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 2006 roadmap's impasses

In the wake of its defeat the Kan government has made it patently clear that the Hatoyama government's "ratification" of the 2006 realignment plan was nothing of the sort — it is now saying that it will be impossible to complete negotiations before Okinawan gubernatorial election in November. The government once again is considering alternatives to the V-shaped runways to be built at Henoko bay, and is reluctant to impose a solution on the Okinawan people.

But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, American domestic politics is emerging as a new constraint on implementing the 2006 agreement. Both houses of Congress have voted to cut funding for the construction on Guam that is necessary to prepare the island to receive the 8,000 Marines and their dependents that according to the plan will move from Okinawa to Guam in 2014.

Congressional staff members said the problems in building new facilities for the Marines in Guam loomed even larger than the politics in Japan in their decision to cut funding.

The Senate appropriations committee said they remained concerned about Guam’s inadequate water, electrical, road and sewer infrastructure — and said inadequate planning had gone in to preparing for the nonmilitary aspects of the move.

The House Appropriation Committee report echoed the Senate findings about Guam, and said it had made the cuts because of the Defense Department’s “inability to address numerous concerns about the sustainability of the buildup as currently planned.”

These budget cuts come more than two years after the US government's Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the Defense Department the the US military for dragging its feet on the Guam end of the realignment plan and suggested that it was unlikely that the 2014 target would be met — and not because of Japanese politics. In late 2008 Admiral Timothy Keating, then the commander of US Pacific Command, acknowledged that the plan would most likely not be executed on schedule, citing budgetary concerns.

Corey Wallace is right to point to Washington's hypocrisy — for all of Washington's hand-wringing about political instability in Japan, the reality of the 2006 agreement was that the domestic political conditions concerning the agreement in both countries were at best complicated, and at worse impassable. For the realignment to go forward on schedule, the US government would have to secure the support of the people of Guam and Congress would have to budget a tremendous amount of money to improve the island's infrastructure, while Tokyo secured the support of communities in Okinawa and budget for the Futenma replacement facility and the construction underway on Guam.

In the rush to get something committed to paper, the Bush administration and the LDP have left the alliance with a festering sore, an agreement that looks all but unimplementable, has eroded trust between Washington and Tokyo, and mortally wounded the DPJ in its ten months in office. Considering these costs, it is remarkable that the Obama administration has clung so tenaciously to this Bush administration legacy. Is there anything in American foreign policy making to rival the much-vaunted bipartisan consensus on Japan?

Facing constraints in the alliance

Prime Minister Kan Naoto had his debut on the world stage at the G20 meeting in Toronto this week. While in Toronto he had his first meeting with US President Barack Obama.

As Reuters notes, Kan met with Obama for a half-hour, considerably more time than Hatoyama got when he visited Washington in April (when Hatoyama was infamously described as "loopy"). The two leaders apparently discussed their shared love of matcha ice cream, and the Japanese media looked for signs that the two were becoming pals, looking for evidence that the relationship between the US and Japan was back on track after the Hatoyama government "strained" the bilateral relationship.

Meanwhile at gatherings in Washington to commemorate the "fiftieth anniversary" of the alliance (depending on when one chooses the date the birth of the alliance), the mood, according to Peter Ennis, was relatively upbeat following Hatoyama's decision to embrace a version of the status quo regarding Futenma and his subsequent resignation. Ennis says that the theme was "emphasize the positive."

All well and good, but as far as I can tell the alliance is right back to where it was 2007-2009, with the only difference being that the Japanese government is openly confronting the problems surrounding the implementation of the 2006 roadmap.

As I've argued before, the collapse of the Abe government in 2007 was more than just a spectacular reversal for the LDP — it marked the end of the bilateral "project" that grew out of the Nye Initiative in the mid-1990s to build a stronger, closer US-Japan alliance. After rewriting the guidelines on defense cooperation, securing (token) Japanese contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, and develop a new "shared values" rationale for the alliance, the project ran squarely into the wall of political realities in Japan and in the region.

