The wages of uncertainty

The exchange of fire between the North and South Korean militaries that left two ROK Marines dead and at least a dozen wounded (see the roundup at Wired’s Danger Room blog), following closely on the heels of revelations regarding a new North Korean uranium reprocessing facility, strengthens hopes that the US and Japan might be able look past Futenma and strengthen their security relationship. The relationship has, of course, had a bit more wind in its sails since the standoff between Japan and China over the maritime collision near the Senkakus.

Can we really draw a straight line from regional instability to closer security cooperation between the US and Japan? Arguably this logic has worked in the past, with North Korean provocations from 1994 onward stirring Japanese policymakers to bolster Japan’s capabilities and launch new bilateral initiatives with the US, ballistic missile defense being perhaps the most notable example. And there are signs that the DPJ-led government is remarkably more realist in its approach to the region than many expected. I think Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji spoke for many in the DPJ when he told an official Chinese foreign affairs publication that he is “by no means a hawk but a realist who values idealism.” The distinction between “hawk” and “realist” is meaningful and says a lot about the DPJ’s approach to foreign and security policy.

To be a hawk in Japanese politics is not just to support a certain set of policies: it is more a cultural identity than a policy stance. It is a worldview that, in addition to wanting to dismantle political and legal constraints on Japan’s security policy, questions the value of Japan’s postwar regime (that which former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō wanted to "leave behind"), supports revising the constitution (not just Article 9), opposes “masochistic” interpretations of history, and promotes traditionalist values. While they cite the threats posed by North Korea and China to justify their policies, the idea of Japan as a great power is valued in its own right — it is not driven by material considerations.

Meanwhile, to be a realist in Japan means much the same as it does in other countries: valuing the sober assessment of national interests, and thinking clearly about how best to secure those interests using the means available. While I think “realism” is often associated with a predisposition towards military capabilities and the use of force, it need not be. As Eric Heginbotham and Richard Samuels argued in a 1998 article in the journal International Security, postwar Japanese leaders have been “mercantile realists,” thinking of Japanese national interests in broader terms that prioritized Japan’s economic position.

The DPJ has thus far been far more realist in its foreign and security policies than has been generally recognized. Like earlier LDP governments it is working to maintain some sort of constructive relationship with China, however difficult, while building closer bilateral ties with other countries in the region that are also concerned about Japan’s rise. The government has signaled that it is willing to invest in Japan’s security, for example announcing last month that the MSDF will increase its purchase of new submarines from sixteen to more than twenty. As this post at Sigma1 notes there are signs that the government’s new National Defense Program Guidelines, which the DPJ has been considering since it took power, will contain a number of sensible proposals to enhance Japan’s security, including a relaxation of the arms exporting principles and relocation of SDF personnel from the north to the south. Is Japan “rearming”? Arguably not. But we are not seeing a passive and pacifist Japan either, despite the idea that the DPJ is “left wing.”

But what about the relationship with the United States? On the face of it, the dispute with the US over Futenma has shown the limits of the DPJ’s realist tendencies, allowing its position on the bases to be driven by domestic political considerations instead of the “national interest.” However, is it really in the interest of either Japan or the US to force bases on an unwilling Okinawan public? The point is not that the DPJ has been particularly sober minded in its approach to the issue, but that it is not altogether clear how the bases in Okinawa serve Japan’s interests, which leads to the larger question of how the US-Japan alliance can best serve the interests of both countries.

This is the big question hanging over the alliance, the question that the two countries may finally be in the process of addressing as they begin consultations in advance of a bilateral summit that is expected to be held sometime in the spring. Will North Korean provocations or Chinese maritime adventurism push the alliance in new directions? If anything, I think regional uncertainty reinforces the trend towards a “strong but limited” security relationship focused deterrence in and around Japan instead of more expansive or grandiose plans for the alliance. And given Okinawan opposition to US bases and the uncertainty regarding the US economy, the countries should be talking about politically and economically sustainable deterrent capabilities. 

As such, while developments in the region may lend a certain urgency to bilateral talks about the future of the alliance, it is unlikely that they will push the US-Japan alliance in a drastically different direction than it was already going.

The virtues of Kan

Kan Naoto, Hatoyama Yukio's second finance minister, was the first DPJ member to declare his intention to run in the party election scheduled for Friday — and it seems unlikely, for reasons outlined by Michael Cucek here, that he will be denied the job.

What would be the significance of Kan's replacing Hatoyama?

I think that what I wrote when Kan became finance minister is even more apropos for Kan's becoming prime minister: "While it is common to point to DPJ politicians like Hatoyama and Ozawa and conclude that the DPJ is a pale imitation of the LDP, Kan's career shows that the DPJ's victory has brought new politicians with different backgrounds and different concerns from LDP politicians to the fore." Should Kan become prime minister, he will be the first prime minister since Koizumi not directly related (son or grandson) to another prime minister, and the first non-hereditary politician since Mori. He began his career toiling on the margins of Japan's reformist left, a follower of Eda Saburō, who tried and failed to modernize the JSP, and lost three elections before finally winning a seat as a representative of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1980.

Indeed, the political origins of Hatoyama and Kan could not be more different. Not only is Hatoyama the scion of a political dynasty, he seemingly entered politics on a whim — the family thought his brother Kunio would be the politician while Yukio would pursue his academic career. Kan, however, became involved in politics purely out of his convictions, starting as a student activist. Had Kan been interested in pursuing personal ambitions, he could have found better ways to do it than by following a marginal center-left politician.

Accordingly, unlike Hatoyama, he has a core set of beliefs that may in fact be best called social democratic or liberal in the American sense. He is egalitarian, a believer in transparent, clean, and accountable government. He became famous as minister of health during the mid-1990s for taking on his ministry's bureaucrats over an AIDS-tainted blood scandal, which may be an easy position for a politician to take (especially during the "bureaucrat-bashing" 1990s), but nevertheless conformed with the focus of Kan's career in politics. During the months leading up to the election, he became the DPJ's point man on administrative reform, a role he continued to play when the Hatoyama government formed. 

Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to say that his beliefs are something like Eda's, who in 1962 stressed that he wanted Japan to have "the American standard of living, Soviet levels of social protection, British parliamentary democracy, and Japanese pacifism." While these days one would not think to look to the Soviet Union as a model for social protection — Scandinavia would probably be the model today — this mix of policies might best capture Kan's politics, perhaps with the exception of Japanese-style pacifism (more on this momentarily). He certainly made clear last summer that he believes strongly in the necessity of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy in Japan, and as finance minister

Kan has said fairly little over the years about foreign policy and Japan's relations with the US and its neighbors. To the extent that he has talked about foreign policy, for instance on previous occasions that he led the DPJ, his views have been virtually at the center in terms of the spectrum of opinion within the DPJ. He as acknowledged the importance of the alliance and the US forward presence on multiple occasions, but when Koizumi was prime minister, he criticized the government for its slavish subservience to the US and for not balancing the US-Japan relationship with the other "pillars" of Japanese foreign policy, multilateral cooperation at the UN and bilateral and multilateral relations within Asia. He isn't exactly dovish, but he's no hawk either. Accordingly, I would not be surprised if Okada Katsuya either stays on as foreign minister or continues to play an important foreign policy role in another capacity.

However, the details of Kan's policy beliefs may be less important at this juncture than his biography. Given that he is a conviction politician, given his ministerial experience (something that Hatoyama lacked), and given his emphasis on open politics, Kan may be the right man to restore public trust in the DPJ-led government and lead his party to a respectable showing in next month's upper house election. The central task for the Hatoyama government was the restore public faith in government after years of LDP misrule. The central task for a Kan government would be to restore public faith in government after years of LDP misrule — and nine months of Hatoyama misrule. If the public does not trust the government, it is difficult to see how Japan will escape its economic stagnation. As I've said before, if the public cannot trust the government to be honest about its intentions and forthright about how public money is spent, no government will be in a position to ask for something like a consumption tax increase.

Kan certainly has the right biography for this purpose — and having been a cabinet minister before, he should be more capable of managing the cabinet than Hatoyama was, avoiding the self-inflicted wounds that ultimately destroyed the Hatoyama government.

