COLUMN ONE : Japan Is No Longer an Island of Security : Threats from within and abroad fray people’s vaunted sense of safety. Some break postwar taboo to urge strengthening of military and police.

One by one, the scenes bespeak a violent, lawless nation:

The chief of the National Police Agency is shot four times by a masked man as he leaves his home. About 5,500 subway commuters are sickened and 11 killed by a terrorist attack with nerve gas. A veritable army of police--2,500 strong--in paramilitary gear and gas masks raids a compound stocked with deadly chemicals.

These events might have occurred anywhere else in the world and Noriko Nagayoshi might not have given them a second thought. But the 40-year-old homemaker watched them unfold in disbelief because they were rocking her Japan--the world’s most celebrated bastion of public peace and order.

Here, vigilant police and close-knit communities have always kept crime rates remarkably low and streets safe even at night. Gangsters have been managed through “understandings” with police not to let their wars, guns or drugs reach ordinary folk. Japan’s fabled public safety, in poll after poll, has consistently ranked as its best national asset.

But the recent reign of violence--along with Kobe’s killer earthquake in January and growing threats abroad--has severely shaken the cherished Japanese sense of security. Not since World War II have the people of this nation been so pressed to confront an issue so long taken for granted: how to protect themselves.

The growing awareness of the treacherous world may be the biggest shift in attitudes of the Japanese toward their security--and the police and military forces that protect them--in half a century, analysts say. Long blamed for Japan’s wartime repression, the state security organs were weakened under postwar democracy. But as the sense of unease rises here, more people are turning to them for relief.

“You can’t trust your neighbors now, because you don’t know what they’re doing,” Nagayoshi fretted after the sarin nerve gas attack March 20 on Tokyo’s subways. “In the past, there was a time when you spied on your neighbors, and I can’t deny that we won’t go back to that. . . . It’s a frightening situation. I think we’d better strengthen the police.”

Police say crime is on the inevitable upswing as traditional systems of social control and self-policing break down. Ever since China’s Tang Dynasty introduced group organization to Japan in the year 645, authorities have employed units of five or 10 families to watch each other’s behavior, provide mutual defense and shoulder collective obligations such as taxes.

The groups evolved into the modern-day “neighborhood watch” associations. But the drift from rural areas to cities and an influx of foreigners have weakened the system and left most Japanese to live in urban anonymity.

Dwindling public coffers also have cut 10,000 officers from a nationwide force of 220,000 since 1992. The cutbacks, coupled with declining numbers of new recruits and the imminent retirement of large numbers of officers, are threatening the future of Japan’s famous “police box” system of neighborhood stations credited with keeping crime low. While some areas have begun to experiment with automated police boxes--Tokyo is studying staffing one with a robot--they are considered a poor substitute for the ubiquitous neighborhood cop.

The recession has squeezed gangsters, prompting many to break taboos and launch lucrative ventures in gun smuggling and drug running, police say. As a result, Japan’s once-insulated shores are being infiltrated by record numbers of guns, drugs and criminal gangs from the United States, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Colombia and elsewhere. Pressed by the new demands, the National Police Agency--the nation’s central crime bureaucracy--recently created a division on international crime and devoted one-third of its 1994 annual white paper to the burgeoning problem.

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Most worrisome, police say, is the rise in shootings of unarmed citizens. The attacks range from armed assaults on 18 corporate executives since 1992 to the gunning down of a doctor by a disgruntled patient at a train station last year. Although the 1,747 guns seized last year are a pittance compared to U.S. figures, the 482 weapons seized from non-gangsters represented a sixfold increase over the last four years.

“Until now, we were a homogeneous people surrounded by the sea and able to shut things out,” said one police officer. “But with technological advancements and closer contacts between countries, that has gradually changed. We can’t see the future.”

Japan is still far safer than most other industrialized nations, with a crime rate one-fourth that of the United States. But its incidence of crime hit postwar highs last year, increasing 3.5%. A recent government poll showed that 92% believe crime will continue to rise and that those who rank safety as Japan’s most prized asset dropped by 10 percentage points to 46.2%.

