Time for the US to accept new realities

According to Helene Cooper of the New York Times, "President Obama will arrive in Tokyo on Friday, at a time when America’s relations with Japan are at their most contentious since the trade wars of the 1990s."

Cooper then proceeds to list the ways in which the transition to the DPJ has made for a "more contentious relationship."

The bill of particulars includes the Hatoyama government's decision to withdraw MSDF refueling ships from the Indian Ocean, the decision to revisit the roadmap on the realignment of US forces in Japan, the loss of "shyness about publicly sparring with American officials," and plans to revisit the bilateral Status-of-Forces agreement (SOFA). In addition to all that, she implicitly criticizes Prime Minister Hatoyama for failing at his "kiss-and-make-up session" while visiting New York and Pittsburgh, when he "responded with the usual diplomatic niceties" but was the last to arrive at a dinner for G20 leaders in Pittsburgh.

Reading this article one gets the impression that the US-Japan alliance was in perfect shape right up until the DPJ took power in September. The onus is apparently entirely on the DPJ for being disagreeable and contentious, for sparring with American officials when they try to dictate what the Japanese government should and should not be doing. The article only hints that there might be structural forces tugging at the alliance beyond the drama involving the senior officials of both countries, beyond Hatoyama's late arrival or Gates's "snubbing" the defense ministry when in Tokyo.

The current tension — if tension is the right word for it — is the product of structural change in two areas, neither of which works in favor of the US.

First, that the DPJ is in power is alone an indicator of profound changes occurring within Japan. For all the speculation by analysts about whether the public favors this proposal or that proposal in the DPJ's manifesto and about whether the public actually expects the Hatoyama government to be able to deliver, the DPJ's victory spelled the end of the old system of government. While the new system is still coalescing, I think it is already safe to say that there will be no going back to the old regime of cozy ties among LDP backbenchers and bureaucrats. The old system meant that the alliance rested in the hands of a small number of LDP alliance managers and MOFA and more recently JDA/MOD officials. As analysts like the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, who rushed to the defense of Japan's bureaucrats after the August election, realized, the US benefited greatly from this system. Alliance cooperation was predictable, even if the US government would have preferred that Japan contribute more.

This system, however, made it difficult for the Japanese government to secure the approval of the Japanese people when it came to things like sweeping changes in the configuration of US forces in Japan. Indeed, after the fiasco of the 1960 treaty revision, the Japanese people and their representatives were rarely consulted when it came to alliance cooperation with the US. And the US government had little reason to object to this — indeed, while the Obama administration may have forgotten or may not appreciate the role the US played in propping up the LDP and its 1955 system, the DPJ and the Japanese public has not.

The old system was also poorly configured for introducing sweeping changes into the nature of the alliance. The alliance managers on both sides certainly tried after 1996, when they thought they could turn the alliance into a global security partnership without having to consult with the Japanese people about whether they wanted their Self-Defense forces participating in US-led wars far from Japanese shores. When the people were finally consulted, it turns out that they had no interest in the "Japan as the Britain of Asia" model. The public had no interest in a robust military bolstered by bigger defense budgets, or in constitution revision, which some officials on both sides thought would be the inevitable product of greater US-Japan defense cooperation. It turns out that if given a choice between maintaining the constitution and cooperating with the US abroad, the Japanese people would prefer the former. The DPJ's victory, while not directly a result of foreign policy, was a product of public dissatisfaction of the LDP's government behind closed doors in which the Japanese people were consulted as an afterthought — including and especially on the alliance.

With the option of a more robust global security partnership foreclosed, the discussion is now turning to what the alliance should be instead, a discussion that is long overdue and might have happened sooner if the two governments had been more honest with each other. What Cooper sees as the signs of tension stemming from the DPJ's coming to power I see as the first stirrings of an honest dialogue between the two governments. Okinawa is just one manifestation of this process. The US was the beneficiary of an arrangement by which the LDP made its life easier politically by foisting the bulk of US forces in Japan to distant Okinawa. It is now paying the price, as the DPJ tries to get the best deal possible for the people of Okinawa.

