkheim West in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, re-creates the experience of an international flight right down to walking the streets of a foreign city. The restaurant foyer simulates the waiting area at an airport gate, complete with a flight information display and a departure counter.
A person dressed as a gate agent greets guests and hands them a boarding pass and a make-believe Japanese passport stamped with the name of their destination. I booked a first-class “flight” to Rome. Other flights are available to Germany, Spain, New Zealand, Finland, France, Ukraine, Hawaii and New York City. The experience is two hours long with a three-course meal. Once customers are checked in, a “flight attendant” guides them to their seats; the restaurant is built to resemble an aircraft interior, with actual seats from Airbus 310 and 340 airliners.