But it was not until the subway poison attack that many Tokyoites directly felt endangered. And the recent shooting of the nation’s police chief was the boldest blow against a government official since World War II.

The growing sense of insecurity is not limited to the society within. Dramatic changes beyond its shores are pushing the nation to question its own safety. For 50 years, few Japanese thought much about security, because they were enveloped in the security embrace of the United States, analysts say.

But the end of the Cold War has raised questions about how long U.S. troops will stay in Japan, just as China and North Korea have loomed as potential military threats. Security experts here also paint grim scenarios of as many as 150,000 refugees fleeing to Japan after Hong Kong reverts to China in 1997, or boatloads of North Koreans seeking haven should Pyongyang’s Communist regime collapse.

“This is a very unsafe world, but we have been very lucky after the war and somehow insulated from direct exposure to catastrophe, war and bloodshed,” said Tadashi Yamamoto, head of the Japan Center for International Exchange.

But how a nation should protect itself is a more delicate question in Japan than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Other nations might rush to beef up the military or police, but here such options are fraught with political peril. The reason: Japan still suffers from a legacy of repressive militarism blamed for World War II; preventing its re-emergence has been the postwar national mantra.

To crush Japan’s troublemaking potential and push it down the path to peace, the Allied Occupation dismantled the mighty imperial war machine and the omnipotent Naimusho, or Internal Affairs Ministry, which controlled the dreaded Special Higher Police.

Along with a national constitution renouncing war, Japan developed Self-Defense Forces, or SDF. Until last year, however, their very existence was regarded as unconstitutional by the nation’s top opposition party, the Socialists, and the public viewed them mainly as glorified garbage collectors who cleaned up after natural disasters.

Short on staff, training, equipment and public respect, the 170,000-member forces have never been seen as adequate to defend the nation; even if Japan were attacked, a plurality of Japanese said they would not support SDF efforts to defend the country, according to a 1980 government poll.

For their part, the police were reorganized into localized bureaucracies with no central investigative authority; Japan lacks any counterpart to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Takemoto Iinuma, director of the Yomiuri Research Institute.

The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest daily newspaper and owner of the institute, is leading the call to strengthen the state. Last year, it broke a 50-year taboo and urged a revision of the nation’s peace constitution, prompting similar reviews still under way at the Asahi Shimbun--the Yomiuri’s liberal nemesis--and other major newspapers.

The Yomiuri Research Institute is studying national security issues and intends to unveil a proposal that will encompass everything from the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty to managing internal crises such as natural disasters or terrorism.

“Fifty years ago, Japan abandoned war and we forgot the concept of security,” Iinuma said. “But the earthquake disaster and the sarin terrorism are forcing us to rethink our past attitudes. We are trying to make a turning point.”

More people are beginning to praise such once-taboo statements as a “new realism.”

“There has been a tangible maturing of the Japanese security consciousness,” said Yukio Okamoto, a former Foreign Ministry official who runs a consulting firm.

Most prominent, he and others say, is the growing acceptance of the Self-Defense Forces.

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While their dispatch abroad for peacekeeping was ferociously contested as unconstitutional before 1992, when a law was passed to allow it, missions to Cambodia, Zaire and Mozambique have brought increased public support. A proposed dispatch to the Golan Heights now under study barely merits headlines. Public support for participating in international peacekeeping has increased from 22.4% in 1989 to 48.4% in 1994, according to a prime minister’s poll.

The troops’ rescue work after the Kobe quake and chemical expertise after the sarin attack rehabilitated their image even further.

“There won’t be one person who criticizes the SDF in the next election,” predicted Yoshiaki Saito, a quake victim.

Wataru Nishigahiro, the Japan Defense Agency’s chief of training, said there had been a “remarkable change” in public attitudes toward the forces since the Persian Gulf War opened debate on the need for Japan to contribute not only money but peacekeepers to international efforts. Morale has soared, and the number of Defense University graduates spurning the forces plummeted to the lowest level in a decade. Only 11 of 361 graduates this year exercised their option not to join the forces. (The recessionary crunch on the job market, however, is regarded as a significant factor.)