Of course, that the DPJ wants to reconsider the alliance with the US is shaped by another structural change, the transformation of East Asia. To a certain extent the 1996 vision of the alliance was undone precisely because the two governments were unable to decide what role the alliance could and should play in a region in which growing Chinese influence (and interdependence) was an inescapable fact. The answer provided by the Bush administration and the Koizumi and Abe governments was "shared values" and cooperation among democracies, an approach that did not survive the Abe government. And values diplomacy notwithstanding, even Abe Shinzo recognized that jabbing the Yasukuni stick in China's eye was a poor substitute for a China policy. Arguably Japan was already shifting in the direction of an Asia-centered foreign policy after Koizumi, but — with the notable exception of Fukuda Yasuo — its prime ministers were less explicit about the changes underfoot. They dutifully recited the mantras while reorienting Japan away from a security-centered US-Japan alliance. As I've argued previously, what's changed with the Hatoyama government is that it has for the most part discarded with the alliance boilerplate and is actually trying to articulate what Japanese foreign policy should look like in an age characterized by a rising China, a still strong but struggling US, and a region populated with countries facing the same dilemma as Japan.

As Hatoyama's frenetic Asia diplomacy suggests, his government is obsessed with carving out a leadership role for Japan. Devin Stewart is right to suggest that Japan cannot neglect the US dimension of its new realism. But I think Stewart is mistaken when he suggests "the path toward a more 'independent' foreign policy for Japan is not by weakening its alliance with the world's strongest military power." On the contrary, I think Japan's credibility as a leader in the region is enhanced to the extent to which the Hatoyama government is able to show that its foreign policy is not dominated by its alliance with the world's strongest military power. Which is precisely what Fukuda tried to achieve when he stressed that security cooperation would take a back seat — and what some in the US are coming to appreciate. The DPJ still has work to do answering the question of precisely what kind of security relationship it wants with the US, of course, which is why it is good that the Hatoyama government decided not to rush the National Defense Program Guidelines that were originally supposed to be issued in December. Instead the US and Japan will be conducting a bilateral review of the alliance at the same time that the DPJ-led government is conducting an internal review of defense policy going forward.

Meanwhile the Japanese people are sensitive to the need for an Asia-centered approach in Japanese foreign policy. The public had little interest in Koizumi's approach to China. Whatever concerns Japanese citizens have about China, they have little interest in policies in provoking China. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that despite, in Stewart's words, a "bellicose North Korea and an increasingly powerful China," the public does not support a dramatic increase in Japan's military capabilities, an expansion of the roles open to the JSDF, and ever closer defense cooperation with the US. At the same time there is little support for ending the alliance entirely.

Both the US and Japan have considerable room for maneuver within these structural constraints. Indeed, the US is by no means powerless in the face of Japan's push to reorient its foreign policy. For starters, the Obama administration can reverse course on trade policy in Asia, a region which Daniel Drezner contends "has simply bypassed Washington." Instead of viewing the DPJ's initiatives in the region as leaving the US behind, the Obama administration should view it as a spur to join the game.

Moreover, the Obama administration ought to reconcile itself to the DPJ's message. Thus far Washington has mishandled the transition to the DPJ, in what arguably counts as an open-source intelligence failure. Washington did not take the DPJ seriously until far too late, and even when analysts in Washington began listening to the DPJ they still thought that the DPJ was bluffing — or was trying to appease its left-wing members and the Social Democrats — when it talked about the alliance and Okinawa. The DPJ means exactly what it says. Of the examples cited by Cooper, all were articulated by the DPJ well before it won the August election, and articulated not because of the DPJ's left but because there is a broad consensus within the party on the need to reconsider the alliance and recenter Japanese foreign policy on Asia.

It is unlikely that President Obama will use this weekend to begin engineering a shift in how the US responds to the structural forces that have brought the US-Japan relationship to this juncture. As Michael Cucek trenchantly observes, there will be altogether too much left unsaid when Hatoyama and Obama meet Friday evening. But it is time for the administration to realize that the current difficulties are not simply the product of the DPJ, its leaders, and its coalition partners, and that it is not too late for the US to revitalize its Asia policy and its alliance with Japan.

Preview of Obama's visit

My thoughts on President Barack Obama's impending visit to Japan can be found at the website of the Macarthur Foundation's Asia Security Initiative, here.

