Summary
The Democratic Party of Japan’s sweeping victory in recent elections could have a decisive impact on U.S.-Japanese relations.
Analysis
The DPJ’s victory is faintly reminiscent of President Obama’s rise to power in the sense that it has the feel of a watershed moment in Japanese politics. Many of the Liberal Democratic Party’s ‘old guard’ parliamentarians have lost their seats to a new generation of Japanese politicians that is both younger and has more female representation. With new blood comes new ideas, and much of these ideas lack the Cold War mindset that has framed Japan’s role in Asia since WWII.
This political generation shift represents a will to change the conventional U.S.-Japanese relationship, and the decisiveness of the DPJ’s electoral victory has provided a way.
Already there are several indications that the DPJ government will seek some kind of overhaul of U.S. forces in Japan. A coalition agreement brokered between the DPJ and two other parties granting DPJ control of the Upper House was delayed by disagreements over the status of U.S. deployments in Okinawa. The Social Democrats pushed hard to insert a call for the relocation of U.S. forces based in Okinawa to Guam, nevertheless they eventually had to settle for a more ambiguous wording that afforded the DPJ-led government greater flexibility when dealing with Washington.
DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama also campaigned on the need to re-orient Japan’s foreign policy towards Asia, a strategy that alludes to improving Japan’s relationship with China. To achieve real progress in Sino-Japanese relations however would require that Japan distance itself from the U.S.-Japan security pact.
To policymakers in Beijing, the U.S.-Japan alliance is an obsolete part of the Cold War alliance system that has been perpetuated in the hope of containing Chinese military power. Any reduction of U.S. involvement in Japan’s defense is thus welcomed in China because it lessens the perceived likelihood of Japanese involvement in a conflict over Taiwan.
It should be emphasized that the DPJ is not going to leave the U.S. at the altar, so to speak. Any changes made to the Status of Forces Agreement are likely to be incremental. What the DPJ actually requests could end up being some combination of: a reduced deployment in Okinawa, Japanese legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops in Japan, or the U.S. government assuming a larger financial responsibility for U.S. forces based on Japanese soil.
DPJ lawmakers are certainly wary of the anti-Japan streak in Chinese nationalism and hence are hesitant to completely forego the security benefits of U.S. military power, nevertheless there is a feeling that the sun is setting on American military primacy in East Asia. The dual pressures of expanding Chinese military power and declining U.S. economic hegemony have created cracks in the Cold War axiom that all of Japan’s security needs are served by the U.S. alliance. Some of what the DPJ is expected to try and change in the Status of Forces Agreement has already been re-negotiated in South Korea, another East Asian U.S. ally that is re-orienting defense strategy towards self-sufficiency.
As is the case with national security, the DPJ government could potentially have a similar impact on the economic side of U.S.-Japanese relations. Masahara Nakagawa, the DPJ’s shadow finance minister, has raised the possibility that Japan will start diversifying its foreign reserves away from the U.S. dollar. With a public debt that is nearing 200% of the GDP and a 10% budget deficit, the economic situation that the Japanese government currently presides over can be described as tenuous at best. If fluctuations in the U.S. dollar decimated the value of Japan’s foreign currency reserves, Japan’s economic crisis could fast reach ‘disaster’ levels.
Given the sound economic rationale behind Japan diversifying its foreign reserves and growing accord in East Asia on the need for a global reserve currency, this could be an issue that the DPJ uses to stress Japan’s arrival as an ‘Asian’ country. It is also instrumental as a flagship issue because it plays to Japan’s strengths as a global economic power without touching down on the politically contentious question of what role Japan’s military should play in international society, a question that the DPJ coalition is still divided on.