What about that other task facing the new government, the Futenma problem? Kan has said little about it, refusing, it seems, to stray beyond his brief as finance minister. However, it seems unlikely that Kan — or any other DPJ politician — will rush to embrace a plan that is now being written off as unimplementable. Perhaps he will have the backbone to scrap the thing entirely. One way or another, the demise of Hatoyama following his shift on Futenma and the collapse of the coalition with the SDPJ has undoubtedly poisoned the issue. If the Obama administration were smart, it might learn from the mistakes it made last year when the Hatoyama government took office and give the new government time to find its bearings and plan a course of action, whether that course of action is trying to soften up public opinion on some relocation option within Okinawa or searching again for an option outside of Okinawa. If the US is actually serious about resolving the problem, it is not enough to say that Japanese public opinion is simply a problem for the Japanese government to deal with: to insist once again on a plan that cannot win the support of the Japanese public and expect another prime minister to fall on his sword for it would be sheer folly.

Ultimately if Kan is the next prime minister and if the Ozawa regime is truly uprooted, the DPJ will have an opportunity to reclaim some of the goodwill that has been squandered since September.

(Image courtesy of Curzon from Mutantfrog/The Coming Anarchy, based on a whimsical Facebook status update of mine from earlier today)

Was the coalition doomed from the start?

On Friday, Fukushima Mizuho, the head of the Social Democratic Party of Japan, refused to bow to the prime minister's decision to accept a modified version of the 2006 realignment agreement, forcing the prime minister to dismiss her from her position as minister responsible for consumer affairs.

Not surprisingly, on Sunday the SDPJ decided that it would leave the coalition, although it suggested that electoral cooperation in the upcoming upper house election is still possible. The DPJ still holds a slim majority in the upper house with the PNP — perhaps thanks to the work of the "devil" — and will undoubtedly press harder to get its legislation passed without having to extend the current Diet session.

Jun Okumura questions whether electoral cooperation is the wisest decision for its survival "as an anti-business, anti-Japan-US alliance protest party." In this statement, of course, one sees the problem with the coalition between the DPJ and the SDPJ. With 308 seats — including 221 of 300 single-member districts — in the House of Representatives, electoral dynamics suggest that the DPJ would drift to the center once in power, as it needs to maintain pluralities in as many districts as possible. In this sense, perhaps the only surprising thing about the Hatoyama government's embrace of the old agreement is that it tried so hard and so long to find an alternative to accommodation. Some might say that the DPJ is becoming the old LDP, although I don't think that's a particularly meaningful assessment: Futenma, and Ozawa's courtship of old LDP interest groups notwithstanding, the DPJ's priorities and identity remain distinct. If the LDP and the DPJ increasingly resemble each other (and if the LDP survives), it is because survival in a political system dominated by nonaligned voters will produces moves to the center in order to satisfy as many floating voters as possible, combined with rhetorical and symbolical gestures to distinguish one from the other.

The SDPJ is in wholly different circumstances. The party has only seven seats in the lower house, four from proportional blocs and three from single-member districts. One of those three — Teruya Kantoku — is from Okinawa's second district. As a marginal party, the SDPJ's survival depends on offering something unique to a narrow slice of core supporters, in this case left-wing ideologues who share its commitment to reducing the US presence in Japan, resisting revision of the constitution, and resisting growing inequality. While on paper there appears to be some basis for cooperation between the SDPJ and the DPJ, the reality is that for the DPJ compromise is indispensable (for large parties, manifestos, one might say, are made to be broken), while for the SDPJ its survival depends on rigid adherence to its principles and promises. Had the LDP not fallen into such disarray, the coalition might have survived a bit longer in mutual resistance to a convenient enemy, but the electoral dynamics of the coalition seem to have doomed the partnership in advance.

Electoral dynamics were compounded by the SDPJ's history. The old Socialist Party virtually broke itself by compromising its principles on the security alliance and the SDF to form a coalition with the LDP in 1994. That choice may have been the result of the party's failure to recognize that the JSP was becoming a marginal ideological party even before electoral reform: in 1993, the party actually lost 66 seats, most of them to the LDP splinter parties that would form the non-LDP coalition after the election. In other words, having betrayed its core supporters on the alliance once before, it was extremely unlikely that Fukushima would act differently than she did.

In short, Fukushima had to reject the prime minister's compromise on account of the past, present, and future of the SDPJ. The party's future is still precarious — it is not immediately clear which party gains more from electoral cooperation without cooperation in government — but having stood on principle, the SDPJ should have an easier time maintaining its electoral base.

Hatoyama accommodates the US on Futenma

It may have taken a few months longer than I expected, but it appears that the Hatoyama government may have finally accommodated itself to the 2006 agreement on the realignment of US forces. The US and Japanese governments have reached an understanding regarding the future of Futenma following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Tokyo.

The latest bilateral agreement largely reaffirms the 2006 roadmap: the Hatoyama government has agreed to the construction of a new runway somewhere in the vicinity of Camp Schwab at Henoko Bay, with the details regarding the precise location and the method of construction to be decided by President Obama's visit to Japan in autumn. The US, meanwhile, agreed to disperse some training activities from Okinawa to elsewhere in Japan. The Hatoyama government has also stated that it will campaign for the inclusion in the Two-Plus-Two statement due 28 May a pledge to return bases in Okinawa to Japanese ownership within ten to fifteen years.

The Hatoyama government's work is by no means complete. Not only will it have to coax prefectural and local officials in Okinawa into not making too much of a fuss, but the government will also have to work to preserve the governing coalition. Fukushima Mizuho, Social Democratic Party chief and consumer affairs minister, replied to the news by asking why the prime minister went ahead with talks with the US without securing the support of the Okinawan people and his own coalition. Whether Fukushima's remarks are the prelude to the SDPJ's pulling out of the coalition remains to be seen. Even more troublesome for the prime minister could be the opposition of Ozawa Ichiro, the secretary-general of his own party. Despite his professions to having no role in policymaking, Ozawa has not refrained from taking a hard line in calling for relocation of Futenma outside of Okinawa entirely. Responding to the latest agreement, Ozawa said it would be "difficult" to secure the acquiescence of the Okinawan people (which, one would think, would be at least partly Ozawa's job as secretary-general).

It is tempting to criticize the Hatoyama government for its supposed "about face" on Futenma. However, from the beginning of this dispute the government has repeatedly stressed that it was keeping all options on the table, including the reaffirmation of the 2006 agreement as it stands. As I've said before, the Hatoyama government was acting in good faith. It genuinely wanted to review the 2006 agreement in the hope of finding something better. Had the US government not reacted so harshly to the Hatoyama government's fairly modest request, and perhaps even signaled its willingness to offer concessions early on this dispute could very well have been contained and even resolved months ago. As it stands, prolonged public exposure gave the Okinawan public time to mobilize, making it that much harder for the Hatoyama government to secure domestic approval for a slightly revised agreement.

While the Hatoyama government may have been genuinely open to the 2006 agreement from the start, one cannot rule out the possibility that Hatoyama has genuinely come to believe that the 2006 agreement is by and large the best option. Given that the prime minister has been rather guarded about his preferences, it is difficult to say. However, Hatoyama has certainly made more frequent use of phrases like "national interest" in recent weeks than he did a mere nine months ago. As the dispute wore on, he became noticeably more inclined to speak of US bases in terms of regional security and deterrence (something Martin Frid noticed). Presumably Hatoyama will be expected to give an honest account of his reasoning to his own party, his party's coalition partners, and local officials in the days to come.

The damage to his government has, of course, already been done, because the damage to the government's reputation had less to do with the substance of the realignment plan — about which the public is divided — than with the government's gross incompetence in its handling of the issue. Despite its persistent efforts to remind the public that all options were on the table, I wonder whether the public will see the government's actions as anything but capitulation after months of dithering. At the very least the government has removed the issue from the front burner, freeing it to direct its (and the public's) attention to other matters before the upper house election expected to be held in July.