Waking up to a new alliance

The day of Barack Obama's first visit to Japan is approaching rapidly and the focus of the allies remains on the future of Futenma and the US-Japan agreement on the realignment of US forces in Japan.

The Hatoyama government is still weighing its options — and Prime Minister Hatoyama has said on more than one occasion that his government will not be treating Obama's visit as a firm deadline for coming up with an alternative to the status quo agreement. Okada Katsuya, the foreign minister, is pushing hard for the Kadena option, which he made clear in response to questioning in the upper house last week is for the moment his personal preference and not the policy of the government. On the other side of the debate is Kitazawa Toshimi, the defense minister, who has emerged as the cabinet's advocate for upholding the current agreement. Last month he stated that he thinks relocating the Marine helicopters at Futenma to the air force base at Kadena is "extremely difficult," and he subsequently suggested that it would not violate the DPJ's election manifesto if the government were to uphold the agreement to build a replacement facility at Camp Schwab.

The US government, not surprisingly, also sees Kadena as a non-starter. Following Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's statement, General Edward Rice, commander of US forces in Japan, told Asahi that Kadena would not work as an alternative. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell is due in Tokyo Thursday for talks, but on Tuesday State Department spokesman Ian Kelly stressed that "it’s up to Japan to decide what kind of relationship they want to have." In other words, the US government has no interest in renegotiating, and the Japanese government can take it (and suffer the political costs at home) or leave it (and embitter the Obama administration towards the new government).

Okada is also under fire from Okinawans, including Okinawa governor Nakaima Hirokazu, who sees the Kadena option as doing nothing to relieve the burden on Okinawa's citizens.

In other words, the Hatoyama government is no closer to having a proposal to present to the US.

While the conventional wisdom says the Hatoyama government's deliberate pace is a cause for alarm for the alliance — see this Jiji article for example — I am still convinced that the complaints about the public disagreements between Hatoyama's ministers are more a product of observers being unaccustomed to the cabinet actually making policy as opposed to genuine disorder in the government. This is normal government. Indeed, this debate over the alliance lies at the nexus of the DPJ's plans to normalize Japan's foreign and domestic policies, as it shows the cabinet shining light on its deliberations — removing alliance management from the shadows of Kasumigaseki — while also not being bullied by Washington into rushing its decision. In other words, the DPJ is doing exactly what it said it would do. Rather than treating the US with "deference" (remember that word?), the Hatoyama government is weighing its options. It has not ruled out the status quo, but it will not be pressured into accepting the status quo for its own sake either.

Nevertheless, some in Washington seem to feel that the Hatoyama government was in need of — in Michael Green's phrase — a "smackdown." [Although, to be fair, it's possible that he did not choose that unfortunate word for the title of his post.] Upon reading his post at Foreign Policy's Shadow Government one could be excused for thinking that he was discussing the relationship between an empire and its satrap and not two sovereign governments. In addition to his use of the word "smackdown," he calls Hatoyama "defiant" (as opposed to Hatoyama patiently weighing his government's options); Gates's stance, he writes, "sent shudders" through the DPJ; and the DPJ has been "slapping around" the US (instead of articulating a policy approach that happened to differ from its predecessor's).

In a single post Green managed to illustrate why the DPJ's approach to the alliance is merited. During the "golden age" — Green appears to have taken the rhetoric from days of George and Jun and (briefly) George and Shinzo seriously — the US government did not need to deliver "smackdowns," it seems, because Tokyo followed along nicely (which, given the frustrations endured by US negotiators during the Defense Policy Review Initiative talks, was a convenient facade for what was actually a fairly contentious period for the alliance). The difference seems to be that LDP governments kept their disagreements private. The difficulties of the Koizumi years wash away and we're left with talk of a golden age.