Regarding the former, when faced with a government that was dead set on constitution revision, it turned out that the Japanese public was not all that interested in it, no matter what years of Yomiuri Shimbun polls said (although revisionist politicians apparently missed the polls that showed that very few felt that constitution revision was an issue deserving of the attention of national leaders). More than that, there are few signs that the Japanese public is interested in anything but the status quo as far as security policy is concerned. In other words, the status quo in which Japan spends less and less each year on defense while playing host to forward-deployed US forces. While public opinion polls are at best ambiguous regarding Japan's former refueling mission in the Indian Ocean or its ongoing anti-piracy mission off the Horn of Africa, the public isn't exactly clamoring for a more expansive role abroad for the SDF. Nor does there seem to be much support for collective self-defense, another remaining piece of the project.

Now, of course, it's the job of the government to lead — indeed, dating back at least to the early 1990s the idea behind the administrative reforms at the heart of the DPJ's program was that it would produce more decisive leadership, especially in foreign and security affairs. But realistically speaking, it is unlikely that a government committed to a controversial fiscal retrenchment agenda will simultaneously pursue a foreign policy agenda that would if anything be more controversial, especially in light of the domestic agenda.

The result is an unusual parallel to the Yoshida Doctrine, which, incidentally, Ambassador Katō Ryozō, who before serving as ambassador to the US for the whole of the Bush administration was deeply involved in the project to strengthen the alliance, recently declared had "completed its mission." Today Japan finds itself in a position where it needs an alliance with the US based on the forward deployment of troops not to free up resources for re-industrialization but so that it can weather its demographic plight and economic decline. The resulting arrangement looks the same, but the underlying logic is strikingly different — and remarkably fragile, resting as it does on the strength of the US commitment to Asia, the willingness of the Japanese taxpayer to provide host-nation support (and Okinawan and other communities to host US forces), and the restraint of the People's Republic of China.

In fairness, policymakers in both countries seem to recognize that this arrangement is less than ideal. For example, two years before he became known within US-Japan circles for issuing a warning to the Hatoyama government not to challenge the 2006 agreement, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered a speech in Tokyo calling for a review of the alliance that would seek to answer basic questions about its raison d'etre. 

But no one has taken up Gates's call, perhaps in large part because there are no easy answers to the challenges that face the alliance. Japan's domestic political environment shows no signs of changing (at least as far as the alliance is concerned), and the political environment could even worsen if the ruling parties fall short of a majority in the upper house. While China occasionally acts in ways that could trigger a shift in Japanese public opinion, on the whole China has been restrained, meaning that Japan will continue to seek a constructive partnership with China. There are no signs that the US commitment to regional security is wavering, but given the state of the US economy it is impossible to rule out an isolationist turn (fears of which naturally lead Japan and other countries in the region to consider their options).

In other words, the new project for the alliance is learning to accept and make the best of these constraints. As leaders of both countries say, the alliance continues to play an important role in providing peace and security in the region, but the idea that the alliance could be something more than a "passive" or negative force for peace (what, after all, could be more passive than oxygen, Joseph Nye's commonly used metaphor for the US presence in Asia), that it could play a creative role in promoting US values or reshaping the regional security environment appears to be increasingly fanciful. The alliance may well survive for decades to come, but its survival — and the form it takes — may depend less on decisions made in Washington and Tokyo than on decisions made in Beijing.

Mr. Kan's Third Way

The Third Way has, belatedly, arrived in Japan.

The style of politics popular in advanced industrial democracies during the 1990s among center-left leaders keen to reconcile their left-wing parties to the rise of neo-liberalism and the onset of austerity after the 1970s had heretofore failed to surface in Tokyo. But with the ascendancy of Kan Naoto, Third Way politics may get another lease on life in Japan.

