Noynoy's rampage in Japan

Noynoy Aquino has gone on a rampage in Japan. First, he openly declared support for a change in the Japanese constitution, naively hoping that a Japanese military freed of its purely defensive purpose in order to effectively deter China will work to the advantage of the Philippines in its own dispute with Beijing.

The Japanese, ever polite, must have simply rolled their eyes and feigned sudden deafness. They must have been told in advance that the Philippine president has no diplomatic finesse and knows absolutely nothing about sovereign issues and foreign policy matters.

A change in the Japanese constitution is something that is up to the Japanese themselves to determine. Japan and the Philippines may find themselves in the same pickle with regard to China, but that does not give Noynoy the liberty to make public pronouncements, for or against, the matter of charter change in Japan.

I can picture how Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's liver must have turned yellow at the effrontery of this Filipino, even if Abe himself is actually pushing actively for constitutional change. The Japanese are a proud people who love nothing than to solve their own problems themselves.

It must have been the test of Abe's political astuteness to simply swallow hard to let the gaffe pass and charge it to memory as just another waking nightmare. And of course the Japanese, taking their cue from their leader, looked the other way.

Noynoy, however, remained clueless as usual. In fact, apparently feeling emboldened by his "erudition" in telling Japan to its face that he supports any move to change its constitution, Noynoy plodded on with more brilliant flashes of foreign policy initiatives.

Not waiting until he gets back home, Noynoy told the Japanese that the Philippines does not need to go to war with China, as if the Philippines ever had that as an option. I can just picture the livers of the Japanese turning opaque with disgust. Who is this guy, they must have thought, still polite.

But while the Japanese quietly endured the Philippine president, China was all up to no good business. On the same day that Noynoy happily engaged the Japanese in official nonsense, the Chinese published a new map with an expanded "territory" now encompassed by a 10-dash line instead of the previous nine-dash line.

And the new 10-dash line map has China claiming "territory" right up to the Philippine doorstep. In fact, China has virtually claimed the entire South China Sea as its own, this time not just by the hubris of its spokesmen but officially on paper.

I do not expect Noynoy to see how ridiculous a position he has just painted himself into. But what a pathetic sight I see of him exhorting Japan to change its constitution so it can be more "war-ready" while at the same time making public his own position against war with China.

Not that I take the contrary view and want war. But that is a position that is doubly obvious, first not only because we renounce war as a matter of state policy and second because it is not in our best interest to go to war with China, where we can only lose more territory that we hope to protect.

But that is not something the leader of a country should advertise, especially at a time when the enemy is already banging on the door. At the very least, you can keep the enemy guessing, so that if you only have a pin as defense, you still let the enemy consider the possibility of getting blinded by a prick.

Every Filipino knows we are no match for China in a shooting war. But whatever comfort we can derive from such an uncomfortable situation we derive from being vague and keeping the enemy guessing. The least we can expect from such a situation is for no other than Noynoy himself not to telegraph our pitiful position.

If China can whip up a white flag just by rearranging a few dashes on a map, what is to stop it from actually taking possession of all the territories encompassed by those darned dashes? Not even Japan, its new constitution notwithstanding, is likely to come to the aid of the taken.