What of the US-Japan alliance? Despite the warnings from Washington of the damage that Hatoyama was doing to the alliance by asking for time to consider whether there might be a plan that would satisfy all parties, the reality is that the alliance is more durable than the Cassandras thought. That is at least in part thanks to China's latest maritime mischief and North Korea's torpedoing of the Cheonan. The idea of a desire on the part of the Hatoyama government to replace the US-Japan alliance with a Sino-Japanese entente was always far-fetched, but it seemed more plausible among some in the shadow of the Futenma. 

Indeed, in retrospect the reaction of US officials and commentators to the Hatoyama government's request seems even more overblown given the lack of histrionics in Washington in response to Britain's new coalition government, given that both Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nicholas Clegg have questioned the US-UK "special relationship" in terms not altogether different from the DPJ. (Stephen Walt puts the attitudes of both governments in wider context here.) The difference, of course, is that whereas Britain has to find the right balance between its ties between the US and the European Union, Japan has to navigate between the US and China. It goes without saying that London's relations with Brussels do not cause nearly as much anxiety in Washington as Tokyo's with Beijing. But recognizing the difference does not excuse the overreaction. The Hatoyama government was not the first and will not be the last government of a US ally in Asia to argue with the US while trying to maintain a constructive relationship with China. The sooner Washington recognizes that the better it will be for both the US and its allies.

Meanwhile, this new agreement does not mean that the DPJ is abandoning its belief in a balanced, Asia-centered foreign policy in which the alliance is important but not all-consuming. "Resolving" Futenma is a necessary first step to actually discussing what the alliance should look like as the DPJ continues to pursue closer bilateral ties throughout Asia — and not just or primarily with China.

Why did Hatoyama go after Futenma first?

With little surprise, the Hatoyama government has decided to postpone a decision on the future of Futenma, after alienating both the Okinawan people and the US government with its indecisiveness on the issue. Reuters reports that after months of treating the end of May as the deadline for solving the dispute, the government has announced a new target of November.

The damage has, of course, already been done, now that the government's approval ratings have sunk below twenty percent and with the DPJ's looking certain to fall short of a majority in the House of Councillors in this summer's election. As Michael Cucek suggests, Hatoyama may be holding on to power simply because no DPJ member wants the responsibility for leading the party to near-certain defeat in the election.

When the history of the Hatoyama government is written, the central question that will have to be answered is why it made Futenma the top priority of its government. While the Hatoyama government has been up to other things — some good (calling bureaucrats to justify their programs, liberalizing campaigning practices), some not so good (its ambiguous record on public works) — it is not an exaggeration to say that the government has been mortally wounded by the dispute over Futenma, not because of the government's position per se, but because of its inability to take a position. Arguably it is due to his mishandling of Futenma above any other issue that has led Hatoyama to be branded as a poor leader, for good reason.

It is truly mystifying why the Hatoyama government not only threw itself into the Futenma morass shortly after taking office, but took on the problem without a clear plan of action. The easiest — the wisest — course of action would have been to delay. The relocation was already delayed, thanks to LDP foot-dragging. The transition to a new, inexperienced ruling party offered the perfect excuse for delaying the issue further. At the very least the government could have stalled for time until after the House of Councillors election. And why not? The DPJ was elected last year on a manifesto that was, but for a short (and short on specifics) section on foreign policy, wholly concerned with fixing Japan's economy and society. The government would have good reason for putting Futenma on the shelf for at least its first year.

I can think of a few explanations for why the prime minister acted as he did. 

First, as I've argued before, he may have believed that he would be able to find a solution that would satisfy both Okinawans and the US simply by negotiating one-on-one with Obama. Alternatively, he may have simply thought that the US would be more willing to compromise than it proved to be. We might call this the miscalculation hypothesis. 

Second, perhaps the government wanted to make a clear statement that it marked a departure from LDP rule, and Futenma proved a good, high-profile demonstration case. Given the relatively narrow window between the launch of the government and the campaign for the upper house, perhaps the Hatoyama government reasoned that tackling Futenma was a way of achieving some policy goal that could be presented to voters in a way that other pledges, which will take a longer time to deliver, would not. (This hypothesis is compatible with the first.) 

Third, the DPJ could have been acting on the basis of ideological beliefs. I'm less convinced by this argument, if only because by trying to please all sides the Hatoyama government has elicited almost a total absence of its own beliefs on the issue other than the need to find an alternative site than the one in the 2006 roadmap.

Fourth, I suppose it is possible that during the 2009 general election campaign the DPJ leadership came to believe that the issue had to be resolved immediately, and acted accordingly.

I'm not sure which of these explanations, if any, best captures the government's reasoning. Perhaps there is no clear reason, which would explain why the government wandered into the issue seemingly without a plan. Meanwhile, the Hatoyama government's mishandling of the dispute means that even November could be a difficult target to meet.

This post will likely be the first of several on the fallout of the Futenma dispute.

UPDATE: As can be seen in the comments, I did leave out one obvious explanation: US pressure, both explicit in the form of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's infamous visit to Tokyo shortly after the DPJ took power, and implicit, in the pressure posed by Obama's November visit to Japan, for which the DPJ wanted to have something to offer to the US President.

Media coverage of tension between the US and Japan meant that every comment, every plan, every "promise" reverberated in Japan, so that each step the government took on Futenma was one step deeper into the quagmire.

Washington continues to see Japan slipping away

Writing on the nuclear summit, Al Kamen, who pens a Beltway gossip column in the Washington Post, had the following to say about Hatoyama Yukio:

By far the biggest loser of the extravaganza was the hapless and (in the opinion of some Obama administration officials) increasingly loopy Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. He reportedly requested but got no bilat. The only consolation prize was that he got an "unofficial" meeting during Monday night's working dinner. Maybe somewhere between the main course and dessert?

A rich man's son, Hatoyama has impressed Obama administration officials with his unreliability on a major issue dividing Japan and the United States: the future of a Marine Corps air station in Okinawa. Hatoyama promised Obama twice that he'd solve the issue. According to a long-standing agreement with Japan, the Futenma air base is supposed to be moved to an isolated part of Okinawa. (It now sits in the middle of a city of more than 80,000.)

But Hatoyama's party, the Democratic Party of Japan, said it wanted to reexamine the agreement and to propose a different plan. It is supposed to do that by May. So far, nothing has come in over the transom. Uh, Yukio, you're supposed to be an ally, remember? Saved you countless billions with that expensive U.S. nuclear umbrella? Still buy Toyotas and such?

Ignoring the snide and demeaning comments about Hatoyama's being "increasingly loopy" and "a rich man's son" (what does this have to do with anything?) or the comment suggesting that the "expensive U.S. nuclear umbrella" and US consumers' purchases of Toyotas are acts of charity, Kamen managed to sweep aside all the complexity of the Futenma dispute in the course of a few paragraphs.

This item may be another sign of what I referred to last month as the "losing Japan" narrative. Due to Hatoyama's "loopiness," the US is losing an important ally and increasingly finding it necessary to "bow" to China (see the first paragraph of the column). Naturally media outlets inside Japan have already reported on Kamen's comments, with the subtext that Hatoyama is embarrassing Japan abroad even as the US and China move closer together.

For the record, Mr. Kamen: Japan is a sovereign, democratic nation allied to the United States, not a vassal. However poorly Hatoyama has managed the problem, he is trying to balance the concerns of his country's most important ally with the concerns of the voters who elected him. He certainly deserves better than to be denigrated in this fashion.

UPDATE: I have changed the name of this post to reflect the fact that Kamen's column reflects not just a narrative popular at the Washington Post — although the Post has thus far been its main mouthpiece — but a narrative increasingly popular in Washington and in the Obama administration.

Why Hatoyama is failing on Futenma

Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio returned home to Japan Wednesday after attending the Nuclear summit in Washington hosted by US President Barack Obama. Whatever significance the summit had for Obama's diplomatic agenda, as far as US-Japan relations are concerned nukes were overshadowed by Futenma. Hatoyama's self-imposed deadline of resolving the dispute by May is approaching, and there are few signs that his government will be able to reach a conclusion that satisfies the US and local communities in Okinawa by the end of next month.

Indeed, on the eve of Hatoyama's trip the government announced that it would be holding off on opening working-level talks with the US because it did not yet have a plan to present.

