WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could use the WikiLeaks revelations of US spying on his government to make security affairs far more secret, US China Policy Foundation Co-Chair and former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman Jr. told Sputnik.
“The Japanese government now has an excuse to take further steps to tighten internal secrecy — something that it has been doing to widespread opposition in Japan,” Freeman said on Friday.
A new secrecy crackdown by Abe would strengthen hawks in Tokyo and undermine champions of its post-World War II pacifist Constitution, which Abe is now revising to permit Japan to send military forces overseas once again, Freeman warned.
“This is not good news for Japanese friends of the United States or for those committed to the continued limitation of the powers of the Japanese state under the post-war pacifist constitution,” he said.
“The US was outed as a serial peeping Tom in relation to its allies in 2013,” he said. “Since then, American disrespect for the privacy of friendly foreign government officials has strained US relations with key allies and partners. Now it's the turn of Japan.”
Washington-Tokyo ties were likely to be strained by the latest revelations, the veteran envoy acknowledged.
“Japan [is] the United States' most important ally in Asia. It will come as a shock to Japanese that their loyalty as allies of the United States earned them no exemption whatsoever from American surveillance,” Freeman noted.
Freeman also said Japan’s own internal security services do not appear to have been collaborators in the NSA's eavesdropping.
However, he added, the new documents s had revealed “the United States to have been behaving in the same way that Japan's adversaries like China do.”
The WikiLeaks documents list 35 NSA targets for telephone intercepts in Japan, including the switchboard and officials working at the Cabinet Office, plus senior financial and trade officials. The natural gas division of Mitsubishi and the petroleum division of Mitsui & Co. also appear to have been under surveillance.