The US government is now paying the price for believing that the post-1996 decade was a golden age for the alliance, for believing that pocketing cooperation from the Koizumi and Abe governments meant that it enjoyed the support of the Japanese people as a whole. Green can tell himself that the alliance is popularity among three quarters of the Japanese — which may be true (although the latest figure is actually 68.9% favorable, a seven-point drop from the previous year's poll), but the alliance's overall approval rating says very little about what the Japanese public thinks about specific pieces of the alliance's agenda in recent years. Voters may not have had the alliance and foreign policy at the top of the list of reasons to vote for the DPJ, but it is difficult to say that they were voting for the status quo on the alliance. It strikes me as odd that voters would be open to the DPJ's promises of sweeping changes in how their government functions (easily the most popular portion of the DPJ's agenda) but would demand that the government cling resolutely to the status quo in foreign policy. As the DPJ is illustrating, it is entirely possible to support the maintenance of the alliance while demanding changes in how it operates.

And, meanwhile, a recent report based on a series of discussions among US and Japanese experts convened by the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) and drafted by Michael Finnegan and exposes Green's argument about a "golden age" as a myth. Premised on the idea of "unmet expectations" — expectations that were unmet well before the DPJ took power — Finnegan concludes "despite public statements about strength, the alliance is actually quite brittle precisely at a time when both allies are perhaps depending on it more than ever." The idea of mismatched expectations from the alliance is not a new one, but Finnegan provides a frank assessment of the state of the alliance and shows despite the apparently close relationship between President Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi, the relationship among the national leaders did not translate into a frank and realistic discussion of whether the alliance is headed.

What does Finnegan see as the mismatched expectations? He sums of each country's expectations in two words: for the US, "Do More," and for Japan, "Meet Commitments." It is difficult to say whether the report's assessment of Japan's expectations for the alliance continue to hold under the DPJ government, but "Do More" pretty much sums up US expectations going back decades. The irony was that the advent of unipolarity ratcheted US expectations of Japan and its other allies to unprecedented levels — despite (or because of) the US was unchallenged by a rival superpower and towering over all rivals even during the peace divided 1990s, the US decided to bear more burdens than ever, which meant more demands for burden-sharing with its allies. Accordingly, after 1996 the US came to expect greater operational cooperation with Japan and greater Japanese involvement in providing security far from Japanese shores. The failure to strengthen bilateral cooperation for the defense of Japan is particularly glaring, and it falls on the Japanese government's shoulders. This failure raises an obvious question: if the LDP was such a faithful friend of the alliance, why is Finnegan able to provide such a lengthy list of operational deficiencies short of the major sticking point of the ban on the exercise of Japan's right of collective self-defense?

Finnegan concludes the report by offering a list of options available to each government going forward, and proposing that the allies scale back their expectations so to acknowledge political constraints in Japan and refocus the alliance on the core mission of defending Japan. He writes: "The new bargain suggested here would establish a laser-like focus on the core expectation of the alliance, the defense of Japan. Such a recalibrated or tempered arrangement would forgo out-of-area missions, instead recognizing a division of labor within the alliance. On the one hand, Japan would assume primacy in the defense of Japan, focusing all of its defense efforts and resources on this singular mission. Japan would be its own 'first line of defense' for the first time in the postwar period." Having argued for precisely this model of the alliance in the past, I fully agree with this proposal and am glad that Finnegan and the NBR study group managed to flesh out what it means in concrete terms. (Indeed, I argued for precisely this kind of discussion on the occasion of a previous Gates visit to Japan, when the secretary was working for a different president.)

The greatest virtue of the NBR report is that it recognizes that whether or not it was possible to create the expansive global alliance desired by some Japan hands after 1996, it is not possible today. Even before the DPJ took power Japan's leaders recognized that the challenge for the coming decades is carving out a role for Japan as China solidified its position as a regional superpower. Even Hatoyama's LDP predecessors recognized that they could no longer get away with antagonizing China over Yasukuni and other history questions. Neither of Abe's LDP successors saw it worthwhile to talk about the values shared by the US and Japan and to expend political capital deepening cooperation among the region's democracies. The challenge for the US and Japan is to build an alliance based on the notion that Japan has little choice but to be deeply engaged in regional cooperation, whatever form it ends up taking. Hatoyama, Okada, and other DPJ leaders do not believe they have to choose between Asia and the US, but they do believe that the alliance as it was conceived by alliance managers in the 1990s and early 2000s forces them to pick a side and constrains Japan's freedom of action.