While the press is filled with rumors regarding the various alternative sites under consideration by the Hatoyama government, there is no sign (yet) that the government is coalescing around a single option.

Even if the dispute is resolved favorably (whatever that means), it is safe to say that in terms of the process, the Hatoyama government's approach to Futenma has failed. What explains the Hatoyama government's disastrous performance on the Futenma issue? Why has the government performed so poorly on an issue that has taken on such importance for the government?

The Prime Minister: On Futenma, the buck has to stop with Hatoyama, something that Josh Rogin identifies as a major source of dissatisfaction in Washington. Despite the importance of this issue — despite Hatoyama's willingness to invoke the Japanese set phrase ("I'm risking my political life") to signal this issue's importance for his government — Hatoyama has been wholly absent from this debate. There is no excuse. Even if Hatoyama wanted to respect the policymaking process by letting his cabinet ministers debate the matter, on an issue as thorny as Futenma Hatoyama ought to have been taking the lead. As AEI's Michael Auslin notes in Rogin's piece, there is no sign that Hatoyama has a preference regarding an alternative to the current relocation plan.

I would argue, however, that Hatoyama is indecisive not because his party is unruly or filled with conflicting opinions. Has there ever been a political party in a democracy that did not house differing opinions on important and not-so-important political issues? As I've argued before, I think that the DPJ's divisions are an issue to the extent that Hatoyama has created a void at the head of the government. Hatoyama does not appear to have concrete preferences about any policy area, not just Futenma. He has shown little command of policy specifics, and has not yet moved past speaking in bland generalities.

On Futenma, I also think Hatoyama deserves considerable blame because I think he thought that he could rely on personal diplomacy with Obama in lieu of a concrete alternative plan. His government's audience, however, was not the president but working-level officials in the US who have mastered the details of the current plan and most alternatives over the course of years of negotiations with the Hatoyama government's predecessors. Hatoyama seemed to think that if he could just reach an understanding with Obama, the details would take care of themselves. 

When the Hatoyama government is no more, "Trust Me" may well be the epitaph on its tombstone.

The Cabinet: Perhaps the cabinet doesn't deserve its own heading, seeing as how many of the flaws in cabinet's policymaking process are the result of Hatoyama's vacuousness, but since anonymous officials in Rogin's piece see the "process" as a problem, it is worth addressing this argument.

The cabinet is responsible to the extent that the debate has not been contained within the cabinet committees responsible for addressing the issue. The debate between Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya and Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi has, for example, played out in the pages of the nation's newspapers. The process has been unruly and haphazard, with no apparent logic to how the government considered various alternatives to the 2006 roadmap.

The cabinet — or perhaps more specifically Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi — also deserves the blame for failing to develop a communications strategy on Futenma from the beginning. At various points in time Hirano has interjected to remind ministers and the public that all options (including the status quo) are on the table, that the government is proceeding from a "zero base." What should of happened is that from the beginning the prime minister, the chief cabinet secretary, and other ministers should have stressed its message plainly — particularly to the Okinawan people — and announced its process and criteria for weighing alternatives. It should have set out its own roadmap for deliberations instead of merely setting a deadline.

Again, at least some of the blame for the cabinet's dysfunctions rest with Hatoyama for creating a permissive environment. The dysfunction may also to a certain extent be a consequence of the bumpy transition to a new policymaking process based on cabinet government, in which all ministers are responsible for the government's policies instead of just the policies of their ministries (hence Okada's stressing the importance of unity among ministers). The Futenma problem is the first major test of the new system, and the government's failure should be seen in that light.

Coalition politics: Another argument to account for the dysfunctional government looks to the DPJ's coalition with the Social Democrats and the People's New Party. Hatoyama is indecisive, this argument goes, because he is trying to keep his coalition partners — especially the Social Democrats — in the government.

I am inclined, however, to see the coalition explanation as one of the least significant when it comes to explaining the Hatoyama government's behavior.

First, there is enough dissatisfaction with the 2006 roadmap within the DPJ to suggest that even without the SDPJ being in government the Hatoyama government would still have tried to find an alternative plan. The SDPJ has perhaps complicated the process through its cooperation with activists in Okinawa and its own efforts to find an alternative site, but these activities have had at worst a marginal effect on problems that would have plagued the Hatoyama government even without the SDPJ's involvement.

Second, while some point to the SDPJ's threat of pulling out of the government should the air base stay in Okinawa, there is considerable reason to doubt the SDPJ's ability to follow through on a threat to withdraw from the government. Indeed, SDPJ members themselves have questioned the idea. The fact is that the SDPJ gains little from abandoning its seat inside the Hatoyama cabinet, and party members know it. From the prime minister's perspective, were he to find an alternative plan that the US would accept, it seems doubtful that he would back away from it on the basis of SDPJ grumbling.

The DPJ: What about divisions within the DPJ? Even if Hatoyama can safely ignore the SDPJ, has he been hindered by divisions within his own party? This view is popular in Washington, where it is taken as common knowledge that the DPJ is an incoherent, dysfunctional party. I have never been convinced that the DPJ is any more divided than the LDP was during the height of its power — and I am convinced that it is less divided than the LDP today.

On the Futenma question in particular, it is hard to see how the "divided DPJ" has undermined the government. The DPJ as a whole — like the cabinet — is largely in agreement on the need to develop an alternative plan (this includes "pro-US" DPJ politicians). While there may be some disagreement on the question of whether the alternative site should be inside or outside of Okinawa, I see no reason to believe that Hatoyama's indecision is the result of undue consideration of one view or the other, or that the party's backbenchers would not fall into line if and when the government reaches its conclusion.

To the extent that there is a division between government and party over Futenma, it is the role played by Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro that matters. Throughout the process, Ozawa has spoken out against any plan that keeps the replacement facility in Okinawa, consistent with the party's old "Okinawa Vision" paper that called for moving the base first out of the prefecture, then out of Japan entirely.

But again, it is worth asking what the process would have looked like had Ozawa been on the same page as the government. Has Hatoyama been indecisive because he was too solicitous of Ozawa's opinion? Has Ozawa forced the government to consider alternatives outside of Okinawa that it would not otherwise consider? At this point it is hard to say for sure, but even if Ozawa was on the same page as the government the Hatoyama government would have struggled to develop an alternative.

Ideology: Related to explanations based on party or coalition politics is an explanation based on ideology, that the whole dispute is the result of some kind of reflexive anti-Americanism on the part of the Hatoyama government.

As I see it, this argument is patently false. Were the Hatoyama government acting on the basis of a desire to boot US forces from Japanese shores, there would be no Futenma problem. The government would say "Yankees go home" and that would be the end of the story. That the Hatoyama government is searching so hard for alternatives — including alternatives within Okinawa — is evidence of its desire to maintain a constructive relationship with the US that includes US forces stationed in Japan, not evidence of its desire to undermine the relationship. The Hatoyama government's flailing about is evidence of its good faith in trying to find a solution that will satisfy all parties to the agreement.

Double-edged diplomacy: At the heart of the matter is, of course, the relationship between the central government, the Okinawan prefectural government, and local communities, all in the shadow of the alliance with the US. Beyond Hatoyama's deficiencies and beyond party politics in Tokyo like the complicated game being played between these actors.

Accordingly, even as one criticizes the Hatoyama government's approach to the Futenma problem, it is necessary to acknowledge that the Hatoyama government inherited a mess from the LDP. The LDP's approach to the roadmap was to reach an agreement with the US first, and local communities later. Between 2006 and 2009 very little had been done to secure the ratification of the people of Okinawa, who polls show as overwhelmingly opposed to the current plan. Prefectural and local officials have actively opposed both the current plan and alternative plans that would keep a replacement facility in Okinawa. According to the Okinawa Times, mayors of thirty-four of the prefectures forty-one municipalities will be participating in a mass public meeting on 25 April to oppose relocation inside Okinawa. The Okinawan public feels "betrayed" by the Hatoyama government and will, if anything, increase the pressure on the government.

One can debate the extent to which public anger has been fueled by the DPJ's raising expectations in Okinawa only to dash them once in power, but local concerns would be important regardless of the Hatoyama government's behavior since taking power.