In his maiden policy speech as prime minister on 11 June, Kan explicitly spoke of a "third way" to the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. Rejecting the first way, what he identifies as the ideology of the construction state (shared prosperity through public works), and the second way, "extreme market fundamentalism" focused on supply side reform at the expense of public welfare, Kan proposed a third way that would target the budget deficits that he says have produced ongoing stagnation and eroded confidence in the social security system. In short, he is trying to break what I've described elsewhere as an impossible trinity of deficit reduction, renewed, balanced, and low-carbon-emitting growth, and robust welfare provision.

What follows is a set of policies intended to create a "Strong Economy," "Strong Government Finances," and "Strong Social Security." 

His proposals on the first point are a reiteration of the DPJ's prevailing position on the economy: the need to balance external and domestic demand, to be realized through a combination of intra-Asian trade, tourism, Green technology, and support for families and the elderly.

On the second point, Kan alluded to the specter of Greece — an allusion that will be repeated in other times and places in the coming years — to make the case for aggressively attacking Japan's bloated national debt with efforts to cut wasteful spending and fundamental tax reform, which would undoubtedly include a consumption tax increase. Naturally he appealed to the LDP to cooperate with the government on this issue.

Finally he turned to social security, identifying a secure social security system as critical for economic growth. Effectively he argued that a shaky social security system in an aging society triggers hoarding on the part of middle-aged and senior citizens concerned about their well-being in retirement.

The similarities with the Third Way politics of Blair and Clinton are not accidental. Kan, a veteran of Japan's reformist, pragmatic left, is at once trying to unleash and humanize Japanese capitalism. He praises Koizumi's supply-side reforms for promoting the restructuring of Japanese businesses, but despairs of their impact upon Japanese society in the form of unemployment and persistent deflation.

While Kan arguably speaks more fluently about economic policy than any prime minister since Koizumi — his speech was largely free of the airy fairy rhetoric that characterized Hatoyama's pronouncements — it is difficult to see Kan's Third Way having any more success than the Anglo-American Third Way, which in retrospect seemed to do little more than promote the Casino Capitalism that produced the financial crisis that has arguably wiped out whatever gains were made to the state's role in welfare provision and plunged both countries ever deeper into debt. The point is not that Kan is foolish for trying to reconcile what appear to me at least as irreconcilable political goals: the political environment demands that the government addresses all three, not least the problems in the social security system. Instead, it seems likely that over time Kan will be forced to focus on one goal at the expense of the others — and that the privileged goal will be deficit reduction.

Even without Kan's embrace, it is likely that deficit reduction would become the government's primary goal with Greece serving as "focusing event," with Kan's government full of deficit hawks, and with the finance ministry still a potent force in policymaking. But with Kan himself having embraced the issue in strong terms, there appears to be little doubt that his government will prioritize deficit reduction above all else, to the point of the DPJ's including a pledge to increase the consumption tax in its manifesto for next month's upper house election (perhaps not a bad move politically with a Yomiuri poll showing sixty-six percent support for a consumption tax increase). Kan has also stated that within the month his government will establish 2020 as a goal for restoring the government's primary balance to surplus.

The question, however, is whether deficit reduction will lead to sustainable growth and secure social security spending. For example, I find it difficult to believe that the government will able to promote greater domestic demand, let alone sustain existing domestic demand while taxing consumption at higher levels. Deficit reduction is undoubtedly valuable in its own right, it's just difficult to see how the Kan government will be able to make good on the totality of its economic program. Can the government really cut enough waste and raise enough tax revenue to shrink its deficits while expanding programs to promote economic growth?

I think that the pursuit of deficit reduction will have implications for Japan's foreign and security policies. The first challenge, however, is figuring out exactly what has changed: Yomuiri sees a new realism in the DPJ's latest manifesto (discussed here at Twisting Flowers), but the reality is that apart from the new government's emphasis on rebuilding relations with the US and the call for defense transparency in China, the DPJ is putting in words what it has already been doing since taking power, especially in its focus on stronger bilateral ties with South Korea, Australia, and India. And really, the Hatoyama government was not nearly as soft on China — or as opposed to the US-Japan alliance — as the contemporary wisdom in Washington held.