As difficult as the Futenma dispute is, I am still fairly sanguine over the ability of the Obama administration to manage the shift to a deep but narrow security partnership, in which security cooperation is focused almost exclusively on the defense of Japan and embedded in a broader partnership in which the allies cooperate closely in areas other than security outside of East Asia and are free to pursue independent initiatives as necessary within the region. At the very least, an alliance based on Yokosuka and Kadena can still be valuable to the US.

It is time, however, for US officials (and former officials) to stop acting surprised that the DPJ is doing precisely what it promised it would do — and to wake up and recognize that the early 2000s were not a golden age and that there are more points of continuity between the LDP post-Koizumi and the DPJ than most are willing to admit. I am truly dismayed by how Washington — inside and outside of government — has handled the transition to DPJ rule. While the Obama administration deserves credit for having Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meet with Ozawa Ichiro when she visited Japan back in February, the administration seems taken aback by the Hatoyama government's following through on its promises to manage the alliance differently from the LDP. It is time for commentators in Washington to stop clinging to the notion that the DPJ is "badly divided internally" on foreign policy. While the Hatoyama government may be debating how best to resolve the Futenma issue, it is anything but divided when it comes to changing how the alliance is managed and where the alliance should fit in Japan's foreign policy. The Hatoyama government is entirely serious, and it will be running the government in Tokyo for the foreseeable future.

It is time for Washington to wake up to the reality of DPJ rule. The NBR report is an excellent step in the right direction.

Hatoyama restates his government's mission

The 2009 extraordinary Diet session, the first under the leadership of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's cabinet, opened Monday with a speech by Hatoyama to a Diet populated by an overwhelming majority of parliamentarians from his Democratic Party of Japan. He declared Monday the first day of a "bloodless Heisei Restoration," a transformation without black ships and without war and occupation.

The substance of the speech was familiar enough. He opened by reiterating what I've previously described as the twin themes of the DPJ's campaign narrative: "regime change" (Hatoyama used the phrase "major cleanup" in this speech) and "livelihoods first." Discussing his government's plans for cleaning up the policymaking process and changing the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats, the prime minister showed once again that the DPJ's plans are clearest when it comes to reforming Japanese governance. From strengthening political leadership within ministries to dissolving the administrative vice ministers' council to creating new cabinet committees to stripping the DPJ of its policymaking bodies, the Hatoyama government is consciously erecting a new system of government. And in the name of conducting government with the public interest in mind, his government is changing how public money will be budgeted, shifting the focus of budgeting "from concrete to people" in Hatoyama's words.

But more than changing how public money is spent, Hatoyama stressed that in the name of "fraternity" his government would work to protect the most vulnerable members of Japanese society, a focus that has particular resonance after the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's recent report on poverty in Japan found that the trend detected in a 2003 OECD report has continued (as of 2006), with 15.7% of the public's earning less than half the median income, placing Japan as fourth-worst in the OECD.

The speech was by and large a composite of Hatoyama's campaign speeches, his essay in VOICE, and his speech at the opening of the UN General Assembly in September. Drawing from the VOICE essay, he reiterated the importance of bolstering Japanese civil society and community, and, in words reminiscent of Ozawa Ichiro's speech at the DPJ convention in January, said that Japan needs an "economy for human beings." He repeated the DPJ's emphasis on the need for focus on values other than economic growth, that his government would, while promoting economic competition, would also work to support employment and foster skills, build a safety net, and pursue consumer-oriented goals like food safety. This kinder, gentler economy will be joined with greater activism by citizens in education and the provision of health and welfare in their communities.

On foreign policy, he once again stated his ambition for Japan to serve as a "bridge" internationally. He wants Japan to take the lead on climate change and energy issues, nuclear non-proliferation, and cooperation in Asia — and he wants to cooperate with the US on these global issues. He repeated the DPJ's desire for an "equal" relationship with the US, and stated that the equality of which he speaks refers to an equal partnership to combat the aforementioned global problems. In other words, an equal US-Japan relationship is one focused on issues other than the bilateral security issues that have crowded the bilateral agenda since the early 1990s, issues like the future of the US military presence in Okinawa. The Obama administration should appreciate that the Hatoyama government is no less eager to move on to other areas of cooperation, but that it wants the best deal possible for the people of Okinawa — and the prime minister, his cabinet, his party, and his coalition partners clearly do not believe that the current plan is the best possible deal.