The US government has been equally inflexible when it comes to the 2006 roadmap. To a certain extent, the US bears responsibility for upping the stakes on Futenma. By leaning hard on the Hatoyama government from its first weeks in office — starting with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's blunt message for the new government — Washington trapped the Hatoyama government between its perceived promises to the Okinawan people and its need to be seen as a responsible steward of Japan's most important bilateral relationship. Every action taken by the Hatoyama government thereafter was amplified, plugged into the narrative of the "crisis" in the relationship growing out of the Hatoyama government's understandable desire to revisit the 2006 roadmap.

While there are signs that the US might be willing to compromise if and when the Hatoyama government provides a detailed alternative, the damage has been done. By raising the stakes for the Hatoyama government, the US government made it less likely that it will get what it wants, a quick agreement along the lines of the 2006 agreement that speeds along the process of relocating Marines to Guam.

These arguments suggest that while some tension over Futenma may have been unavoidable, both the Hatoyama government and the Obama administration could have taken steps to minimize the damage to the relationship and the Hatoyama government. Had the Hatoyama government established a coherent, insulated policy review process from the beginning and communicated to the US the modesty of its aims (while trying to lower the expectations of the Okinawan people) and had the US government recognized the Hatoyama government's good faith and given it some room to maneuver domestically, the tension in the US-Japan relationship could have been avoided.

As it stands, the Hatoyama government is trapped. If it accepts the current agreement unchanged after months of posturing, it will undoubtedly face considerable opposition from a public that will ask what it was all for. If it presents a plan featuring an alternative location in Okinawa, it risks outrage in Okinawa and rejection by the US. If anything, the Hatoyama government's best option may be presenting the US with an alternative plan featuring a site outside of Okinawa, which would both appease the Okinawan public and force the US to vote up or down. Would this outcome be perverse? Absolutely, and it would  ikely ensure that the issue would remain on the agenda for months to come. But it seems like the only option open to the Hatoyama government as it tries to escape a trap of its own making.

Ozawa will stay home

On a visit to Tokyo in February, Kurt Campbell, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, met with embattled DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro and extended an invitation to visit Washington. Ozawa said he would visit on the condition that he be able to meet with President Barack Obama. At the time I suggested that since Ozawa's visit could undermine the Hatoyama government's tortuous process of reviewing the 2006 agreement on the realignment of US Forces in Japan, he should keep his Washington meetings as perfunctory as possible — and also wrote that "perhaps it would be better off if an Ozawa visit to Washington fell through."

The visit has in fact fallen through: on Wednesday it became clear that Ozawa would not be going to Washington during the Golden Week holidays and will instead be going sometime after this summer's Upper House election. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, a number of DPJ officials suggested that by going to Washington Ozawa would raise the specter of "dual diplomacy." Asahi similarly suggested that the trip has been postponed so as to not cast a shadow over the Hatoyama government's ongoing effort to find a solution to the Futenma problem.

While some will fret that Ozawa's not going to Washington after having taken such a high-visibility trip to Beijing last year sends a signal that the DPJ is more interested in good relations with China than with the US, it would be a mistake to interpret the decision to postpone in this light. If anything, it should suggest that perhaps too much value was attributed to Ozawa's trip to China in the first place.

I remain convinced that it is an unqualified good that Ozawa will not be in a position to intervene in diplomacy over Futenma at a critical moment for the Hatoyama government. Any expectation in Washington that Ozawa holds the key to solving the impasse over Futenma rests on a distorted impression of Ozawa's power within the DPJ-led government, an especially distorted impression now that the one thing the public is largely in agreement on is the desirability of Ozawa's being removed as secretary-general and that Ozawa has been forced to tolerate criticism from DPJ members. Indeed, reminiscent of the idea in American politics that power in a presidential administration depends on physical proximity to the Oval Office, Asahi suggests that a "new troika" may be forming, composed of Hatoyama, Finance Minister Kan Naoto, and reform czar Sengoku Yoshito, as the latter two now have offices in the Prime Minister's residence.

The solution to the Futenma dispute will ultimately depend on the prime minister and his cabinet, which is why Watanabe Kozo, a senior DPJ legislator, suggested that Hatoyama would have to step down in the event that he fails to resolve the dispute by the end of May. The real risks of Ozawa's further complicating the process is not worth the trivial symbolic benefits that would come from Ozawa's trip.

Open diplomacy

Within a week of the formation of the first Bolshevik government, Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, went to the foreign ministry and forced the staff to open safes containing secret treaties that the Tsarist government had made with the Allied powers over the course of World War I, treaties that for the most part concerned how the Allies would divide up the territorial spoils of war.

"Abolition of secret diplomacy," wrote Trotsky, "is the first essential of an honorable, popular, and really democratic foreign policy."

Lest anyone think this opposition to secret diplomacy was simply a reflection of the new government's opposition to the "propertied minority," the first of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points was a call for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." (Although, it should be noted, the Fourteen Points were to a certain extent a response to the Bolsheviks.)

On Tuesday the Hatoyama government's expert panel reviewing secret agreements made between the US and Japanese governments from the 1960s onward released its report, confirming the existence of the ongoing agreement that permitted the introduction of US nuclear weapons into Japan for the duration of the cold war despite the three non-nuclear principles that would seem to prohibit precisely that. The panel revealed more than 300 documents, although it seems that some were missing. Naturally the panel drew criticism from recent LDP prime ministers, who had continued to deny the existence of the documents despite their existence having been confirmed by declassified US documents. On the other end of the political spectrum, Fukushima Mizuho, consumer affairs minister and head of the Social Democratic Party, praised the report as "ground-breaking."

My point in linking the Bolshevik government's release of secret treaties to the DPJ's release of secret treaties is not to suggest that the DPJ is somehow dangerously radical or akin to the Bolsheviks. After all, by releasing the documents the Bolsheviks damaged the ongoing war effort and triggered Wilson's efforts to recast the war as something other than a war among empires for territory. To a certain extent, the Hatoyama government is merely rectifying the Japanese side of the historical record, seeing as how the US stopped deploying nuclear weapons overseas at the end of the cold war and confirmed as much nearly a decade ago.

My point rather is that concerns about secret diplomacy are not unprecedented, and that they are naturally linked to broader concerns about how a country is governed. In this sense the Hatoyama government is doing more than historical recordkeeping, but rather it is showing that open government does not stop at water's end. Not content with revealing the many ways in which bureaucrats — under the watch of LDP governments — have wasted taxpayer money, the DPJ wants to show how the LDP conducted foreign relations out of the sight of Japanese voters. It is perhaps easy for the DPJ government to criticize decisions made during the cold war, but then the Hatoyama government would not be the first to question cynical decisions made by governments during the cold war. (Anyone else remember when Condoleeza Rice criticized FDR for abandoning Eastern Europe at Yalta?)

The DPJ has in fact been consistent in its opposition to secret diplomacy conducted by LDP-led governments, right up to the present day. When the DPJ opposed the extension of the Indian Ocean refueling mission after taking control of the upper house in 2007, central to its argument was that the government had not been forthright with information about what exactly the ships were doing there. Who was the fuel going to, and what were those ships doing after being refueled?

More importantly, the same concerns drive the Hatoyama government's approach to the Futenma issue. Lost in the endless amounts of copy written about the dispute is that the Hatoyama government has been animated as much by the process by which the 2006 agreement was reached as by its content. The manifesto upon which the DPJ was elected, after all, promised only a review of the realignment roadmap. It made no promises about what the DPJ would push for instead. As the government has repeatedly stated, it is proceeding from a "zero base" as it conducts its review of the roadmap and possible alternatives. While the negotiation process and the roadmap that resulted were far from secret, the DPJ wanted to review whether LDP governments actually considered all options, skepticism that is not unwarranted given the long history of secret diplomacy with the US.