Moreover, the Kan government's overtures to the US can be overstated: even the formulation of support for the alliance voiced in Kan's address last week was more like former LDP Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo's, in which the alliance is viewed largely in terms of its role in providing stability in Asia, than the vision of the alliance as resting on a foundation of shared values and dedicated to the promotion of democracy in the region. Like Fukuda, Kan recognizes that stable, constructive relations with Japan's neighbors, China most of all, are essential, and that the US-Japan alliance is valuable insofar as it contributes to Japan's Asia policy aims.

But in the Kan government's unflinching support for last month's agreement on Futenma, the new government is clearly interested in bolstering the US pillar of Japan's foreign policy. What I wonder is whether the DPJ's renewed interest in the security relationship is a function of its focus on deficit reduction. As the government looks to reduce spending, DPJ officials may increasingly be coming to the realization that austerity combined with regional uncertainty means that for the foreseeable future Japan will be dependent on US deterrent power. While the new government is quietly hedging against the possibility that the US commitment to Asia might weaken through its focus on bilateral cooperation with regional powers and its growing acceptance of the need to loosen restrictions on arms exports (which would lower the cost of bolstering Japanese's own conventional capabilities), the DPJ clearly accepts that for the foreseeable future it will be necessary to maintain a constructive security partnership with the US, even if the party continues to hope for an "equal" partnership.

It is open to debate whether austerity is leading the Kan government into a more enthusiastic embrace of the US (or even whether the embrace is more or less enthusiastic than the Hatoyama government's or any LDP government's for that matter). The DPJ may simply be free or cheap riding irrespective of concerns about austerity in the future. Or it may sincerely believe that the status quo is more or less the best option for Japan when it comes to coping with the rise of China.

However, I think the proposal to relax the three arms-exporting principles is a sign that the DPJ is sensitive to the costs of defending Japan and, therefore, that while the alliance may provide the most cost-effective means of national defense (provided measures are introduced to lessen the domestic political costs of US bases on Japanese soil), the government should look for ways to reduce the costs of Japan's providing its own defense in due time.

In short, at home and abroad the DPJ is performing balancing acts, pursuing multiple and at times conflicting goals that require flexibility on the part of the government — precisely the reason why Ozawa and other politicians have called for a stronger Westminster-style executive over the past two decades. Whether the government will be up to these challenges even with reform remains to be seen.

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.

The "losing Japan" narrative

In different ways, two articles published in Western media outlets this week suggest the emergence of a new narrative concerning Japan in elite circles in the United States. One might call that narrative the "losing Japan" narrative, reminiscent of the idea — propagated by newsman Henry Luce — that the United States, or rather, the Democratic Party "lost" China when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War. This narrative suggests that the United States is "losing" Japan to China, raising a call to arms that unless the US government acts expeditiously it could let the DPJ-led government lead Japan into China's embrace.

The first is the now infamous editorial in the Washington Post on Fujita Yukihisa, the DPJ upper house member best known for his doubts about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Michael Cucek and Paul Jackson have the controversy well-covered.) However egregious Fujita's views, Washington Post's editorial is revealing of the "losing Japan" narrative in a number of ways. Start with the editorial's treatment of the subject. Despite his impressive-sounding titles, Fujita has little or no role in Japanese foreign policymaking under the Hatoyama government. The international department is not a policy shop, and Diet committees are meaningless. Either the Post was ignorant of these facts — in which case the editorial writer, Lee Hockstader according to Fujita, did a poor job — or the Post was aware but wrote a misleading editorial anyway in which Fujita is ludicrously described as a "Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment." It is possible that the Washington Post made an honest mistake, but then one gets to the inferences Hockstader draws from Fujita's thoughts about 9/11:

The only thing novel about Mr. Fujita is that a man so susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe happens to occupy a notable position in the governing apparatus of a nation that boasts the world's second-largest economy.