If the content of Hatoyama's address adds little to what we already know about what Hatoyama and his government want to accomplish, I think the speech tells us much about the kind of prime minister Hatoyama is becoming. As I wrote in early September when Hatoyama was assembling his cabinet, it appears that Hatoyama is governing as first among equals in a cabinet of heavyweights, with the help of an inner cabinet of two or three close advisers. An Asahi article describes the Hatoyama cabinet as being characterized by cabinet ministers submitting policy proposals, often by floating trial balloons in the media, while the prime minister, with the help of Kan Naoto, the deputy prime minister and head of the national strategy office, Hirano Hirofumi, the chief cabinet secretary, and Sengoku Yoshito, head of the administrative reform council, decides which policies to approve. The government will face a test as it attempts to whittle down the gigantic first draft of the 2010 budget, but I think that it is unlikely that this basic pattern will change. Hatoyama has referred to himself as a "conductor-like" prime minister. His orchestra may at times be cacophonous — especially with Kamei Shizuka in the mix — but I see open debates among ministers regarding national policy better than the alternative of discussions among bureaucrats behind closed doors. That said, whether the Hatoyama system succeeds as a vehicle for implementing policies remains to be seen.

Meanwhile as the conductor Hatoyama will undoubtedly continue to give speeches that may be maddeningly vague as far as policy is concerned but will offer regular reminders of his government's mission to his subordinates in the cabinet, his party's backbenchers, and the public at large.

Slowly but surely a new system of government is taking shape in Japan.

Gates rules out renegotiation

The DPJ has pushed on Futenma — and the Obama administration, in the guise of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has pushed back.

Gates, visiting Japan on a tour through Asia, delivered an unambiguous message to the Hatoyama government that the US government is not interested in renegotiating the bilateral agreement on the realignment of US forces in Japan. As he said in a joint press conference with Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi:

Our view is clear. The Futenma relocation facility is the lynchpin of the realignment road map. Without the Futenma realignment, the Futenma facility, there will be no relocation to Guam. And without relocation to Guam, there will be no consolidation of forces and the return of land in Okinawa.

Our view is this may not be the perfect alternative for anyone, but it is the best alternative for everyone, and it is time to move on.

We are — feel strongly that this is a complex agreement, negotiated over a period of many years. It is interlocking — (inaudible) – immensely complicated and counterproductive. We have investigated all of the alternatives in great detail and believe that they are both politically untenable and operationally unworkable.

I emphasized the paragraph above because I think it's probably the most honest statement of the US position at this point. The administration has enough problems on its hands that it has little interest in renegotiating what it sees as a done deal — signed by foreign ministers and everything — after years of hard work. I can understand the US position: Futenma has been a source of unpleasantness for a long enough time that the US government just wants the issue off the agenda.

But, on the other hand, the concerns of the new government and the people of Okinawa cannot be tossed aside simply because the US government is impatient. It is too convenient for the US government to say that it signed an agreement with the LDP and therefore the DPJ should just accept the agreement and move on — as if the transition from the LDP to the DPJ was a routine matter. I continue to find it perplexing that US officials expect that the DPJ would take power and attempt to change everything but the alliance, which was, after all, an integral piece of the 1955 system. The US may not view the alliance that way, but to pretend that the US was not a pillar propping up the LDP system for years, to pretend that the US-Japan alliance is an alliance like any other, is to be willfully insensitive to history. As much as Gates and the Obama administration would like to turn the page, their Japanese counterparts — the first government in a half-century based on a parliamentary majority for a party other than the LDP — cannot simply accept what it views as the product of the "abnormal" US-LDP alliance.