The Hatoyama government deserves some blame for not being clearer about why it wanted a review in the first place, which enabled some to paint the government as anti-American. But those who see the Futenma dispute in the worst possible light have misinterpreted the Hatoyama government's position. I think that the Hatoyama government is approaching Futenma less as a foreign policy issue than as a domestic policy issue, because a bilateral agreement as complicated the realignment plan involves too many actors within Japan to be simply a bilateral matter for governments in Tokyo and Washington. Indeed, if the 2006 agreement has a flaw it is that the Koizumi government acted without the full approval of Okinawan constituents, which explains at least in part why subsequent LDP governments did little but drag their feet on implementing the agreement.

The Hatoyama government is acting in good faith in trying to find an agreement that will satisfy all parties, not just the US government. Not surprisingly it has found that "double-edged" diplomacy is tricky, if not impossible — little wonder that governments opt to keep their foreign affairs secret. As the May deadline for its review approaches, hints that the government is leaning towards a plan to build a Futenma replacement facility in Okinawa on land instead of offshore has prompted opposition from local governments and the prefectural assembly, from DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro, and from the US itself. The whole process could end in failure, with no one happy with the final outcome, least of all the Hatoyama government.

But whether or not the Hatoyama government succeeds, it is important to recognize that it is acting on the basis of an old idea, that a democratic foreign policy must necessarily be conducted in the sight of the people in whose name it is being conducted. In its pursuit of this aim, the Hatoyama government has also implicitly suggested that an alliance conducted behind closed doors is inappropriate for a more democratic Japan, that the alliance will not endure if it continues to rest upon secret agreements and understandings.

A new alliance in the making

Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya has arrived in Hawaii for a Tuesday morning meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Following weeks of bilateral acrimony, the two will discuss negotiations to strengthen bilateral cooperation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the US-Japan mutual security treaty, signed fifty years ago this month.

For the moment it appears that the US will — not without displeasure — set Futenma aside while a defense ministry team considers possible alternatives for building a replacement facility at Henoko bay. In advance of her meeting with Okada, Clinton said, echoing a recent New York Times op-ed by Joseph Nye (more on this in a moment), that the alliance is more important than Futenma, and she and Okada will discuss ways to improve cooperation instead of dwelling on the contentious base issue.

It is about time that the Obama administration stepped back from the brink. The administration ought to have known better. It is one thing to state that the US government understands the Hatoyama government's political constraints; it is another to act on the basis of this recognition and play it cool, recognizing that perhaps there is something unseemly about the US government's leaning heavily on the first Japanese government headed by a party other than the (longtime US client) LDP to abandon a campaign promise within weeks of taking power.

Nye's counsel of patience is well-timed and appropriate — as is his admonition that "a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic" if it comes about through a heavy-handed approach to the Hatoyama government. Also appropriate is his reminder that the bilateral relationship is about China, as it was when Nye was at the Pentagon spearheading the review of the alliance in 1995. "Integrate, but hedge," writes Nye.

The problem, however, is that 2010 is not 1995. Japanese leaders and the Japanese public remain concerned about China's rise, but Japan's economy is far more dependent on China's than it was in 1996 when the US and Japan reaffirmed their security relationship. If anything, the idea of a threatening rise seemed clearer in 1996, when China was menacing Taiwan, than today, with China, its economy growing even as the developed economies struggle to recover from the global financial crisis, continuing to modernize its armed forces. Today China is an indispensable participant in global meetings but also, perhaps, a hegemon in waiting in East Asia. At the same time, the value of the US-Japan alliance as a security relationship may be less valuable today than in 1995. It would only be sensible for Japanese officials to wonder about the value of the US deterrent after what Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong call "the end of influence." As they write in their new book by that title: "As money alters power relations, the United States is not simply becoming dependent — but it is no longer independent, either. That is a major change. And China is no longer helpless and cowed in face of the superpower hegemon; it has got a grip on it. Indeed, while the world peeks in, the two countries are realizing that they have thrown themselves into an intimate economic embrace with, to say the least, very mixed feelings."

The alliance is by no means valueless, but the terms certainly have changed. Japan can no longer afford to be wholly dependent on the alliance as its hedge against a violent turn in China's rise, because the US commitment may be less than ironclad. Even politically, Japan has plenty of reasons to desire good relations not just with China — as it watches the US develop the bilateral relationship described by its current secretary of state as the world's most important — but with other countries in the region that eye China warily even as they profit from its rise. The Futenma feud has, to a certain extent, drawn attention away from the Hatoyama government's other initiatives: the prime minister's multilateral diplomacy, but, more importantly, his visit to India, his government's first negotiations with Russia over the Northern territories (of particular importance to Hatoyama as the grandson of Ichiro, who restored Japan's relations with the Soviet Union in 1956), and the possibility of a rejuvenated partnership with South Korea. Analysts who see Japan's foreign policy decision as a dichotomous choice — the US or China — are missing the reality that Japan prefers to be dependent on neither, or rather prefers good relations with both (a "dual hedge") and moreover close relations with other countries in the region as a hedge against US-China competition and cooperation. It will take time for these diplomatic initiatives to bear fruit, but the Hatoyama government is moving forward with a clear vision. It recognizes the need to enhance Japan's influence in the region, and by signaling a renewed willingness to make amends for Japan's wartime past and a desire to deepen Japan's economic ties within the region (an important theme of the government's new growth strategy), the Hatoyama government is developing an Asia-centered foreign policy.

The question for the US and Japan going forward is what role the alliance can play in this more fluid regional environment. The hope that the US and Japan, along with other democracies, could present a united front tasked with integrating China peacefully has proven unrealistic. Instead the most salient division in the region may be that separating the US and China from the region's middle and small powers. Accordingly, the security relationship will be scaled back (as discussed here), making the dispute over Futenma that much more of a distraction. The future of the US-Japan relationship may be a hard security core linked to the defense of Japan and some form of US forward presence in Japan (in the same way that Singapore has facilitated the US forward presence in the region), looser political and economic cooperation in the region, and closer cooperation on global issues like climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and the like.

What remains to be answered is how long the US will be willing and able to maintain forces in the region — and how much of the cost of basing them in Japan Tokyo will be willing to bear. The answer to these questions remains to be seen, but in time Ozawa Ichiro's offhand remarks last year about the US forward presence one day being reduced to the Seventh Fleet (and air force elements, as he later added) could prove accurate.

These changes will take years to unfold, and they are not foreordained: exogenous shocks of one form or another could take the region and its major players in different directions than that outlined here.

But the dream of 1996 has passed. The US-Japan relationship will be looser and less security-centered than alliance managers had hoped following the 1996 security declaration, the 1997 guidelines, and the Koizumi government's support for the Bush administration in Western and Central Asia.

The unrealistic DPJ?

In the Wall Street Journal, Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini recently warned of the dangers of the Hatoyama government's "unrealistic" policies and advising Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio to follow Barack Obama's lead.

Hatoyama, they tell us, needs to face up to reality. He "needs to become 'Hatobama,' a pragmatist ready to disappoint ideological allies and assuage centrist fears of a policy agenda his country simply can't afford."

They knock Hatoyama and the DPJ for "ambitious" and "contradictory" promises, repeat unquestioningly the Washington line that the DPJ risks undermining the US-Japan alliance (more on this in a moment), and finally worry that the DPJ is too strong, too unhindered and therefore could run up Japan's debt without triggering growth, producing an "an unnecessarily turbulent 2010." Hatoyama needs to become less ideological and more willing to compromise, like Obama.

The central premise of this op-ed is that if Japan struggles, it is because of the unthinking ideology of the DPJ and not because of the intractable problems that years of misrule by the LDP left for the DPJ to solve. There are several critical gaps, however, in this op-ed.

First, aside from suggesting that Hatoyama become more willing to "assuage centrist fears" — whatever those are — they offer few indications as to what the Hatoyama government should be doing. What, if anything, should the government scale back? What should it be doing instead? Japan's national debt is obviously a problem, but, on the other hand, given that the government has managed to run up the national debt to such considerable heights without facing disaster, it seems that Japan is in uncharted waters when it comes to the its debt-GDP ratio.

Second, and related to this last point, Bremmer and Roubini are vague about the consequences of the Hatoyama government's policies. "Unnecessarily turbulent?" What does that mean in real-world terms? More importantly, how much more turbulent could it get compared to 2008-2009? Alternatively, might not turbulence simply be the natural by-product of an electoral victory that even these authors recognize as "historic."

