The Foreign Ministry's latest annual report reads partly like a litany of resolutions. That is only to be expected given the series of incidents and scandals that have hit the foreign service over the past year or so. Naturally, the blue book, as the report is commonly known, calls for a string of steps to remake the ministry and improve its badly tarnished public image.
At the outset of the report, Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi states the obvious: Public understanding and support are essential to the smooth and effective conduct of foreign policy. The first thing to do, of course, is to implement necessary reforms expeditiously. That is the only way to revive public confidence in the scandal-tainted Foreign Ministry and to bring the half-paralyzed foreign service back to normal.
The ministry now is under fire for its inept response to the Shenyang incident, in which Chinese police officers removed North Korean defectors from the Japanese Consulate General in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. The episode has exposed some of the weaknesses in Japanese diplomacy: poor capacity for crisis management and lack of human rights awareness.