The Hatoyama government has already softened its stance on Futenma considerably by backing away from the position that the Futenma replacement facility should be outside of Okinawa. Is the Hatoyama government in a hopeless position? Gates may have been entirely sincere in the message he delivered in Tokyo, but it also is not a bad bargaining stance either. If ratcheting up pressure on the new government forces it to drop the issue — perhaps with a minor concession like this — the US will have gotten its way with little effort expended. But I doubt that the government will back down easily, certainly not without compensation. The domestic politics of the issue do not favor backing down: its coalition partners, the SDPJ in particular, want Futenma out of Okinawa, the DPJ is largely united against the current agreement, and the Okinawan people and their representatives are unhappy with the current agreement. Were it to back down now that it has put Futenma at the top of its agenda in advance of President Obama's visit next month, the Hatoyama government's public approval rating would probably suffer. And, beyond the government's interests, it should be stressed that the prime minister and his ministers actually object to the substance of the current agreement and want it changed and are willing to exhaust political capital to do so (and to show that a DPJ-led government is capable of standing up to the US).

If the Hatoyama government does not back down, what options are available to the Obama administration that won't make Futenma a bigger problem than it already is? If the administration simply refuses to talk about Futenma and then blames the agreement's failure on the Hatoyama government, how can it expect a constructive relationship with the new government on other issues? Would the Obama administration contemplate abandoning Futenma unilaterally and leaving the Japanese government to clean up after the Marines? I doubt that the situation will come to any of these scenarios. The US has little to gain by letting the issue fester — and, ironically, despite Gates's desire to "move on," rejecting the Hatoyama government's desire to renegotiate outright may be the surest way to guarantee that the allies will be unable to move beyond the question of what to do about Futenma and US forces in Okinawa.

The US ought to acknowledge that the Hatoyama government has actually shown itself to be relatively flexible on the question of Futenma when compared with earlier DPJ statements. The Obama administration must recognize that to simply say no to a Hatoyama government that is desperate to find a solution — that shares Gates's desire to move on — is to make it harder for the US and Japan to turn their attention to other, more important issues. For the sake of both countries I hope that Gates's position is not the Obama administration's final position.

And as for the Hatoyama government? Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya has a month until President Obama visits Japan. He should at the very least be ready to provide some idea of what concessions will be necessary to get the Japanese government to back away from more comprehensive revisions, however difficult it may be do so.

However tetchy the relationship looks at the moment, this is not a crisis for the alliance, but rather the DPJ simply doing what it said it was going to do: speak honestly to the US. When was the last time, after all, that a meeting of senior US and Japanese officials carried even a whiff of public controversy? As Ozawa Ichiro reportedly said in a meeting with US Ambassador John Roos, "I want the US to speak frankly about any problems, just as I think that Japan's DPJ government should speak directly to the US."

The Hatoyama government will delay on defense policy

Busy with the hard work of introducing a new policymaking process, rewriting the 2010 budget from scratch so to make room for the programs promised in the DPJ's election manifesto, and finding a way to extract concessions from the Obama administration on the realignment of US forces in Japan, it is understandable that the Hatoyama government has been relatively silent on the question of defense ministry reform. Recall that under Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, in the shadow of the investigation of defense trading company Yamada Yoko, then-Defense Minister Ishiba Shigeru launched a process of defense ministry reform, a process that took on greater urgency after the Atago, an MSDF Aegis destroyer, collided with a fishing vessel.

But Ishiba was out as defense minister not long after his commission produced its final report and not long before Fukuda himself was out. Thereafter the Aso government let defense ministry reform — and defense procurement reform — drop from the agenda.

The Hatoyama government should be interested in reviving procurement reform, given how wasteful Japan's defense spending is even as budgets have tightened over the past decade. The government should be eager to end expensive defense procurement practices like purchasing small numbers of defense platforms every year instead of making multi-year purchases in bulk. Intended to preserve an indigenous defense industry, the price of these practices has been steep: the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan concludes that these measures have "raised the cost of Japanese systems 300 percent to 1,000 percent higher than comparable equipment built
in other countries that have adopted enhanced procurement reforms."

The government has not completely forgotten about defense reform, but last week the defense ministry announced that it will scrap the plan drafted under the LDP, most notably its proposal to mix civilians at the defense ministry with JSDF personnel, which was to be introduced next fiscal year. Instead Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi said that government will delay reform for a year and draft its own plans.