Third, their praise of the American system and its veto points and their recommendation that Hatoyama should act as if he faces a similar environment is strange considering that the DPJ is deliberately trying to move away from a system characterized by a surfeit of veto players, a system that prevented the LDP from introducing reforms that might have reoriented Japan away from its export-led growth model years ago. After years of governments paralyzed by a cumbersome policymaking system, a bit of turbulence may be a small price to pay for a government capable of articulating and implementing policies without having them die by a thousand cuts at the hands of lower-level bureaucrats and parliamentary backbenchers.

Bremmer and Roubini are right to call attention to the contradictions in the DPJ's program, but again, they do not consider that these contradictions are rooted in the contradictory challenges facing the Hatoyama government. As I have discussed in this post and elsewhere, the DPJ faces a trilemma: get the national debt under control, build a more robust social safety net, and develop a new economic growth model rooted in more consumption by Japanese and more investment in sunrise industries, which has heretofore been woefully deficient (with the additional wrinkle of cutting Japan's carbon emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020). In other words, the Hatoyama government isn't just trying to engineer a "recovery": it is trying to, it needs to, construct a new economic model to replace the broken model of growth finally shattered by the global economic crisis. Economic growth alone is not good enough. Had the Japanese people wanted that, they could have returned the LDP to power, which as always promised growth plain and simple.

The problem is not that the Hatoyama government is too ideological, although perhaps on certain issues this complaint has some truth (temporary laborers, for example) — the problem is that the government runs the risk of being mired in these contradictory tasks, unable to deliver satisfactorily on any of them. This is an all-too-real risk, but if the Hatoyama government fails, it will not be on account of a lack of pragmatism.

The same goes for the US-Japan alliance. For all the talk of the DPJ's ideological inflexibility — whether out of conviction or a desire to preserve its coalition with the SDPJ and PNP — the DPJ-led government has proven to be flexible on the Futenma question. Trying to thread the needle between abandoning its promises to the Japanese people outright and saying no for the sake of saying no to the US, the Hatoyama government is trying to develop a constructive alternative to the 2006 agreement. And, meanwhile, when Americans talk of the Hatoyama government's "undermining" the alliance, I cannot help but wonder whether that is a threat or a prediction. If the DPJ damages the alliance, it will be as much the result of the Obama administration's reaction to the Hatoyama government as of the Hatoyama government's actions regarding Futenma.

The point is that both at home and abroad the Hatoyama government has been remarkably open to "pragmatic" solutions to the problems facing Japan. Indeed, if the government's public support has fallen it is because the government has been too yielding, the prime minister too reluctant to commit to a line of policy.

Hatoyama himself is certainly aware of the challenges before him, noting on his return to work Monday that 2010 is a "do-or-die" year for Japan.

Returning to Asia

To a certain extent, Japan’s political year ended in August when the Democratic Party of Japan defeated the Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide. From the vantage point of December, 100 days into the Hatoyama government, the Aso government and LDP rule already seem distant.

But from another perspective, it is not so easy to draw a line in Japan’s political history.

The DPJ’s victory represents not so much a break as an experiment. Beset with difficulties at home and abroad — naiyu gaikan, in the Japanese — the Japanese public opted to change captains after giving the LDP opportunity after opportunity to right the ship of state. This is not to say that the LDP and the DPJ are interchangeable. The DPJ’s new model of government does mark a departure from the LDP system. Discussion about turmoil within the Hatoyama cabinet or the role of DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro in the government ignores the obvious conclusion that disagreements within the cabinet actually matter under the DPJ — and that it is the influence of one party official that is being debated and not the veritable army of subcommittee chairmen who wielded influence under the LDP. The bureaucracy, far from sabotaging the Hatoyama government, has largely acquiesced to “political leadership.” The transformation of Japanese governance that is well underway is significant and overdue.

The question, however, is what the DPJ-led government is doing with its newfound capabilities. When it comes to policy, the evidence of change is mixed. It is far too early in the new government’s tenure to draw definitive conclusions about its successes and failures, but in both economic and foreign policy it is possible to sketch the Hatoyama government’s achievements and consider the extent to which the new government has parted ways with the LDP.

Foreign policy: I will start with foreign policy because it is foreign policy that has grabbed the headlines for most of the past three months.

In foreign policy, it certainly looks like the DPJ is taking Japan in a new direction. Washington certainly thinks that the Hatoyama government is doing so — an recent article in the Washington Post by John Pomfret says that U.S. officials see Hatoyama Yukio as “mercurial,” “befuddling” analysts, who wonder whether the prime minister is engineering a “significant policy shift” away from the U.S.

There are two questions to consider here. First, is the DPJ shifting from the U.S., and if so, how (and how is its foreign policy approach different from the LDP’s)?

I would answer the first question with a “yes, but.” Talk of a shift implies that there are but two choices for Japan in Asia: siding with the U.S. or siding with China. The reality, however, is that Japan is choosing both (or neither). The DPJ’s foreign policy approach, which will continue to evolve in the New Year, is grounded in the recognition that Japan cannot afford to be overly dependent on either the U.S. or China. Japan is hedging, against the U.S. by ensuring that the country enjoys a constructive political relationship with China, against China by continuing to stress that the U.S.-Japan alliance is, in the words of Kan Naoto, the deputy prime minister, “the most important relationship” for stability in the region and the world. The Futenma question is entangled with this shift. As power within Japan shifts from bureaucrats to politicians — and as Japan shifts from a US-centered foreign policy to a more flexible foreign policy — it is hardly surprising that the new government has raised objections to an agreement foisted on the public by alliance managers. It is unclear to me why Washington is so surprised that the Hatoyama government is doing precisely what the DPJ said it would do: push for a revision of the 2006 agreement. (It is also unclear to me why the DPJ should be more concerned about breaking promises to Washington — if that it is indeed what the Hatoyama government is doing — than about breaking promises made to the Japanese people) The DPJ is showing that its new realism means that it will make decisions on the basis of Japan’s national interests. It will not simply accept decisions made by previous governments or embrace the U.S. line, no matter how strenuously US government officials, senior military officers, and former government officials bemoan the “befuddling” actions of the new government.

“New realism”: perhaps the “new” is not necessary, because the DPJ is following in the footsteps of Meiji oligarchs and Yoshida Shigeru in trying to maximize Japan’s foreign policy options and limit the degree to which it is dependent on others. It is also, incidentally, following in the footsteps of the LDP prime ministers who succeeded Koizumi Junichiro. After Koizumi attempted to center Japan’s foreign policy on the US-Japan alliance, even conservative successors like Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro recognized that they could not afford to alienate China in the way that Koizumi did for the duration of his premiership. Fukuda Yasuo went further than both his predecessor and his successor to acknowledge that in the evolving Asian order Japan could do treat the US-Japan alliance and Japanese foreign policy as interchangeable, but the three prime ministers were consistent in recognizing that Japan needs to expand its freedom of actions in the region.

In this sense, the Hatoyama government is building upon the work of its predecessors. Hatoyama, with his talk of an East Asian Community, may be more enthusiastic in this pursuit than LDP prime ministers, but the thrust is the same: Japan needs to build new relationships and modify its relationship with the US, making it less about security cooperation and more about other forms of cooperation. Regarding the former, while most observers view the Hatoyama government has focused on forging a closer relationship with China, I think we should see its actions as driven by a desire to avoid having to choose between the US and China. Much like other countries in the region that have strong ties with both great powers, the Hatoyama government is trying to develop a “third way” composed of multilateral cooperation among all countries and bilateral ties with countries in the region other than the US and China.

