Tokyo Plays Hard to Get with Washington

Much to Washington’s growing annoyance, the newly elected Japanese government led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has yet to announce whether it will or will not seek to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa, home to 75 percent of the roughly 50,000 US troops stationed on Japanese soil.

On the campaign trail, Hatoyama - who came to power after a landslide election victory over the incumbent Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) this August - pledged to review a 2006 agreement codifying the relocation of the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the residential area of Ginowan in the densely populated southern part of Okinawa to Henoko, a less densely populated area in the northern part of the island. 

As part of the agreement, which was signed after 13 years of bilateral negotiations, Washington also agreed to reduce the number of US military personnel stationed in Japan by relocating 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.

As far as Washington is concerned, Japan has been dragging its heels for long enough over a decision on whether to stick to the 2006 relocation agreement.

Lost in translation

Last Friday, Mikio Shimoji, head of the policy research committee of the People's New Party, a junior partner in the DPJ-led coalition, was told by US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell that Tokyo had one more week to officially forget about re-negotiating existing agreements.

On Tuesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada notified US Ambassador John Ross that Tokyo would not comply, and that a decision on the base relocation issue had been postponed until next year.

Fearing just that, Washington has in recent months threatened that it might not be able (read: willing) to request a budget allocation from the US Congress for the planned transfer of US Marines from Okinawa to Guam for fiscal year 2011 if Tokyo chose not to stick to the 2006 agreement.

Last week, the US Congress adopted a budget of $310 million for the transfer of the marines to Guam in 2010. 

As far as Campbell is concerned, when Hatoyama told US President Barack Obama “Trust me on the base issue” during a Japan-US summit in November in Tokyo, that was as good as the Japanese prime minister promising to accept the current base relocation plan by the end of the year.

However, that is not apparently how Hatoyama remembers the conversation with Obama who in an interview with Japan’s NHK news upon arrival in Tokyo in November said  that  it was “perfectly appropriate” for a new Japanese government to review existing bilateral agreements.

The politics of respect

In essence, Hatoyama is second-guessing Washington - something that Paul Midford, associate professor and director of the Japan Program at The Norwegian University for Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, says should have happened long ago.

"The previous LDP governments were too often too cooperative with Washington,” Midford told ISN Security Watch.

“A policy toward an ally should not be too intransigent but also not too cooperative. Japan will better defend its national interests and gain greater respect from the US if it exercises more independent judgment and says no to Washington when its demands do not accord with Japan’s own definition of its national interests,” he said.

Or, as Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI) at the University of San Francisco, told ISN Security Watch: “Tokyo is obliged to seek renewed discussions with the US if it is dissatisfied with what previous LDP governments have negotiated. These discussions should be routine and not a cause for friction.”

However, the prospect of Washington accepting that Tokyo would get to decide who stays and on what terms is not good, Johnson said.

“The Obama appointments from [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates on down, are completely routine and do not include even a hint of new thinking,” he said. “The Japanese-American relationship is bogged down by excessively old-fashioned, Cold War-type thought, and Obama has not altered it in any way. The US is likely to react to any sign of Japanese independence with belligerence.”
     
Out of alternatives

Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada - who has until recently been the prime advocate of a revision of the current base relocation agreements - admitted that attempts to revise the agreement were likely to fail, simply because of the lack of realistic proposals on where to send the US forces to instead.

Earlier in November, Hatoyama instructed Okada to explore possible relocation sites other than Henoko, including in Guam. Last week, he concluded that “There is no other option any more but to go with the Henoko plan without risking that the entire US forces realignment plan falls apart.”

Fumiaki Kubo, professor of political science at the University of Tokyo, agrees that in the end there will be little choice but to cave in to US pressure. “It would take years to find a new site and woo an amenable host community,” he said in a recent interview with the Japanese press.

And while some (mostly US) analysts and commentators fear that Japanese requests to change the existing agreements will inevitably and seriously damage the bilateral alliance, there a few real indications of such. In fact, the Japanese government has recently begun allocating funds for the base relocation plans.

The fiscal 2010 budget includes 28.8 billion yen to relocate the US Futenma air station, probably an indication that Tokyo will indeed and eventually stick to the existing realignment plan. Furthermore, Tokyo has earmarked 34.6 billion yen for the transfer of US Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.

While this should appease Washington somewhat, there is more bad news.

For years, Tokyo has sought (admittedly with fairly limited persistence) to change the so-called US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, which protects American troops from legal prosecution in Japan. It has also recently resumed the debate about reducing Japan’s so-called Host Nation Support (financial support) for the US military in Japan, which currently stands at $5 billion per year.

Hatoyama has promised to get serious about both issues in the months ahead, but then again, he has also promised to reduce the burden of the US military on Okinawa. Something will have to give.