We have no reason to believe that Mr. Fujita's views are widely shared in Japan; we suspect that they are not and that many Japanese would be embarrassed by them. His proposal two years ago that Tokyo undertake an independent investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 24 Japanese citizens died, went nowhere. Nonetheless, his views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Mr. Hatoyama, elected last summer, has called for a more "mature" relationship with Washington and closer ties between Japan and China. Although he has reaffirmed longstanding doctrine that Japan's alliance with the United States remains the cornerstone of its security, his actions and those of the DPJ-led government, raise questions about that commitment. It's a cliche but nonetheless true that the U.S.-Japan alliance has been a critical force for stability in East Asia for decades. That relationship, and its benefits for the region, will be severely tested if Mr. Hatoyama tolerates elements of his own party as reckless and fact-averse as Mr. Fujita.

Again, one can debate whether Fujita can be properly described as having a "notable position in the governing apparatus," but the leaps Hockstader takes from Fujita's position are unjustifiable, leaps that can be detected in the slippery language Hockstader uses. "Fujita's views seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama." Hockstader makes this outrageous charge without providing a shred of evidence beyond Fujita's views. Meanwhile, in the subsequent paragraph he casually dismisses the Hatoyama government's rhetorical commitment to the alliance (and, for that matter, its sizable financial commitment to the reconstruction of Afghanistan) to speak of "actions" that "raise questions." I assume here he means Futenma, although who knows. This phrasing is precisely the kind of attitude that has produced the DPJ's approach to the alliance in the first place, the idea that there is only one way to be in favor of the alliance. Finally, Hockstader basically threatens the Hatoyama government, suggesting that if Fujita is not dispensed with, his government will suffer accordingly in the eyes of official Washington.

Note, finally, that while Hockstader questions the sincerity of the Hatoyama government's commitment to the alliance, he says nothing more about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. The silence is deafening. Note also the scare quotes around mature, as if the DPJ's position that the alliance as it was conducted under the LDP is in need of changes is an absurd idea. The DPJ, he seems to be saying, has a critical approach to the alliance and an uncritical approach to the Sino-Japanese relationship. (This comparison is hardly valid: the US-Japan relationship is complex and has the thorny question of US forces in Japan at the heart of it, while the Sino-Japanese relationship is not nearly as complex and is still progressing by baby steps from the deep freeze it experienced under Koizumi.)

As I read it, the editorial can be summarized as "Hatoyama's party harbors a 9/11 denier, clearly does not take the relationship with the US seriously, and is moving Japan closer to China."

A more serious version of this argument can be found in the Financial Times, where columnist Gideon Rachman argues that the DPJ gives the impression of drifting in China's direction.

He writes:

When Mr Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan took power last August, it broke more than 50 years of almost continuous administration by the Liberal Democratic Party. The DPJ is keen to differentiate itself from the LDP in almost every respect, and foreign policy is no exception. In an interview last week, Katsuya Okada, Japan’s foreign minister, said that the LDP followed US foreign policy “too closely”. “From now onwards,” says Mr Okada, “this will be the age of Asia.” The foreign minister adds that talk of Japan choosing between China and the US is meaningless, and that Japan’s friendship with America will remain “qualitatively different” from its relations with China. But some DPJ party members have called for a policy of “equidistance” between China and the US.

