Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

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

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

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio returned home to Japan Wednesday after attending the Nuclear summit in Washington hosted by US President Barack Obama. Whatever significance the summit had for Obama’s diplomatic agenda, as far as US-Japan relations are concerned it was overshadowed by Futenma. Hatoyama’s self-imposed deadline of resolving the dispute by May is approaching, and there are few signs that his government will be able to reach a conclusion that satisfies the US and local communities in Okinawa by the end of next month. Indeed, on the eve of Hatoyama’s trip the government announced that it would be holding off on opening working-level talks with the US because it did not yet have a plan to present.

It is safe to say in terms of the process, the Hatoyama government’s approach to Futenma has failed. What explains the Hatoyama government’s disastrous performance on the Futenma issue? Read more…

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA

Japan’s Public Prosecutors Office (PPO), especially the Special Investigation Department (SID) of the Tokyo District PPO, takes pride in its vigorous pursuit of politicians taking bribes, especially from construction firms. In the past, its gaze has fallen almost exclusively on Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians, whom it has pursued without fear or favour. In the last year or so, it has switched its gaze, and begun going after the two most prominent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) politicians, Secretary-General Ozawa and Prime Minister Hatoyama, and their political secretaries, with an alacrity that has given rise to some speculation that its actions might have been politically motivated.

Providing evidence to support such allegations is almost as difficult as finding concrete evidence that Ozawa, Hatoyama and their faithful servants have committed offences under Japanese law. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

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. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

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.’ Read more…

Author: Christopher Pokarier, Waseda University

Whales do not usually surface by the exclusive north shore of Sydney harbour. Yet when Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada sat down for a meeting with Kevin Rudd at the Australian Prime Minister’s official Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, on Saturday afternoon, the topic was very much on the menu of their conversation. Prime Minister Rudd declared just the previous day that, as pledged while in Opposition, if a diplomatic agreement to end Japan’s Antarctic whaling program by November was not achieved then ‘…let me tell you, we’ll be going to the International Court of Justice.’

That the whaling issue could assume such public prominence might bemuse pioneers of the bilateral relationship who overcame the legacy of war and cultural distance to forge a prosperous and profoundly important partnership between the two nations. Read more…

Author: Hitoshi Tanaka, JCIE

Over the past several years, and especially since September’s historic change of government in Japan, it has become clear that there is a need to reassess the US-Japan alliance to ensure that it is equipped to face the challenges of the 21st century. There have been changes in Japan that are now reflected in domestic politics, but we cannot ignore the fact that there have been important changes in the regional context as well. China’s rise is apparent to everyone, and there is now a consensus view that East Asia is becoming an engine of growth whose dynamism is benefiting the world.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has spoken frequently of two lofty concepts that arise out of a recognition that the regional context has changed: the desirability of forging an ‘East Asian community’ and the need to have a more equal US-Japan relationship. What is missing in this talk, however, is a clear articulation of how to link the goals of a strong and more balanced US-Japan relationship with a vision of regional community that is equipped to deal with the changes unfolding before us. Although some observers may see these aims as inconsistent or even mutually exclusive, they can be complementary. In fact, effectively coordinating them should be the focus of intense and forward-looking discussions between Japan and the United States. Read more…

Author: Yoichi Funabashi

To mark the 50th anniversary this year of the signing of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, the two governments have declared their intention to ‘deepen’ the alliance. They aim to create a new vision for the alliance by November, when U.S. President Barack Obama plans to visit Japan.
But Japan-U.S. relations are experiencing a rocky patch, mainly due to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s decision to re-examine from scratch a 2006 agreement on the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa Prefecture. In the United States, an increasingly critical perception has taken hold over what the Hatoyama administration is trying to achieve.

In an editorial on 28 January, The New York Times noted ‘there are worrying signs that many of Japan’s new leaders and its postwar generation don’t understand the full value of the security partnership.’ Read more…

Author: Peter Van Ness, ANU

In East Asia, ‘the times they are a-changing,’ and the pundits are full of speculation about what the new ‘architecture’ for the region will look like. After the Democratic Party of Japan’s historic electoral defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party in August, the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has the opportunity to take the country in new directions, but it is unclear whether it will have the vision and determination to prevail. America, the world’s only superpower, is in serious trouble, and meanwhile China is on the rise. The focus is on how relations between United States and China will work out, and a discussion of new forms of multilateralism. Often ignored in these discussions, however, is the key role of Japan. Japan is too rich and too powerful to be left out. Whatever the future of East Asia, Japan will have to be a founding participant. In my view, Japan is an indispensable power in the region.

The Japanese are worried about the rise of China, but they worry even more about how to manage their relations with their post-World War II security guarantor, the U.S. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

Before entering politics — the family business — Hatoyama Yukio was a fledging academic, a Stanford-educated engineer. His background as an academic is often on display when he delivers set piece addresses. He has a penchant for abstraction, for drawing upon broad principles and shying away from the nitty gritty details of policy. This tendency is perhaps common to all leaders, but Hatoyama seems to take particular interest in how to frame policies intellectually (see his persistent use of his pet term yuai last year).

Remarkably, Hatoyama only used the term yuai once in his latest address, his policy speech for the new ordinary session of the Japanese Diet. Read more…

Author: Ryo Sahashi, University of Tokyo

In the first hundred days under the new administration of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its coalition partners, Social Democratic Party (SDP) and People’s New Party (PNP), criticism of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s foreign policy stance by domestic and American political commentators has continued to mount. The Hatoyama government’s approval rating among Japanese voters has also dropped significantly, though past administrations have also commonly experienced severe declines in popularity within their first three months.

The criticism seems to have reinforced a public impression of Hatoyama’s lack of leadership and strategic vision. Read more…

Author: Brad Glosserman, CSIS, and Robert Madsen, MIT

Since the inauguration of the Hatoyama administration in Tokyo last September, US-Japan relations have resembled a slow-motion train wreck. The Hatoyama government’s desire to ‘rebalance’ Japan’s foreign policy and to forge ‘a more equal relationship’ with its ally have triggered alarms and raised fears of a rupture, rather than the recalibration that everyone professes to want. But those fears are misplaced. Japan in fact has no viable alternative to its alliance with the United States. The real danger is that the current troubles might do lasting damage to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently described as a ‘truly indispensible’ partnership.

There are many, generally well-known, reasons why the alliance will almost certainly survive this difficult period. Read more…

Author: Akira Kojima

Last year was a politically exciting but economically depressing year for Japan. It was the first time in 16 years that the government had been led by a party other than the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also a year in which Japan suffered its largest decline in GDP in half a century. The year 2010 is to be another difficult and challenging year, with economic deflation necessitating the adoption of a new growth strategy and a July upper-house election which could create a historical watershed of Japan’s politics.

While Japan was not at the epicenter of the global financial crisis, with Japanese banks having better balance sheets and much less exposure to toxic financial commodities, the ensuing collapse in export demand and financial spillovers have plunged Japan’s economy into its severest recession in many decades. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

The U.S.-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. Read more…

Author: Yoichi Funabashi

This year will be the crucial test of whether the administration led by the Democratic Party of Japan can develop into a vigorous, staying force. Its greatest challenges lie in the areas of diplomacy and national security.

On January 4th, in his first news conference of the year, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said, ‘About half of domestic politics is, in a sense, taken up by foreign affairs and national security.’ Read more…