Hatoyama’s recent trip to India is particularly revealing in this regard. Building upon initiatives developed by Abe and Aso, Hatoyama met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss developing the Indo-Japanese global partnership, deepening cooperation on security, and promoting Japanese investment in India. The difference between Hatoyama and Abe, for example, who in 2007 visited India to promote security cooperation with India in the context of a quadrilateral that included the US and Australia, is that Hatoyama is promoting a strictly bilateral relationship. Unlike the Abe government, the Hatoyama government’s approach does not look like the encirclement of China by a “league of democracies.” It is not robed with the rhetoric of “universal values” but rather appears to be driven by the Hatoyama government’s desire to expand its freedom of action. By the same token, the agreement to create an Indo-Japanese two-plus-two by which Indian and Japanese foreign and defense sub-cabinet officials can meet regularly looks different when it is not accompanied by rhetorical volleys aimed at China and is not linked to a wider network of security cooperation among democracies.

The same desire to forge relationships independent of the US and China drives the new government’s approaches to South Korea, ASEAN, Russia, Australia, and others.

Of course, the Hatoyama government — or the DPJ, considering Ozawa’s giant mission to China in December and Ozawa’s leaning on the Imperial Household Agency to arrange an audience with the Emperor for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s likely successor — has symbolically focused attention on the relationship with China that contrasts with the friction in the relationship with the US. But it is worth noting that the Hatoyama government has not moved beyond symbolic gestures in the Sino-Japanese relationship, while focusing on concrete cooperation with other countries in Asia. And as for the US, if US officials were not so short sighted they might recognize that there will likely be benefits for US-Japanese cooperation in the medium and long runs from the Futenma dispute. The DPJ is airing grievances about the alliance that had been muffled around the LDP: that while the US will bear the lion’s share of the burden in the (unlikely) event of war, the Japanese people bear the more immediate costs of hosting US forces in peacetime and that the central government in Tokyo has in turn shifted an unreasonable share of the burden of hosting US forces onto Okinawa. Meanwhile, given that the Hatoyama government is even more determined than the Obama administration to forge a realignment agreement that balances security concerns with the environmental and social concerns of the citizens of Okinawa and Japan more broadly, as well as the DPJ and its coalition partners, it may be worth waiting the extra five months that the Hatoyama government will spend devising an alternative. Furthermore, by saying no to the US, the Hatoyama government may have done more to force a discussion on the form and functions of the alliance than years of LDP rule.

The Japanese people seem to prefer some sort of “Goldilocks consensus” in Japan’s foreign policy. Unease with the Hatoyama government’s handling of US-Japan relations suggests that citizens do not want the government to go too far in saying no to the US, but growing satisfaction with the state of Sino-Japanese relations also suggests that citizens do not want the government to antagonize China. In this year’s Cabinet survey of foreign policy attitudes, the proportion of respondents who view the Sino-Japanese relationship as “satisfactory” rose to 38.5% from 23.7%, while the proportion of respondents who view the relationship as unsatisfactory fell to 55.2% from 71.9%. I think there is value in looking at this improvement in light of a poll conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the waning months of the Koizumi government, in which 77.9% of respondents desired improvement in the relationship. 47.7% of respondents said that cooperation should focus on forging a generally cordial relationship with an eye on the big picture, compared with 20% who thought it should focus on regional and global matters and only 10% who felt it should focus on Japanese sovereign rights. There is little desire to return to the ice age of the Koizumi years.

Despite the impression of US officials, the DPJ-led government, far from being radically out of line with the Japanese public, is virtually at the center of the Japanese political spectrum on foreign policy. That could be a problem for those who believe in a security-centered US-Japan relationship rooted in shared values and implicitly directed at a rising China, but it need not be a problem for US-Japan cooperation as a whole.

Incidentally, the reason we can have this discussion about the DPJ’s foreign policy changes is due to the nature of foreign policy, which is largely interpretive and rooted in symbols and language. Doctrines and declarations, the stuff of foreign policy, can signify change without actually changing anything in reality — which should serve as a note of caution that for all the doctrinal changes associated with the Hatoyama government, the US and Japan still enjoy a close partnership with a durable foundation and very much unlike the relationships between the US and China and Japan and China. Japan’s foreign policy may change perceptibly under the DPJ, but it would be wise for the US to not overreact to change that is in any event driven by forces larger than who governs in Tokyo — and it would behoove the Hatoyama government to be more insistent about reminding the Obama administration about the ways the relationship is not changing (even if the Obama administration is reluctant to listen).

Economic policy: Unlike foreign policy, however, in which a speech or a summit can serve as evidence of change, economic policy is more complicated. For starters, economic policy failures are more immediately felt by citizens — and have more immediate consequences for governments. The costs for getting economic policy wrong are (usually) much more noticeable for citizens than the costs of foreign policy blunders. Inheriting an economy in recession, the Hatoyama government has been particularly sensitive to the need to get economic policy right. After all, as of November Japan’s unemployment rate was 5.2%, only a slight improvement over July’s record 5.7% unemployment.

While it is far too soon to grade the Hatoyama government on its macroeconomic record, the government has provided the latest guide to its economic policy approach in a new economic strategy approved by the cabinet on Wednesday. Readers will recall that during the campaign that DPJ struggled with economic strategy: given the weakness of its proposals in its manifesto, the party was compelled to issue a clarification that attempted to outline the DPJ’s growth strategy.

The basis of the DPJ’s campaign rhetoric — repeated in the introduction to the latest strategy — is that Japan has to shift from a producer-centered economic growth model to a consumer-centered growth model. In other words, it is essential for the government to stimulate consumer spending on foreign and domestic goods and services, providing a better quality of life for Japanese citizens.

The new strategy states that the goal is to create a “problem-solving-style state” that will tackle climate change and the problem of Japan’s aging, shrinking society by promoting “green innovation” and “life innovation,” in the process making Japan into a “model country.” While there are a number of laudable proposals in this strategy — the focus on trade and investment within the Asia-Pacific is particularly noteworthy — the document reads like so many LDP economic strategies before it, flighty rhetoric and ambitious goals without clear proposals for how to achieve them (and like the Abe government, a clear penchant for katakana buzzwords). Similarly, the very idea of a growth strategy suggests that the government can plan the transition from producer-centered to consumer- and innovation-centered growth. I do not see how, with the return of deflation, the government will convince households to spend the cash they have been hoarding, or how the government will promote greater risk-taking and entrepreneurship among young Japanese, in the process remaking the labor market so that workers who fail to secure regular employment upon finishing school are not forever condemned to irregular employment. For that matter, there is little sense of the tradeoffs facing the Hatoyama government. How will it balance the goal of restoring fiscal normalcy with the goal of building a social safety net with the goal of promoting green innovation and other measures to promote economic growth?

The DPJ-led government will have to surmount these challenges in large part because its predecessors failed to do so. It will clearly take time, which, again, is not the DPJ’s fault seeing as how the LDP did little to shift Japan’s economic model after the bubble burst.

Perhaps the one saving grace of the new growth strategy is its focus on Asia. In this sense the division between foreign and economic policy is artificial: like Japan’s governments at other critical turning points, the Hatoyama government recognizes the centrality of economic policy for achieving the country’s foreign policy goals. Without being more open to trade and investment within the region, there is no way that Japan will be able to expand its influence in the region as China continues to grow. That competition need not be zero-sum — but even to reap positive-sum gains Japan will actually have to enter the competition for influence. Bilateral EPAs concluded within the region in recent years are a start, but Japan has more work to do.

As we look ahead to 2010, we should see how this process of reorienting Japan to an Asia that is increasingly the center of the international system. In doing so, the DPJ will not necessarily be forging a new path but will instead be taking bigger steps along a path that the LDP had already started down, a path laid by the changing regional order. The US will remain an important player in Asia, but no longer will it be the region’s indispensable nation. Indeed, the Hatoyama government’s policies should put pressure on the Obama administration to follow through on President Obama’s claim that his is the first “Asia-Pacific” presidency. In 2010 the two allies will have to consider the meaning of their alliance even as they celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. They should not shrink from this task.

There are big changes afoot. While the DPJ and its leader are responsible for some of the content of Japan’s new policies, it is likely that similar debates would have occurred even had the LDP been able to retain power.

There is no guarantee that the DPJ will succeed in either smoothly transitioning to a more independent foreign policy without alienating the US, China, or both, or build a new economic growth model without bankrupting the country or simply failing to promote new industries. But by the end of 2010 we should have a better sense of whether the Hatoyama government will succeed in its bid to return Japan to Asia.