It is not only defense ministry reform that will be delayed. Not surprisingly given that it is barely a month old, the Hatoyama government has decided that it will delay the National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) that was supposed to be released in December until next year. It will also delay the related Mid-Term Defense Program, which outlines the government's defense spending plans. In the meantime the Hatoyama government will do what previous governments did in advance of the 1995 and 2004 national defense reviews: it will convene a council of experts to help revise the NDPG.

Hopefully delaying a year will result in a better document, an NDPG that points the way forward for the JSDF in an era of constrained budgets, maximizing the efficiency of Japan's defense spending while seriously considering the roles that the JSDF can play that enable Japan to contribute abroad without violating the constitution. It is unlikely that the DPJ will reverse the decline in defense spending, not with its commitment to building a more comprehensive welfare state while cutting budgetary waste and trying to prevent the economy from falling back into recession. That, and if anything the public wants the government to spend less on defense (as found in the poll mentioned here and in other polls). But given that austerity in defense spending will continue for the foreseeable future, the DPJ insist that Japan get the most of its limited defense spending. That would be a far cry from "remilitarizing" Japan, but it would show that the Hatoyama government takes national defense seriously, inoculating it against the LDP's inevitable criticism come election time.

The next NDPG and mid-term defense program come at an important time. China's military spending has continued to grow unabated, the mounting fiscal crisis in the US inevitably will raise questions about the durability and scale of the US security presence in East Asia, and Japan's own fiscal difficulties mean that the Hatoyama government has to determine how its defense strategy fits with its plans for relations with the US, China, and Asia more broadly and with its plans for administrative and budgetary reform. Hopefully the government will staff its advisory commission with heavyweights and give them the freedom to tackle this set of problems in full.

Three years of Observing Japan

This week marks the third anniversary of the birth of this blog.

Needless to say, Observing Japan has grown in ways that I could hardly have foreseen three years ago when I returned to Japan to work for now-Lower House Member Asao Keiichiro — indeed, it has grown in ways that I could hardly have envisioned a year ago. After this past summer, I suppose that it's probably safe to say that I've made the transition from blogger to pundit (for lack of a better term). It was a busy summer, as the list of media appearances in the sidebar indicates. In August the blog had a record number of visitors and page views, a record that was easily broken when the blog reached more than 27,000 visitors and more than 36,000 page views. During the same period the number of subscribers rose from the mid-700s to more than 1,200 today.

I still cannot quite believe all that's happened to me since I began writing this blog. Perhaps I should not be so surprised, not in an age in which Nate Silver can use a blog as a platform to share his expertise and become a media superstar. (I'm comparing myself to Silver in a very broad sense: needless to say Time will never name me one of the world's 100 most influential people.) We all have to get accustomed to a new process by which society identifies "experts" — in place of a prolonged process of accreditation, there is the constant churning of the Internet, which has no shortage of nonsense but also provides a means for consumers of information to find quality sources of analysis and then quickly share them with others.

I hope that I have been such a source for all of you reading this blog. I'd like to think that my analysis has improved over the past three years, in large part because of writing this blog, by which I have developed my own conceptual framework for thinking about Japanese politics, a framework that will undoubtedly continue to serve me well in the future. Thank you for bearing with me as I've taught myself about the subject. I should also thank my teachers, those from whom I have learned directly and indirectly - and my fellow bloggers, most notably Michael Cucek and Jun Okumura, who from very early on have been excellent partners in an ongoing discussion about Japanese politics. (Incidentally a recent post by Tyler Cowen captures the power of blogging as a learning tool precisely.)

As I move into the fourth year of blogging, there will likely be some changes around here. Inevitably I will be writing less here, in part because I have more opportunities to write elsewhere, in (large) part because I need to devote more time to being a doctoral student, and in part because after this extraordinary summer, I am experiencing a mild case of blogger burnout. While I don't write nearly as much as he does (and have only been blogging for three years), the sentiments expressed by Andrew Sullivan in this post resonate with me. I was particularly pleased to return to MIT for the fall semester after my hectic summer precisely so I could start looking at the forest again.

In any case, thank you all again for reading, for commenting, for emailing, and for telling me when I'm completely off target.

(Also, some asked whether I could provide an English translation of the article I wrote in Asahi last month. While not a translation, I've posted the first draft of the article here.)