An advisory panel to the government recently recommended upgrading troops’ weapons and improving intelligence-gathering systems, such as spy satellites, to help them better defend the home islands. The recession, the Cold War’s end and Socialist opposition have slowed increases in defense spending--now about 6% of the national budget--and effectively shelved many of the plans, however.

“In the conventional weapons area, we can develop much more than the present situation,” Nishigahiro said. “But we can’t push it too quickly. We have to very carefully wait for public opinion.”

Some, however, are ready to endow defense forces with bold new authority. Computer specialist Tomohiko Shimizu always regarded the forces as nothing but “tax thieves.” But the recent instability has changed his mind, and now he advocates empowering trained units on terrorism, disasters and other areas of specialization to act without necessarily waiting for requests from local authorities--a process that created the much-criticized delay in dispatching SDF teams to quake sites.

Others advocate expanding powers for police. The Yomiuri’s Iinuma, for instance, supports strengthening police forces with a centralized investigative authority similar to the FBI. Others say police and prosecutors should be given more legal tools, such as the right to plea bargain and broader authority to nab terrorists by requiring a less-demanding burden of proof.

The military has stayed firmly in line with legal procedures capping its authority--in the aftermath of the Kobe quake, commanders gamely waited four hours for the required aid requests from civilian authorities before dispatching rescue teams. But civil rights attorneys have raised eyebrows at the recent police sweeps and a new nationwide order to “root out” all members of Aum Supreme Truth, the religious sect suspected in the sarin attacks, “utilizing all possible laws.” As a result, members are being arrested and held on such charges as expired car-inspection certificates.

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“I’m scared to death,” said Masao Kunihiro, one of the Parliament’s most outspoken liberals, who quit the Socialists last year when they reversed most of their positions to join the conservative Liberal Democrats in a new ruling coalition.

He said the climate of instability might invite a return to authoritarianism--a fear fanned by what he calls a “right-wing backlash” that has begun to defend more boldly Japan’s wartime legacy.

“Coming at a time when frustrations are still high over the government’s inept response to the Kobe earthquake, the subway gassing may be one of those pivotal incidents that make a people, after 50 years of unfettered freedom, long once again to give the state more power,” Ayako Doi wrote recently. Doi is editor of the Japan Digest, which excerpts and translates into English key articles and editorials from the Japanese press.

Doi recalled that Japan’s brief flowering of prewar democracy during the Taisho Era came to an end when security forces rushed in to restore order after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake in the Tokyo area. Two years later, the infamous “national security law” was enacted establishing the secret police, she wrote.

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In the sarin case, the televised images of thousands of riot police raiding private residences stirred uneasy memories for Toshiko Oguchi. A former labor activist, she demonstrated against the Vietnam War and the presence of U.S. bases in Okinawa--and in her mind’s eye still can see the riot police pushing and shoving.

But the horror of the poison gas attack and revelations about toxic chemical stockpiles owned by Aum Supreme Truth have appeared to suspend public skepticism--including her own--about police methods, she said.

Japan specialist Chalmers Johnson says there should be nothing surprising at all about an eventual shift back to state power--even the comeback of an intrusive security system--given the long history of state power in Asia. “It’s not a matter of saying it’s good or bad. This is reality. Liberal democracy has always been something projected onto Japan by Americans,” said Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

But Japan’s most celebrated spokesman of the left, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, isn’t about to resign himself so readily. The instability many Japanese feel today, the writer says, can be used to power a people’s movement aimed at winning what he believes is true security for Japan: peace with Asia, beginning with a full apology for past war deeds.

“If the Nobel Prize gave me any influence,” Oe said, “I hope to use it to keep our democracy, our constitution and our limits on police and self-defense forces.”

Tokyo Bureau researchers Chiaki Kitada and Megumi Shimizu contributed to this report.