"All the balls are in our court now," quipped
one Japanese pundit. Rightly so. Now that U.S. President Barak Obama has been
reelected, he says, all the alliance issues, including the stalled plan to
relocate a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa and delayed participation in the
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks, must be taken off the back burner they
were put on throughout the presidential election season. But now the player on
the Japanese side responsible for hitting the ball back into America’s court, Prime
Minister Yoshihiko Noda, is likely to be benched when Japan holds parliamentary
elections on December 16. The problem is, however, even bigger than that: The
player on the Japanese side has changed so often, “like every 10 minutes,” that
the game has hardly advanced at all.
"We don’t expect any major change of U.S.
policy towards Japan," said another former diplomat-cum-pundit, "but
the problem is on the Japanese side. We are experiencing ultimate confusion. We
need to think about what message we get through to the U.S. and how we
act."
These two pundits were voicing widespread
concerns in Japan about the relationship with the United States. For Japan, the
choice of Obama or Romney mattered far less than Japan’s own imminent choices
amid both domestic and regional crises. The country feels itself afflicted with
a siege mentality for the first time in many decades—one that could even be
compared to the ABCD (American-British-Chinese-Dutch) natural resource
encirclement on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack—although so far that
comparison has remained too edgy to be voiced publicly.
This
time the feelings of encirclement began with a sudden visit in July by Russian
Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to one of the islands to the north of Hokkaido
that are claimed by both nations. These islands were seized by the Soviet Union
illegally, Japan claims, following the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945.
The Japanese saw this visit as an egregious affront, particularly coming as it
did in the summer season, the traditional time that Japan pays tribute to the
war dead.
Then came the sudden landing by South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak on the tiny Takeshima Island (also known as the
Liancourt Rocks) in the middle of the Sea of Japan, claimed by both Japan and
Korea. This landing occurred a few days before the anniversary of the Japanese
surrender in World War II, the timing of which was also seen as an affront.
Though South Korean border guards heavily protect the island, no previous South
Korean president had ever dared to visit it.
On the very anniversary of the Japanese
surrender, Hong Kong activists landed on one of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku
Islands in the East China Sea, triggering a serious Sino-Japanese dispute and
leading to massive anti-Japanese demonstrations in more than a hundred cities
throughout China. Some of the protests degenerated into acts of vandalism,
looting and arson targeting Japanese factories, stores and restaurants and
causing damages in the billions of yen.
All of this happened while the one-year-old
administration of Mr. Noda, the sixth Prime Minister in six years, was on the
verge of collapse—again! Just this past summer, the Democratic Party of Japan,
led by Mr. Noda, had successfully enacted legislation to hike consumption taxes
and reform the national social security program (the Premier’s key policy
goals) with the help of Liberal Democrats and the Buddhist Party, New Komeito.
In exchange for the help, Noda promised to call a general election “sometime
soon.” In the end, he dissolved the Lower House on November 16, setting up the
coming showdown on December 16, in which his party is all but certain to lose
power.
Proceeding in parallel with all of the above has
been a confusing political party realignment, with the Mayor of Osaka and the
Governor of Tokyo forming the twin eyes of a political typhoon, while Noda’s
DPJ has lost four scores of Diet members and the LDP has changed its leader.
Thus the heightened partisanship, ideological
division and confrontation that marked the U.S. elections this fall may pale in
comparison to what Japanese politics has faced since Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi stepped down in 2006. The United States, at least, has a solid
two-party system; it is very hard for the Japanese even to say how many parties
they have in the Diet at any particular moment.
Amidst Japan’s lamentations over this chaotic
state of affairs came another shock, this one from America: A group of
well-known bipartisan Japan hands headed by former Deputy Secretary of State
Richard L. Armitage and Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, both of whom held senior
posts in previous U.S. administrations, made a rather alarming pronouncement in
a report titled “The U.S.-Japan Alliance:
Anchoring Stability in Asia”:
For Japan, however, there is a decision to be
made. Does Japan desire to continue as a tier-one nation, or is she content to
drift into tier-two status? If tier-two status is good enough for the Japanese
people and their government, this report will not be of interest.
More shocking than these words was the fact that
the report came out on the very anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War
II, at the very moment a Chinese group had landed on the Senkakus! So it was
that, with the report’s words still ringing in Japanese ears, we saw Chinese
citizens chanting in the streets of Shanghai, “Destroy Japan and retrieve
Okinawa!” So it wasn’t only about the Senkakus!
Again, no one said so in public, but the
Armitage-Nye report felt a bit like the famous “Hull Note” of 1941—the
ultimatum handed to Japan by then Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanding the
total and unconditional withdrawal of Japanese troops from Manchuria. Of
course, this association is outrageous for all sorts of reasons, but the timing
of various incidents this summer reminded at least some Japanese of the
predicaments the country faced on the eve of the Pacific War.
So
it remains. When Japanese look around the neighborhood many feel besieged at a
time when domestic politics seem to be collapsing into a heap of confusion and
revolving door prime ministers—again, in a way not wildly different from how
pre-war Japanese citizens observed their situation in the early 1940s.
Thus, when Japanese were following the news of
the U.S. presidential election, many of them, and the history conscious most of
all, had to be wondering whether the U.S. leadership would really come to
Japan’s help under the obligations of the bilateral security treaty. The
simple, if not publicly admitted truth, is that increasingly numbers of
Japanese think the United States might not be on our side in a possible
military collision with China. This is so despite the fact that, according to a
rolling survey, positive feeling toward America, along with negative feeling
toward China, has been climbing over the past several months. There is no law
of human nature preventing people from worrying about their friends, after all.
Some Japanese are thus asking themselves why the
United States, which made a sudden about face to secure a surprise grand bargain
with China forty years ago, should not repeat it if, indeed, Washington is
disappointed with Japan for possibly being content to drift into tier-two
status. The rebalancing toward Asia that the Obama Administration has been so
eager to claim credit for may be laying the groundwork for that, for all
Japanese know.
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