[A-List] Japan: angling for promotion

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Look up, Mr Kim: Japan's spy in the sky
By Axel Berkofsky
Asia Times, January 15 2003

Japan is shooting spy satellites into orbit to get ready to keep a high-tech
eye on axis of evil member North Korea.

The Japanese government recently announced it will launch two "information
gathering" satellites in March on a mainstay H-2A rocket. The spy satellites
will be able to fly at an altitude of more than 20 kilometers, thereby not
violating other countries' territorial airspace and making it impossible for
ground-to-air missiles to shoot them down.

Initially, two satellites manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric Corp will be
launched from the National Space Development Agency at Japan's Space Center
on Tanegashima Island. The systems are referred to as "multi-purpose
information-gathering satellites" able to monitor weather, illegal
immigration and intrusion by North Korean spy ships, while checking on
Pyongyang's missile bases and plutonium-production sites.

Areas subject to surveillance are not only North Korea but also China,
Russia and other "suspicious" states, according to the Japanese government.
China, as usual, suspects this is yet another step toward Japanese
militarism and is not exactly keen on Japan counting the growing number of
Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan. "Just checking on the weather" goes the
official line coming from Tokyo assuring Beijing that China is not on
Japan's list of regional evil-doers.

Japanese Defense Agency officials fear that their country's spy satellites
are significantly inferior to US commercial satellites. Despite the 250
billion yen (US$2.1 billion) that has been invested in developing the
satellites so far, their ability to focus on objects on the ground is
described as "very poor".

"We don't see much on the ground and still very much rely on the US telling
us whether we are seeing something suspicious," says a Defense Agency
official.

In fact, Japanese satellites are believed to be inferior even to Cold
War-era US satellites, and compared with the United States' state-of-the art
Lockheed Martin-manufactured IKONOS satellites, Japanese satellite
technology still has a way to go before shooting high-resolution pictures,
analysts believe.

Until now, US spy satellites have been feeding Japan with intelligence, with
the Americans selling overpriced commercial satellite photos for $8,500
each. It should have stayed that way, an American analyst points out.

"I am not sure if the Japanese space program is smart long-term policy or
foolish national pride, but presumably the US, France, Russia and China all
see it as the latter," he suspects, indicating that Japan opted for shooting
anything at all into space in its eagerness to catch up with the spies from
the United States, Russia and Europe.

If things go well and the satellites enable Tokyo's policy-makers to see
what Pyongyang is up to, two more of them will be launched in August, the
Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center (CSICE) promised recently. Officials
from the CSICE are confident that the satellites, each of which comprises an
optical and a radar satellite unit, will remain in the orbit for five years,
circling the Earth up to 20 times a day at an altitude of 400-600km.

However, if things go less well and North Korea sends another missile over
East Asia without Tokyo seeing a thing, the government has decided not to
provide any information on malfunctions and intelligence flaws in order to
avoid "told you so" lectures from the United States, as a CSICE official put
it.

In the 1990s, the United States initiated a bilateral US-Japan intelligence
center analyzing satellite images, but Tokyo for a change did not cave in to
US requests, going for its own satellite program instead. A waste of money,
say some.

"There are better ways for Japan to spend its limited defense funds. It
would have been smarter to invest in training several thousand
satellite-image analysts capable of working with US analysts in a joint
intelligence center," says Peter Ennis of the Oriental Economist & Weekly
Toyo Keizai in Tokyo.

Fearing that Japan would go ahead with the satellite program with or without
Uncle Sam's blessing, the US later changed its rhetoric, calling Japanese
surveillance satellites "beneficial to both countries". Now, however, the US
is not sure anymore whether it is at all interested in Japanese satellite
pictures. "Who needs Japanese photos [already] shot by US commercial
satellites earlier and much sharper?" a military analyst asks.

The decision to introduce Japanese-made information-gathering satellites
goes back to 1998 when North Korea "test-fired" a Taepodong ballistic rogue
missile over Japanese territory in August 1998. Back then it was suspected
that the Americans had withheld intelligence on the North Korean launch and
only released details after the Korean missile went down in the Pacific. The
official version, however, is somewhat different.

Thanks to its spy satellites and U-2 reconnaissance flights, the official
version goes, the United States gave the Defense Agency plenty of warning
before North Korea launched the missile. The Defense Agency was also given
time to divert an Aegis destroyer to the Sea of Japan so that its
sophisticated radar could be used to track the missile's flight path,
Japan's navy remembers now.

On June 30 last year, just before the final match of the soccer World Cup in
Yokohama, the United States reportedly provided flawed information about a
Chinese missile that did not land in its territory, putting the Japanese
government in a state of panic. Even the US does not always get it right, as
it turned out, and Japan's Defense Agency urged its government to shoot
Japanese satellites into orbit as soon as possible, suspecting that Japan's
friends in Washington might stick with their tactics of keeping their
secrets to themselves.

"We don't know to what extent the US is ready to share information with us
at all," a high-ranking Defense Agency complained back then.

The United States for its part does not really seem to trust its
increasingly assertive junior alliance partner too much either. The US
National Intelligence Council, which reports to the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), warned last year that Tokyo might be planning to change the
framework of US-Japan defense arrangements with its own spy satellites in
orbit.

"Spy satellites do not alter the US-Japan security agreement in any way,"
counters James Clay Moltz, research professor at the Center for
Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies
in California.

"American commercial concerns, however, do exist. US companies are certainly
not pleased that Japan is developing an independent reconnaissance
capability, since it will eventually cause them to lose market share. But it
will still take a number of years before Japan will be able to match even US
commercial products," he adds.

Japan seems eager to make some money in space before that. After two
straight failures to launch satellites in 1998 and 1999, it shot an H-2A
rocket carrying four commercial satellites into space last month to compete
with US, European and Russian satellites.

Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA) could do with some extra
cash after its budget was cut by 12 percent to $1.4 billion last year.
What's worse, NASDA will be forced to merge with two other state-run space
programs this year and is notoriously short of staff. While the United
States has about 7,000 well-trained image analysts, Japan employs only 300
of them and not even the threat from Pyongyang has yet led to a round of
recruiting new analysts.

Yukio Sato, a former ambassador to the United Nations and one of Japan's
most influential commentators on Japan's security, however, still thinks
big, claiming that Japan's own independent intelligence-gathering activities
should even go beyond East Asia and as far as the Persian Gulf, securing
Japan's sea traffic.

"Having a reasonable insight on the situation in Gulf countries is essential
for working out prospects for a continued stable supply of oil. As a country
that limits its use of military force, Japan needs to obtain information
more quickly than other nations," Sato maintains.

Low-quality photos and low funding or not, Japan seems ready to check on
North Korea in case Kim Jong-il should get bored with French oysters,
Russian caviar or his 15,000-video-film collection and turns to testing a
rogue missile over East Asia instead.