Several things are notable about this paragraph. First, is the DPJ really acting out of a desire to differentiate itself from the LDP? Given that foreign policy plays so little a role in the calculus of voters, I have a hard time believing that the DPJ-led government's foreign policy initiatives are driven by electoral considerations. Second, why do unnamed DPJ party members get equal billing in this paragraph with Okada, who seems to be firmly in control of foreign policy making? Okada provides a decent summary of the government's foreign policy approach, suggesting that the DPJ is not drifting from America, but instead shifting the emphasis of Japan's foreign policy, from a foreign policy in which Asia policy was tailored around the alliance to a foreign policy in which the alliance is tailored to fit Japan's Asia policy. And yet the paragraph ends with unnamed backbenchers and their unspecified equidistant "policy."

Rachman continues by citing Hatoyama's controversial essay in the International Herald Tribune, and Ozawa's grand tour in Beijing and intervention to arrange an audience with the Emperor for Xi Jinping. Rachman is at least careful to admit that "it is probably overdoing it to suggest that Japan is definitively shifting away from its postwar special relationship with the US." But the article conveys the impression that Japan is a prize in the struggle for influence between the US and China — and that the battle for Japan has begun.

There are several problems with this narrative, in both its belligerent Washington Post form and its more circumspect Rachmanite form. The fallacy both articles share is the idea that Asia is sure to be zero-sum, that a country like Japan can only be in the US camp or the China camp. Joining the former camp, Rachman concludes, would entail "[cultivating] warmer relations with other democratic nations in the region, such as India and Australia, in what would be an undeclared policy of 'soft containment' of Chinese power." And yet that is precisely what the Hatoyama government wants to do. Rachman might respond that the time for choosing has not yet arrived, which is true, but it also raises the possibility that another future is possible in which countries like Japan, Australia, and India maintain security ties with the US in order to keep the US engaged even while maintaining constructive political and economic relationships with China, navigating between the two superpowers in order to avoid unmitigated dependence on either one.

The Washington Post is even more unabashed in its embrace of an approach to Asia that does not allow for nuance, which it aired in another editorial on Japan published earlier this year.

The problem with this approach to the region and Japan on the op-ed pages of newspapers well read by policymakers in Washington is that this way of thinking could easily become self-fulfilling prophecy. Rachman may be warning of a possible future, but many in positions of power — with the help of the Washington Post — could come to take what he describes as a given.

A major flaw with the "losing Japan" narrative is that there is remarkably little data upon which to reach firm conclusions, a point acknowledged by Rachman. Think of how little we know about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. Interestingly, both the examples he cites as cases confirming the tilt towards China involve the activities of Ozawa Ichiro, i.e. a figure outside of the government who may not be long for politics. What data points do we have concerning Hatoyama and members of his cabinet? Not many. Hatoyama has made clear that he will not provoke China on historical issues. Beyond that? Unmentioned in both articles is that the Hatoyama government is building upon the "strategic, constructive partnership" concept developed by the Abe government, right down to the continued use of the term. That doesn't sound like a government doing whatever it can do differentiate itself from the LDP.

I'm willing to cut Rachman some slack, because his piece contains numerous caveats and notes of caution. But the Washington Post editorial is another story entirely. By picking a DPJ member whose views would obviously draw opprobrium in the US and then implying that his views represent a "strain" in the DPJ, this editorial is little more than a hatchet job against Japan's ruling party. How this editorial will help reverse what the Post believes is Japan's drift towards China is beyond me.

After all, the last time Japan was a political battleground for a cold war in Asia, the US had  considerably more invasive means at its disposal than sharply worded editorials.  Accordingly, this narrative may in fact be a product of insecurity about declining US influence, much as insecure Japanese elites fretted that the transition from Bush to Obama would mean the return of Japan passing. The reality, however, is that in the unlikely event that Japan were to reorient itself from the US to China, there would be little the US could do to stop it.

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.

"Our Far East Partner"

The title of this post is the name of a propaganda film produced by the US Army sometime after the end of the occupation that I found at the Internet Archive. Makes for interesting viewing as we mark the alliance's fiftieth anniversary.

Upcoming television appearance

Readers in Japan will be able to catch me live on Sunday evening from 10:10pm, where I will be appearing on NHK BS-1 to debate the future of the US-Japan alliance with Okamoto Yukio, Michael Green, and Magosaki Ukeru.

General information is available here (in Japanese).

On the Nago election

My thoughts on the election of Inamine Susumu as mayor of Nago City can be found here, in the Wall Street Journal Asia.

Lest we forget

The US-Japan alliance turned fifty this week, and the allies celebrated by steering the conversation away from Futenma and releasing a 2 + 2 joint statement that reiterated why the alliance matters in the first place.

Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, also gave a press conference Tuesday that makes for interesting reading when it comes to thinking about the challenges the alliance faces going forward.

Campbell stressed that 2010 will be year for discussions within and between the two governments on the future of the alliance. He voiced a greater degree of understanding that the DPJ's early initiatives within the context of the US-Japan relationship are understandable given democratic politics than I think the Obama administration had done previously.

But while Campbell discussed areas of cooperation and the importance of deeper security cooperation, he did not say the US government hopes the outcome of bilateral consultations on security over the coming year will produce. To a certain extent, the US position is the same as it has been for decades and can be summarized in a single word: more. As a superpower that is facing burdens and challenges that will increasingly overwhelm its capabilities, the US needs allies like Japan to share the load now more than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today. More can be greater military spending or new military capabilities, constitution revision or reinterpretation, higher levels of foreign aid, or greater involvement in peacekeeping.

The problem, however, is that, as Brad Glosserman and Robert Madsen note in a Pacific Forum CSIS paper (not yet online), Japan may not be able to provide much more for years to come, if ever. Without substantial economic reform Japan may not be able to commit the material resources the US would prefer — and without serious economic reform the Japanese people will continue to have little or no interest in constitution revision.

In other words, despite the desire on the part of US officials from both parties to "strengthen" the alliance, the Yoshida consensus may continue to hold, in that Japan will continue to provide less security cooperation than the US prefers because its government is focused almost exclusively on economic challenges at home. The difference, however, will be that Japan's economic resources will likely continue to decline; withholding resources from the SDF today is for the sake of directing them into social security (above all) instead of using them to promote economic development as in the 1950s and 1960s. The question is whether the US will be able to live with a Japan that is, as Glosserman and Madsen note, more dependent on the US even as it is able to provide relatively less towards both its own defense and alliance cooperation.

As I've already written, fiscal constraints at home will not be the only factors preventing the realization of an "ever closer" US-Japan alliance. Whatever the latest headlines are concerning China's behavior, the lesson of the Koizumi years is that the Japanese people do not support a policy of unremittingly cold political relations with Beijing — and the lack of support for more military spending suggests that there is little stomach for an arms race. Japan is going to learn to live with a stronger, more confident China, and it will do so in part through closer relations with other countries in Asia.

Finally, while I am confident that the alliance will continue to exist in some form, it is worth considering ("lest we forget") how difficult it is to preserve an alliance aimed at an external enemy to an alliance that is, in Campbell's words, "basically aimed at no specific or particular nation." While some would off record that it is aimed at China, that would entail a discussion of what it means for an alliance to be "aimed" at a country. Given that we do not even know what Japan would do in the event of a war over Taiwan, it is hard to say that US-Japan alliance is "aimed" at China. Instead the alliance is chasing monsters of a smaller, more amorphous nature. Is there an alliance in history that has successfully transitioned from being aimed at some country or coalition to being aimed at "uncertainty" or instead of being against an enemy being for public goods? That's not to say it's impossible, but the Obama and Hatoyama governments have a difficult year ahead of them.

Here's hoping that the two governments approach the task realistically, acknowledge the limits of each country's commitment, and shape their future expectations accordingly. Perhaps it is fitting that the year began with Japan's ordering its refueling ships home from the Indian Ocean, an appropriate reminder of the continuing political and economic limits on Japan's contributions.

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.